This is a guest post by Bonnie Hope.

Computers evolve so quickly, and there’s such a big difference in price between a basic model and the latest technology. How important is it to stay ahead of the curve? This depends partly on how much money are you willing to spend, because the more you spend, the more power, speed and storage you can get. In the end, though, your choice should come down to how good you need your computer to be – don’t blow the budget on more computer than you’ll ever use. There’s no point buying a Lamborghini if you’re only going to use it to run errands.

If you will only be using the computer for basic applications like word processing, email and surfing the Internet, any current model will do. Look for a CPU with a processing speed of at least 2.2 GHz. You’ll want 2 GB of RAM and 200 to 300 GB of hard drive space. The computer should also have at least two USB connections to plug in input devices, like your camera. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a new computer on the market without these basic specs, so really you can just shop around for the lowest price.

Intermediate users need a little extra speed and storage space. You fall into this category if you use your computer for music, movies, downloading or photo editing. Get as much RAM as you can afford; more memory will improve your computer’s performance more than a faster processor. Also get the biggest hard drive you can afford. Those audio and video files take up a lot of space. Go for a DVD burner over a CD burner. DVDs are more versatile, and CDs are quickly heading for obsolescence.

Gamers and designers need to shop for top-of-the-line models. The graphics involved in these applications will completely choke up the average computer. Get a high-speed processor and as much RAM as possible to keep things running smoothly. You’ll also need a dedicated video card; these come specialized for either gaming or design, to optimize your graphics. Gamers will also need an extra-large hard drive, especially if you keep more than one game installed at a time.

About Author :
Bonnie Hope is the Assistant Editor of thecomputerscatalog.com.

This is a guest post by Alicia Haines Davis.

There’s no doubt that Windows 7 is an improvement over its predecessor Windows Vista.  However, the question remains: is it worth transitioning for those with Windows XP virtual machines?

On the one hand, your network may function perfectly well with Windows XP, so why change a good thing?  And if you’re like many other businesses out there right now, paying for upgrades may not be your most pressing priority.  On the other hand, at some point your technology becomes outdated and slow regardless of how good it was when you bought it.  You may not have to change with every new hardware or software upgrade, but at some point it’s just prudent in order to stay with the times.

If you’re feeling conflicted about taking the plunge, consider these four points before making a decision one way or the other.    

• Logon times: Slow logon times plague many companies, leading to distracted employees and reduced productivity.  In comparison to Windows XP, the Windows 7 client provides a superior logon time because you can begin the logon process before the operating system is booted up.  And as the old adage states, saving time is saving money.
• Remote meetings: As more and more people work remotely, the ability to conduct efficient meetings over the computer is becoming crucial.  Windows 7 provides bi-directional audio so that you can both listen and respond with the use of your computer’s microphone.  Windows XP only allows you to listen one-way.
• Multimonitor sessions: For all those VM techies who use multiple screens at work, here is some good news.  All of your monitors will be available to your virtual desktop with Windows 7 as opposed to Windows XP, where only one can be accessed.
• Video Quality: Whether you’re watching a video via RDP for work or are checking out something during your lunch break, suffering through the “slide show” effect can be very aggravating.  Windows 7 offers a vastly improved viewing experience that is close to watching the same video locally from your PC.

Weigh your options and see where they take you.  It’s important to keep in mind what will help your business not just in the short run, but years down the line.  Where do you want to go and what can you do to help your company get there?

About Author :
Alicia Haines Davis is the Marketing Communications Manager at triCerat, a computer software company that specializes in remote desktop management and virtualization software. From universal print drivers to Windows 7 virtualization, triCerat offers a variety of enterprise management services.

The Snipping Tool is another wonderful feature avaible in Windows Vista and 7 that allow you to crop anything on-screen before saving them to image format of your choice. Here in this article, we will guide you through the proper ways of using Snipping Tool.

How to use Snipping Tool?

Let’s say we have something like this on our screen:

If we want only the logo part of entire screenshot, we can do it using snipping tool.
Firstly, open snipping tool by pressing the Start button, type in “snipping tool” and you will see it from the search result. Or you can access it by going to All Programs –> Accessories –> Snipping Tool.

Now, you should have the snipping tool appear on your screen. At this time, other parts of your screen should be a little bit gray.

The options button allows you to set up something before proceeding to snip.

• Hide instruction text
• Alwayscopy snips to the Clipboard
• Include URL below snips (HTML only)
• Prompt to save snips before exiting
• Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active.
• Selection ink Color choices.

There are several types of cropping available in this tool.

• Free-form Snip
• Rectangular Snip
• Window Snip
• Full-screen Snip

In this case, we will use rectangular snip. To snip the logo part of ontechnews.com, simply drag with your cursor and it should look like this:

The logo part should now be cropped into the tool where you can edit with pen, eraser, highlighter, etc. You can also send this image directly to someone via email through this tool by pressing the send snip button.

To save this image, press File –> Save as. Choose the location where you want your image to be saved, and the image format that you want it to be saved.

Congratulation! You’ve just finished this tutorial!

Are you always wondering why is the Print Screen key exist on your keyboard but nothing appear when you press on it? Here in this article, we will guide you through proper ways of using this special key. 

The Print Screen key is used to capture whatever is displayed on-screen and save it to the clipboard. After that, you can paste it anywhere in your document so that it can be displayed and printed.

To capture whatever displayed on your monitor screen:

1. Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. 
2. Open Paint, Microsoft Words, Microsoft Powerpoint or any other software which an image can be pasted.
3. Hold Ctrl and press V, or simply right click and press paste.
4. Your desired screenshot should be displayed.

To capture whatever displayed on your current window:

1. When you are in the window that you want it to be captured, Hold Alt key and then press Print Screen key on your keyboard. 
2. Open Paint, Microsoft Words, Microsoft Powerpoint or any other software which an image can be pasted.
3. Hold Ctrl and press V, or simply right click and press paste.
4. Your desired screenshot should be displayed.

Do you have a large monitor? Or do you have difficulty when reading some texts on the screen? If so, you’re in the right place now.
It’s becoming a lot more common for people to use larger and larger monitors. With this fact, zooming feature are in high demand in any operating system. Microsoft has finally implemented its first ever successful built-in zooming feature in its latest OS, Windows 7. The existance of this feature has killed all other similar third party zooming applications to death.



This feature provide ease for users to read tiny texts and makes presentations much more effective and enjoyable for both presenters and audients.

To zoom in and out, and to exit:

• Hold windows logo key  and press “+” or any Plus key to zoom in.
• Hold windows logo key  and press “-” or any Minus key to zoom out.
• Hold windows logo key  and press “Esc” key to exit the Magnifier Application.

To change the types of zooming:

• Hold Ctrl and Alt, and then press F to switch the magnifier to Full Screen Mode.
• Hold Ctrl and Alt, and then press L to switch the magnifier to Lens Mode.
• Hold Ctrl and Alt, and then press D to switch the magnifier to Dock Mode.

Try it out yourself and you may eventually get familiar with it. Have fun!

This article covers most of the things about Data Representation. If you reach this page by searching a certain keyword from any search engine, I would recommend you to use CTRL-F to find the parts that you need.

Data Formats

Computers – Process and store all forms of data in binary format.
Human communication – Includes language, images and sounds.
Data formats – Specifications for converting data into computer-usable form. – Define the different ways human data may be represented, stored and processed by a computer.

Computing Systems Data

Usually the computing systems are complex devices, dealing with a vast array of information categories. The computing systems store, present, and help us modify:-

• Text
• Audio
• Images and graphics
• Video

Digital vs. Analog

Computing systems are finite machines. They store a limited amount of information, even if the limit is very big. The goal is to represent enough of the real world data to satisfy our computational needs and our senses of sight and sound. The information can be represented in one or two ways: analog or digital.

Analog data – is a continuous representation, analogous to the actual information it represents.
For example, a mercury thermometer is an analog device. The mercury rises in a continuous flow in the tube in direct proportion to the temperature.

Digital data - is a discrete representation, breaking the information up into separate (discrete) elements. Computers cannot work with analog information directly, so there is a need to digitise the analog information. This is done by breaking the analog information into pieces and representing those pieces using binary digits.

Why digital signal?

Both electronic signals (analog and digital) degrade as they move down a line. The voltage of the signal fluctuates due to environmental effects. As soon as an analog signal degrades, information is lost. Since any voltage level within the range is valid, it is impossible to know that the original signal was even changed. Digital signals jump sharply between two extremes (high and low state). A digital signal can degrade quite a bit until the information is lost, because any value over a certain threshold is considered high value and below the threshold is considered low value.

You can still retrieve the information from a reasonably degraded digital signal. Periodically a digital signal is reclocked to regain its original shape. As long as it is reclocked before too much degradation, no information is lost.

Binary Representation

Why binary representation (as opposed to decimal or octat, etc..)?
Because the devices that store and manage the digital data are far less expensive and complex for binary representation. They are also far more reliable when they have to represent one out of two possible values. The electronic signals are easier to maintain if they carry only binary data.

One bit can be either 0 or 1. Therefore, one bit can represent only two outputs. To represent more than two outputs, we need multiple bits. Two bits can represent four outputs because there are four combinations of 0 and 1 that can be made from two bits: 00, 01, 10,11.

In general, n bits can represent 2n outputs because there are 2n combinations of 0 and 1 that can be made from n bits. Note that every time we increase the number of bits by 1, we double the number of things we can represent.

Data Formats – How to Interpret Data

Meaning of internal representation must be appropriate for the type of processing to take place:

• That is, images & sound: have to be digitised.
  Images – need detailed description of the data, how colour is represented at each data point
  Sound – need sampling rate
• Proprietary formats
  Unique to a product or company
  For example, Microsoft Word, Corel Word Perfect, IBM Lotus Notes.
• Standards
  Evolve two ways:
  Proprietary formats become de facto standards (e.g., Adobe PostScript, Apple Quick Time)
  Committee is struck to solve a problem (Motion Pictures Experts Group, MPEG)

Why Standards?

They exist because they are:-

• Convenient – sometimes the time to market is very important whenever trying to finish a product, therefore existing standards may be used to save time elaborating own protocols and interfaces.
• Efficient – most of the standards are put together by committees with a wide experience in the specific area.
• Flexible – usually the standards allow for manufacturer or OEM specific extensions.
• Appropriate – address a specific problem in a specific domain.

Standards allow communication and sharing of information. They also allow computing systems and software to interoperate (at both hardware and software levels). Sometimes standards are arbitrary and have some “blast from the past” reasons (due to historical evolution).

Examples of Standards

Standards Organisations

ISO – International Standards Organisation
CSA – Canadian Standards Association
ANSI – American National Standards Institute
IEEE – Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Text : Alphanumeric Data

Three standards for representing letters (alpha) and numbers

• ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Interchange
• EBCDIC – Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code (not used anymore, used to be used in IBM mainframes)
• Unicode

ASCII Features

7-bit code
8th bit is unused (or used for a parity bit)
27 = 128 codes
Two general types of codes:
95 are “Graphic” codes (displayable on a console)
33 are “Control” codes (control features of the console or communications channel)

ASCII Reference Table

Escape Sequences

Extend the capability of the ASCII code set. For controlling terminals and formatting output. Defined by ANSI in documents X3.41-1974 and X3.64-1977.
The escape code is ESC = 1B16
An escape sequence begins with two codes:
Example:-
- Erase display: ESC[2J
- Erase line: ESC[K

Unicode

The extended version of the ASCII character set is not enough for international use. The Unicode character set uses 16 bits per character. Therefore, the Unicode character set can represent 216, or over 65 thousand, characters. Unicode was designed to be a superset of ASCII. That is, the first 256 characters in the Unicode character set correspond exactly to the extended ASCII character set.

• Version 2.1
  • 1998
  • Improves on version 2.0
  • Includes the Euro sign (20AC16 = )
  • From the standard:
    …contains 38,887 distinct coded characters derived from the supported scripts. These characters cover the principal written languages of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Asia, and Pacifica.
• Latest version of Unicode is 4.0
• More details can be found at Unicode’s main website http://www.unicode.org

Text Compression

It is important that we find ways to store text efficiently and transmit text efficiently:-

• Keyword encoding
• Run-length encoding
• Huffman encoding

Audio

Sound is perceived when a series of air compressions vibrate a membrane in our ear, which sends signals to our brain. A stereo system sends an electrical signal to a speaker to produce sound. This signal is an analog representation of the sound wave. The voltage in the signal varies in direct proportion to the sound wave.

To digitise the signal we periodically measure the voltage of the signal and record the appropriate numeric value. The process is called sampling. In general, a sampling rate of around 40,000 times per second is enough to create a very good high quality sound reproduction.

Audio Formats

Several popular formats are: WAV, AU, AIFF, VQF, OGG, WMA and MP3. Currently, the dominant format for compressing audio data is MP3. MP3 is short for MPEG-2, audio layer 3 file.

MP3 employs both lossy and lossless compression.

• Analyses the frequency spread and compares it to mathematical models of human psychoacoustics (the study of the interrelation between the ear and the brain) and it discards information that can’t be heard by humans.
• Then the bit stream is compressed using a form of Huffman encoding to achieve additional compression.

Images and Graphics

Colour is our perception of the various frequencies of light that reach the retinas of our eyes. Our retinas have three types of colour photoreceptor cone cells that respond to different sets of frequencies. These photoreceptor categories correspond to the colours of red, green, and blue.

Colour is often expressed in a computer as an RGB (red-green-blue) value, which is actually three numbers that indicate the relative contribution of each of these three primary colours. For example, an RGB value of (255, 255, 0) maximises the contribution of red and green, and minimises the contribution of blue, which results in a bright yellow.

Images and Graphics

The amount of data that is used to represent a colour is called the colour depth.

• HiColour is a term that indicates a 16-bit colour depth. Five bits are used for representing the R and B components. Six bits are used for representing the G component, because the human eye is more sensitive to G;
• TrueColour indicates a 24-bit colour depth. Therefore, each number in an RGB value is represented using eight bits.

Digitised Images and Graphics

Digitising a picture is the act of representing it as a collection of individual dots called pixels. The word pixel was derived from the words, “picture element”. The number of pixels used to represent a picture is called the resolution.

Bitmap Images

Also known as raster-graphics format. It’s used for realistic images with continuous variations in shading, colour, shape and texture.
Examples:

• Scanned photos
• Clip art generated by a paint program
  Preferred when image contains large amount of detail and processing requirements are fairly simple

Input devices:

• Scanners
• Digital cameras and video capture devices
• Graphical input devices like mice and pens

Managed by photo editing software or paint software. Editing tools to make tedious bit by bit process easier.

Each individual pixel (pi(x)cture element) in a graphic stored as a binary number. Pixel: A small area with associated coordinate location. Example: each point below represented by a 4-bit code corresponding to 1 of 16 shades of gray.

Bitmap Formats

• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format): .TIF
• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): .GIF
• BMP (BitMaPped): .BMP
• JPEG (Joint Photographers Expert Group): .JPG
• PCX: .PCX (pronounced dot p c x) – Windows Paintbrush software
• PNG: (Portable Network Graphics): .PNG (pronounced ping)

Object Images

A vector-graphics format describe an image in terms of lines and geometric shapes. A vector graphic is a series of commands that describe a line’s direction, thickness, and colour. The file size for these formats tend to be small because every pixel does not have to be accounted for.

Vector graphics can be resized mathematically, and these changes can be calculated dynamically as needed. However, vector graphics is not good for representing real-world images.

Created by drawing packages or output from spreadsheet data graphs. Computer translates geometric formulas to create the graphic. Storage space required depends on image complexity
number of instructions to create lines, shapes, fill patterns.

Cannot represent photos or paintings. Cannot be displayed or printed directly. Must be converted to bitmap since output devices (except plotters) are bitmap.

For Example : Objects seen in movies like Shrek, Toy Story, The Incredibles, Madagascar.

Most object image formats are proprietary. Files extensions include .wmf, .dxf, .mgx, and .cgm.
Popular Object Graphics Software:

• Macromedia Flash
• Micrographx Designer
• CorelDraw : vector illustration, layout, bitmap creation, image-editing, painting and animation software
• Autodesk AutoCAD
• W3C SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) based on XML Web description language – Not proprietary

Bitmap vs. Object Images

Video Images

Requires massive amounts of data. Video camera producing full screen 640 x 480 pixel true colour image at 30 frames/sec, which is also 27.65 MB of data/sec.

Method depends on how video delivered to users.

• Streaming video : video displayed as it is downloaded from the Web server
  Example: video conferencing
• Local data (file on DVD or downloaded onto system) for higher quality
  MPEG-2: movie quality images with high compression require substantial processing capability

A video codec (Coder/Decoder) refers to the methods used to shrink the size of a movie to allow it to be played on a computer or over a network. Almost all video codecs use lossy compression to minimise the huge amounts of data associated with video.
Two types of compression:-

• Temporal compression
• Spatial compression

* The above information is aimed to assist people who want to learn more about computer technology. These works are not mine. All credits go to the original creator(s) of this article or founder(s) of these knowledges. These works is not and will not be used for any commercial purposes in this website. If you are one of them and want this article to be removed from this site, kindly proceed to the contact page and tell us about it. We’ll do so immediately.

After receiving my copy of The Sims 3, I’ve gone insane. Non-stop playing from evening until midnight… Here in this post, I would like to share some info which I believe that everyone who play The Sims 3 would surely look for it.

Ambrosia

Ambrosia is the best and most expensive recipe in the game which after consumed you can lengthen your life time. Let’s say if you are now an adult and you have 15 days left before becoming an elder, after eating ambrosia, your aging bar will be reduced to 0 which means you will be a freshly formed adult.
To make ambrosia, you will need deathfish and life fruits, and certain level of cooking skill (Level 10 if I’m not mistaken).

Deathfish and Its Location

To catch deathfish, you have to firstly purchase the deathfish bait guide book from the bookstore. To read the book, you need certain level of fishing skill (Level 8 if I’m not mistaken). Then, you can go start looking for deathfish.
Deathfishes are usually located around graveyard. In Sunset Vally, the deathfish spot is right in the graveyard. Refer to the image below:



As in Riverview, the deathfish spot is a little far away from graveyard, but still it’s within the area. Refer to the image below:

Life Fruits

Life fruits are very rare, but after you get the first piece of it or its seed, you can plant it and harvest it yourself. As far as I know, there are two methods to get life fruits. First method is to search for unknown seeds, collect them and plant them till you get life fruits. Unknown seeds are usually located near the beach, river, mountains and roadside. You can also purchase collector helper using your happiness rewards points which cost 40k points.
Refer to the image below to see how an unknown seed look like:

Another method is by joining science career. After reaching certain level of your science career, your sims will bring some rare plants home randomly. Life fruits are one of these rare plants.

Have Fun!!

As always, someone sent me a request on how to fix this issue and here is the solution.

Problem:
Backupuser.exe is a malware or virus stored somewhere in your computer that will automatically creates (without your permission) autorun.inf and itself (backupuser.exe) in all drives such as hard disks, newly plugged pendrives, etc.
Edit: “backupuser.exe” sometimes named “_backupuser.exe”.
The above two files mentioned can be seen only if you have enable the “show hidden files” option for your explorer. To do this, open any file or window, click tools –> folder options –> view tab –> under advanced settings, click “Show hidden files and folders”.

It also run a task named iexplorer.exe silently.
Note: The task, iexplorer.exe, is actually refers to Internet Explorer. Thus, whenever you run your Internet Explorer, you will surely see iexplorer.exe in the task manager. It’s not a virus or malware by default.
In this case, perhaps you haven’t notice it yet, backupuser.exe will also run iexplorer.exe even if you didn’t run any Internet Explorer. I’m not sure what is it for, but it’s possibly a threat to your computer.

Solution:
– Delete/Remove backupuser.exe. –
To do this, you will need hijackthis which can be downloaded from here (or simply google hijackthis).

HijackThis inspects your computers browser and operating system settings to generate a log file of the current state of your computer. Using HijackThis you can selectively remove unwanted settings and files from your computer. Because the settings identified in a HijackThis log file can belong to both legitimate software and unwanted malware, it is important to use extreme caution when choosing to removing anything using HijackThis.

HijackThis also comes with a process manager, HOSTS file editor, and alternate data stream scanner.

After finish downloading, install it anywhere you like. Open it, click “do system scan” button, a list of tasks which running in the background of your computer will be shown. Find backupuser.exe at the end of each line, select it and click “fix checked”.

Note: DO NOT FIX CHECKED ANYTHING THAT YOU UNSURE WHAT IS IT, IT MAY BE YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM’s TASKS. I would like to make it clear that I am not responsible for any loss or damage you may incur by reason of using this application.
After “fix checked” backupuser.exe, restart your computer and it will be GONE forever unless there is any pendrive with this virus again being plugged into your computer.

Another solution for this problem is to scan your computer and any drive you have with high ranked antivirus software such as Kaspersky Antivirus or Bitdefender Antivirus. I have tried scanning with Avast Antivirus, but backupuser.exe somehow cannot be detected. Perhaps there are other antivirus softwares which might possibly detect it and clean it right away.

Leave your messages in the comment section below if you have any further problem or better solution that you would like to share with us. Thank you.

There are several ways where you can tweak Xunlei 迅雷 for better download speed. The things that you can do to speed up your Thunder Xunlei download speed are as following:

1. Port Forwarding the ports that stated in your xunlei for both TCP and UDP. To see what’s your TCP and UDP ports are of your Xunlei, go to tools and then option, go to BT and look for the ports(the words are in chinese). For guide of port forwarding, visit www.portforward.com.

2. Uncheck UPnP under the same place(tools -> option -> BT).

3. Set your upload speed below the speed you can get. For example, if your package support 512kbps of upload speed, set it to 40-45kb/s.

4. DOWNLOAD ONE FILE AT A TIME. This is the most obvious tweak. You may see a great change of speed after you stop a several tasks and let only one of them run it.

5. Since it work as a http header, some people claim that forwarding port 80, 8080 and 21 are the best because there is no other http browser using ports beside these 3 ports. I personally don’t feel any differences of this tweak.

6. If you are using Windows XP, set your TCP half open connection to around 100 so that more connections are allowed to connect through your pc. Google “TCP half open connection” for more details.

Good Luck and enjoy downloading!

To prevent any unnecessary circumstances related to law, I hereby claim that this post is written for legal purposes.

Yes! we have no choice but to love Streamyx!
If you are a subscriber of ~~ streamyx, you should know how we, the users of TM Net Streamyx feel when we are downloading through torrent. Torrent is totally legal for everyone to use, as long as the materials you upload or download are not illegally copied. But, I believe nobody will care about this. So, lets leave this aside.

Speed? Throttling?
Speed, speed and speed! Everyone wants speed! But for us, the Streamyx users are not getting the speed we want. It’s ok if we take consideration of our economy. We are unfortunately unable to afford the higher technology. We understand it. But, please don’t throttle us… (Based what I know, throttle means something like blocking you from p2p connection.)

How slow you are when you are torrent-ing?
I personally get 1 to 10kbps using Bitcomet, Azureus, utorrent and BitTorrent. How about you? I’m not sure whether you get better speed or not because the possibility for them to throttle you is extremely depending on your location. They throttle the users mostly from crowded place as their bandwidth of that area is not able to support all users.

Best Torrent Client?
There is nothing that is the best. But for us who get throttled by our ISP, 迅雷(xunlei) or Thunder is the best solution to download faster!


How does 迅雷(xunlei) or Thunder works?
(Based on what I understand about this software) Xunlei connects to peers using fake http header, unlike other torrent client which connect to peers directly. Since it works this way, the connection is no longer a p2p connection. It is the same as you download something from a source. For Xunlei, a peer is equal to a source, thus it can connect to many sources for one task. This concept can bypass the thrrotling of your ISP.

Weaknesses of Xunlei
The speed is extremely unstable. It’s all depend on the task itself. If there are more sources, it would be more stable. How unstable it is? For example, when you have 100kbps for a task, it can sometimes have a sudden drop to 2kbps or lower. Why is this happen? I’m still not sure about this. But, I guess that a task might sometimes experience some file transfer pausing during the process. Thus, the speed might be affected.

TRY IT OUT!!
Download it from Xunlei.com.