Here is something that I found on mint.com and just had to share it.

Budget Planner – Mint.com

I just couldn’t believe that, I refuse to spend anymore than $10 on a 1 meter HDMI cable that is always going to be plugged in and only unplugged maybe once a year, I have one on the blu-ray player and one on the Xbox360 and they work amazingly.

I will have to share the expensive speaker cable VS the cheap wire coat hanger story one of these days.

great-balls-of-fire

I wish everything would download that quick, but it is anywhere from 20kb to 500+ kb, very nice, I know that it also depends on the server you are downloading from…

Fisrt up my DNS is via openDNS and I have quiet a tight blocked list with them.

The programs I use are:

Microsoft Security Essentials – link here

This is the 64bit version, I find this program to be the quickest and less intrusive on my computer.

microsoft security essentials

Next up is Spyware Blaster – link here

Spyware Blaster locks down your browsers so that malware can’t get in (well 99% of the time)

“Prevent the installation of ActiveX-based spyware and other potentially unwanted programs, Block spying / tracking via cookies, Restrict the actions of potentially unwanted or dangerous web sites”

spywareblaster

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware – link here make sure you click the download free version (blue button half way down the page)

This program is a scanner and wont prevent malware.

“Detects all the other items that most AV tools wont or leave behind etc”

malwarebytes

Now only MSE provides real time protection while the other don’t.

I use the windows Firewall and I have the UAC on and enabled, which I suggest you do as well as it keeps your system closed to half of the nasty items out there and it locks Internet Explorer into its own area of memory so that if you do get malware, virus or what ever they will be locked into that area of memory and won’t be able to get out and play with the rest of the system.

I normally block a lot of cookies because there just not needed. I always keep programs like Java, flash and adobe reader up to date.

I always do a custom install of software, especially a lot of freeware and even open source software because lately I find they try and install toolbars etc.

An example of this is a driver I downloaded for a USB based TV tuner, it was a 12mb file (give or take a few 100kb or so) I extracted it with 7-zip and went into the folder that contained the files and I pulled the files that I required, well that the operating system required and there where 4 files totaling 255kb in size, you should have seen all the other crap that was in there, 80% of it was not needed.

The only reason I use this card over the on board is because it has a lot more volume and depth than on board, on board has a serious lack of tonal volume so to speak.
The creative card has major problems in games, UT3 audio is all over the place and don’t even get me started with Bioshock, that game use to have perfect audio but now it is so bad that the game is un-playable…

I went to download a new driver or the latest driver for the card which is over 1 year old now as you can see in the image below.

creative-really-old-drivers

Dated the 02/07/2009, what the hell.

The image below shows the extracted files and what seems to be a lack of support for windows 7.

creative-old-drivers

4 main items and the Setup.ini file shows XP and Vista only, now I now that Vista drivers will work on Win7 but that is just slack guys.

Don’t even get me started on that crap and totally useless Creative ALchemy, the latest version wont even detect any games that I have installed, when there should be at least 20 games in the list, if I go to add one it just comes up with a error message saying the game has all ready been added but there is nothing in the list.

Creative it is about time to pull your fingers out of your arse because there is no way in hell that I am going back to on board audio and I simply don’t have the funds to buy an alternative from another manufacture, not that I would because most of them still seem to use some sort of creative chipset.

A quick video below shows some of the line up.

The first broadcast television channel to cater for men 16-49.

Some of the line up according to prime is the Family Guy, American dad, 30 rock, how I met your mother, That 70′s how, scrubs, Caprica, Stargate Atlantis, warehouse 13, fifth gear, the universe, life after people, the boneyard and many others including first run big movies for the blokes such as strangers and primeval.

Sounds quiet good to me.