PortableApps

They don’t leave traces or make any changes to the computer they’re plugged into. All settings and changes are saved to the portable drive. PortableApps will work on Windows XP or later and there are equivalent programs for Linux such as www.portools.com. Most of the sites’ programs are open source and all can be downloaded at no cost. There are also no restrictions on the type of portable drive needed. The applications can be installed to memory cards, flash drives, hard drives, and even to media players.

Google Chrome Portable

The benefits are extremely useful when on a library or public computer where changes to the computer system is either frowned upon or not allowed. It is also helpful that browser bookmarks, history, and add-ons are stored on and loaded from the removable drive.

A+ Logo

In order to pass the exam, a lot of your time would be spent learning the necessary material. Reading a book corresponding with the certification would be the bulk of your studying. As the exam questions are periodically updated, it would be preferable to buy the most recently released book and research your required material online. It can also help to purchase practice exams to help you test your ability to pass. As these tests usually cost less than half the expense of the exams, it can be cost efficient to buy them rather than risk failing and paying the exam fee twice.

CCNA Logo

Your Typical LCD

An LCD most likely consumes between 25 and 35 watts, and in California that translates to 90 cents and $1.26 a month respectively. The best thing you can do is adjust your monitor to reduce eye strain, and if you do it right, then you may save some power in the process. In a typical setup, you will be able to adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor, although your video card or chipset may provide you with additional brightness, contrast, and color correction features.

The brightness setting on your LCD determines almost all of its power usage, and by adjusting it, you are almost directly adjusting the power it consumes. However, to minimize eye strain, you should adjust the brightness so that the monitor screen appears just as bright as the rest of the room. Your eyes will quickly strain if there is a substantial difference – such as when you stare at a computer screen at night with the lights off.

Changing the contrast setting on a monitor does very little to affect power usage, but it can greatly reduce eye strain by making it easier for your eyes to distinguish between colors. For example, by increasing the contrast you can make black text on a gray background appear sharper rather than blend in. Contrast changes can also make the screen appear brighter without actually changing its brightness.

Monitors vary in the effect of their contrast settings, but higher contrast generally means a brighter screen with colors blending together. And lower contrast generally means a darker screen with sharper colors. And if your monitor’s settings are too limited to properly adjust the screen, you can also check to see if your graphics driver provides additional options. In Windows, you can right click on the desktop to look for Intel’s “Graphics Properties,” nVidia’s “Control Panel,” or ATI’s “Control Center.”

The Kill-A-Watt Meter

You might be surprised to hear that electronic devices still consume power even when they’re turned off – pretty much anything that plugs into a wall outlet does. This power is referred to as “standby power,” and it’s commonly used to provide some sort of feature – like an infrared receiver listening for a remote, a computer waiting for the ON button to be pressed, or a DVD player displaying the current time. However, this standby load often provides no benefits at all.

Watts are used to measure the rate at which power is consumed, and power usage over time is usually measured (and billed for) in kilowatt hours (kW-h). The cost varies greatly depending on where you live, but the U.S. national average is about 12 cents per kW-h. In California, the average price for residential power is 15 cents and commercial power is one cent cheaper. The average American household (in 2007) consumed 936 kilowatt hours each month.

Although most power is used by appliances such as air conditioning systems and refrigerators, your electronics do consume a significant amount of power. But how much exactly? To answer that question, we’ve prepared the following table showing the typical power usage of computers, monitors, and peripherals.

So if your computer idles at 65 watts, then it would consume at least 46.8 kilowatt hours in a month (30 days) if you never turned it off. And if you live in California where power is 15 cents per kW-h, then you’d be adding $7.02 to your electric bill. Of course the cost will be a lot more depending on how much you use the monitor and peripherals, but at a minimum, your printer, monitor, switch, and phone will add another 14 watts for a total of 79 watts and $8.53.

Let’s say you wanted to lower expenses and you kept your computer and peripherals off at night by turning the power strip off (which stops almost all standby power usage). If your night is eight hours long, this would only save you $2.84 each month. However, if you shut down your computer and didn’t turn off the power strip – thereby losing some power – you would still save $2.27. The power lost at night due to standby power modes is only 57 cents in this case – not even worth considering.

A ''Stupid'' Strip

Even so, a few vendors are marketing “smart” power strips which can shut off some outlets when power usage on a control outlet gets low enough. So if your computer is on the control outlet and it goes to sleep, then the Smart Strip would turn off all power to peripherals on the other outlets. In our typical setup, these peripherals consumed only 14 watts of standby power, and even assuming the computer would be off or asleep for 15 hours each day, the most you could save in a month would be 95 cents. Hardly enough to justify the expense – both of money and energy – of a Smart Strip.

Sadly, according to the EPA, the United States does not have any comprehensive regulations for the disposal of electronic waste. But while the Federal government is behind the times, California and many other state governments are not. These state regulations differ greatly in their scope and effectiveness, so here we will only talk about the laws in California.

California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control classifies computers, their peripherals, cell phones, monitors, media players, and similar devices as “Electronic Waste” – also known simply as “e-waste.” This category is also a subset of a larger group which the DTSC refers to as “Universal Waste.” And while this name sounds relatively harmless, it’s a horrible misnomer. Universal Waste, according to the DTSC, is hazardous waste that contains toxic substances – such as refrigerators, washers, and other household appliances.

By law in California, it is illegal to throw e-waste in the trash, and many programs have been established to help businesses and consumers recycle their old electronic devices. Even so, finding out how to recycle e-waste can be confusing, and it isn’t always free. Many retailers have either voluntarily or legally been obliged to accept e-waste at their stores, but of course they don’t handle the recycling themselves, and there’s little guarantee that it would be done properly. Plus, these retailers usually accept only specific types of devices – for example, a T-Mobile store will only accept old cell phones.

In our opinion, the best way to recycle is to look for “recycling events” hosted by local e-waste collection companies in collaboration with city governments. At these events, you can usually drop off all kinds of e-waste without any fees. For San Diego, you can find a schedule of local recycling events on SanDiego.gov (More on San Diego’s recycling program). Outside of these events, most collection companies charge fees for some of the devices they accept, and many of them also offer additional services such as document destruction or waste pickups.

If you can’t wait for the next event or there won’t be one in your area, you can find the nearest collector with CalRecycle’s directory. And if you have your doubts about a particular collector or recycler, you can use the California DTSC website to find out what a company is licensed for. There you can see whether the collector does its own recycling or ships it elsewhere. It’s also a good idea to make sure your collection company doesn’t ship waste outside California where regulations for the safe handling of toxic materials is lacking or unenforced.

Google Chrome

As our gateways to the Internet, web browsers are the most important application that we have on our computers. We have said a lot of good things about Firefox on this blog, and while it’s still our favorite, Google Chrome is coming in a big way. Considering that Chrome was released in late 2008 and that many features are still being implemented, Chrome has done remarkably well to capture almost 5% of the worldwide user base.

Having just stolen this title from Apple’s Safari, Chrome is now the third most popular browser. Of course the first two are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox with just under 63% and 25% usage share respectively. The gains among newer browsers like Safari and Firefox have up until now come at the expense of Internet Explorer – which has seen its usage decline rapidly over the past few years.

But this is not the case with Chrome. Google’s browser – especially with its recent beta releases for Mac and Linux systems – is pulling users away from Firefox. Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser because many users either don’t know how to switch or wouldn’t realize any benefits from it. There are also a significant number of web applications and some websites which still work only with Explorer. But for those who do want to switch, Chrome is starting to sound like a better choice than Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox

The main problem with Firefox is that the code base is ancient, and so far Mozilla has not made any large-scale changes that would get their browser as fast as Chrome or Opera. Google’s browser is at least twice as fast as Firefox (depending on the test), uses less memory, and offers greater stability by using a separate process for each tab. The only thing that’s keeping Firefox in the game is its great support for browser add-ons and the many excellent ones that are available.

Even without support for add-ons, Chrome has managed to get its 5% share, but this is going to change very soon. The beta version of 4.0 includes support for browser extensions, and many of our favorite Firefox add-ons are already available as Chrome extensions. However, we did notice a lot of bugs that need to be still need to be worked out.

Once version 4.0 is released and developers have finished porting our must-have add-ons over to Chrome, it will be hard for us to find a reason to keep using Firefox. This will be a decision many people will be faced with, and unless Mozilla does something truly amazing with Firefox, Chrome is sure to overtake it within a few years.

The Lala Logo

In our previous article, we wrote about the strong demand for peer to peer file sharing, and one of the technologies which may finally reconcile legitimate supply with that demand is cloud computing (centralized content). By licensing access to media content rather than distributing the content on physical media or in data files, content providers can provide very convenient access to what they have and really cut down on distribution costs. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not quite yet. Lala.com showed (and maybe still shows) great promise as the perfect combination of social networking, digital music, and software as a service. In theory, users can host all of their music online where it’s available at any computer with internet access. Backups aren’t needed because Lala stores all of the songs on its servers, and Lala allows its users to transfer their existing music collection to their Lala account. When Lala doesn’t already have a particular song in its database, it allows users to upload the MP3 from their computer.

And while that all sounds great, Lala’s implementation and service have been lackluster at best. We know the future lies in cloud computing, and when Chrome OS and similar platforms hit the market, we expect the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like this to skyrocket. So we’ve been trying Lala – which is ostensibly the best solution yet in its category – for the past few months to give an honest evaluation. So here’s what we think…

Availability. We haven’t noticed that much downtime with the Lala website or the servers which stream the music, but even while the rest of the site and content is working fine, many of the songs which we uploaded (songs which were not in their database) are no longer playable. This is the single biggest problem we have with Lala – they have little respect for the music of an individual user, and they clearly prioritize the music that they already have in their database.

The Player. The web interface for viewing a user’s music library and playing songs is miles above any other web-based player we’ve seen. The fact that the interface is minimal and simplistic turns out to be a plus because playing music shouldn’t be complicated, and we didn’t end up missing any of the advanced features that Winamp or Rhythmbox might have offered. There is certainly room to improve though, and we would have liked better, more convenient search functionality. Editing tags for songs in our library was a breeze, and it’s much easier and faster editing “web songs” than it is for MP3s on a hard drive.

Reliability. Lala’s player uses Adobe Flash and overall works well, but it has some serious bugs. After having the browser open for a long while (maybe a day or so), the player stops playing sound. It continues to buffer songs, but it just never starts playing. Oddly enough, we saw this error happen very consistently on both Windows and Ubuntu in both Firefox and Chrome. We were only able to pinpoint the problem because Chrome allows us to unload the flash plugin in its Task Manager (a subsequent refresh would reload it and allow the player to start working).

A User... Sometimes

Price. In this area, we have nothing but great things to say about the Lala experience. Buying the right to listen to a song on Lala costs only 10 cents. The prices for downloading full MP3s are also very reasonable, but buying an entire album of web songs only costs a little more than a dollar. This is really the way music buying should be, and this is what we loved about Lala’s offering.

The Future for Lala. Overall, Lala is a great idea that just hasn’t fully materialized yet. There had previously been a lot of speculation about an iPhone app and whether the authoritarians over at Apple would approve it, but earlier this month Apple acquired Lala for $85 million (according to the WSJ). It’s still unclear how Lala will fit into the larger Apple picture, and it’s likely that Lala may be absorbed by – or at least merged with – iTunes.

The one good thing about this acquisition is that Apple must now honor the purchases made by Lala’s users. If Lala had gone under, then its users would have lost the money they invested in their online collection. And who knows, Google was rumored to have been bidding for Lala, and they may still be looking to create their own music streaming service. Unlike their multitude of other products which have nothing to do with their business model, organizing the world’s music (alongside targeted ads of course) sounds like a good fit.

Napster's Logo

Who can forget the widespread popularity of Napster in 2000? The dramatic increase in Internet usage during the 1990s created the perfect environment for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to emerge, and most of what was shared at the time was MP3 files. Naturally the Recording Industry (RIAA) brought a lawsuit, and the immediate effect was that Napster was shut down in July 2001. But this was only a temporary setback as there were now countless millions of people around the world who knew the benefits of P2P sharing.

So it wasn’t long before Morpheus and Kazaa took Napter’s place, and P2P sharing continued its growth. The RIAA wasn’t even close to learning its lesson, and they took StreamCast and Grokster, the companies behind Morpheus and Kazaa respectively, to court for copyright infringement. The RIAA was not immediately successful in suing these second-generation P2P firms, and in the mean time it resorted to suing thousands of individuals who had used these programs. After a protracted legal battle, A U.S. Federal court ruled against the P2P companies in September 2006.

And as P2P networks such as Kazaa began to decline due to legal pressure, the use of BitTorrent for file sharing surged. While Kazaa was a software program used with its own file sharing network, BitTorrent was simply a protocol for communications between computers. The central concept behind BitTorrent is that every user who’s downloading (leeching) is also uploading (seeding) to others. This reduces or removes the burden on a web server to provide a particular file, and it also allows users to host their own files for others to download.

Many applications (or clients) have been written for the BitTorrent protocol, and neither the clients nor the protocol can be associated with copyright-infringing uses – they are simply technologies in their own right. However, every popular P2P system has something which links its users together. In the case of torrents, websites (known as trackers) allow users to upload and download .torrent files which contain information about a particular file and the address of the server that keeps track of the clients currently leeching or seeding that file.

And as websites, trackers are not directly tied to any one individual or location and are easily renamed or relocated. One of the first trackers to gain popular recognition was SuprNova.org. From 2002 to 2004, the Slovenian website was widely regarded as the largest torrent tracker, but in December of 2004, the website’s owner was forced to take it offline due to legal threats.

However, just two months earlier in October 2004, ThePirateBay.org was launched in Sweden, and it would become the most widely recognized BitTorrent tracker in the world. The Pirate Bay still holds that title, and it’s still in operation today despite intense legal opposition. In the Fall of 2009, a Swedish court ordered The Pirate Bay’s Internet provider (ISP) to block its traffic and the site’s owners to cease operations, but the site was quickly relocated to an ex-NATO territory within the Netherlands. And even after that, The Pirate Bay is taking some steps to avoid more lawsuits and advising BitTorrent trackers and users to move to a new “trackerless” system. While the future of The Pirate Bay is uncertain, it’s clear that peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t going anywhere.

So what are people sharing that creates so much controversy? Almost all of the copyrighted works that are “pirated” through torrents and P2P networks are digital media such as movies and music. The reason so many turn to file sharing is that media companies such as Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are clinging to outdated pricing models. People today consume an incredible amount of digital media content, and many either can’t afford to pay for it or need their media in an unrestricted digital format.

For example, Green Day’s latest album costs $13.99 on Amazon, and even if you paid that much, there’s no easy way to get the music from the CD onto a computer or MP3 player. You could also buy MP3s online for under $1 each, but that is still too expensive for most. This creates a barrier that supply and demand won’t tolerate, and as a result, file sharing is meeting that demand. It’s illegality has forced P2P technologies to evolve towards decentralized liability, and as popular as P2P sharing is today, it’s fair to say it’s been wildly successful.

The AMD Phenom II X3

In particular, there may be problems with one or more cores, the amount of heat generated, their highest clock speed, or defects in the cache memory. If cache memory is at fault, then the faulty memory can be disabled allowing the processor to still be sold as a low-end model (e.g., Celeron & Sempron).

However, when cores are disabled at the factory because they’ve failed a test, there may not be any real-world problem with the core. This would be the case if the manufacturer needed to be more stringent in its testing methodology in order to force more processors into the budget model lines. And in most cases, these disabled cores can be unlocked and will perform without any significant issues, but currently, only AMD processors support unlocking disabled cores. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of how to do this and take advantage of value-priced processors.

First Step. Decide on a processor model which comes with one or more disabled cores. Currently, AMD ships some Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron models with single, dual, and triple cores that can be unlocked to use the additional cores. Everything depends on the processor model, so make sure you’re buying a processor with disabled cores. You should also be aware that you may not be able to unlock only one disabled core if there are others also disabled. It’s usually all or nothing, although Asus recently released new BIOS revisions which allow cores to be unlocked independently.

Second Step. Decide on a motherboard which supports AMD processors and unlocking. Though each motherboard will have its own set of options, most have an option somewhere in the BIOS (System Setup) labeled Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC). You can usually change this setting from “Disabled” to “Auto,” “Per Core,” or “All Cores.” However, use the “Per Core” option with care as some configurations can cause your system to be unstable. And with some motherboards, you may have to update the firmware (flashing the BIOS) for ACC to work properly.

Third Step. With your disabled cores now unlocked, run a stress test to ensure your system is stable. A stress test forces your processor to work at full capacity by having it process an algorithm many thousands of times.

A Quad-Core Layout

If there are any problems with your disabled cores, you will usually see errors after only a few minutes – though it is still a good idea to run the test for at least 20 minutes to ensure stability. Prime95 is an excellent utility for running stress tests, and we highly recommend it.

The Odds. The chances are very good that you’ll be successful, and the success rate is rumored to be around 70%. Accurate numbers are hard to come by because of course AMD will not provide statistics. But if you’re unsuccessful, the worst case scenario is that you bought a processor which only operates as advertised.

Also, for those of you who succeed, remember that your processor will be generating more heat from the additional cores and a stock heatsink and fan (HSF) may no longer be adequate. It’s usually a good idea to invest in a decent HSF, and ThermalTake and Zalman often have the best products in this area.

Real World. For example, we built a system with a Phenom II X2 545 processor, a Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H motherboard, and a Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 1333Mhz stick of RAM. The Phenom processor with free shipping costs $89 on Newegg, but after unlocking the two disabled cores, it’s now the equivalent of the Phenom II X4 945 (a quad-core) which costs $166.