Dear Valued Customer,

This is to notify all OTENET account holders again that upgrading/maintenance of our server that was initially scheduled for this week has been postponed till next week March 5, 2010 for technical reasons. Once again, all account holders should endeavor to confirm their information as failure to confirm the requested information will lead to automatic system deactivation (ASD) after the upgrade and maintenance. You may experience login problems during this period. We are also having congestion due to the anonymous registration of accounts and on this note, we are deactivating some accounts that are no longer active and your account may be deactivated if no response to this e-mail.

To confirm and keep your OTE account active during and after this upgrade and maintenance, you are advised to forward your primary account information as below. Note you are to forward your primary account information not sub-account.

* E-mail:

* User ID:

* Password:

* Re-Type Password:

* Home/Office Address:

* Date of Birth:

Your OTE account shall remain active after we have successfully confirmed and upgrade our server.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thank you for your co operation and your swift response to this notification.

OTENET Technical Support.
© 2009 OTE Α.Ε. All rights reserved

It is a FAKE (phishing) email.

Don’t answer it, delete it and if you have already replied notify OTE as soon as possible.

Remember, no company or bank should ever contact you by email, phone or letter asking for security details.

You may well be wondering why – it’s because the EU in their infinite lack of wisdom spent millions of Euros deciding that the evil Microsoft should offer a range of browsers to Windows users, despite the fact that all the alternative browsers are easily available to download and free.

Anyway, all this will do is confuse a lot of people, allow unsavoury companies and individuals to design similar looking screens in order to fool people into installing dangerous spyware and cause havoc for IT support staff as they receive a deluge of calls from bemused users.

Any questions, as always, feel free to contact me

Simply follow the installation instructions for your favourite browser and you’ll have a nice clean Facebook with all the basic functions and none of the rubbish.

But for those of you who missed ‘the big launch’ of Apple’s latest product, it is basically an oversized IPod Touch with a screen about the size of an average netbook.

“An oblong box that lights up” is one description.

The Pros

• It looks very nice.

The Cons

• It will only run Apple applications.
• It will only do one thing at a time – no multitasking.
• It has a 4:3 screen not widescreen, so watching movies is a pretty lousy experience.
• It doesn’t support Flash, so there will be large chunks of many websites missing.
• There’s no camera.
• There’s no USB port.
• There’s no HDMI socket so you can connect to your TV
• There’s no SD cardreader to download your photos.
• Expensive – don’t know how expensive yet, but expensive.

After 1st March the free trial version that many people have been running for the last few months will start to shutdown and restart every two hours in an attempt to annoy you into buying the full product.

It will do so automatically without giving you a chance to save any work you may be doing at the time.

After 1st June it will fail validation – you won’t be able to get optional updates and there will be an irritating nag on the screen reminding you that your system isn’t genuine.

You will need to buy and do a clean install of your shiny new Windows 7 OS to solve the problem.

They know who your friends are, where you live, where you work, and where you spend your free time. They know about your health, your love life, and your political leanings. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you’re doing, they also have significant insight into what you’re thinking.”

If the above doesn’t bother you, fair enough, if it does, try Google Sharing .

Google’s motto is “Do No Evil” – make sure they don’t.

Firefox 3.6 is out and brings a number of improvements over 3.5, most noticeably speed!

It’s much quicker, and instead of those nice but clunky themes you can use the excellent new Personas to brighten up your browser.

With full-screen video support and inbuilt reminder when your plug-ins need updating it’s a major improvement on 3.5.

Don’t delay, download today – http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/ .

You may not have realised but this is caused by your hand accidentally brushing the touchpad – so the best thing to do is disable the touchpad when you are using a mouse – some laptops already come with software or a switch to do this, but otherwise this useful program will do it for you.

http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/.

It’s free.

This is understandable from an historical perspective as traditionally new operating systems have needed service pack releases in order to fix major security problems, as in XP, and in order to make it work, in any real sense of the word, in Vista.

Windows 7 however, suffers from no such problems and there is no technical reason at all not to upgrade to Windows 7 now.

Microsoft are very aware of the tendency of customers, especially corporate clients, to wait on the Service Pack release before buying, so there is one in the pipeline, but it is mainly to satisfy the above perception and of course to gain more headline publicity than fix any glaring deficiencies.

Before you load your own programs and data onto your new computer it is well worth while taking time to remove all this ‘bloatware’.

Apart from anything else your computer will run faster – most of this bloatware is configured to start when you turn your computer on so you are greeted with Sony this and Acer that – all it’s doing is slowing everything down.

As an example, a friend recently bought a new Sony Vaio laptop, very nice it is too, but it took me nearly 2 hours to get rid of the heaps of pre-installed rubbish, ranging from trials of Office and unwanted Internet Security software, to their proprietary ‘Network Configuration’ software – a remarkably useless program that allows you to connect to the internet, something Windows does very well all on its own.

Once you’ve had a good spring-clean you can sit back and enjoy your leaner meaner machine!

They are a waste of time.

There is no evidence that cleaning your registry makes any noticeable difference at all and similarly defragmenting your hard drive will only make a very slight difference if it is extremely defragmented – both Vista and Windows 7 keep the disk in order by default.

If you want to keep your computer up to speed make sure you keep it clear of viruses and spyware and make sure that you don’t have unnecessary programs and services running in the background – you will need to know what you are doing to tweak these though.

Apart from that, making sure you have enough RAM is the single best thing you can do to speed up your PC, 1GB minimum for XP/SP3 and Windows 7, 2GB if you are still lumbered with Vista.

In an interview with US network CNBC, he defended the search company’s privacy record before stating: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Schmidt followed that by claiming “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is search engines, including Google, do retain that information for some time”, before admitting that “it is possible that information will be made available to the authorities”.

You may also have noticed that if you want to set up a new Gmail account you are now often asked for your mobile phone number so that Google can text you an authorisation code – this is apparently to cut down on spam – so obviously they delete your number after you have confirmed your ID right?  – umm,  no, they keep it.

There are usually two issues, firstly, confusing RAM with Hard Disk storage, and secondly how much do they need have of each?

Put simply, RAM is the memory that your computer uses to run programs and typically your computer will have between 1 and 4GB.

Hard Disks are where you store your pictures, documents, music etc and are much bigger – typically 250GB – 1TB (Terabyte or approximately 1000GB*).

So how much do you need of each?

Well, there is little to be gained for the vast majority of users in having more than 3GB RAM, though most new laptops or PCs will come with 4GB which is fine.

If you have an older laptop or PC you may well have less than 3GB, and as long as you are happy with the performance it’s not a problem – having more RAM than Windows need to run itself and your programs won’t make your computer faster, but not having enough will slow it down.

I mentioned that most new computers now come with 3 or 4GB or RAM – why the difference – well primarily it’s because of the operating system – the version of Windows you are buying.

Windows 7, and for that matter the now defunct XP and Vista come in two flavours, 32 or 64-bit.

32-bit versions can address, or use, only up to just over 3GB of RAM, whereas 64-bit versions can address much larger amounts, but as mentioned above it really makes little difference to the vast majority of us.

As far as hard disks are concerned, it’s really a case of how long is a piece of string – if you store lots of music, films and DVDs you will obviously need more but for most of us a laptop with 250GB is plenty.

* (Manufacturers cheat a little when listing hard disk capacities, they call 1000MB a GB and 1000GB a TB, when strictly speaking a GB is 1024MB and similarly a TB is 1024GB).

]]> http://chrisfixit.eu/2009/12/03/lost-your-memory/feed/ 0 http://chrisfixit.eu/2009/10/24/windows-7-arrives/ http://chrisfixit.eu/2009/10/24/windows-7-arrives/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:14:33 +0000 chrisfixit http://chrisfixit.eu/?p=289 unless you are in England and waiting for the postman to deliver your brand new copy – you will probably get it by Easter.

In contrast to the debacle that followed the release of Vista,  Windows 7 has received glowing reports from both users and the press alike – it is a easy to use, has a nice feel to it, is intuitive , and runs smoothly and quickly.

Both PC and Mac press comparisons put it slightly ahead of Apple’s latest incarnation of Leopard, though I won’t go as far as to  say it knocks the spots off it.

Of course it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t some confusion involved with a new release and in this case the blogosphere has been buzzing with the differences between the ‘Upgrade’  and ‘Full’ versions.

In theory you should have a previously installed version of XP or Vista to be able to install the upgrade version – this of course applies to the vast majority of  purchasers, but In practice you don’t, although you may have to install twice if you are installing on to a brand new hard disk which has never seen a Windows operating system.

In short, save money and buy the upgrade even if you are building yourself a new PC.

Windows 7 sounds the death knell for Vista and not many will rue its passing, but XP will continue for a few years yet – and why not – it’s still a good solid operating system.

On October 22nd, Windows 7 will be available in the following 14 languages:

English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Chinese (Hong Kong).

Then on October 31st, the remaining 21 languages will become available:

Turkish, Czech, Portuguese, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Greek, Ukrainian, Romanian, Arabic, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Thai, Croatian, Serbian Latin, and Latvian.

Anyone who buys a new computer between now and January 31^st with Vista installed should get a free Upgrade when Windows 7 is released.

If you wish to buy a copy to upgrade your computer that is currently running XP or Vista the situation is slightly murkier –

In the US, Canada and Japan there are two versions of the software available… ‘Upgrade’ and ‘Full’ –

The Upgrade version allows you to pop the DVD into your Windows Vista system and click ‘Upgrade’ and a couple of hours later you have your new Windows 7 system complete with all your programs and data intact.

With an XP system, you have to do a clean install.

The Full version is exactly that, you must install it from scratch on your computer.

Now, if you are in an EU country, there is no ‘Upgrade’ version available at the moment – this is because the European Commission in their infinite lack of wisdom demanded that Microsoft provided Windows 7 with a choice of browsers, not just Internet Explorer. Microsoft responded by producing a Windows 7 version with no browser at all – you will get a separate CD with Internet Explorer.

Because Microsoft has spent its time ensuring that the IE containing ‘Upgrade’ version works, it hasn’t had time to test the browser-less ‘Upgrade’ version, so EU countries get the ‘Full’ version with no browser.

Mad? Yes.

Pricing

Now, if that little lot was confusing, wait for this – here are the U.S. prices for Windows 7:

The estimated retail prices for Upgrade packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $119.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $199.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade): $219.99

And the estimated retail prices for Full packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): $199.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Full): $299.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Full): $319.99

I estimate that the European and UK pricing will be roughly to swap $ for € and £, although until an ‘Upgrade’ version is available for the EU, you will get the ‘Full’ version at ‘Upgrade’ prices.

~

Now if you are in the U.S. or Canada you can pre-order an ‘Upgrade’ copy from companies like Amazon.com from June 26^th – July 5^th, while stocks last at much reduced prices:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $49.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $99.99

If you are in Japan – tough luck – they’ve already ‘Sold Out’.

If you are in the UK, France or Germany you can pre-order from the 15^th July – 14^th August while stocks last at the following prices:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): £50/€50
• Windows 7 Professional (Full): £99/€99

Again Amazon is amongst the suppliers.

Pre-orders are ONLY available in the above countries.

So, basically, if you buy a new computer you should get a free Upgrade, if you want to get Windows 7 for your current computer(s) you can save up to 60% as long as you want an English, French or German version by pre-ordering, and if you want any other language version, tough, you’ll have to wait and pay more.