The Razer Tiamat($179.99):  Those of you who know Razer shouldn’t be all that surprised that they’ve an entry on this list. They are, after all, one of the top businesses on the market when it comes to developing gaming accessories and peripherals. Not only is it (comparatively) cheaper than several other entries no the list, it’s also capable of  near-perfect sound, and looks mighty fine, to boot. Plus, it’s Razer- so that brings it a little higher in the books of most folks, right away.

Turtle Beach Ear Force($112.78): The Turtle Beach headset features four speakers in each ear cup and dual subwoofers- the end result is that you end up with full surround-sound being pumped directly into your ears. Pretty sweet, no? It looks pretty spiffy, to boot. Oh, did I mention that it’s also 360 compatible, as well?

The Astro A40($249.99): You’re going to need to kick your wallet in the teeth and shell out a bit of cash to afford this one-but it’ll be worth it. Right out the door, this one’s got a pretty hefty endorsement behind it as the official headset of MLG. Chances are good that if the pros are happily using it, it’s probably a pretty decent product, no? It’s got many of the features that you’ll see in several of the others on the list, with headphones that essentially cancel out all noise in the area, and looks right sexy, too.

The LogitechG39($119.99): What sets the G390 apart from the other entries on this list is that it’s fully wireless- no cords to get tangled or run over by your office chair. It delivers the same level of sound quality as all the other headsets hear, features a noise-cancelling boom mic, and can be customized with touch and voice commands, using several programmable keys. Not a bad deal for 120 bucks, no?

Sennheiser PC36($249.95): Here’s another that carries a hefty price tag, with good reason. Sennheiser’s beautiful headset features noise cancellation, a microphone that cuts itself off when the boom is raised, full surround sound and Hi-Fi sound. Couple that with a visually pleasing design and comfortable ear cups, and you’ve got a winner.

Naturally, these are only a few suggestions to get you on the right track. Shop around! Find the microphone that you think will fit you the best- just be sure you read the reviews, first.

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The Five Best Gaming Headsets

Understand What’s Happening

One of my favorite cartoon shows growing up as a kid was G.I. Joe. Looking back as an adult, I can see where the show brought some important values to my life. The most important of which is the phrase “and knowing is half the battle.” It’s as true an axiom for combating Cobra Commander as it is for fighting your computer nemesis. The first key step to dealing with your computer problem is to ask yourself “What is the computer doing and how does it differ from what I expected?” I find it best to work with an example:

Sitting down to write an expense report for the fourth quarter stockholder’s meeting, Maximillion finds that when he starts up Microsoft Word, he encounters an error message that says “Word has encountered an error and needs to close. (51187x) Please contact your system administrator for assistance.”

A fairly daunting error message when sitting down for such an important task will almost always induce a fair amount of panic. But, never fear – with a grasp (even a non-technical one) on what’s happening, the battle is already half-way won. If you’re taking my advice, the first step in this example is you know you’ve opened up Word to create a document. You get an error. You expect it to open and let you begin your work, but it won’t. It spouts the above spurious error message. Unless you’re an encyclopedia of Microsoft error messages, it won’t immediately be clear what’s wrong.

Know Your Resources

This part of the process I generally refer to as “Google Is Your Friend,” and will often use this mantra around friends and family not to be mean, but to encourage them to research things for themselves. However, that’s not to say asking your geek friends isn’t in your repertoire of resources. You will likely find them a lot more willing to help, though, if you’ve already done your homework. A quick Google search for this spurious error message won’t likely return any results (except maybe this post) because I’ve invented it for the sake of example. But in a real-world situation you’ll likely find the error code comes up with at the very least an article from the software company explaining what has happened. If the explanation is still “Geek to you,” you may find further clarity Googling the terms, or seek out your Geek friends.

Searching Google has become such a ubiquitous tech support tool that sarcastic geeks even created a website called “Let Me Google That For You” which, through a specially crafted link, shows an animation of someone typing in your search term in a Google search box, and then it says “That Wasn’t So Hard, Was It?” and links you to the results.

Plan a Path of Least Destruction

In our example scenario, Maximillion’s report is due soon. A complete re-install of Microsoft Office may not be the wisest solution even if it turns out to be effective. In your Google search, you may yield an even simpler answer that leads you straight into a better solution. The beauty of the Internet is most questions you could ask have already been asked before and if you’re lucky, already been answered.

In this example, one search result contains a post from a friendly forum poster who asks: “I usually leave the computer password-protected so that I can control my children’s access with supervision. However, this past weekend I got up from the computer to check on dinner in the oven and the rascal sat down and logged on to a social networking site. While he was there he installed some sort of game that turned out to be a virus. After my antivirus program removed the virus, I tried to open up Word and got a weird error message with this number (51187x) telling me to contact my system administrator. I don’t have one of those! Please help!” A helpful commenter replies with some of the information they found Googling the explanation for the error, and suggests doing a roll-back to a recent Restore Point using Windows’ System Restore tool. This seemed to resolve the issue for the troubled poster.

Maximillion quickly finds that trying the solution that worked for the forum user resolves his issue and takes only a few minutes to complete. He’s able to get back to work without a huge amount of fuss.

Learn What Interests You

Solving your own problems doesn’t have to be all work and no fun. As you work on your own problems, you may have a topic tickle your fancy. You may not consider yourself a geek, but everyone has a little bit of geek inside them. Want to learn how to build your own computer? It’s not that hard. The primary obstacle to knowing more about the computer is the intimidating fear of screwing something up.

Become educated by reading up on the topics that intrigue you. Most computer geeks of the true form have had little to no formal training. Computer geeks read manuals and documentation for fun. They write code. In troubleshooting computers and operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux), geeks know the ins and outs of how the computer works. When it doesn’t work right, it’s a whole lot easier to see where the problem lies. Follow the steps outlined above, and you’ll quickly be on your way to solving any computer problem whether its hardware, software, or just not knowing how to get things done. You just may find yourself getting calls from your friends for help one day – and save them a call to the local big box store’s tech support squad.

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How to Solve Almost Any Computer Problem Yourself

The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed. This vulnerability can be exploited locally through a malicious USB drive, or remotely via network shares and WebDAV. An exploit can also be included in specific document types that support embedded shortcuts.

Microsoft has recently released a hotfix to address this vulnerability. This hotfix is not published through Windows Update and is only available as a manual download and install. However, before you install this pay close attention to the note:

NOTE: Applying the fixit will remove the graphical representation of icons on the Task bar and Start menu bar and replace them with white icons without the graphical representation of the icon.

Because the exploit uses a specially crafted icon, this hotfix essentially disables pretty icons in shortcuts and replaces them with the blank white page. While no known security issue should be overlooked, due to the obvious impact this hotfix will have on how your system looks, you should definitely weigh the pros and cons before installing this hotfix.

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Microsoft Hotfix For The Exploitable LNK And PIF Vulnerability

Stickies is a PC utility [...] to try to cut down on the number of yellow notes [...] stuck to [your] monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.

The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores information in a single text-based ini file.

Everybody knows what they are so no further explanation is needed. The fact that it has virtually zero footprint is a nice added bonus as well.

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Add Sticky Notes To Your Computer Desktop

What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

Out of the box, RichCopy includes a graphical configuration so you can control all the parameters of your copy project. If you are moving several large files, the multi-threaded and pause features are fantastic options. Of course, you can use RichCopy from the command line as well which makes this tool clearly superior to RoboCopy.

There are lots of power tools out there for file copying, but this is the only one I know of developed by Microsoft.

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Powerful Microsoft File Copying Utility

Choose Bing and we’ll send you a $3 donation code to use towards a public school classroom project of your choice on DonorsChoose.org. This money can give a new reader a copy of “The Wizard of Oz,” an inkpad to a budding artist, or four new compasses to young urban explorers.

Yes, the motivation here is obvious but let’s not fault a good deed.

So if you do want to give Bing a shot as your default search engine, why not help out with and educational cause at the same time?

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Microsoft Donating $3 To Education For Each New Bing User

That said, if you are thinking about getting a Google Android powered phone and want to give it a test drive before you buy, then check out this article titled ‘How to Test Drive Google Android on Your PC Without Buying a Phone‘. The author walks you through the process of installing the Android emulator on your computer which will let you install and run applications on the emulated phone.

While the article focuses on Windows, the emulator works on Windows, Mac and Linux so all users can give it a try. This is a great way to make sure you really like what you getting before you actually get it.

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Give Google Android A Try Without Having A Phone

SmartSniff is a network monitoring utility that allows you to capture TCP/IP packets that pass through your network adapter, and view the captured data as sequence of conversations between clients and servers. You can view the TCP/IP conversations in Ascii mode (for text-based protocols, like HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP.) or as hex dump. (for non-text base protocols, like DNS)

The usage is very self-explanatory, just run the program and all traffic across your network card is displayed. You can view everything from HTTP traffic to file shares which makes this utility great for sniffing out potential malware or for doing some intensive development debugging. As such, this utility is geared towards power users who can interpret what this information means (it isn’t too hard to figure out).

For Windows 7/2008 users this utility is all you need, but Windows versions prior to 7 have conditions which may effect its ability to run as intended, so if you are running one of these versions take the time to read this.

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Easily Monitor Network Traffic On Your Windows Machine

The report shows an alarming development in 3rd party program vulnerabilities, representing an increasing threat to both users and business, which, however, continues to be greatly ignored.

This trend is supported by the fact that users and businesses still perceive the operating system and Microsoft products to be the primary attack vector, largely ignoring 3rd party programs, and finding the actions to secure these too complex and time-consuming.

Granted, the more software titles you support on Windows, the more likely you are to higher up on the list because the rankings are determined by the total of all vulnerabilities in all your products. Interestingly enough, however the ranking of browsers from most to least security issues goes: Firefox, Safari, Chrome and finally IE8 (meaning IE8 has the fewest known vulnerabilities).

These findings are determined based on Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) application and are simply aggregate totals that do not take the severity of the known issues into consideration.

Again, these rankings do not include the OS, only 3rd party applications running on Windows. So the moral of this story is to make sure you keep all your software titles up to date as much as possible.

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Apple, Oracle, Microsoft Top The List Of Most Vulnerable Software Vendors On Windows

In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Most likely, this is due to blood not fully circulating while you are in the sitting position.

You may be wondering why I am posting this on a technology blog. The reason is simply that many people in the tech/IT world do spend large periods of time sitting in front a computer. While the study focuses on TV watching and car driving, you can easily replace this with being in front of a computer.

So what can you do if you fall into this category? Take more “stand up” breaks… walk around the room a bit when you have been sitting for an extended period of time.

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Study Links Long Periods Of Sitting To Heart Disease