The Samsung 24 inch Widescreen LCD Full HD Monitor has a response time of only 5ms and I should know as I currently own this make and model. The speed is fast enough to allow this monitor to perform perfectly, even in the fastest moving scenes.

It presents movies, games, and Internet streamed content with precision and without the motion judder, blurring, and ghosting that can occur on a slower monitor. This allows you to enjoy a completely immersive viewing experience, especially if your playing one of the latest PC games.

The ultra-high 70,000:1 Dynamic Contrast ratio and its automatic back light adjustment creates deeper, more dramatic dark tones and brighter, more striking light tones. This monitor is therefore a joy to watch and work with. I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 quite a bit and it works like a dream on this Samsung monitor.

You too can now enjoy images that echo reality with rich, vivid colour and brilliant natural intensity.

When it comes down to the details, conventional monitors simply pale in comparison to Samsungs 24 inch Widescreen LCD Full HD Monitor.

Check out the reviews at Amazon.co.uk and see how good this monitor really is!

Column Composer Magic is a brand new Dreamweaver plug-in from PVII that enables you to compose CSS column structures, as well as entire CSS pages, from the comfort of a graphical user interface inside Dreamweaver.

You can use Column Composer Magic to add multi-column structures anywhere on your existing page or inside widgets, such as accordion or tab panels. You can also use CCM to create an entire CSS page layout.

This plug-in is a great tool for web designers and is only $95. What a bargain!

Take a look at this YouTube video to see what Column Composer Magic can do for you.

Microsoft has outlined how IT professionals will be able to set up Windows 8 using a flash drive, and has also claimed that the installation process will be much quicker than that for earlier versions of Windows.

Windows 8 will play down the need to type in the product key during installation. Those setting up the new version of the OS via the web delivery method will not have to type in the key at all, as it is ‘pre-keyed’ in the download file for the unique user.

However, IT professionals and other advanced users may want to install Windows 8 from a USB key while leaving the installation process unattended. In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft Setup and Deployment team member Christa St Pierre explained how this can be done:

When putting Windows 8 onto the flash drive, the user will be able to copy-and-paste the product key into an ‘unattend answer file’, which will itself need to be copied into the root of the USB stick. This will make it possible to leave the installation running without having to be there. Similarly, the user will be able to use the same file to pre-set the UI language and automatically configure the PC to boot multiple operating systems. “You could configure multiple boot options manually in the Advanced Setup GUI and BCD configuration, but why do that when you can script it? The unattend framework is very flexible and you can instruct Setup to format, create, or modify partitions on the PC’s disk(s),” St Pierre wrote.

St Pierre added that advanced setup from a USB drive was not supported in the Windows 8 developer preview build, but would be in the finalised version.

Another change can be found in the way Windows 8 will handle the transfer of preserved files from the old Operating System to the new. While previous Windows installation processes did this file-by-file, the Windows 8 process will move whole folders. There is just one transport folder, rather than the two needed for the Windows 7 upgrade, and Microsoft has also made various other tweaks to speed the process up. The result, St Pierre claimed, was that Microsoft had “virtually eliminated” the difference in upgrade times between a clean install and upgrades involving hundreds of thousands of preserved files.

Source: ZDNet

The processes Windows goes through during Start Up can help you determine where your PC hangs or produces a blue screen. For example the if the POST cannot detect necessary hardware or determine the boot device it will halt and not let Windows start up at all.

By knowing were a problem lies its far easier to get help.

At QBS PC Help we have several articles that can help track down start up problems such as:

PC POST Beep Codes

Problems with the Power On Self Test (POST)

PC restarts many times and then boots up

PC System Fails CPU Test

Here’s a list of process that occur during Windows Start Up:

1. After pressing the power button, the PC’s firmware initiates a Power-On Self Test (POST) and loads firmware settings. The POST is a set of routines including a memory check, system bus check and other low-level stuff so that the CPU can initialize the computer properly. The POST process ends when a valid system disk is detected. All modern BIOS’s allow the boot device to be set manually, so you can boot from a floppy, CD-ROM, hard disk etc.

2. Firmware reads the master boot record (MBR), and then starts Bootmgr.exe. Bootmgr.exe finds and starts the Windows loader (Winload.exe) on the Windows boot partition.

3. Essential drivers required to start the Windows kernel are loaded and the kernel starts to run, loading into memory the system registry hive and additional drivers that are marked as BOOT_START.

4. The kernel passes control to the session manager process (Smss.exe) which initializes the system session, and loads and starts the devices and drivers that are not marked BOOT_START.

5. Winlogon.exe starts, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and any Group Policy scripts are run. When the user logs in, Windows creates a session for that user.

6. Explorer.exe starts, the system creates the desktop window manager (DWM) process, which initializes the desktop and displays it.

P.S. If you want to go deeper into this subject check out Windows On/Off Transition Performance Analysis at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows

The New Epsom Workforce Pro Series.

The new, slimmer Xbox 360 has a lovely black gloss finish with built-in Wi-Fi, making it easy access to the wealth of entertainment on Xbox LIVE, where HD movies and TV stream in an instant.

A 250 GB hard drive means you’ll have plenty of space to store your favorite games and movies. All in all, more games, more entertainment and more fun.

The Xbox 360 comes bundled with Kinect. Kinect brings games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways – no controller required. Easy to use and instantly fun, Kinect gets everyone off the couch moving, laughing and cheering. See a ball? Kick it. Want to join a friend in the fun? Simply jump in. Even control an HD movie with a wave of the hand. Featuring a dedicated, specialized port, the Xbox 360 250GB is built to connect seamlessly with the Kinect Sensor.

Check out all the mouth watering details at Amazon.co.uk -Xbox360 plus Kinnect

1&1 makes it so easy to design and launch your business website that you can have it up and running in a just few moments. Simply enter your business sector, choose a layout and colour scheme and you’re finished! You can then change the content and layout at your convenience.

No programming or web design skills are necessary. And the best part: you can now try 1&1 MyWebsite FREE for 30 days!

Just click here to get started right away.

Two Assassins united by a single destiny – to defy those who want to control the will of man.

Thunderbird 8 arrived today, a new version of Mozilla’s e-mail software that now is linked with the Firefox rapid-release program.

Thunderbird 8 is built using the same Gecko 8 browser engine that’s used in Firefox 8, also released today.

Notably, the new version is accompanied by Lightning 1.0, an add-on under development for years that gives Thunderbird a calendar module, too.

Thunderbird 8 also includes “improvements to attachment handling and accessibility, updated Search and Find shortcuts, and several security, and stability fixes,” according to a blog post by Mozilla’s Rafael Ebron.

The Lightning add-on makes Thunderbird a more capable replacement for Outlook for those opting for an open-source approach to sending, receiving, searching, and archiving e-mail. It’s built to work with Thunderbird 8, but also supports older versions.

The Lightning add-on lets people add calendar entries, subscribe to online calendars, manage a to-do list, and more. For details, check the Lightning 1.0 release notes.

To dowload Thunderbird 8 visit the mozilla web site: www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird

A national computer security campaign is urging smartphone users to do more to protect themselves from unwittingly downloading malware applications.

Get Safe Online says that there has been an increase in smartphone malware as the market has grown.

Criminals are typically creating Trojan copies of reputable apps and tricking users into installing them. Once on the phone, the app can secretly generate cash for criminals through premium rate text messages.

Get Safe Online, a joint initiative between the government, police and industry, said it was concerned that users of smartphones, such as Android devices, were not taking steps to protect their devices.

Get Safe Online said fraudsters are designing apps which generate cash secretly in the background without the owner realising until their monthly bill.

A typical scam involves an app designed to send texts to premium rate services without the user knowing. Apps can appear to be bona fide software or sometimes masquerade as stripped down free versions of well-known games.

Rik Ferguson, a hacking researcher with internet security firm Trend Micro, said: “This type of malware is capable of sending a steady stream of text messages to premium rate numbers – in some instances we’ve seen one being sent every minute. With costs of up to £6 per message, this can be extremely lucrative. The user won’t know this is taking place, even if they happen to be using the device at the same time, as the activity takes place within the device’s back-end infrastructure.”

Here’s a few tips to keep your own Smartphone free of attack

Source BBC Tech News

The all-new Kindle features a new, compact design that’s 30% lighter and at just 170 grams it’s almost as light as a feather. Its also 18% smaller – small enough to fit into your pocket.

The all-new Kindle can store up to 1,400 books so you no longer have to pick and choose which books to fit into your luggage. You can have your entire Kindle library with you, wherever you go.

Kindle is easy to hold and read. Its page-turning buttons are located on both sides, allowing you to read and turn pages from any position. The reading screen is sharp and natural with no glare or backlight. Reading on Kindle is nothing like reading from a computer screen. It can be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room!

Kindle is based on wireless technology and doesn’t require a computer to download any content. It supports public and private Wi-Fi networks or hotspots that use the 802.11b, 802.11g, or 802.11n (in b or g compatibility mode) standard with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security using password authentication. Be warned that it does not connect to WPA and WPA2 secured networks using 802.1X authentication methods and does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.

The books and magazines you buy for your Kindle are safe as Amazon provide Free cloud storage for all the content you buy from them.

Battery life is simply amazing. A single charge lasts up to one month with wireless turned off based on 30 minutes of daily reading time. If you keep wireless always on it lasts for up to three weeks. Battery life will of course vary based on wireless usage, such as shopping at the Kindle Store, web browsing and downloading content.

Find out more about Amazon’s top selling product, now on offer for just £89!

Watch as the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series comes to life in this live action commercial for Skyrim.

Here’s a free, easy to use undelete and file recovery tool called Recuva – and from the same company that provides my favourite cleanup program CCleaner.

When you delete a file, the contents of that file are not usually overwritten or removed straight away. The space used by that file is marked as “available” so that it can be used the next time data is written to your hard drive. As long as your old data is not overwritten by something new, there’s a good chance you can recover that deleted file.

This is where utilities like Recuva come in. They can scan the available space and the control information on the hard disk to identify files that might be recoverable.

Recuva starts with a Wizard that allows you to specify what drives to scan, and what classes of files to look for.

For example did Microsoft Word crash or did you forget to save that important Word document. No problem because Recuva can intelligently rebuild Word documents from their temporary files! In fact, Recuva can get back documents, emails, music files and can even help you to recovery from damaged or formatted disks. It also works on any rewritable media you may have.

It doesn’t matter if you need to recover priceless photographs from your digital camera’s memory card, files you backed up to an external hard drive, or the documents you carry around every day on your flash stick, Recuva’s got it all covered.

If you listen to music on an iPod, this program can recover files directly from the iPod’s drive. Even though you can’t access files on your iPod directly, Recuva can. You don’t have to worry about losing music from iTunes or your iPod any more.

For pro photographers, Recuva even supports the Nikon RAW and Canon RAW (.CRW) formats.

If you are feeling adventurous you can even use the program’s advanced interface and have it scan a specific drive you specify, and then filter the results based on type or name.

If you are looking for a good undelete and file recovery tool look no further than Recuva. I’ve certainly added it to my computer repair kit.

Find out more about Recuva from the developers website – http://www.piriform.com/recuva

The latest BlackBerry Torch 9800 is a high-resolution touchscreen smartphone with slide-out keyboard and optical trackpad.

At the beginning of October I decided to run a really crazy offer!

My 144 page Easy PC Repair Guide with 48% off the full retail price. That’s a drop from £24.99 way down to only £12.99!

Be warned that this offer runs out on the 31st October. On 1st November the price will revert back to £24.99 so grab this great offer while you can!

When you buy the Easy PC Repair Guide you will learn how to remove unwanted programs, put your bloated Windows Operating System on an crash diet, optimise your hard drive with a few mouse clicks and speed up your computer using the tools provided by Windows.

The Easy PC Repair Guide is clear, concise and very easy to use. It covers everything you need to know about your computer from its day to day running, through to the fixing of crashes and hardware problems.

This unique guide also covers the installation of computer memory modules, graphic cards, hard drives, power units, CD/DVD drives, processors (CPU) and motherboards. And it is well illustrated to help guide you through the many complexities of the computer world.

By getting a copy of my Easy PC Guide now you will get a completely free upgrade to version 4 when it becomes available in January 2012. So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to take full advantage of my 48% discount!

This post looks at how to share your printer between Windows 7 and Windows Vista when it is already attached to your Windows 7 PC. If you follow these steps closely you should be up and running quite quickly.

Set Windows 7′s Share Settings

To share you printer you should start in Windows 7′s Advanced Sharing Settings (Found in the Network and Sharing Centre, alternatively just type Advanced Sharing Settings in the Search Programs and Files box).

Once there make sure you turn on network discovery, file and printer sharing, and public folder sharing. Make sure these are enabled in both the Home or Work and Public profiles.

Depending on your setup, you might want to turn off password protected sharing. Otherwise you’ll need to enter the password for each machine in the network. Turning it off while you’re setting up printer sharing does make things a bit easier though by saving a step.

Set Windows Vista’s Share Settings

On the Vista machine we need to double check and make sure it’s sharing settings are ready to go. Right-click on Network and choose Properties. The Network and Sharing Center will then open up. Under Sharing and Discovery turn on File Sharing, Public Folder Sharing, and Network Discovery. Also on the Vista PC you might want to turn off password protected sharing, but it’s completely up to you.

Now that we have the correct settings on each machine, it’s time to put this to the test. Make sure all your computers are turned on and then open up Network on the Windows 7 machine. You should now see all the PC’s on the network.

Now on the Vista computer, double click on Network and you should see the Windows 7 machine. You should see the folders and devices that are now shared. And you should see the printer that’s already connected to the Windows 7 machine.

Test the Printer Sharing Set Up

As you can now see the printer connected to Windows 7 you should make sure that you can connect to it and print a test document.

In Windows Vista click on the Start menu and type Printers into the search box and hit Enter. Right-click on the shared printer and select Properties. Under the General tab click on the Print Test Page button. Another test you might want to perform is opening a text document and making sure you can print that to the printer that’s already attached to Windows 7.

Provided everything prints out successfully you might want to make the shared printer the default printer for your Vista PC.

Fixing any Problems that Crop Up

If your computers cannot see each other or the printer is not working, here are a few steps you might want to try to determine where the problem lies.

Double check to make sure that Network Discovery and File and Print Sharing are enabled on both PC’s.

If the printer isn’t working, double check to make sure you have the latest drivers for each OS installed.

You didn’t have to install any different drivers for this printer sharing, like you often have to when sharing a printer between XP and Windows 7.

Results with sharing printers will vary depending on the printer you own and the set up that’s needed. Older printers are in fact notorious for having issues with drivers that won’t work with either Windows Vista or Windows 7. So the only solution may be to buy a new printer.

You’ll be pleased to know that as long as network discovery is enabled on both the Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, sharing printers is actually a straightforward process.

I hope this short post will get you started with sharing folders, files, and printers between your Vista and Windows 7 PC’s.

The link exchange requests you receive often have a bad effect on you as they are badly crafted and all look too similar. As a result it’s often hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

So what can you do if you want to develop your own link campaign? How should you go about it?

If you want to get quality back links from authority sites, you will have to send link exchange requests that inspire and help the webmaster so that your request stands out. The secret of successful requests is to write link exchange messages that are not seen as spam by its reader.

Get the reader’s attention

If you want people to read your link exchange messages, they should not sound like the dozens of other emails that the typical webmaster receives each and every day. Try to use the recipient’s real name throughout your message. If your link request starts with “Dear webmaster” then it’s likely that it will be moved quickly to the trash bin.

Be personal

Write a personal message for each recipient. Use a real email address with a real name as the sender address. Free email addresses and email addresses with numbers look like spam and will not be dealt with by the webmaster.

Create interest

What’s in it for me? You should answer that primary question as soon as possible in your email. Do not list any features. Focus on benefits. First, nobody is really interested in the great features of your website. Tell the recipient how your website solves his problems or the problems of his readers.

Appeal to the ego of the recipient

Tell the recipient that you will list his site in some special category or that you have already linked to his site. It’s easier to convince people if you appeal to their ego.

Create desire

The recipient of your link exchange email will not react to your request if you don’t create desire.

To create desire out of interest, you can tell the recipient that you downloaded his eBook, subscribed to his newsletter or RSS feed, etc.

The webmaster you send an email to is far more likely to reciprocate if you have already done something in advance. Give the recipient the feeling that he’s special.

Make the action needed as easy as possible

Don’t make the webmaster think too much. Make the linking process as easy as possible by giving him copy/paste HTML code with your link information. Of course, the code should only be an option and you should not insist on that code. If the webmaster wants to use another code to link to your site, that’s okay.

A sample link request

Hi Name of webmaster,

I am the webmaster of xxxxxx.

I have been searching for good online website partners through Google, for mutual website promotions and traffic development.

In the process I came across your website http://www.xxxxxxxxx and after browsing through it I found it very informative and useful for the visitors to xxxxx. I therefore believe it would be beneficial for our companies if we swapped links. This exchange will go towards improving our sites ranks in the major search engines, especially Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Please consider adding my link to your site on a suitable page, preferably: http://xxxxxxxxxxxxlinks.html.

In response to this, I will add your website to our own links page http:/xxxxxxxxx/links.html

Here’s the information you need to upload our link:

Title: xxxxxxxx

Description: xxxxxxxxx

URL: http://xxxxxxxxxxxx

Please let me have your reciprocal link so I can add it to my links page – http://xxxxxxxxxxx/links.html.

If you have a unique article, you can send it to me with a back link to your own website and I will create a separate page for you in my article directory. Please make sure that the article is not a copy from any other website. I will also be happy to add a guest blog post to my xxxxxxxx Blog.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards, Your name

Your address and telephone numbers.

P.S. If you are not the webmaster please forward this email to the appropriate person.

I’ve decided to run a really amazing offer for the whole of October!

My most popular PDF eBook ‘The Easy PC Repair Guide‘ is now available for just £12.99, that’s 48% off the full retail price of £24.99! On 1st November the price will revert back to £24.99 so grab this great offer while you can!

I’m presently working on the next version of this repair guide and this will expand it from 144 pages up to 160 pages or so, packed full of pc tips, advice and repair guides. A fully searchable PDF guide to help you solve up to 98% of any computer problems you might experience during the ‘life’ of your Windows computer.

Unfortunately not every problem can be solved with this guide because sometimes problems involve hardware issues, like hard drive failure, or there may be a virus which cripples your computer to the point that it must be completely wiped clean.

Even so, I believe this wonderful Repair Guide will be able to turn you into a PC expert! After all, if you only look at speeding up a Windows PC you will still know a lot more than most people out there! And by buying the Easy PC Guide now you will get a completely free upgrade to version 4 when it becomes available in January 2012. What are you waiting for?

Take advantage of this temporary price reduction and click here to buy your own personal copy of my Easy PC Repair Guide.

With Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.5 speech recognition software, you can enter text just by speaking. Control your favourite Mac applications – including Microsoft Word 2011 – using only your voice.

Performance and improved memory use were the goals of Firefox 7, which arrived on schedule on Tuesday from Mozilla.

The wide-release version of Firefox 7 brings changes to the majority of Firefox users that have been available on the beta and Aurora channels for some time. These include claims of significant gains in reducing memory use, “often 20-percent to 30-percent less, and sometimes as much as 50-percent less”, a company representative wrote in a blog post based on work by Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote.

These performance gains are the first public results of an internal Mozilla project called MemShrink, which, as the name implies, is about reducing the browser’s system impact.

Mozilla cited several specific areas of improvement in Firefox 7, including when the browser is kept open for long periods of time, when multiple tabs are open at once, and when the browser is used concurrently with other programs that also use a lot of memory. The company also noted that MemShrink was successful in part because of the rapid-release cycle that a vocal minority of Firefox users have been criticising.

Other changes in Firefox 7 for desktops include a new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas for faster HTML5 games and animations, and improvements for Web developers. These include support for the W3C navigation timing API, which allows developers to measure page load time and site navigation against factors like bandwidth, and a new set of Firefox tools for developers.

Firefox 7 for Android includes a full list of changes, including the ability to select text in a Web page for copying and pasting. Long-tap on a site, and the Android-style drag handles will appear. There’s a new Quit feature under Preferences/More to force an exit from the browser, the WebSocket API now works on Firefox for mobile devices, and image rendering has been improved on Tegra-powered tablets and phones. The browser also now auto-detects your system default language if it’s supported, and a new Preferences option enables you to change the language displayed in the browser on-demand.

Source: CNET