IT NEWS, TIPS AND ADVICE - JANUARY 2008
Welcome to the latest article:
Latest Support Issues - Faster Surfing with Onspeed
I go to many customers who have a dialup connection and are unable to get ADSL or broadband. Trying to find anything on line or book flights etc is slow and frustrating. I have installed or recommended onSpeed. It isn't free: it costs 40 Euros a year which is just over 3 Euros a month
You may well have heard of ONSPEED before – it has been around for a while. It has a 14 day money back guarantee so there is nothing to lose really. I used it for my first year here until I had my high speed connection installed.
Here is a link to the website where you can download “ONSPEED” to improve the speed of your surfing by up to 10x which makes dialup as fast as most broadband connections and increases broadband connection performance as well. It really does make a difference. Click the picture below to go to their website.
It is easy to install. These are the instructions from the website:
Three simple steps to speed up any existing Internet connection – including Dial-up, Broadband and Mobile connections:
- Pay securely online - just€39.99for a 12-month subscription of ONSPEED.
- Download the ONSPEED software from the link given once your purchase has been confirmed.
- Set up ONSPEED by following the easy steps in the auto-installation wizard. ONSPEED takes less than 2 minutes to set up from start to finish.
ONSPEED offers a 14-day money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied.
Your payment details are sent over a secure connection.
It works by reducing the amount of information downloaded by compressing it first and then decompresses it on your PC. Believe it or not, it is faster to compress, send and decompress than it is to just send. It also displays pages intelligently – for instance, the quality of pictures improves as the page loads so that you see all the text and a low resolution pictures immediately which means you can probably see all you need to see and be on another page in less time than it previously took just to download the page.
If you give it a try and you don’t see a significant improvement you can always cancel within the 14 days.
Vista Update - Superfetch and Readyboost
Superfetch
Windows Vista has introduced Superfetch which is an upgrade to the XP Prefetch. The idea is to identify those programs that you use most often and preload them in anticipation of you opening them and thus reducing the time taken to load the program. The PC then appears to be quicker and more responsive. This is a good thing!
Vista's improvement over XP's prefetch is to analyse your behaviour. For instance, if, like me, the first thing you do is open Outlook and then Firefox, Vista knows this and will preload the core programs in memory before you have clicked the relevant icons. Very clever! The downside, is that your hard disk will be working for some time after you have logged in which can be a little disconcerting: why is the PC working when I'm not asking it to?! Still, a small price to pay.
Readyboost
The Readyboost is a different thing altogether: the idea is to use USB flash disks to supplement the internal RAM memory. This has proven to be less effective than anticipated and only offers limited improvement to program load up times. If you are considering buying a PC with a small amount of RAM with the idea of 'boosting' it with your 2GB flash disk: forget it! You should have at least 1GB of RAM to run Vista and enjoy the benefits. In most cases, a RAM upgrade is still the best we to improve the systems speed.
Tips: How to easily and quickly reduce the size of your images
If you’ve ever had to resize a group of digital picture files, you’ve probably launched your image editing program and then resized each image individually — this is an extremely time-consuming task. Windows XP has a built-in image resizing utility buried inside the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box that can quickly and easily resize a large group of digital picture files at once. Follow these steps:
- Open Windows Explorer.
- Make sure the Tasks pane is visible. (The Folders button acts like a toggle switch. If the Tree pane is showing, clicking the Folders button will display the Tasks pane. Click the Folders button if the Tree pane is showing.)
- Open the folder containing the group of digital pictures you want to resize. Select the group.
- Under the File And Folder Task list, select the E-Mail The Selected Items command.
- When you see the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box, click the Show More Options link to expand the dialog box.
- Select a radio button next to one of the available sizes and click OK. A new mail message window containing the resized digital pictures as attachments will appear.
- Pull down the File menu, select the Save Attachments command, and save all the attachments to a different folder.
- Close the mail message window and click No in the Save Changes dialog box.
Final Word
I encourage anyone with a comment, suggestion, question, idea, criticism or inspiration to contact me at
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.
Please also see The Inland Magazine Computer Problems Forum if you have a specific IT problem.
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