What is Mobile Broadband?

What is mobile broadband? Home broadband’s great – when you’re at home. But when you’re out and about you need a connection that lets you do all your essentials: check your email, download music tracks, stream video, browse websites etc. Mobile broadband allows you to connect to the Internet using 3G mobile phone networks when …

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What’s the best way to manage my digital photo’s?

Virtually everyone is taking pictures digitally these days and storing them on their computer. This is fantastic, but creates a whole lot of other question: How do I organise my image files so I can find them again? How can I do some basic editing and improvement? How do I back up my picutes so …

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How fast is my broadband – really?

The actual speed of your home broadband is influenced by lots of factors including: The distance to your home from the Telephone Exchange The quality of your homes internal telephone cabling and location of your router The quality of service provided by your Internet Service Provider The “contention ratio” of your service – that is, …

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Wonky Wireless? PowerLine could be the answer!

Is your home wireless network unreliable? Struggling to get a reliable signal in every room of your house? Getting interference? There is a solution! PowerLine (sometimes called “HomePlug”)  allows you to extend your network around your home by using small plug in modules that send data signals (safely and transparently) over the power cabling already …

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What is a backup?

In simple terms, a backup is just another copy of your data that you would use if the data on your computers hard disk was lost or inaccessible. As you can imagine, the subject of backups can get very complicated. There are whole industries dedicated to backup and disaster recovery and a bamboozling array of hardware …

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What is Mobile Broadband? What’s the best way to manage my digital photo’s? How fast is my broadband – really? Wonky Wireless? PowerLine could be the answer! What is a backup?

What is Mobile Broadband?

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July 12, 2011

What is mobile broadband?

Home broadband’s great – when you’re at home. But when you’re out and about you need a connection that lets you do all your essentials: check your email, download music tracks, stream video, browse websites etc.

Mobile broadband allows you to connect to the Internet using 3G mobile phone networks when you’re out and about.

Not very long ago, connecting to the Internet when on the move was expensive, slow and unreliable -  but now, with the improved coverage provided by some of the 3G service providers, mobile broadband is a reality for everyone.

Mobile broadband allows you to connect your laptop PC to the Internet and use it in exactly the same way that you would with your home broadband connection. All you need is a small USB “dongle” which you connect to a spare USB port on your laptop. The dongle contains all the gadgetry required to connect you and set up is extremely simple.

3G coverage varies from provider to provider and it is well worth checking the websites of the various service providers to check that they provide good 3G coverage in the areas where you will want to use the service.

I personally use the Three network and find that they provide the best 3G coverage, while also being one of the cheapest networks. Three are a dedicated “3G only” network and have concentrated all their resources on building the best network for Mobile Broadband.

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What’s the best way to manage my digital photo’s?

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July 11, 2011

Virtually everyone is taking pictures digitally these days and storing them on their computer. This is fantastic, but creates a whole lot of other question:

  • How do I organise my image files so I can find them again?
  • How can I do some basic editing and improvement?
  • How do I back up my picutes so that they’re not lost if my computer fails?

 How could I organise my images files?

You should organise your files in a way that helps you to find them again, much like a filing system in a filing cabinet. You can do this manually by creating “folders” on your computers hard disc. Creating folders is extremely easy and allows you to create a hierarchy, so for example, you could create a folder called “2011″, then within “2011″ you could create a folder for each month, then you could organise your picture files into folders according to the month in which they were taken:

  • My Pictures
    • 2011
      • January
      • February
      • March
      • etc…

Another approach might be to create a folder called “2011″, then within “2011″ you could create folders for Events, Holidays, Birthdays, Christmas etc and organise your pictures in a way that makes it easy for you to find and retrieve them when you want them:

  • My Pictures
    • 2011
      • Birthdays
        • Barry
        • Susan
      • Christmas
      • Events
      • Holidays
        • Corfu
        • Cornwall
        • Egypt

This approach can work well for small image collection and is simple to implement, however it has some limitations. For example, let’s say I go on holiday to Cornwall and while we’re away it’s Susan’s birthday. Should the pictures from Susan’s birthday go in the 2011\Holidays\Cornwall folder or the 2011\Birthdays\Susan folder? Wouldn’t it be great if I could tag the photo’s with all of this information so I could find them in both categories?

Thankfully this functionality is available but requires some software with the ability to tag your images and index them for you.

Software, such as the excellent Adobe Photoshop Elements, and Corel Paintshop Pro include the functionality to categorise and tag you images in whatever way works best to enable you to find and retrieve them easily.

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How fast is my broadband – really?

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July 6, 2011

The actual speed of your home broadband is influenced by lots of factors including:

  • The distance to your home from the Telephone Exchange
  • The quality of your homes internal telephone cabling and location of your router
  • The quality of service provided by your Internet Service Provider
  • The “contention ratio” of your service – that is, how many other users you’re sharing your bandwidth with (all providers do this to some extent)
  • The time of day – obviously there is more demand on the service at certain times of the day, and this impacts on the performance.
You can check the actual speed of your connection (free of charge) by using online performance testers like speedtest.net. It’s always interesting to compare the performance of your connection with that claimed by your service provider. For information on improving the speed of your connection – check out the other information in the Broadband Speed category of homecomputerhelp.info!

Test your Internet connection speed at Speedtest.net

As BT have the largest data network and provide the majority of broadband connections in the UK, I recommend BT Broadband – you can find their latest tariffs here.

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Wonky Wireless? PowerLine could be the answer!

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July 5, 2011

Is your home wireless network unreliable? Struggling to get a reliable signal in every room of your house? Getting interference? There is a solution!

PowerLine (sometimes called “HomePlug”)  allows you to extend your network around your home by using small plug in modules that send data signals (safely and transparently) over the power cabling already installed in your house. Sounds crazy? Complex? Dangerous? Well, thankfully, it couldn’t be simpler. The small PowerLine units simply plug into power sockets in your house just like a mobile phone charger – nothing could be simpler!

I discovered PowerLine networking when I moved into a new house and found, much to my frustration, that the signals from my wireless router couldn’t penetrate the interior walls. My connection was unreliable, and the VPN connection I was using to connect back to my work kept dropping out. It was impossible to use the BBC iPlayer and generally the whole thing was really annoying.

I really didn’t want the hassle of running and installing cabling around the house and wanted a simpler and tidier solution. I did some Internet research and came across PowerLine.

I ordered three Netgear PowerLine units from Amazon and thought I’d give it a go – and I was blown away by how good they were (and still are!).

Basically, the units look like small white plug in battery chargers with ethernet (network) sockets on the side. I have one plugged in to a power socket and connected by a network cable to my broadband router. I’ve got one upstairs in my office connected to my PC and work laptop, and another in my lounge behind the TV connected to my satellite box, TV (for iPlayer!) and a wireless access point which provides wifi for devices in the lounge – perfect!

The PowerLine system provides a network “backbone” linking all of my access points together as if I’d run network cables between them. They work perfectly across different circuits (and circuit breakers) in the house and are perfectly reliable. There’s no configuration required – they are completely “plug and play” and are completely transparent. You don’t even need to install any software!

My Netgear’s provide me with 85Mb/s of bandwidth between the units – more than enough, and significantly more than the capacity of my BT broadband (which is about 6Mb/s).

I really can’t recommend them highly enough – yet funnily enough, very few people seem to know that PowerLine is available as an option!

So, what do I need to set up a reliable network in my house?

The answer – very little! Here’s a quick shopping list:

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What is a backup?

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July 1, 2011

In simple terms, a backup is just another copy of your data that you would use if the data on your computers hard disk was lost or inaccessible. As you can imagine, the subject of backups can get very complicated. There are whole industries dedicated to backup and disaster recovery and a bamboozling array of hardware and software available to back up your PC – but my best advice is to “keep it simple”, but make sure that your data is regularly backed up and protected.

 

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What is a computer virus anyway?

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June 28, 2011

A computer virus is a piece of malicious software that can copy its self from one computer to another in order to spread and “infect” more computers. Computer viruses are intentionally written by programmers. Some viruses can be relatively harmless, whereas others can corrupt data, steal personal information from your computer or cause very serious problems for individuals and organisations alike. Computer viruses as we know them today started to emerge in the 1980′s, however the number of viruses and their technical sophistication has increased significantly over recent years.

Strictly speaking, a more accurate term for this sort of software these days is Malware (meaning malicious software) due to the fact that not all Malware “infects” more computers in the way that a traditional computer virus does. Malware is commonly (unwittingly) downloaded from websites by users. Once installed the malware can steal information from your computer, such as your address, debit or credit card information or other personal information.

You can easily protect yourself from viruses and malware by installing good quality commercial Anti-Virus software. Some examples of excellent anti-virus software for home use are:

You can read more here or check out our recommended Anti-Virus products in our shop.

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