Monday, July 23, 2007

New PSP



Finally Sony is going to release a newer, and lighter version of their psp! James Yu from Gamespot managed to try it out! Here are some of the things he said about it.

  • The lighter weight is immediately noticeable as soon as you pick it up.
  • Sony slimmed down the battery size, while managing a 5 hour battery life. You can use the old PSP's battery which doulbes the playing time, but the cover won't fit on it, so Sony will offer a high-capacity power kit that will come with its own PSP cover to fit over the larger battery.
  • Gamespot editors have noticed a slight difference on the D-pad and buttons, giving it a more tactile feedback, and an overall better feel.
  • New speakers have been added.
  • Standard 3.5mm headphones will still work, but the new jack configuration won't be compatible with the existing PSP remote.
  • The new PSP will include a video out put, which will allow you to output gameplay, photos, and movies, to a TV screen
  • The loading time has dropped due to Sony increasing the RAM on the device from 32MB to 64MB.
  • The new PSP will charge through a USB cord, like an iPod.
  • It will come in a core pack for $169 or a $199 Entertainment Pack with additional colors, and some more goodies.
  • It will come in Piano Black, Ice Silver, and, for a limited time, Ceramic White.
For more information, and more pictures, read the article about it in GameSpot, by clicking here.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Anti Spyware

Now that you have an anti virus, you will need at least 2 anti spywares, because no anti spyware will detect all spyware. Again if you are willing to pay, you should get either Spy Sweeper or Spyware Doctor, all of the following free products that I am about to mention except for Spyware Doctor Starter Edition. Now if you want to get it all for free like I did, :) then you will need to get the following programs. The first one is A-Squared free, this freebie updates daily, has a nice user interface, and has over 785,000 signatures. That is very impressive. To get an exact break up of how many signatures it has for each type of malware, go to their home page by clicking here. A downfall of this program is that it doesn't have a scheduler. The other one is Spyware Doctor Starter edition which comes with the Google pack. It does everything that the paid version does except that alot of its real time protection features have been disabled, it is still a great on demand scanner though (this means that it is good for scanning manually). It has a nice user interface, updates at least once a day, and has a scheduler as well. It has over 440,000 signatures, which although isn't as much as A-Squared, it is still pretty impressive. The biggest downfall of this program, as well as the paid version, is that it adds quite a bit of time to your start up. To get these products click on their names below:
Spy Sweeper, Spyware Doctor, A-Squared, Spyware Doctor Starter Edition.
Remember to comment if you have anything to say, or any other products to recommend, your views are always welcome.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Anti Viruses

Hello, these couple of weeks' posts will be about your computer's security. To get a good comparative on the Anti Viruses Performance, go here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ and look at the February and the May reports. If you want a free anti virus i would recommend one of these: Avira AntiVir, or Active Virus Shield. Avast and AVG don't have as good as detection rates as these two. Don't let the name AOL scare you, Active Virus Shield is powered by Kaspersky, one of the best Anti Viruses so, in the website, Active Virus Shield would get the same results as Kaspersky. It updates alot as well, it can update as much as 15 times a day! When i had Avast, I wanted to try out AntiVir, when i ran a scan with AntiVir, it found a rootkit and 3 trojans that Avast missed. Anti Vir is the lightest one on computer recourses, which means that it will slow your computer down the least. The biggest con about the free version of AntiVir, is probably that it will display a big ad about upgrading to a paid version, every time you update it. I tried AVG on a computer that i knew for sure had viruses. It found 11 and could only remove 7 of them. If you are willing to pay for an Anti Virus, I would recommend Kaspersky. You can get a free 30 day trial from here.

Friday, July 6, 2007

Cleaning up your computer even more

There are a lot of good programs for cleaning up your computer even more than what the programs that come with windows provide. Two free ones that i think are good are CCleaner (AKA Crap Cleaner) and Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal if you know any other good one, free or not, comment and tell everyone! Both CCleaner and WindowsCare have a clean up feature like Disk Cleanup, a registry cleaner, and a Start Up manager to manage programs that run at start up. Be careful with the registry cleaner though, because if you don't know how to use it well it could cause more harm to your computer than good. CCleaner also has an uninstall feature, which is quicker and provides a more thourogh list than Add or Remove Programs. WindowsCare provides a spyware scan (not a very good one though), a Security Defense that prevents spyware from getting on your computer, a system optimization, which changes settings on your computer to make it faster, a privacy sweep that deletes your internet history, etc., and a memory cleaner to free up ram on your computer, you shouldn't do this unless you have barley any RAM left, because it could end up slowing down your system! To get CCleaner click here. To get Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal click here.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Better Defragmentation

The defragmentation that the windows defragmenter provides is very slow and some times doesn't defragment every thing. There are better defragmenters that you can get for free. Two that are good are: Iobit SmartDefrag, and AusLogics Disk Defrag. I like the user interface of the Auslogics Disk defrag more than SmartDefrag, yet SmartDefrag has a feature that will continuisly defragment, your hard drive, so that it won't get fragmented as quickly. Remember to never do anything while defragmenting, or closing the program in a middle of a defrag, because this could lead to file loss. To download them go here:
Iobit SmartDefrag
AusLogics Disk Defrag