Internet Explorer 8
Internet Explorer 8 adds accelerators to provide instant access to information like maps, web searches, translations, email, blogging, and more; faster performance; a smart address bar; improved privacy protection; and Compatibility View for displaying websites designed for older browsers.
Internet Explorer 8 addresses just about all of the major concerns that users and critics have had with the world’s most used browser. Whether they get answered in a way you like is another matter.
There are several new and interesting features. Web Slices lets you save predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead of going to a traffic Web site for updates, the latest commuting news comes to you. Similarly, Accelerators make repetitive tasks one-click behaviors, for instance finding directions or blogging. InPrivate browsing introduces a cache and history on-off switch, while related tabs are color-coded and automatically reorganized as you open them. There’s also tab sandboxing, which means that when a tab crashes, IE itself won’t, and it even tries to resurrect the page that crashed.
There’s a greater emphasis on Web standards and security than before. The SmartScreen and cross-site scripting filters throw up a red warning page when you’re about to visit an unsafe site. There’s also domain highlighting, which grays out the name of the URL you’re looking at except for the domain itself. This sounds simple, but effectively draws attention to spoofed site URLs. There’s also a compatibility button so that sites designed specifically for IE 7 and earlier can still be viewed.
IE 8 lacks a default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, but you can search your history and most visited pages from there. Also, the installation process still requires a reboot–unimpressive, to say the least. Drawbacks aside, there’s no reason to not upgrade if you’re an old fan of IE, and there’s even a few things in IE 8 for new users.
License: Free
Limitations: No limitations
Download Accelerator Plus
Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) 9.1 is the world’s most popular download manager, with over 168 million users worldwide. DAP accelerates your download speed so you can get all your favorite files, applications, and videos as fast as possible. Additionally, DAP features powerful privacy, security, and file management tools letting you download with confidence and flexibility.
DAP is easy to use, working automatically with your web browser to provide the fastest download speed possible. DAP 9.1 has been enhanced with the most requested features. Now you can download your favorite videos from YouTube and other popular video sites. Downloading is safer in DAP 9.1 with innovative new download security powered by SpeedBit’s Multi Antivirus (MAV) Analysis. In DAP 9.1 you can now choose your Download Style. Internet Explorer style downloading lets you get files with Download Windows, and Firefox style downloading presents all your downloads in a Download list. DAP is also being translated in multiple languages by users working on the DAP Wiki project.
License: Free
Limitations: No limitations
Some Ways To Increase Your Computer Speed Fast
I’m sure you’ve come across tons of articles and even suggestions from some of your friends on how to get your computer to work faster. It’s really not that hard to increase your internet speed. I’m going to make it real simple for you and you don’t need to be a computer geek to make this work. The first thing you need to remember is to never, and I mean absolutely never download programs especially free software without reading the fine print. Most free computer software will bombard your computer with spyware which will eventually bring your internet speed to a screeching halt! If your computer is already infected with spyware you can download the leading spyware remover called ad-aware which will scan your computer and remove spyware and tracking cookies from your computer.
Another way of making your computer and internet connection faster is by clicking on start, then run and typing in msconfig. Go to start tab and remove any program except your antivirus software and any other program which you must have start when windows starts. This tip will increase your computer start up time dramatically!
Step number 3, and I do this almost on a daily basis is to clean up your internet cache. Go to your control panel which you can access from your start button and click on internet options. Go to temporary internet files and clear your history. I would recommend that you also set internet history to a maximum of 2 days. Next step is to delete your temporary internet files including offline content. Last step is to delete cookies. Be careful though because deleting your cookies will also delete useful information from your computer. You can read a how to on cookies here www.howstuffworks.com/cookie.htm.
These steps are the basics you can take which will speed up your internet connection immediately. I would also recommend doing a virus check on your computer on a weekly basis. If you don’t have antivirus software, get it! You’ll be happy you did. Just one virus can wreak havoc on your computer! Make sure you test your internet speed whether it’s broadband or dial-up, before and after you take these simple steps so you can compare if these steps you’ve taken have worked. Taking these basic steps will make you a happy surfer and will restore your faith in the World wide web!
For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to computer tips, do please browse for more information at our websites.
How Important Is A Broadband Speed Test?
A broadband speed test will determine if your internet is connected at a high speed. High speed internet provides people and businesses a faster method to connect world wide and many people choose to find better internet providers that will provide this service.
Many internet service providers will advertise that they can provide the fastest speed but unless broadband speed tests are done you will never know if you have the right amount of speed to upload or download files.
In order to be online all the time, a high speed connection will need to be used. Dial up modems don’t allow that and you have to wait to connect to the internet. Businesses and individuals requiring access to the internet daily need to rely on the effectiveness of high speed connections. This is a necessity when you are running your own business, especially if it is from your home. Counting on your clients for income requires a fast internet connection that is reliable.
The faster the connection, the better your downloads and uploads will be. Most internet providers think that their clients do not need the allotted speed on a frequent basis. The end result is too many clients who use their solutions all at the same time, making internet connections slower. You will need to do your research and compare several internet providers before you sign the contract with a particular company. Otherwise you could be disappointed as to the amount of internet speed you are working with. This could translate into lost income or an unhappy family.
Over a hundred programs offer broadband speed tests when you sign onto the internet. The cost is for free. A program can detect your connection and decide the speed based from upload and download rates. Use several broadband speed tests using different programs.
If the program that does your speed is slower than what the provider has promised, it may not be the entire fault of the provider. Ineffective processors or too many applications can slow down your computer thus affecting your internet use. When these have been corrected, than a truer picture of your internet connection may be forthcoming.
A broadband speed test is the only way to determine how fast you will be able to connect to the internet. Take advantage of the free tests that can be done on any program used by the correct website. You will be able to determine if you then will need to increase your connecting speed for a more pleasurable internet use.
Article by Cindy Heller.To learn more about broadband speed test, please visit internet broadband provider.
Overclock your Computer
Hence, some chips are slapped with a lower official clockspeed and sold for less groats than their beefier brethren. The potential for their intended glory remains, however. Overclocking techniques can unlock at least some of that potential, albeit at the risk of frying the chip completely.
The tinfoil hat/Angry Internet Men theory is based on the same concept but chucks in a bit of paranoia. In this scenario, every same-series processor is born equal, but The Man artificially neuters most of them and slaps different badges on what are fundamentally the same chips. Overclocking, then, is simply a way of taking back what’s rightfully yours.
The truth likely lies somewhere between the two. Mass production certainly makes more financial sense than dozens of separate lines, and it’s true that a low-end CPU or GPU can be made to punch far above its weight, but their stability isn’t as guaranteed as a chip that’s officially able to run at a higher speed. No manufacturer wants to deal with a steady trickle of returned parts, after all. But it does mean home overclocking is almost always productive - and seemingly more so with every new hardware generation.
It’s also increasingly easy. The earliest overclocking on the 4 to 10MHz 8088-based CPUs of 1983, involved desoldering a clock crystal from the motherboard and replacing it with a third-party one, with only partially successful results. Ouch. Still, the precedent was set: a dedicated guy-at-home could exceed his chip’s official spec. IBM, then very much the top dog of PC land, wasn’t entirely happy about this, so follow-up hardware included hard-wired overclock blocks.
More soldering this time of a BIOS chip, managed to get around this. By 1986 IBM’s stranglehold had been broken, resulting in a raft of ‘clone’ systems - and a wealth of choice. Intel’s 286 and 386 processors became the de facto standard chips, and bus speed and voltage controls began to shift from physical switches and jumpers to BIOS options and settings.
It was the 486 that really changed everything however. It’s telling that this was the chip most prevalent during the era that birthed the first-person shooter as we know it: 1993’s Doom very much popularized performance PCs for gaming driving system upgrades in the same way a Half-Life 2 or Crysis does these days. At the same time, the 486 introduced two concepts absolutely crucial to overclocking both then and now. Firstly, it popularized split product lines; no longer was it a matter of buying simply a processor, but rather which processor. The 486SX and DX offered some serious performance differential, and notably the SXs were hobbled/failed DXs, giving rise to the ongoing practice of assigning different speeds and names to what were the same chip. For a while too, the 25MHz SXes could be overclocked to 33MHz by adjusting a jumper on the motherboard; something less salubrious retailers took full advantage of. Secondly, it introduced the multiplier: performing more clocks per every one mustered by the system’s front side bus. The 486’s 2x multiplier thus effectively doubled the bus frequency. This was something overclockers would make the best of for successive processor generations - bumping up the multiplier was the simplest and often most effective way of increasing CPU speed. Nowadays (since the Pentium II, in fact), the multiplier is locked to prevent this, save for high-end chips, such as Intel’s Extreme Edition series. For a while, there were complicated ways of defeating the multiplier lock: soldering on a PCB for earlier chips, third-party add-ons and the infamous practice of drawing a line onto certain AMD CPUs with a pencil. No CPU manufacturer’s likely to make that mistake again.
Around this time, RAM overclocking became more common place, as memory speeds were ratified, and with that came more tweaking of the front-side bus to compensate for the locked multipliers. Overclocking shifted further towards the BIOS and away from jumpers, which in turn led to overclocking software.
The first was 1998’s SoftFSB, which enabled bus-tweaking from within Windows for the first time. With the Pentium III era came aftermarket coolers, as processors now chucked out so much heat that a standard cooling block and fan wasn’t enough to cope with an overclocked chip. And so it continued, overclocking largely becoming easier and more common place with each processor generation. This leads us to the Core 2 chips of today, and Intel’s current terrifyingly unassailable dominance of the CPU market. Generally drawing as little as half the power of the Pentium 4s that preceded them, most of the range offers a vast amount of overclocking headroom, to the point that a low-end Core 2 Duo can almost go toe-to-toe with the top of the line.
So how’s it done? Key to processor overclocking is the front side bus (FSB). In the very simplest terms, this is the connection between the CPU and the rest of the PC, and its speed defines the processor’s speed to a significant extent. Intel CPUs final speed is the FSB times the multiplier - so if you’ve got an FSB of 266MHz and a multiplier of 9, your chip will run at approximately 2.4GHz. While the multiplier is usually locked - though some chips let you at least lower it, to conserve power and reduce heat - the FSB isn’t. Bump up the FSB and you bump up the chip. In our example taking the bus to 290MHz gives us a 2.6GHz processor. This is no random example, incidentally, it’s what we run the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 in one of our office test systems at, giving it a healthy 200MHz boost that makes a noticeable difference in CPU-intesive games and hi-def video re-encodes.
What stops us from going higher? Not a lot in the case of this particular chip. We’re playing it safe for desktop work, cos we’re in a particularly sweaty office. When we’re playing around with high-end tasks, we can have it running stably at over 33GHz (with an FSB of 370 or so) on a decentish, third-party air cooler. That’s more or less trading blows with the best Intel has to offer on a $200 chip. But while going to 280MHz on the FSB took a BIOS tweak, a reboot and Microsoft BOB’s your uncle, going much higher does involve more fuss.
First up, when our Q6600 is at 33GHz, it’s also running at nearly 70°C when under maximum load (and around 50°C when idling). It’s perfectly stable, but it could damage it in the long run, and on top of that the fan is making enough noise to wake the deaf pensioner in the next street over. Watercooling, a fancier air-cooler or even just a spot of dust-cleaning will bring the heat down, but there can come a point where that stuff becomes more expensive and hassle than simply buying a better processor.
Hurdle the second is the motherboard. Pushing up the FSB doesn’t affect only the CPU, but also the motherboard and, in many cases, the RAM and PCI-e slot to boot. In our case, we’re using a motherboard that supports a monstrously high FSB. When shopping for a motherboard, its max FSB will usually be referred to as four times the actual speed, due to the way the processor actually fetches data. So when we’ve got the FSB set to 266MHz, in effect that’s 1,066MHz. When it’s up to 372MHz, we need a motherboard that’s happy at nearly 1,500MHz. That simply isn’t a given, especially on cheaper boards, so shop carefully. As well as that, if you’ve got a board with a stingy BIOS, you may not be able to alter RAM and PCI timings independently of the FSB, which can lead to those falling over. Ours does, and for our mighty near-Gigahertz Q6600 overclock, we have to lower the RAM’s clock speed a little to compensate for the strain put on it by the raised FSB - we have it sitting pretty at 893MHz. It could comfortably go higher, but the real-world benefits (as opposed to the willy-waving benefits, which are a different matter entirely) would be so miniscule that it’s simply not worth placing the extra pressure on the RAM.
Similarly, while faster and, most likely, more expensive RAM will cope better at their stock speeds with a massive FSB, the pay-off is often so minor that value RAM, running at a lower clock-speed may well be enough to make your overclocking masterplan hugely successful. Even the best memory will net you something in the region of just a five per cent performance boost - worth having if every little helps, but it’s the FSB that makes the big difference. And for that, the motherboard is critical.
Thirdly, there’s the matter of voltage. The faster your chip runs, the more power it needs to feed it. As the FSB goes up, you’ll find your motherboard’s North Bridge and your RAM also get hungrier.
Unfortunately, your hardware will automatically report its revised power requirements, so trial and miserable error are required to find the sweet spot. Volt tweaking is a fiddly and danger-fraught business.
Some overclocking-friendly motherboards can automatically adjust voltages for you, but are understandably conservative about it, so for the really big overclocks you’ll need to set them yourself. This needs to be done by the tiniest increments possible, establishing reboot-by-reboot how many volts your embiggened CPU needs; as low as possible, essentially, as firing too many into it can fry it. Establish in advance what your chip’s out-of-the-box volts are and, through a mix of common sense and googling, decide on a number you’re not going to risk going higher than. We pushed our Q6600 from 13 to 1.4V, which is a fairly big increase as volt modding goes. It’s not just a matter of the so-called vCore either - as you go for the big overclocks, you’ll find you’re having to play with the arcane likes of CPU PLL and FSB termination voltage. Again, so long as you raise stuff in tiny increments the risk of killing your chip, RAM or motherboard is fairly minimal.
It’s a different matter with AMD processors, which for a while now have had an onboard memory controller, which allows the chip to communicate more directly with the RAM, which in turn means there isn’t an FSB as such. Instead, you’re overclocking something known as the HyperTransport bus, which is achieved in more or less the same way, but can require lowering the NT’s own multiplier to retain stability when you bump the speed. If you’ve gone for one of the recent AMD Phenom Black Editions, you’ll find it comes with the multiplier unlocked, which makes overclocking an easier affair.
By contrast, overclocking a graphics card is dead simple. As a more self-contained piece of hardware, there’s none of this confusing multiplier or FSB business; just overclocking the card itself, finding the right speeds for both the GPU and the card’s onboard memory. Free software - some of it official NVIDIA/ATI driver plug-ins - will do the trick from within Windows, and built-in safety cut-offs and stability tests make it incredibly hard to damage the card, though of course you are going beyond the warranty. It’s also grown a little more complicated of late in that you may need to overclock the shader clock as well as the GPU and RAM for the best boosts. In the case of NVIDIA cards, it used to be that this was twinned to the GPU speed, meaning a raise in one had a synchronous effect on the other, but for a little while now they’ve been able to be altered independently. So if you hit the speed ceiling on the GPU, it may yet be possible to eke more performance out of the card by pushing the shader clock a little further.
While the present situation is that you can overclock everything and be pretty confident it’ll work, the future of the form is harder to call. One thing seems sure: it’s not a dirty little nerdy secret anymore, but an increasingly common practice, most especially with Core 2 chips. There’s a vast aftermarket cooler industry to support it, and even cheap motherboards can handle a bit of a free boost. If anything overclocking will become easier, with more and better applications to achieve it within Windows, rather than from the BIOS, and possibly more in the way of automatic volt-modding. But much depends on the future of desktop processing. There’s a big war brewing between Intel and NVIDIA as to whether the CPU or the GPU will be the major element in the PC of the near-future.
Intel are pushing ray-tracing using a multi-core CPU to render game graphics, while NVIDIA’s CUDA enables its recent GeForce cards to perform parallel processing, such as video encoding and in-game physics, far faster than a CPU could manage. If either of these bed in, overclocking will need to take them into account. At the same time, the slow move to ever-more cores potentially reduces the need for conventional overclocking, as raw clock speed continues to be a lesser concern to multi-threading and, in the case of 3D cards, the number of stream processors and texture units. That’s hardly going to stop anyone from trying it, of course. Even when its effects are minimal, overclocking’s always going to be a sure-fire way of making a system feel like its yours rather than simply a collection of mass-produced parts.
Modding the case is one thing, but what makes a PC is its performance. When you’ve painstakingly tweaked that performance into something that suits your own purposes, and it’s become something that feels like you’ve gone far beyond what you paid for it, the system will feel more unique than all the green neon tubing in the world could ever hope to achieve.
Article Autor:Sandra Prior To learn more , check out the http://usacomputers.rr.nu site.
Alltel Officially Becomes Part Of Verizon
Verizon this week officially became the nation’s largest wireless operator, finalizing their $27 billion deal to acquire Alltel. Verizon is paying $5.9 billion and acquiring $22.2 billion in Alltel debt, and will in turn get about 13 million new customers — for a total of 83 million customers. For reference, AT&T has 74.9 million, Sprint has 50.5 million, and T-Mobile has 32.1 million. While consumer advocates fought the deal, saying it would only serve to reduce competition, it was approved by the FTC, FCC and Justice Department.
Alltel customers are now included in the Mobile to Mobile calling family of Verizon Wireless. Verizon customers have unlimited calling to Alltel customers in place, though Alltel customers still have to pay — for the time being. Verizon Wireless customers can check to see if their friend’s numbers are eligible for unlimited Mobile to Mobile minutes by using this tool.
According to the post, Verizon plans to convert Alltel customers to Verizon Wireless billing within two to three months, with a full brand conversion within six months.
There’s a full integration FAQ at the Verizon website here.
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