Solar Charging for your iPhone

Are you like me?  Are you constantly running out of juice on your cell phone?  Did you forget to plug it in last night?  If so, never fear, solar charging is here to save the day!  Novothink has released an Apple-certified solar charging case for iPhones.  They claim two hours of direct sunlight will give enough juice for 30 minutes of talk on a 3G network or about 60 minutes on a 2G network.  It also comes with an app to manage your solar needs.  The product is called Surge, and it is sure to be a hit!  (Hopefully they’ll release it for Blackberries so that I can join in on the fun!)

Going All Custom on Your Router

This is for those people who aren’t afraid of getting their hands a little dirty and doing some tweaking. For those of you out there that have Linksys brand wireless routers, you may have noticed that you have to reboot those routers on a semi-regular basis.  (Linksys is not alone on this, most consumer routers have issues here and there, especially if they are a bit older.)  Most of the time the cause of this is as simple as the router messed up and needs to be rebooted, or maybe the user was downloading too much through bit torrent (!) and locked it up.  Either way, depending on what model you have, there is finally a semi-permanent fix available.

Now, I’ll preface with this warning:  This is *NOT* for the faint of heart or those not intimately familiar with computers.  This involves replacing the built-in software on the wireless router with a completely different program, and while free, is not without danger, the worst of which is rendering your router a useless blue brick!

Ok, with the Public Service Announcement out of the way, I’ll point you in the right direction.  The first thing to do is check on DDWRT and see if your router is support by this firmware.  If it is, and you want to try it, then read through the documentation on the website, and visit all of the forums and posts that it tells you to.  Make sure you understand everything before you do it.  I’ve performed this a number of times on different routers, and each one has its own procedure to get the firmware changed.  Do not deviate from the directions.

Once finished, you will have software on your router that is MUCH MUCH better at handling high connection loads and staying on for months on end with no issues.  I personally run a Linksys WRT-150N at home, and it is notorious for being a *not very good* router. (hey, I got it for free )  Anyway, I upgraded the firmware to DDWRT, and I haven’t rebooted it in over 4 months, and before I’d have to reboot it at least once per week.

I also recently performed the upgrade on my In-Law’s Linksys WRT54GS, and just like at my house, they went from rebooting it a couple times per month to never.  It is a worthwhile upgrade to any compatible router, and you can feel good for supporting Open Source Software!

Windows Media Sharing issues with Vista and Windows 7

As great as the newer versions of Windows are, sometimes we run across really strange issues that cause huge performance issues.  Once such issue has arisen with Windows Media Sharing.

By default, in both Windows Vista and 7, Windows Media Sharing will share out folders like your Music, Pictures, and Videos folders so that trusted people on your network can access them.  Sounds great, right?  Well, it is, unless it accidentally gets configured wrong.  Then it’s a performance sapping vampire that has an insatiable thirst for your CPU and Memory.

Have no fear though, we’ve seen this problem enough and the solution is actually pretty simple.  In Windows Media Player, there is a Library menu (in Vista)  or Organize menu (in Windows 7) that allows you to change what folders are ‘looked at’ for each category of music, video, etc.  Sometimes, usually by accident, folders such as C:\ and D:\ get added to one of those categories.  This causes huge issues as Windows Media Player automatically looks through all of the folders listed and indexes the contents for easy retreival later.  Each time a file changes in the folders being ‘looked at’ the indexer goes back and makes note.

On the C:\ (and sometimes D:\ folders, there usually exists a file called pagefile.sys.  I won’t go into long explanations about this file, but it has to do with memory management for the system.  Anyway, this file is changing, literally _all_ of the time.  So, if a folder containing a file such as this gets indexed, the indexer will never actually ‘finish’.  This causes it to consume massive amounts of CPU power and memory, sometimes bringing the machine to a literal halt!

But wait, you don’t have to throw the computer out the window!  All you have to do to fix the problem is remove the C:\ or D:\ folder listings from the Pictures, Video, and/or Music folders that the entries are in, and *poof* problem solved!  Of course, if you don’t want to mess with it, you can bring the machine into UNI Computers and we can get it done as well!

UNI Computers, we find the really weird fixes so you don’t have to

Wordpress 3.0 is a go!

We just finished upgrading to Wordpress 3.0.  Wordpress is the engine that runs this website and allows for me to post this oh-so-awesome content for you!  So far, everything looks great, no major crashes, no fires, no insanity.  If you run into anything that doesn’t work on the site, please comment on this post or send an email to info@unicomputers.com

Free Windows Programs worth checking out

So I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now, and completely love it. It does everything well. Multitasking, running for days on end without needing a reboot, recovering from video driver crashes without bringing down the system, I could go on and on. Anyway, I have found a few free programs that are worth checking out.  Most of these will work with most older versions of Windows too:

Chrome

This is my new favorite web browser.  Google released this browser a while back and it has really taken off in terms of the number of people now using it for their primary browser.  It goes off of the philosophy of ‘less is more.’  When you start it up, you don’t get a myriad of buttons to confuse you.  You just get the tab that you’re on currently (plus more tabs as you open them) forward, back, refresh, and a tools button.  That’s it.  More space is devoted to actually ’showing’ the webpage, and less to features that 90% of people will never use.

And then there’s the speed.  Oh the glorious speed.  This browser loads so fast, if you blink, you’ll miss it.  It renders webpages fast, it loads Java-based sites super fast, it does everything fast.  That said, it is RAM happy, so if you don’t have plenty, it may not run that well, but in most machines built nowadays (and especially anything you get from UNI), plenty of RAM is installed right out of the box.  It will run on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.  (y0u have to have at least SP2 for Windows XP)  Get it here.

Notepad++

This is a nifty alternative to the standard “notepad” program that comes with all versions of windows.  It handles multiple tabs, a lot of web editing features, and plugins for even more capability.  Here is the direct download site.

Dropbox

This impressed me enough that I immediately emailed all of my friends, clients and co-workers so that they could check it out.  It is a tiny little program that installs on your machine, and then syncs back with Dropbox.com.  You get 2GB of storage, free.  The best thing, however, is that it operates just like a folder on your machine.  In fact, by default, it’s just a folder on your desktop.  Drag some files in, they sync automatically with Dropbox, done.  So, if you have Dropbox at work, and Dropbox at home, just drag some work that you need to take home into your Dropbox, and then when you get home, it will be synced there for you to continue working on.  When it’s time to take it back to work, just put it back in Dropbox, and when you get back, it’s there!  Super Easy.  Super Awesome.

It also allows you to access www.dropbox.com and download or upload any files, in case you are on a friends machine that doesn’t have Dropbox.  Also, at the time of this article, if you invite friends to Dropbox, you will get free space added to your account, up to 3.25GB total.

I’ve know one client who took a job in Dubai.  In order to be able to easily transfer pictures and stuff back and forth with his wife here in the States, they both installed Dropbox using the same account, now they can easily transfer files much more fluidly then trying to cram them into emails.

For those of you that need more space, Dropbox has a pay option where you can buy more space for a monthly or yearly rate.  Go check it out, it’s like having a little flash drive that’s ‘always on.’

Yes, you can put in the batteries ANY way you want!

I read yesterday that Microsoft, yes the infamous Microsoft has developed a new technology for batteries.  It basically means that you can install batteries (like AAs or AAAs) into a device in any direction, and it will still work! I know that sometimes the little icons imprinted in the battery bays trips me up, and this would be great as you can just pop the batteries in and not worry about them being backwards or turning your device into a pile of scrap!

This innovation is called Instaload, and Microsoft is planning on licensing it to manufacturers instead of making it themselves.  I gotta admit, this is pretty cool!

Click Click Clicky (part 2)

This kind of qualifies as an amendment to the last Click Click Clicky article, as I had an experience with a customer that just begged to be added here.

One of my friend’s aunts had her laptop in the shop this week because it wouldn’t boot up correctly.  We found that it had a bad hard drive.  We installed a new hard drive for her and were able to restore it using the recovery CDs that she had retained from when she purchased it.  All in all it was a pretty smooth operation.

This brought up an interesting thought though:  More and more I am seeing new brand name machines not coming with recovery CDs.  What used to be standard fare with any computer, desktop or laptop, that you purchased is now extremely rare.

If you read the fine print on your name brand machine, (pretty much all of them now are doing this) you may find that it says something to the effect of: “Please run BrandX utility to to create recovery CDs or DVDs”.  Basically these companies, in the effort to save about $1, have elected to put all of the recovery information right on the hard drive.  They usually give you a utility to use to make this recovery into a set of CDs or DVDs at your convenience.  The problem is that normally this utility is buried way down in a submenu somewhere and is very difficult to find.  So you never make the set of discs.  And then your hard drive crashes.  And nothing can be recovered.  And now you have no recovery discs by which to reload your computer with Windows and all of the other programs that came with it from the factory!  Oh the misery!  And the kicker is that brand name maker of your laptop will probably charge at least $25 plus shipping to send you a new set of discs.

So, the moral of the story is:  If you have a brand name computer, make SURE that you look for that utility and make those discs!  You will thank yourself in the long run.  Oh, and on a side note, all new UNI Computers always come with the Windows CDs/DVDs to reload the operating system, we feel it’s the right thing to do, even if it does cost one extra dollar