Orlando Computer Repair Services Blog | BITS

Over the past few years, there has been much debate over Netbooks. These are mini laptops used primarily for internet access in public places. The phenomenon is that some of these laptops get 7-9 hours or battery life on one charge and are much smaller and lighter than their laptop counterparts.

Which is right for you?
Netbooks are very portable due to the fact that they are very small and light. They allow for quick internet activity in any location that has a WiFi connection. An issue with these devices is that they generally come with a very small hard drive. These hard drives are Solid State Drives (SSD) which are basically glorified flash drives. They have rapid access times but slow writing times. They also come with a slow processor. The processor is definitely very efficient in the sense that it consumes very little power compared to normal laptop processors but it is a single-core processor in the era of dual and quad-core processors with much higher speeds and onboard memory.

Traditional Laptops
These are definitely a little less portable due to their size compared to the netbooks, but they offer a lot more storage space, screen real estate, and considerably more processing power. You’ll notice it when you turn on your laptop, launch a program, transfer files… pretty much anything you do on your computer. You’ll get more productivity as well since you’re doing things faster and more efficiently.

It all boils down to whether or not you’re willing to sacrifice speed and productivity for a little bit more portability. If you are, netbooks will definitely get the job done, it might just take a little while longer to get the same task done.

If you’re looking for an email service provider, you might be overwhelmed by all of the choices you have to sort through. They might all seem the same and have similar features, but some are better than others.

Let’s start with # 3:
Microsoft Live Hotmail

Microsoft has been providing e-mail for many, many years. It has evolved a bit into a 5 GB storage powerhouse. It provides you with good amount of security, but doesn’t have the best spam filtering service. In my experience, a good amount of spam gets through the filter and into your inbox. On the plus side, you can chat with your MSN messenger friends directly from Hotmail, making live conversations that much faster.

# 2:
Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! has a reputation for keeping the status quo on e-mail although in the past few years they’ve been trying to reverse that thinking. You can now chat with your Yahoo! contacts as well as attach files as large as 100MB with the built in application for drop.io. Its spam filtering is as good as you could hope for coming from a free service.

#1:
Gmail

Google is the reigning king of webapps. Gmail has everything built right into it. Unlimited storage, the ability to create, edit, find, publish, and save documents all within your Google account. It’s spam filtering is the best I’ve seen of any service, paid or free. You can even have shared calendars, get your e-mail on your phone, and a whole host of other options. This service will not leave you wanting anything else as it is all there for you, waiting for you to launch it.

Internet Explorer (IE) has been plagued with vulnerabilities since the beginning of its existence. It’s not that IE is a “bad” browser, it’s just that it is the most used browser around the world. This high usage percentage makes it the logical target for those who make all sorts of malware. This malware can cause your system to slow down, have popups, or even crash.

Since these vulnerabilities exist, you will get better performance, better security, and better expandability by choosing Firefox.

Firefox is a browser made by Mozilla that not only loads pages faster and has better security, it also allows you to customize it. There are themes that allow you customize the look of Firefox and add-ons that allow you to add functionality to it. The add-ons can be anything from allowing you to play music in the background of your browser to viewing the weather. Obviously this is appealing to most users since browsing the internet with the same old browser can get a little bit tedious. Adding a bit of variety to it can decrease the tedium.

Unfortunately, there is one drawback to using Firefox: Not all websites are compatible with the way it displays the webpages. Sometimes pages will appear distorted or perhaps leave out all media on the page. This can be a little bit frustrating, but is easily remedied by an add-on called IE-tab. IE-tab allows IE to run inside of Firefox, thus allowing a website that cannot be displayed correctly by  Firefox to be displayed by Internet Explorer.

I’m not saying that Firefox will be the best browser from now until the end of time because that would just be foolish. There will most likely come a time where Firefox also develops vulnerabilities of its own. Having millions of users use the same browser will continue to shift the emphasis from IE to Firefox, but that won’t happen for quite a long time.

Do you have a video or data DVD you need to make a DVD copy of? Making a DVD copy can be an unwanted chore. Having to know things such as dual layer DVDs cannot be copied directly to a single-layer DVD disc. Dual layer DVDs have twice the amount of video, audio, or data than a single layer DVD. Luckily, there is a great program called DVD Shrink. DVD Shrink will help with this dilemma.

DVD Shrink allows you to compress the video on the dual layer DVD to fit onto a traditional DVD. The best part is that you can’t notice the loss of quality resulting from the video and audio compression. It’s also very simple to use which makes this program your go to program for DVD copying.

First you load up the program and wait for the initial scanning of the disc.

After this point, you will notice that there are options to choose to remove parts of the DVD such as menus, various languages, etc… to reduce the amount of compression needed. It’s really not necessary to do this, but feel free to play with these settings as you like.

At the top of the screen, you will notice a “back-up” button. Press this button once you are ready to make the copy of the DVD.

After you press backup you might get a screen about RCE protection. Either choose your region or leave RCE as is.

After this screen you will get one about the Target Device. If you don’t have Nero installed, you will have the option to just create an ISO to burn later. Click “ok” and let run. If you had Nero it will copy DVD directly to your blank disc, if not then you will have an ISO that you need to burn with other DVD burning software.

To download DVD Shrink visit BITS Orlando Computer Repair Resource page http://www.bitsinconline.com/resources.