A liquid crystal display (LCD) is a thin, electronic flat panel used to display information and images. It includes monitors for computers, televisions, instrument panels, and other devices ranging from aircraft cockpit displays, to every-day consumer devices such as video players, gaming devices, clocks, watches, calculators, and telephones. LCDs are simply everywhere now.

Its major features and benefits are: lightweight construction (compared to Plasma displays); portability (in the case of smaller displays); the ability to be produced in much larger screen sizes than were practical for older Tube (CRT) displays; and perhaps most important, its much lower power consumption.

Technically, an LCD display is an “electronically-modulated optical device” made up of any number of tiny pixels filled with liquid crystals and arrayed in front of a light source (backlight) or reflector to produce images in color. The earliest discoveries leading to the development of LCD technology date from 1888. Today, tube CRT displays are almost a thing of the past!

Unfortunately, from time to time, a new LCD TV or Monitor will have a problem pixel. This is where the physical crystal actually is stuck or frozen in place. However, don’t panic, since these can frequently be fixed.

There are three basic types of problem pixels:

• a hot pixel (always on, usually white)
• a dead pixel (always off, black)
• a stuck pixel (one or more sub-pixels (red, blue or green) are always on or always off)

To solve a problem pixel, it is recommended to let the display fully warm up (leave on for at least a full day) – this alone can fix many problems, as the display expands due to warming and can free the pixel. Always try this before calling for help. Next, call the manufacturer’s technical support for other techniques that they might recommend – each manufacturer may have different solutions for their products. There are also other techniques that you might try, but always be careful not to damage your display, as this might void your warranty.

The reason why most computers run slow is all to do with a part of your computer called the ‘registry’. This is a database which lies at the heart of Windows and stores all the settings and personalization options for your PC. It’s a central storage facility for Windows, which gives your system the ability to ‘remember’ various different settings that you might have on your system, such as which email addresses you use and even what color theme you have. It’s a very important part of your computer, but the registry is also one of the main reasons why your PC tends to run slow.

Ever since Windows ‘98, when the registry was first introduced into Windows, it’s been causing computer to run slow. And it’s all because of how important it is. The registry is so important that Windows *needs* to use 100’s of files from it constantly. This is okay, but it makes your computer confused and makes it save many of these important files in the wrong way; causing them to become corrupted and extremely hard to read.

This corruption of the registry files is one of the biggest causes of slow systems – because these files become so difficult to read. Your computer needs to read the files from the registry to make it work, but if they are unreadable, then your system cannot do that in a timely manor, making it run slower. This is still a problem for Windows 7 and the bad news is that since the more registry files that become corrupt, the slower your PC runs.

The most likely reason why your computer is running slow is because of these corrupted registry files – they prevent Windows from being able to process the files it needs, resulting in it becoming slow and unreliable. The trick to fixing this problem is to use a registry repair tool, which is a scanning utility that looks through all the registry files and then fixes any of the damaged ones that are in there. Getting these tools to speed up your PC is quite easy – you just need to install one and it will show you what to do. And if you can get a cleaner which is able to fix the most registry errors, you’ll be able to get your computer to run like new again.

If you want to Speed Up Windows 7, then one of the best ways to do it is to use a registry tool. This will scan through the registry database and fix any of the damaged or corrupt files that are slowing it down. You can Click Here to speed up Windows 7.

First of all I looked around for a plugin or app that would do more than mail and contacts. I thought there would a native app to sync my notes and tasks, something that my work Blackberry does easily enough and I found that it was very difficult if at all possible.

Here is what I found first in searching around. There was one guy griping like me and no really good fix except for hacking around two different third party apps. I then looked around for desktop apps that I could start to use to sync anything with iTouch and was again disappointed.

The way that I look at my shiny new iTouch is that it is a media player and game player and just like with almost all other handheld devices I would want to be reminded of stuff and use it as reference and very rarely will enter data to it as it is difficult to get any typing pace for inputting.

So of course there is a temporary but effective method. As we all know there is wifi on the iTouch but otherwise you are off the grid. If this is not good enough then get an iPhone or eventually the iPad and have always on Internet. So right now I have Google Apps or Remember the Milk for tasks or notes. With these apps I can enter info on a desktop or from the iTouch when in the vicinity of a wifi connection and also view the data wherever there is wifi. For anytime that I have no wifi I can just use any of the free info apps to help me remember until later when I am at a computer.

Maybe David Allen would be proud of this method. Easy updates and then looking later at the stuff when I am at the computer to really track it.

Of course when I mention these drawbacks I also have to mention that even without a phone I still have a great PDA. I can have alarms, calendar, contacts all at my fingertips and if I meet anyone I can get the critical info from them. And let us also remember that this iTouch really is supposed to be a very simple PDA and really is supposed to be a media and game player like Apple markets the thing.

So what will this be used for? Steve Jobs has been saying that this is the next generation in computer devices and that this iPad is a real game changer. Now we will see what is going to happen and if people really flock to the bigger screen for the bigger bucks or if people will stick to cheap netbooks. Steve Jobs says that Netbooks are terrible and just give you a crappy laptop. He is doing a full demo so I will post on this later…

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OK here are some numbers. 1/2 inch thick, 1.5 pounds and has a 9.7 inch display. 10 hour battery life. Starting to sound more and more like a iPad is a bigger version of the iPhone but still don’t know the price…

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So Steve jobs announces that the price will start at $499 going to $829 will be wireless and bluetooth and there is a deal with AT&T for a non-contract data plan starting at $14.99/month. Also all the iWork apps will work on the iPad and there is an optional keyboard and no webcam.

So in the end I am undecided about this thing. I would rather have a netbook for half the price even with no 3G and I will stick with my iTouch for now for portability. I am sure this will be a big seller but I am sure the MacBook is as well and I can still get a PC laptop for half the price.

I love Apples innovation and game changing and marketing tactics but I have never really been a big fan of their products for myself as much as I am a fan of their ideas and vision of the future.

At work we use McAfee, which is a bit of a resource hog although it seems to be easy enough to deploy and update so in the enterprise it is incredibly popular.

Lately I have seen that Microsoft Security Essentials is all the rage. Some of the guys at work are installing it, using it, and raving about it. so when my brother in law got a new laptop that was preloaded with a trial of Norton Internet Security I told him to try the free Microsoft Security Essentials. Seemed like a good plan and I had a guinea pig as a tester.

Well things seem to have worked out. My brother in law did the Norton uninstall and the Microsoft Security Essentials install was just two clicks from the home page at Microsoft and after the update everything was done in about 10 minutes.

So I decided to take the plunge.

I installed Microsoft Security Essentials and then uninstalled my AVG on main home computer and everything still seems to be safe and quick.

First Impressions of Microsoft Security Essentials

So the install process seemed to go well. One of the things I was worried about was the brief time that I would have not protected but behind a router on a clean network I was not to worried for myself. I did the install and as I did the uninstall of AVG everything worked well and I rebooted.

After the reboot I had everything running in Microsoft Security Essentials and it seems to use about the same memory footprint as AVG did but I now have some sort of spyware protection as well.

The first thing I decided to do was a full system scan that took a few hours and the results were about the same as AVG was finding daily nothing new except Microsoft Security Essentials thought that VNC was some kind of possible trojan and there was a registry cleaner that it did not like as well. Otherwise everything was the same.

I have now gone from a daily scan to a weekly scan and am looking forward to seeing how this works out. I thought that daily scans of the entire machine were overkill but I will now be dealing with more or less overhead as Microsoft Security Essentials scans for viruses.

Final Thoughts on Microsoft Security Essentials

I am glad that I have done this trial. I have to trust Microsoft as they are the makers of the operating system that i use and there is pressure on them to deliver a product for antivirus that will protect their OS. That means a lot. I am going to put my machine through the regular paces over the next few weeks and see if this is bloated or not. See if the user experience is better or worse. With any core system for the computer it is best to see over time whether it is going to stick or not.

Oh and the best part of this is that the antivirus and antispyware from Microsoft are free. I am pretty happy with this as the competitors are mostly expensive, slow, bloated and dangerous. So far so good.

There is a release candidate out for Wordpress 2.9 that I tried to install yesterday and amongst my blogs I have a mix of MySQL 4.0 and 5.0 databases, well the version for the MySQL 4.0 databases is at 4.0.27 and the minimum requirement for Wordpress 2.9 is currently MySQL 4.1.2

So I looked through the documentation with 1and1 and I saw that the best way to change things is to create a MySQL database 5.0 version and then export the old database, import to the new empty database and I would be good. The trouble I had was that the database export was to big to import to the new database (2 meg limit) so I am still stuck.

I am sure that 1and1 must me aware of this by now, with 1,000 of people possible having trouble with an upgrade in the next few days, and the support tickets that I opened were not handled correctly with the emails coming back telling me how to create a new database only.

So I am hoping that one of two things happens. I hope that 1 and 1 hosting upgrades all the MySQL databases to 4.1.2 from the current patch level or that there is some easier way to upgrade my current MySQL 4.0 databases to MySQL 5.0

Even though Vista is not the most installed Operating System in the world, that would still be Windows XP, today everyone will still be comparing Windows Vista with Windows 7.

As many people know I am still running Windows XP and although I really want to test out Windows 7 the problem that I have is that none of my four computers are good enough for the minimum specs for Windows 7.

Windows 7 wants at least 2 gigs of ram and more realistically six or eight gigs to run well while I seem to be limping along on 500 megs and 1 gig on all of my home machines and my work laptop. And I have to admit that they seem to run great on Windows XP anyway.

So we will see today. Is this the future or will we look back still at Windows XP being the last great OS from Microsoft. I remember the release day for Windows 95 and lineups at midnight to the new OS and back then I had it installed by 3 am and was really excited to test out all the new features that a 32 bit OS offered, that is not happening today becuase most people are still stuck in the past (like me) without the hardware to run Windows 7. Microsoft will have to hope that new laptop and computer sales increase to get a big install base this time around, something that failed during the Windows Vista launch.

Found a simple fix. I just opened the run command (Start–>Run) and typed in outlook.exe  /resetnavpane

I hit enter and Outlook opened correctly

I like the new Firefox so far except for one crappy niggly problem with any new release and that is that most of my Firefox extensions, also known as Firefox Add-ons are not working. There is a fix though and it is the same with the older versions as well.

To reset the compatibility for Firefox Extensions go to the address bar and type about:config and hit enter.

Now that you are in the configuration portion of Firefox just right click anywhere in the first comumn and select new–>Boolean

the boolean has to be called extensions.checkCompatibility and when you hit enter it will ask you if you want this to be set to True or False, choose False.

Now after a restart all of your extensions should work fine and be active.

Let me know what you are finding. Do you like the new Firefox 3.5?

1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to plugins2 this will disable all plugins since the system will not find them

2. If this works and my blog works (It was kinda better but still slow and partially broke) then you can copy that folder to a drive on your machine and then delete all the plugins in that plugins2 folder, delete all the plugins, rename the folder back to plugins, and then add one at a time and see if everything is good. This can help you troubleshoot a bad or memory intensive plugin.

3. Inm my case I found that the blog was still sluggish so I used that hack for getting PHP 5 to work on 1 and 1 internet. I added AddType x-mapp-php5 .php as a line in my .htaccess and this fixed the 500 internal server errors.

Does this work for you? Do you like the new Wordpress? Here are the main new features:

Wordpress 2.8 New Features

That is a crapload of change. The interface though is very similar to 2.7 though which is nice. There are also apparently 100s of bug fixes as well and everyhting just feels more stable.