PC Pharmacy.us

Make Use Of Guides

jimb — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:05:27 +0000

We are a firm believer in reading to learn. My clients will ask me how to do this or that and I always remind them that the internet and Google search is your friend. You need to get out there and read up on your interests or follow up on your questions.

With that in mind, I stumbled upon this today and thought I would post it here. It is a page of 50 guides on how to do things. From Android to Ubuntu. Guides on Google Gmail (which we highly recommend), buying laptops and Microsoft office 2010 tips and tricks. A great guide on using Windows 7 is also available, in fact the complete list is:

Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: The Ultimate Guide
Best of the Web, Delivered: The Reddit Manual
An Android Guide : These Are The Droids You’re Looking For
Virtual Currency: The MakeUseOf BitCoin Manual
Computer In Your Computer: How To Use VirtualBox
New Life: Bring Old PC To Life With Ubuntu [PDF]
Operation Cleanup: Complete Malware Removal Guide
Watch The Web: AWESOME Media Center Guide 2011
Bam! Your Guide To Cool Online Comic Books
Go Google: Free Email and More On Your Domain
50 Cool Uses for Live CDs
The Laptop Buying Guide 2011
Lockdown: Secure Your Files with TrueCrypt
Learn to Speak “Internet”: Your Guide To xHTML
Picture Perfect: Set Up Your Own Photoblog
Open Book: Managing Your eBooks With Calibre
Microsoft Office 2010: Ultimate Tips & Tricks
Stuff Happens: The Backup & Restore Guide
Hard Drive Of The Future: 101 Guide To Solid State Drives
Windows on Speed: Ultimate PC Acceleration Manual
HackerProof: Your Guide To PC Security
The Five-Star Guide For Your iPad
How The Internet Works
You Like This: The Facebook Marketing Guide
Your PC, Inside And Out [Part 2]
The Awesome Automation Guide for Mac Users
Your PC, Inside and Out [Part 1]
The First Unofficial Guide To Dropbox
The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Guide
The Office Worker’s 101 Guide to a USB Thumb Drive
Step-By-Step Guide To Using GarageBand
The Ultimate Windows 7 Guide
The Complete Beginners Guide To Joomla
The Ultimate Guide To Gmail
The Essential Guide To Digital Photography
How To Create Professional Reports & Docs on Word
The MakeUseOf Guide To Internet Searching
The MakeUseOf Online Shopping Guide
How To Build a Gaming PC
The Internet Music Guide For The Audiophile
The MakeUseOf Guide to File Sharing Networks
The MakeUseOf Windows Mobile Guide
How To Build A Great Media Center PC
The Easy Guide To Computer Networks
The Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible
An Easy Guide to Build Your Own WordPress Site
The Underground Guide To The iPhone
The Internet Guide to the Movie Addict
The Complete Guide To Twitter
An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop
The FREE A-Z Torrent Guide
The Idiot’s Ultimate Guide to Build Your Own PC
Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux
MakeUseOf’s Smart Productivity Guide
The BIG Book Of iTunes for FREE
The FREE Mac Manual

Now we have not read all these guides and therefore cannot recommend or condone them all, but most are simple information PDF files that will give you the basic info you need. We also have downloaded and highly recommend he Ultimate Windows 7 Guide for those of you who need help learning your way around Windows 7.

So why not go here and check out some of these great guides and start expanding your Internet / Computing knowledge .. today!

ACH Payment Scam

jimb — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:24:34 +0000

Just got this in one of my email accounts:

Evidently this has been around before but is now back. The “scam” here is to get you to open the attached ZIP file. when this surfaced earlier the NACHA (a legitimate company) posted this response:

Random individuals and/or companies may have received a falsified e-mail with the subject title “Rejected ACH Transaction.” This e-mail appears to be from NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association telling them that there is a problem with an ACH transaction they have originated. The e-mail includes a link which redirects the individual to a fake web page which appears like the NACHA website and contains a link which is almost certainly executable virus with malware.

If you are like me and use PayPal and shop online, this would cause some concern that one of your payments got cancelled. Again, be safe.

DO NOT open any attachments you do not know who they are from.

If you are in doubt, go to the source. So if you receive something about your credit card, go to their site or better yet, your account. In thi scase we checked the NACHA website (noted at bottom of email) and look at their first post on the page:

Google warning users infected with malware

jimb — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:00:23 +0000

Hopefully this hasn’t happened to you in a long time, but how about the last time you used a friend’s PC to discover he had installed three different browser toolbars on top of each other and that Google queries were being filtered and redirected to a (usually awful looking) third-party ripoff site.

Recently Google discovered unusual patterns of activity while performing routine maintenance on one of their data centers. Looking more deeply into the search traffic coming in, they were able to determine this corresponded to a group of users that had been infected with malware. Since yesterday, Google has been showing a warning message at the top of search results to affected users (see the screenshot below).

According to the search giant, the notification has already been shown to hundreds of thousands of users, an impressive figure for just 24 hours. They estimate that at least a couple million PCs running Windows are infected by this “fake AV” software (scam antivirus, also known as scareware) that has hundreds of variants. In other words, Google’s notifications will not cover a wide range of malware strains, but only the specific ones using certain proxy redirects that were detected by Google engineers in the aforementioned data center maintenance.

Anti-malware tools are actively discussed and recommended on TechSpot. If you want to make sure your PC is safe, a good place to start if you run Windows is to download Microsoft’s own Security Essentials software and Malwarebytes Antimalware, both free tools. You will also find personalized malware removal help in our forums courtesy of our kick-ass contributors Broni and Bobbye.

By Julio Franco

Published: July 21, 2011, 9:00 AM

Google Buys G.Co To Create An Official URL Shortcut For Google Products

jimb — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:27:29 +0000

Google joins Internet biggies Twitter (T.Co) , Overstock (O.co) and Amazon (A.Co, Z.Co and K.Co) today in taking over the G.Co domain name, buying the TLD in order to build the official URL shortcut for Google products like GMail, Documents and Photos. While representatives from the .Co registry wouldn’t comment on the specific pricing of the deal, .Co-founder Juan Diego Calle recently told Reuters that in general single letter domains costs more than $1.5 million.

Google says it will use the domain in order to create a shortcut for all its products and services using the format g.co/[XYZproduct/service] and that the domain will be live sometime later in the afternoon today. ”You can visit a G.CO shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service,” said Google VP of consumer marketing Gary Briggs in a release.

Run out of Colombia (and with the support of the Colombian government), the .Co domain is hard core targeting itself towards tech companies big and small. Also announced today is the 500 Startups‘ .Co rebranding; the incubator will be moving from 500Startups.com to 500.co this fall. While not as mainstream, the 500 Startups move is probably just as monumental as the Google news, as it give the domain street cred and solidifies that idea that the “Co” in .Co means companies.

Emphasizing this point, 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure said that he recommends the .Co domain to all his now 150 startups, ” “With .Co, startups can launch businesses and brands on a short, cool, credible domain name — without having to shell out a million bucks to do it.” “CO is quickly becoming the hot new geek TLD in Silicon Valley,” he said.

The .Co domain registry is two days away from the first anniversary of its public launch and most recently hit 1 million registered domains after ten months of existence. Its marketing and advertising push has been aimed at tech companies who have thus far had to settle for a lame mainstream .com domains — i.e. no vowels, weird spelling, etc — or have had to shell out tons of VC cash for the domains that they want. The new enough .Co offers a viable alternative.

“We want to be inspiring people with big dreams and big ideas to do it on a .Co.,” .Co Director Lori Anne Wardi told me about the registry’s aspirations on the phone earlier, “We want to be a platform for the world’s next great businesses.”

Alexia Tsotsis

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Laptop – Notebook – Netbook

jimb — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:15:15 +0000

Awhile back I had written an article comparing the differences in these three devices. Unfortunately I lost those when redoing this site so I am writing a new explanation.

You can find the technical explanations of Laptops, Notebooks and Netbooks by clicking on these terms. This will bring up a pop-up Wiki link with their definitions. I, however, will attempt to show and explain some examples in a little more lay persons term.

Although many definitions lump Notebook and Laptop as the same, the primary difference would be screen and unit size. Years back, IBM came out with their Thinkpad which was in fact a notebook. The screens on these are typically 12″ to 14″ (all screens are measured diagonally) and the size of the device was around that of a spiral “notebook”. Now that size has gone by the wayside for the “bigger is better” screen sizes of 15″ to 17″, true notebooks are hard to find. Of course as screens and units got bigger, their weight also got heavier. The industry saw a need for a lighter more convenient device and the netbook was conceived.

The pictures below are comparison photos I took of both my laptop (on the left 15″ screen) and my netbook.

The unit on the left is a Dell Laptop with 15″ screen and the unit on the right is a MSI netbook with 10.1″ screen. That is a 12″ white ruler on the netbook. Now besides the obvious screen and weight differences, there are some performance differences. A laptop will come with a much faster processor, i.e. computer chip, then the netbook.

IPhone With 3 Extra USB Ports?

jimb — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:23:02 +0000

This iPhone cable has three extra USB ports built right in

07:45 AM, Wednesday, 13 July 2011

The smaller laptops get, the fewer ports they have room for.

It’s a common problem, especially on the smaller Apple laptops, which only have two.
That’s what makes this iPhone cable with a built-in USB hub so smart.

Want three extra USB ports? Just use this cable to charge and sync your iPhone.
You can then plug three other devices right into it, saving space and making up for the scarcity of ports on your laptop. It’s clever and elegant; it’s almost surprising Apple didn’t do this themselves.

DITS via Technabob

Is Netflix doomed?

jimb — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:18:52 +0000

My favorite video streaming services only hope is to convince major media companies to let it rent movies—but I fear it’s already too late.
By Lance Ulanoff

Well that was a short, fast ride. Netflix, a service that continues to expand at an astounding rate and has arguably changed the way we watch movies at home seems primed for a big fall off the top of the home video delivery heap.

Netflix certainly changed movie night in my home. Less than a decade ago, we all got in the car and visited Blockbuster or a local video store and fought over which DVD(s) to rent. Today, the fighting’s still there, but everything else has changed. We don’t leave our house to find movies. First, we stopped going out because Netflix would deliver multiple DVDs directly to our home as fast as we could consume them. Now, however, we’ve cut down our monthly Netflix bill and have just one DVD in our possession at any given time. We rarely watch whatever’s on that disc, though. Instead, we turn on the Blu-ray player, select Netflix, and then find something on which we can all agree (hence the fighting).

Netflix, by the way, seems quite ready to do as we did and leave the red-enveloped DVDs behind. Sign out of your account and visit the Netflix homepage. It’s devoted to promoting Netflix streaming service. You wouldn’t even know it still ships millions of DVDs all over the U.S. (and some to other parts of the world). This makes sense. It’s hard to buy a device without built-in Netflix streaming capability. Of course, Netflix is not alone on these devices. My Blu-ray player and Sony TVs also offer a variety of other video-streaming options, including Amazon, Qriocity, and Hulu. Netflix streaming pickings, though, are still not super for the latest movies.

So what’s the problem? Netflix customers like me are migrating from the labor- and cost-intensive disc shipping services to the largely all digital streaming option. Netflix’s costs must be tumbling and with lots and lots of new $8-a-month, streaming-only subscribers, there should be nothing but blue skies ahead for Netflix. If only that were true.

As this story on CNNMoney explains and even Netflix’s own CEO Reed Hastings has revealed, Netflix will have to shell out millions and millions of dollars (if not billions) just to keep the content it currently offers in its Watch Instantly library. During June’s D9 conference in California, Hastings readily admitted that it was going to cost money to deliver the kind of streaming experience customers demand: “Part of our goal is to make subscribers happy and part is to make our content partners really happy and part of that is writing really big checks,” he said.

CNN reports that many of the contracts Netflix signed with the studios had a user cap. As Netflix blows by those caps, the contracts implode and Netflix loses access to the content. Paying a lot more money is one way to get the movie and TV shows back, but the new deals Netflix signs will be far more expensive than those the partners drafted three or four years ago.

Not that Netflix even has the best library. When I first started using Netflix’s Watch Now services, there were virtually no new films, just titles that had come out last year or a few years ago. There were lots B movies, older films, and crummy TV series that no one wanted to watch when they were new. When Netflix signed with Starz, the service finally gained access to movies that had been in theaters months or just weeks before. That relationship has since imploded , mostly over the fees Starz and its parent Sony wanted and what Netflix was willing—or able—to pay. Hasting’s has explained that “[You] can’t have all the new stuff and have the $8-a-month price we have.”

For me, the result has been that I now look to Apple TV or Amazon for most of my streaming needs. They at least have a selection almost comparable to what I might find if I allowed Netflix to send me more DVDs or visited one of the remaining video stores. Granted, I pay $5 per movie, but that’s still far less expensive than taking the whole family to a movie theater (at $9-to-$12 a head).

And this is where it gets real sticky for Netflix. Hastings said at D9 that, even though the DVD business will eventually go away, Netflix’s streaming business is, for now, still “complimentary.” That could change fast. Netflix is obviously working to counter the shrinking, but probably more lucrative, shipping business by expanding globally into places like Canada and Latin America . Over time, the world will walk away from physical media. Broadband access (wired or wireless) will reach every part of the U.S. and further and further around the globe, and consumers will get their HD video content exclusively from the Web.

Netflix should be well-positioned to take advantage of this trend, but it’s clear to me that that’s not the case right now. As CNNMoney notes, Netflix does not have the cash or, possibly, even the buying power of competitors like Google, Amazon, and Apple. What’s more, switching from one service to another is inconsequential. I can switch back and forth in my home right now, searching for the best movies on the service of my choice. With Netflix making almost no headway in accessing first-run films for instant streaming, and no hurdles to stop consumers like me from switching, Netflix’s future looks very dire indeed.

Chargers

jimb — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:32:48 +0000

This link will take you to the Charger selector page. Please click on the title “Chargers” above to do so.

Batteries

jimb — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:18:42 +0000

This link will take you to the Battery selector page. Please click on the title “Batteries” above to do so.

Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results

jimb — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:59:05 +0000

[Ed: In an effort to clean up the Internet, Google takes a bold move]

Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are far too “spammy”.

The .co.cc space is not an officially authorised second-level domain like .co.uk or .com.au. Rather, it’s offered independently by a Korean company (http://co.cc/) that just happens to own the domain name .co.cc.

Google classes the firm as a “freehost”, and has exercised its right to block the whole domain “if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost are spammy or low-quality”, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team.

The company said in a recent blog post: “To help protect users we recently modified those [malware-scanning] systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain.”

According to a recent report (29-page PDF/2MB) from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, almost twice the number found under any other extension.

That was due to a large number of attacks originating from .co.cc addresses, the APWG said.

The .co.cc “registry” offers single sub-domains for free, and enables customers to bulk-register 15,000 addresses at a time for a mere $1,000, or about seven cents a name.

The company claims to have 11,383,736 registered domains and 5,731,278 user accounts. That would make it one of the largest domain extensions in the world, bigger than both .org and .uk by over two million domains.

The .cc top-level domain belongs to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google’s changes. ®

By Kevin Murphy

• In Networks
• At 09:30 GMT 6th July 2011