If you have read my previous article you would gather I've been looking around for some computer related bargains. A few weekends ago I picked up a Netbook, what is a "Netbook"? I hear you ask. A netbook is a new name given to a certain size of laptop. They are basically ultra portable laptops and because of their size they are usually only 10inchs wide. What is even better is that they are designed to use as little power as possible and as efficiently as possible using processors such as Intel's new Atom processor basically the smallest processor Intel have ever developed. You would have thought with such a processor that you would be limited to the likes of Windows Mobile PC or a cut down copy of Linux, but the Atom can support Windows XP! Now I know Windows XP is supposed to be on its way out (Microsoft said so!), but one thing the Atom processor does is run Windows XP incredibly well. It is the ideal operating system for such a machine which probably would have ground to a holt if Vista was installed. My larger more powerful work laptop usually does if I'm not careful! Although its worth noting that Microsoft are releasing a new version of Windows for netbooks, lets wait and see how good it is..

Anyway back to my Netbook. Its an Advent 4213 with built in 3G, web cam, 160gig hard disk (yes you heard right), built in SD card reader, bluetooth, wifi and1 gig of RAM. That's what neat little package, I thought the 1gig of RAM would have been an issue but the machine hardly uses any of the memory especially when using the likes of Internet Explorer, Remote Desktop and  Windows Live Mail. Granted the machine comes installed with IE6 which I am reluctant to upgrade based on the dire performance issues I have had with it on previous XP installs. The machine hibernates and restarts like a dream in under a minute which is pretty impressive. The built in webcam has excellent quality for Skype calls something this machine does very well. The most impressive feature and the main reason I bought the laptop was for its size (so I could use it on a crowded rush hour train) and the built in 3G modem. Using the 3G modem was simplicity itself, you plug your SIM card into the slot found under the battery compartment boot up and connect to the Internet with the preinstalled connection software. The only issues I have had has really been with the "3" 3G network when it goes down to 2G in low coverage areas. This lower coverage area is actually the Orange network which 3 have a contract with. The Orange 2G network is painfully slow I would imagine that they give 3 customers lower priority over their own customers. just a thought.

My Advent fulfils all of my needs so well that I have now left my work laptop at work because it is so heavy and just use my Advent to connect over VPN or to do work on the train.  

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1525 some time ago with Windows Vista preinstalled for my wife. However after a year the machine was constantly maxing out its CPU. I tried everything, from installing all the Microsoft performance patches running virus scans and spy ware scans with every program I knew. I even searched Dell forums and installed the latest hardware drivers to make sure. I eventually installed Unbuntu Linux on the machine in dual boot mode to make sure it was not the machine causing the problem, and it wasn't the machines fault at all. Unbuntu barely used 5% cpu occasionally it would jump to 100% when using Firefox but other than that the machine was very usable.

The solution
So the problem must have been Vista, so I continued to monitor processes especially the svchost process and check what services this "catch all" windows service was running. Eventually I detected one that kept on coming up all the time was Windows Defender (MsMpEng.exe). I decided to disable Windows Defender by going into the control panel opening up Windows Defender selecting options and disabling it. Like magic the machine was down to 5% CPU usage! Opening FireFox, IE and Outlook only used short bursts of high CPU before bringing the CPU down to 10% to 34% usage. Which was far better than the 100% constant CPU usage.

The clash
One thing I did note though was that AVG anti virus and Windows Defender seem to be in a constant struggle with each other. Its as if Windows Defender checks a file then AVG goes who that file was touched let me just go and check it quickly and then Defender does the same which may have been causing a vicious circle of CPU usage. All I know now is that its better to be have some common sense when surfing the Internet and installing applications on your machine. Anti Virus software if you keep it up to date should be all you need to keep your machine safe. I know some people may require more protection for their machines but there is probably a better product than Windows Defender out there that doesn't stop you using your machine.

Process Tamer
Another program I have found to have been of great use to me is Process Tamer. This little app sits in the system tray and stops any one process on your machine from using more than 100% cpu usage.

I hope this little article is of use to people!

If you read my last article where I predicted the banks must be in a lot more trouble, more trouble than we could ever imagine. If you have seen the headlines this evening you would probably have noticed I was spot on! It looks like RBS's 45 billion pound debt (the GDP of Croatia!) has basically rendered the bank "technically insolvent" according to several news sources. What I find disturbing is RBS has warned that there could be worse to come,l just how deep does the rabbit hole go?

If the government is bailing out banks like its no tomorrow they are obviously going to need more cash, how much longer will it be until the government starts printing more money to cover these debts?

Many companies are going bust because they are unable to secure the lines of lending they used to because of the so called credit crunch. Many of these businesses aren't new some of them have been around for more than a decade.

It got me thinking, banks make a lot of money off the interest rates they charge people when they lend them money. At the end of the day if a bank isn't lending money it probably isn't much of a bank it needs some way of making money to pay its savers interest. If the banks are being so cautious even now at lending to each other even after the government has sunk substantial sums of cash into the system it makes you think we don't really have the bigger picture right now.

It makes you wonder if there is a secret amongst the banks that heaven forbid they are well and truly scr*wed or the debt is a magnitude worse than we ever expected. So much so that if it was revealed to the public the mass panic alone would cause a national disaster and the break down of the economy.  Another part of me wonders if they are spending all this time looking at all of their past investments so they can discover just how badly they have been exposed because they don't even no themselves. It stands to reason if you're a bank with this type of exposure you know your fellow banks probably aren't any better off and you sure as hell aren't going to lend them money to cover their exposure if there is a chance you may not get it back yourselves. To the politicians it has become a case of necessity it probably doesn't matter to them anymore if what the banks did was wrong all they are probably focusing on now is to stop it pulling the whole economy down with it at any cost. This may lead to the printing of extra money and the devaluation of our precious pound to levels we may never have seen before. 

Its true if you shop and haggle on the high street you're bound to pickup a bargain especially concerning the current economic client the consumer has more power over price than they have ever had before.

Wandering around PCWorld my wife and I saw a real bargain of a PC in their clearance section.  This section isn't looked at much by the normal customer who is more attracted to the all dancing all dazzling display models. The clearance sections consists of ex display models or machines with missing bits all wrapped in bubble wrap. Usually these machines are identical to the display area but are missing box's, cables and software and discounted by as much as 50% in some cases. We found one such example with one of PCWorlds own brand PC's which usually retail for £220 but had been discounted to £185 because it didn't have a box or cables.

We got my father who was wandering around some other shops and had been keen to get another PC after his old one had given up the ghost. I had to rush my father through as someone else had seen the same bargain in store and was waiting for me to put the PC down so they could get the bargain. However I was unable to get it to the till without the sheet of paper containing its price which seemed to be missing so it proved to be a real conundrum getting a price as all of the staff were suddenly busy. Eventually we got the price sheet for the computer and it had been brought down to £129! Nice! It was rather easy to get the machine setup for dad, after I had discovered PCWorld still had the demo OS installed which I didn't have the password for. Not a problem there is a setup menu just before the OS boots which will reinstall it from scratch for you with Windows Vista. Its a pretty fast PC which my father is rather happy with after I set him up with 3 Mobile Broadband. We told my parents in-law and they also wanted one! Now I have ordered them a £185 version online. The thing I love about ordering a PC online is you don't get put through the PCWorld staff sales pitch trying to sell you after sales support. I don't need it but maybe some people do, in my mind its just a waste of money because I know how to recover or tune a PC. The staff treat you as though you are nuts not taking it because it appears essential in their minds. I am guessing it might be to some people, but for now I am saving money.

According this article on the BBC web site. Internet and phone communications between Europe, the Middle East and Asia have been disrupted ... yet again! How many times can these cables get severed?

According to the article they may only expect connectivity back on the 31st of December. Well at least we will get some respite from the pesky International call centres over Christmas, thanks Santa!

I really don't understand this, may be someone can shed some light on this one for me. If I am running Internet Explorer on my Windows Vista machine with 3 browser windows open (non of them have Flash) and I also have a VMWare machine open running Windows Server 2003 with 2 programs running. Why oh why does Internet Explorer use 122,792K of precious RAM and VMWare uses 27,080K of RAM? Why is it that this that even when I have Internet Explorer open in Windows Server 2003 in my VMware session on the same pages that it still doesn't use as much RAM?

Also considering that I have turned off all the advanced graphics such as Aero off in Vista.

Is it that:

• Windows Vista is badly written compared to Windows Server 2003?
• Is VMWare so magnificently written that it only uses as much RAM as it needs?
• Microsoft's QA dept didn't do the same quality checks as they did on Windows Server 2003 (great OS by the way).
• That there is an issue with Internet Explorer suffering memory leaks on Windows Vista?

I know so many people who have switched back to "good old XP" for this very reason. Some have even gone as far as using Windows Server 2003 as their operating system to get around these issues. I have read online that companies have delayed upgrading their networks to Vista until Microsoft have sorted out the printing issues Vista has which still exists in Service Pack 1.

If you are reading this article you have probably encountered the same problem I have with svchost continually using 45-50% cpu usuage. Making use of Systinternals process explorer I discovered it was the DNS Client that was using up all my CPU time.

Having a look at several forums online most of the solutions were for Windows XP which didn't work for me and were based around the Windows Update service causing the issue. However my issue started after me implementing a whole raft Windows updates recently.

Anyway long story short my temporary fix has been to disable the DNS Client in Windows Services for now. You can get to this by typing services.msc from the Start menu in Vista finding the DNS Client go to properties and under Startup set this to disabled. You may need to go into Task Manager selected services and End the process tree for the svchost service for this change to take affect without rebooting. Disabling the DNS Client basically causes Windows Vista not to cache the DNS entries effectively making browsing sites you have already seen a lot faster. This is by no means a permanent fix, but until now it will do until Microsoft can issue a fix for the issue....I miss Windows XP...

After discovering that Joost works on the PS3 browser I then decided to to see if the BBC iPlayer worked in the same way and it did! The BBC iPlayer web site now detects if you have a Playstation 3 and then serves up a smaller vision of the site for the PS3. It even tells you to press the right controller in to maximise the content you are watching. I must say there were a lot less complications with it than there was with Joost, probably because the BBC kept it simple, simple works for me it means less goes wrong.

Now I know the iPlayer has been working on the Wii for a while now but its nice to see it working on the PS3 as its the only console I usually keep plugged in because it plays my Blu Ray discs, DVD's and is a lot better at playing streamed content from my Windows Media Centre PC better than my Xbox 360!

You can also see past episodes of Hero's on the iPlayer now BTW.

Okay to anyone in the know this is probably old news by now and the reason I missed this exciting news is I have been locked in a room for 6 months delivering a web site (its pretty cool).

Anyway I got an announcement from Joost today saying that the old Joost client will soon stop working and that I should now watch Joost content directly from the browser. I visited Joost and fair enough all the content was available to view from a browser it then got me think, this all works on Flash right? So it should all been viewable from the PS3's web browser. I hurriedly rummaged around the back of my Xbox, pulled out the fibre optic surround sound cable and plugged it into my PS3 (I had been playing Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 previously). I visited the Joost site and low and behold it works! It also works in full screen! How cool is that I know longer need to plug my laptop into my TV to watch Joost!

Only problems I have had so far is the PS3 sometimes complains about the content not having the correct certificate when I try to click accept it just doesn't highlight the selection and the browser gets stuck so I have to go out and go back into the browser. Other than that its not to bad, however I still get a considerable amount of pauses in the content. It must be my broadband connection not being fast enough (8 megs measured at 6 megs tops) or just a lot of people requesting content?

It always astounds me how bad Sky Customer service really is. Sky I believe is a victim of its own success, they have a large percentage of the pay TV market and appear to struggle keeping up with servicing their existing customers. They have made an attempt to put some of this online so customers can attempt to service their own accounts, but at the moment it just doesn't cover everything that is needed.

To give you an example. I wanted to reactivate my Sky Multiroom room subscription for over Christmas because I had family staying with me who may want to watch other TV shows. You would have thought it would be a simple thing to do right? Well here is what went wrong.

Not sure who to phone I contacted the general Sky Customer Service phone number. The choices they had available with their automated operator service was confusing none of the options for multi room were there so I ended up having to choose something I could find as close as possible to what I wanted. So I am first put through to an automated operator which asks me for my details such as my phone number (you could get this from caller display surely), my postcode and my date of birth.

Finally after 4 minutes I get through to someone and ask the lady if she could help me she told me that she could reactivate my multiroom but that all their systems were down great! I asked her if I could do this online, she said she was not sure. I had to phone back later that night, so I did and got through a call centre in India after being on the phone for 5 minutes who told me the same thing! What really annoyed me is their automated operator could have said "All of our systems are down at the moment please phone back later". Okay I would have to deal with Sky the next day maybe their systems would be up and running then?

The next day after going through the automated operator and telling it all of my details and after waiting the usual 4 minutes I get through to an operator. The operator then goes and asks me these same details again! I explain to him that I have a Sky Plus Box and an additional Sky box that I would like to to re-enable Sky Multi-room on and that I have an existing viewing card for that box. He tells me that he has to put me on hold while he goes away and asks someone after about a minute he returns and tells me that they will have to send me a new viewing card. I ask him if he is sure as I have perfectly good card here, he decides to go away again and ask and about a minute later is back again. I am afraid to ask this guy any more questions because he just doesn't know anything. He tells me he will have to read me Sky's customers agreement on the phone. I resign myself to this and am grateful when the call is over.

Two days later my new viewing card arrives and put it in the box,m but then it tells me I need to activate it ahhh! First of all I log into my Sky account online to see if I can activate the card online without having to wait in a long queue...no! Okay so I ready myself by the phone and call the number suggested on the paper that comes with the card. I get the automated operator who asks me for all of my details to speed things up, I give her my details and then I get put into a queue for 4 minutes..joy! Finally I get through to a call centre in India where the lady first asks me for all the details I gave the automated operator and then tells me I don't have a phone password setup on my account, so I set one up. Then I tell her about activating my Sky card and she tells me she will have to put me through to the correct department and there is a 3 minutes wait! "Okay" I say biting my bottom lip, before she puts me through she gives me the number to phone them directly (why wasn't this on the instructions?) funnily enough I get through to a centre straight away in Scotland, well the lady sounds Scottish and I can understand her perfectly. I explain the problem I have an she also notices that now I have two extra Sky box's registered to my account! I tell her what happened with the guy yesterday and she tells me he shouldn't have sent me an extra card and he should have just reactivated the existing card. She asks me if I would like to to reactivate the old card. I tell her yes, I then ask he about the extra card and I am worried I am going to be charged yet another 10 pounds a month for another subscription. She says because the card isn't activated I shouldn't be charged for two multi room subscriptions. Okay fair enough, she tells me that I will have to 2 minutes to 4 hours for the channels to come through on my additional Sky box.

So after waiting 5 hours I still don't get any channels on the extra box and decide to reboot the box just to make sure but still the same problem. You guessed it I found myself on the phone again to Sky the annoying automated operator asks me the same details again and then when I finally get through to Sky after the usual 4 minutes the guys checks for me and tells me he is going to send the channels to my box again (why can't they add this feature to their web site and let customers do this themselves?) anyway I tells me to wait at least 4 hours again to make sure the channels come through. "very well" I say and then query him on two sky multi room subscriptions being added to my account. He takes a look and goes "oh yes I see" and then he pauses "oh no what's going on" then there is another pause "oh my computer just turned itself off"  I can't believe it! He then tells me I will need to phone back later! Anyway at least my channels are now coming through on my extra box but I am still worried I am going to be charged twice for multi room.....ahhh!

Can anyone tell me if they have the same problem with Virgin Media or Tiscali?

I have often been irriated beyond belief by inconsiderate train passengers who choose that very moment in life to call every number that exists on their phone. We've all sat next to them, they are the people who are uncomfortable with silence. They talk on the phone not because they have to but because they can't help themselves. They are the reasons you yourself only makes calls on the train if its necessary or keep them short. They are the reasons you usually say "I am on the train now I'll call you back later". Anyway C2C trains are introducing a membrane on the windows of their quiet carriages to stop this once and for all. The membrane basically blocks all radio signals from penetrating the train. Wehoo! Now if they could just find a device to block loud personal steros.