Hello! Welcome to PC Tips and Tricks. My name is Ives and I'm here to provide simple tips and technical solutions to your everyday PC problems. We live in a world where we rely mostly on our hi-tech gadgets everyday both for work and personal use and these devices eventually will reach a point where it may crash or simply wont agree with you. Going to the nearest repair depot may take a lot of time, money and effort and the technician's solution was just to hard reboot your PC or just remove the battery of your laptop. You might say to yourself, "I could have done that". Well this website can let you do just that. We'll give you the simplest troubleshooting steps and fixes so that you will be able to fix those everyday glitches and you the hassle of calling tech support who is just going to place you on hold.
How to update Windows 10 using Microsoft Windows UpdateEvery month there is usually at least one (patch, security fix, enhancement) update released by Microsoft for the Windows 7 operating system. Microsoft releases these updates through the Microsoft Update website. Logging into Microsoft Windows Update has been simplified since Vista. Unlike XP the whole update process has been integrated into Windows Vista and 7. After you check out the video tutorial below you will see how simple it is to update Windows 7 using Microsoft Windows Update.
In the following updating Windows 7 via Microsoft Windows Update video tutorial I will take you step-by-step and you will easily learn the following… 1. How-To open up the Microsoft Windows Update settings window via the Windows 7 System Tray 2. How-To open up the Microsoft Windows Update settings window via the Control Panel 3. Explanation of various Windows Update settings 4. How-To view and sort through “important updates” 5. How-To view and sort through “optional updates” 6. How-To select, download and install Windows 7 updates Click on the link to watch video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B95b9FzrdS8 --------------------------------------------------------------How to get better WiFi speed and rangeYour Wi-Fi network might have been adequate when you used it only to surf the web from a laptop, but if you want to start streaming HD video, for example, it might not be fast enough. Here, we’ll look at how to increase your network’s speed and range. Where possible, we’ll show you how to do this using your existing equipment.
Wi-Fi standards Wireless networking equipment adheres to various standards, which are created by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to ensure interoperability between kit from different manufacturers. Excluding the obsolete ones, the standards that relate to Wi-Fi are 802.11g, 802.11n and 802.11ac. The latter is brand-new and, although you can buy ‘ac’ equipment, the standard is yet to be ratified. Each standard specifies the headline speed, measured in megabits per second (Mbps). The headline figures aren’t representative of what you’ll see in practice, but they do allow comparisons to be made. Remember that if you decide to upgrade your equipment, both the wireless router and your computer must adhere to the same standard. For example, if your laptop supports only 802.11g, upgrading to an 802.11n router won’t boost performance, although it might increase the range. In this scenario, you’d also need an 802.11n USB adaptor for your laptop. 802.11g has a headline speed of 54Mbps. This standard has largely been phased out in favour of 802.11n, but you may still be using 802.11g if your computer is more than a couple of years old. If you’re buying a new laptop, make sure it supports 802.11n wireless. This standard has various options, with headline speeds up to 600Mbps. Meanwhile, forthcoming 802.11ac boasts headline figures up to 1.3Gbps. Only enthusiasts should concern themselves with this latest standard for now. Real-world speeds The real-world speed you’ll get from equipment adhering to a particular Wi-Fi standard is about half the headline figure at best. What’s more, it reduces with distance, and with the number of walls and floors between the router and PC. For example, while 802.11g offers 54Mbps, you’ll achieve only 25- to 30Mbps when your PC is next to the router, and much less the further away it is placed. At the limit of the equipment’s range, just before the connection is lost, the actual speed may well be less than 1Mbps. Distance and obstructions such as walls and floors aren’t the only things that will reduce wireless speeds. Another likely culprit is interference from nearby wireless equipment that uses the same channel. 2.4GHz vs 5GHz Two radio bands are used for wireless internet: 2.4- and 5GHz. 802.11g equipment will operate only on 2.4GHz, while 802.11ac supports only 5GHz; 802.11n permits operation in both bands, and many equipment manufacturers let you choose which frequency to use. Before you make a choice over 2.4- and 5GHz, it pays to understand the pros and cons of each. The 2.4GHz band has just 13 channels, nine of which are overlapping, while 5GHz has many more. You stand a much greater chance of avoiding interference from other users in the 5GHz band. This, in turn, will make your connection more stable and faster. This is particularly important if you want to use channel bonding to achieve the highest speed 802.11n offers. As the name suggests, channel bonding uses two 20MHz channels to create a 40MHz channel, theoretically doubling the speed. The problem is that using 40MHz channels reduces the number of non-overlapping channels to just two. In turn, this means that interference with your neighbours’ Wi-Fi equipment is much more likely, leading to poor transfer speeds and the possibility of the connection dropping out altogether. For this reason all 802.11n routers ship with channel bonding disabled by default. Unless you live in a remote area, using 40MHz bands on 2.4GHz is not recommended. The extra number of channels in the 5GHz band means that using 40MHz channels is much more of a practical proposition, but some experts are suggesting that before too long the 5GHz band will be as congested as 2.4GHz. 802.11ac, meanwhile, also allows 80- and 160MHz channels. Rarely does something offer a win-win solution, though, and 5GHz is no exception. A 5GHz signal’s range is generally less than that of a 2.4GHz signal, and this is particularly noticeable if it has to pass through floors and walls – concrete is an especially tricky obstacle. Some manufacturers of 802.11n equipment allow the use of both bands simultaneously, carrying part of the data stream across 2.4GHz and part across 5GHz. This increases the speed beyond that which is available using either band alone. Find free channels As we’ve said, there are 13 channels available on the 2.4GHz band. Many of these channels overlap, which means equipment using channel 2 would interfere with equipment on channel 3, for example. There are only four channels that do not overlap – 1, 5, 9 and 13 – so many people choose one of these. By default, many wireless routers are set to automatically select a channel automatically; others allow you to specify the channel. If you’re having problems with your Wi-Fi, suffering from poor speed or occasional dropouts, it may pay to change channels. Rather than adopting a trial-and-error approach, you should check which channels are in wide use in your neighbourhood. Identifying the free channels is easy with inSSIDer, a free utility from MetaGeek (download it from metageek.net). |
News: No More NetbooksNetbooks, once championed as the savior of the PC, will soon be a thing of the past. Both Acer and Asus, the last companies left standing in the netbook arena, have stopped making the portable, borderline adorable computers. The companies have said they won’t produce new netbooks as of december 2012, but they do have some remaining inventory. If you’ve always dreamt of owning an undersized, underpowered laptop, you better act fast. As smartphones and tablets got more powerful and more affordable the need for an ultra-portable laptop dwindled. Netbooks didn’t need to be highly powerful because they were largely used, as the name implies, to do things online. Once phones became better at performing tasks like checking email and searching the Internet, carrying around a separate device that did those same things became unnecessary.
Free antivirus may be enough to protect your PC online
It should be no revelation, but the software companies proclaiming themselves as security guardians of your PC have the same agenda as the people making malware: to make money.
Antivirus development was once a noble cause, community help for fellow geeks against the childish pranks of attention-seeking delinquents. But then viruses were developed for profit, and antivirus developers welcomed venture capitalists into their throng, to turn vaccines into self-renewing cash cows. Do you need antivirus? Or, as it’s now swelled and sold, ‘internet security’? Equally efficacious antivirus can be downloaded for free from some familiar names, notably Microsoft itself with its Security Essentials. Top names in free Windows antivirus haunt the As, like Aardvark services in a telephone directory - AVG Free, Avast and Avira. Other notables include ClamAV and Malwarebytes. To bolster their revenue stream, commercial antivirus peddlers now bundle super-sized packages with marketable extras - bullet points such as antispyware, firewalls, online backup and parental control. This earns them an extra 10- or 20 quid a year from you. But, in my opinion, most of this is useless tat. iPhone still reliableEarlier this week, research firm Strategy Analytics issued a report showing that the iPhone 5 and 4S are the two most popular smartphones in the world. The 5 alone accounts for 13% of all smartphones shipped globally.
Today, crowd-sourced trouble-shooting website FixYa shared its own findings on the smartphone space. And according to its data, Apple’s handset isn’t just the best-selling in the world. It’s also [by far] the most reliable… FixYa’s Smartphone Reliability Report (via BGR) uses data based on nearly a million combined problem impressions from troubleshooting requests posted by consumers through its product Q&A site and iOS mobile app. For the report, the site assigned each smartphone manufacturer a Reliability Score—the fewer problem impressions the company had relative to their market share, the higher the score. Here’s how everyone faired:
As far as the other manufacturers, Samsung users’ top complaints consist of microphone and speaker issues. Nokia users’ main beefs are ‘laggy response times’ and poor app selection, and Motorola users seem to have problems with everything. |