Category: tech

How to Tell the Quality of Your Computer Hardware

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You want to know if you got a good deal on your processor and you want to know how to understand the classifications and how old your processor is. We all go through this.
Don’t worry, it’s a pretty easy, quick study to find and  there isn’t a whole lot to it. All of the gobbly goop stuff you hear people talking about is much easier to follow when you get the basics down. So…let’s do this. Let’s find out how fast your processor or video card is and which processors are faster or slower than yours.
I will explain this in a plain simple manor without using tech jargon. Don’t freak out.
You can click on any of the images in this post if you are having trouble seeing or reading them.

Age of your  hardware
The first digit from the left tells  how recent the technology is. Let’s say you bought an Intel CPU. That processor is a 7700K. If you look online  and you see nothing  higher at all, such as an 8700 or a 9700, then you are in the latest tech group. If you bought  an i7 5500 and you see online there are i7 7700 CPUs available, then you likely have bought a two year old  processor.

Power class of  your hardware
The second digit from the left tells you how strong your hardware is for it’s class.
If you have an i7 7700 and compare it to an i7 7600, the 7700 will be stronger.

Newer does not mean faster
If you have a 7600 and compare it to the 6700, the 6700 will be faster but incapable of doing some of the more recent tech tricks that have come out since the 6xxx models.

Is it clocked faster?
The last two digits tell you this.
All CPU makers (and video card makers) do a final push of their most recent (but soon closing out) product by shoveling out a hand full of overclocked processors. Intel, for example, ended their last batch of 6th generation i7 processors  with the 6900 rebadged and overclocked as 6950. The 6950 is the overclocked 6900. AMD did this with their FX processors, and shipped out the FX8300 rebadged as a 9590. Rightfully too. They made a beast of that processor. It sucked out more than twice the wattage the 8300 processors pushed, so you had to buy a special motherboard (of only like 5 available) that could handle so much wattage. It was a hot fickle beast, so water cooling was a must. 4.7 GHz out of the box. 5.0 GHz with turbo turned on – on 8 cores.

Now comes the last space. The lettering.
If you buy the i7 7700K, you have bought pretty much the flagship processor of 2017 Intel, but the more expensive, harder to locate and much faster processor is the X model – the i7 7700X.

AMD processors follow the same format

AMD Ryzen Classes

This is good. So we can all understand what we have without having to learn more formats.

Video cards now follow the same format.

Except, now you have to read right to left. That’s only because video cards go through the numbers faster and when they get done with the 1000’s spot, they start back over with a 3 digit identification (usually, who knows, this year may be different). What I am saying is read right to left to see what version. GT, GTX, TI, etc. Then, if it is overclocked, it will be identied by the first number from the right. Strength will be the second number from the right. The last 1 or 2 numbers (the 950GT having one number and the  1050GT having two numbers) will tell you how recent it is. Note that this number does not represent a year. It identifies a series.

Questions or complaints? Questions go at the bottom. Complaints…email those to the manufacturers.

Is Computer Technology in a Slump?

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Sure computer technology is in a slump.
A slump created by the lazy and braggadocios.
The ignorant with money to burn, and the poor who want to look like they have money to burn.
It is now taboo to show people Technology you created from scratch. It makes you look poor and unworthy of honor. No longer do we feel the pride of learning new things and piecing together our ideas and things we learned, into one space to make the things we need.

We have built ourselves into a corner of ignorance.

We used to hack our phones to have web browsers they didn’t have before. We used to get our phones to surf the internet when no one even considered it useful. and we did it with phones that didn’t have a touch screen or a scroll wheel. We created our own mp3 players to suit our phones per model and we would burn that to a 3.5 disk or to a c.d. so we wouldn’t have to rebuild when we changed our phones, we’d just have to modify to work with the version of Symbian on the phone. but now, everything is right there for free with ads, or for sale. No one has to learn anymore. We just nod and smile when someone calls you stupid for not knowing about some app they just downloaded that does what you did 10 years ago, manually. And for god’s sake you can’t tell them this, or they will call you a hipster.

Tech trends are a shame.

All websites are starting to look the exact same crappy HTML 5 over simplified big buttons so people can use it better on their little phone displays that no one can compile a good Java or flash player for.

The days of complexity are gone.
Now are the days of “look, shiney and simple”
and complacency.

It is as if we have dumbed ourselves.

There was a time when software exceeded the abilities of hardware. Which caused the hardware makers to try harder. build better. To evolve.
But now the software makers aren’t trying to create the new.. the more bundled. the bigger deal to make people buy it.
They want to make it easy and super light weight, so you pay again to buy the other crap that used to be in the older version, one by one.

We have become the fat consumer.
And tech… The world for the outsiders… Became fashion-ware for the trendy.
where abilities and functionality no longer matter, just the name brand and brag-ability.
$10,000? Made by apple? Of course it has features functions and abilities that their $150 watch does not have.
In the day when we dreamed of that, we dreamt of hackability. The ability to mod that computer on your wrist to have your own functions to fit your own needs. Now you just download someone else’s idea (app) that best suits you and like it and show off what you downloaded.

We had our DVR. Our home entertainment center from a computer we built with a series of hard drives stacked together to burn our tv shows onto while we worked. With hundreds upon hundreds of function. Those are gone and now we have it in a “cloud” (some hairy dude’s server in his basement Shhhh) and we install an ap for some of the functions and Features with nothing to want to learn.

Do you remember “The Screen Savers” Tv show? It is back.

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Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton kicked off the first episode of “The New Screen Savers” Web television show that geeks have been begging for, for more than 10 years.
As a fellow Geek myself I can not be more tech excited than this.
Here is Episode 1 of The New Screen Savers Found on the Twit Network.

Leo Laporte brought back a screen savers show called “The New Screen Savers”. Yep the show with Patrick Norton and Leo talking tech and answering questions is back. It looks like the launch was very quiet.
But we can fix that.

But who’s going to relaunch Tech Tv?
Maybe “The New Tech TV” or “Techy’s TV”
We shall see how The New Screen Savers plays out.

BTW love the way the intro works.

Actual drone playing the part of the drone.

Amazon’s Drones Dream is just that

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Amazon’s Drones Dream is just that… a dream

Regardless, of how cool anyone sees this.

It would be a bit foolish to figure a bunch of drones flying around in every city just humming up the sky as a feezible tolerable thing and never once considering how kids will start trying to pop them out of the sky.and a few drunk adults.
I can’t imagine there being that many of the Amazon drones shooting around in a city and no one getting hurt, no mid air collisions or it not being a huge waste of resources.
1 u.p.s. driver makes one long round trip around a city and drops off 400lbs worth of  small 1lbs packages. in 8 hours.A small helli shooting 20 miles out at 3-10 miles an hour to and back, can do that … what… once? Twice a day? How many drones would it take to get 400 one pound boxes out?
Picture a guy unloading a truck of junk freshly shipped from wherever. He is at the front of a neighborhood at the Amazon shipping facility. because they all are at the front of neighborhoods since the drones are slow and have short flight spans. He spends an hour or two unloading the truck and evenly spacing the packages out for the drones. now it takes 7 hours for all of the packages to get to the residents, while the delivery guy could have done it in about an hour or three.
Plus imagine the thugs and trash that will follow those things around to get free merchandise?
The whole drone idea is100% idiotic and childish.

Are we all really the “generation of instant gratification”? is this proof of how lazy we are? Is this proof of how we want items 30 minutes sooner, so bad that we will get millions of people laid off just so we can see “change” ? What if you are the last guy in a day’s drone shipping? You won’t get it any sooner, neither would the first delivery.

Sometimes some types of change are the dumbest idea.

 

Wireless Wars

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wifi_warsSo.. I found that one of my neighbors (not sure which one) finds it funny to get into my wifi and reboot it randomly.
oh boy, so you can hack a wifi. You smart little wifi hacker you.

So…

I turned off the wifi broadcast for about an hour and headed to the garage.
Brought in my box full of wireless routers.

logged into each one, and gave them the name my wireless connection had.
and ran through them all turning wifi back on. then placing them around the house at all walls and corners I could.

Log back into my actual wifi, and turn off ssid broadcasting and changed password. ad changed the actual ssid.

So.. basically I gave my neighbor a hand full of routers that don’t have an internet connection at all, to my neighbor to pointlessly play with.
Takes one down, there’s 7 others.

stupid little twit.

I will if I have to, run to fry’s and load up on a bunch of 14 dollar routers and name each one after each of the signals I see broadcasting.

Practicality and Smartwatches ?

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The practicality of smartwatches might be the failure of smartwatches.
This is an industry that targets people who want to say they have the money to waste on an expensive device and not care about the safety of the device while purchasing it, then later comes the cases, because… you know… the chance you might drop it or something. but it can’t be just an old case. You’re poor and not cool if you don’t pay $50+ for an otter box or what ever over priced case is trending. It’s so trending that you can tell what phone someone has under their case, by the case they have in their hands.
So the watches being permanently fixed in a band, is failure. Especially if the band offers some sort of protection. What could be nice is if someone made some really over priced simple bands that are custom to fit only exact specific models. because, you know… choices are for poor people with bad taste.

The idea of a smartwatch is great. but they will never take off. Society is too focused on showing off their 25 inch Iwhatever or whateverPad. or 4 pound extremely brittle “cellphones”.

Smartwatches are way to practical. You may see a few thousand upper class gray BMW owners with suits wearing them and using them for real logical uses.
For the smartwatches to take off, they need to target the gold wearing tacky baggy clothes wearing Chrysler driving with massive useless rims while living in a 200 square foot wooden shack type people. because for some reason that lifestyle is popular.

Maybe if they give them spinny rims or write “beatz” on the side, they might sell out, and people might get shot every them like cell phones.

They need to be about the size of a current iphone and run up the arm.
Otherwise a smartwatch is just a calculator watch.

When did Tech Forums Become So Useless?

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Found myself in a tech support forum looking for help, leaving there very unhelped, unsatisfied and kind of bullied. Tech forums seem to have become the guy that argues the best, is the go-to guy for tech help these days. and that seems to have killed off a lot of people’s desire to visit tech forums. This is my experience with the latest forum I went to… and a little back story.

Cricket_PhoneI was gifted a Motorola Droid Bionic  by a coworker. This Phone was built for the Verizon network. The network I have my cell phone service from is Cricket. After some research, I find that I can get my bionic flashed to Cricket’s network.
At the time, I also had a roommate who had an android cell phone, that was on the Verizon network, and she was wanting to try Cricket. Since I didn’t have the money to get my Bionic flashed just yet, we took her Android to the local Cricket store and had it flashed to their network. We compared her phone signal, to the signal I was getting with my old phone. Her signal was a considerable amount better than mine. and my phone was built for the Cricket network. So I decided that I was definitely flashing this new  Bionic to Cricket.
That night, my roommate got an update notice to her phone. So.. Like any normal person would do, she clicked the “accept” button for the update request. Next morning my roommate had no signal. She was not receiving text messages and she was not receiving phone calls. She was unable to send a text massage and she was unable to make a phone call. So, back to the Cricket store we went. The clerk was very helpful and asked my roommate if she accepted an update notice, and my roommate like a trooper admitted this with a smile. The clerk said “yep, that’s what kills our flashings. First one is free for you ma’am, but please do not accept the next update or you will be in here again getting your phone flashed back to Cricket and it will not be free”. We thanked the clerk and came back a few hours later to pick up the phone. Sure enough, there was an update notice on her phone, she hit cancel and then fiddled around with the phone a bit and then disabled the notice.
After seeing that, I booted up my Motorola Bionic, connected to my router and searched for an update. No update available. A few days later (pay day) I booted the phone yet again and checked for any software updates I could. None except Facebook  but nothing for the operating system of the phone. I take my phone into the Cricket store and pay my $75 to get the phone flashed, come back an hour later to pick it up. Sure enough… Update notice. at the very exact second I saw the notice, the clerk told me “Do not update the operating system (may have said firmware but I have my doubts)”.

So I go home and search for ways to disable the update notice. I came across cricketusers.com . I posted a simple question trying to find where the heck my roommate went in her settings to disable the update notice. This turned into a bunch of over zealous tech tards trying to get me to reflash the phone. all I wanted to know, is where in the menu did she find the setting to disable the notice. Since the roommate wasn’t very techy, she really has no clue what she did. and that is brain murder in it’s self. but she got it done.

So now I know why that place is empty and no one goes there. Techy dudes that get angry because people do not want to follow their misguided misinformed advice. I don’t care if that guy was Dr. Jacob W. Cricket. He wasn’t listening to the issue and how simple the solution could be. Just in a mindset of “I know better, listen to me…. rebuild everything”.

and this is what killed forums. Newbies.

 

 

Apps or Programs Poll

Posted onAuthorTruXter

app OR programs

app OR programs

Before we get to the poll at the bottom of the page, Let’s preface this.
What would you prefer more to have. An Application or a Program ?
would you prefer to have the full entire install of a program with it’s entire file package, or an Application that is set without customizations other than per-customized addons (Which could be sturdy) that cost a bit more?

This is the question that we should be asking. We are nearing the time where operating system vendors move more and more to the “cloud” idea of everything computer. How do we want our installations to be happening? Do we want full installations or applications?

this isn’t so much of whether you want a tablet or a Computer, but the software that could determine whether you should have a computer or a tablet.

Programs

Pros
With a program you get full file access to all of the files that come with a program. Files that can be customized manually to your suited needs and desires.
Your program will not change so drastically with an update, that you can not use it, if it does, then you just uninstall and reinstall and skip that specific update.

Cons
With Programs you could mess the whole thing up customizing and tweaking to your needs and have to uninstall and reinstall.
You have to do the same procedures as an app if you want to buy addons. Click the install button
Scratch your disk and you are looking at an expensive reinstall.

APPS

Pros
With apps there might be a million and one modifications readily for sale that you never expected to exist.
Always online and available
doesn’t cost near as much for initial install.
Really hard to damage the install.

Cons
Not customizable.
all tweaks cost money
All tweaks fit someone elses needs.
No personal back up for when you are without internet service
Bandwidth usage everytime you install.
Always gets upstaged by next version that you have to buy in full.

[poll id=”25″]

Please share so we get more votes.

Verizon MIFI 2200 Review

Posted onAuthorTruXter

After Disconnecting my Comcast Internet and and Cable Television and moving my television service to Dish Network, I found myself in need of internet service. I obtained a temporary use of a Verizon MIFI device. Very nice looking wireless internet device. One single button. You just connect the USB cable from the MiFi 2200 to your computer and instantly upon identifying the card, it opens as a storage device, allowing you to get the drivers right off of the MiFi 2200. Installation of the drivers is less than 3 minutes. Press the lighted button on top of the MiFi 2200 until the light on the side comes on, then open the VZ access software you just installed, and then click connect in the VZ Access manager, and you are on the internet ready to go.

Verizon Wireless MiFi 2200

Verizon Wireless MiFi 2200

Though the device allows you to connect multiple devices at one time, the 3G service, I doubt would handle much more than 1 computer. I have been seeing some very low signal reception and very slow speeds.

mifi on Verizons VZ access

mifi on Verizon

mifi bandwidth

mifi bandwidth

Though the speed test results say 1mbs, sometimes I find myself waiting like I was on dial up, for pages to load. The wait for youtube videos to load is sometimes up to 5 minutes. The monthly bandwidth cap is reached in the first week, and then this slow speed gets even worse.

For someone like me, the MIFI card is a pass. Meaning I will have to pass on getting this service.

Not much different from the results I see with my cricket phone.

Test Date: May 1, 2012 3:53:34 pm
Connection Type: EvdoA
Server: Temple, TX
Download: 2127 kbps
Upload: 794 kbps
Ping: 101 ms

External IP: xx.xxx.xxx.xx
Internal IP: xx.1xx.xx.xx
Latitude: xx.xxxxx
Longitude: -xx.xxxxx

 

Full scores:
looks: 10/10
Ease of use: 10/10
Reception: 3/10
Speeds: 2/10

Final score: 6/10

Internet Explorer (No Add-ons) – How to

Posted onAuthorTips Of Tech

How to use Internet Explorer with No Add-ons
If you have been wondering how to surf the intenet with most of everything turned off, to prevent exploits to each of your typical add-ons. Here you go.

right click desktop and select “create new” and then select “shortcut”.
The command you need that shortcut to run is
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -extoff

Then name your shortcut
Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)

Then again right click the file, select “properties” now change the icon to something that looks nothing like internet explorer. I select the padlock. To distinguish the difference between the stripped internet explorer and regular internet explorer.