New Products, are things getting better?

Well, its all good news at the moment:

Windows 7 is coming out shortly, and its already better than Vista was when it first came out. We`ve been testing it for a while and it does look a bit faster and lighter on resources, but for the life of me, I can`t see that it warrants a new name. "Vista with a few bells and whistles and trimmed down" would be my name, not catchy, but true.

The serious news of the day is the arrival of a few new AMD processors. The new Athlon IIs and Phenom IIs are just Phenom-inal (yeah I know its been done before). Look at Toms Hardware charts, and you`ll see that they just about rule everything, and with really good pricing I can foresee building loads of these little beaties. Call for details anytime 08003118622.

PCWorld again

Its funny how the same old names keep coming up.....on a call today there was a sign maker discussing a sign with my client. He asked me what else I did (apart from setting up networks) and said he had just been to PCWorld paying £400 for reloading 5 computers.

Our price would be £125.

Guess who`s setting his new network up? (not PCWorld)

Sickmantec Products

Once again our old friends at Symantec have excelled themselves, not only do they produce the system gumming -up security suite, but then they go and sell it at 3 times the price it should be.

One of my clients (who happens to be 86, but thats just another reason to hate them) was coerced into renewing her version of IS2008 by Norton sales people, and eventually paid by card (it said auto-renewal on the invoice, so beware) the ubelievable amount of £78 for ONE years subscription !!!!!!! (isnt it 29.99 in PC World?)

It was an older PC with only 256MB memory, and she could not believe it when she saw her system running with a decent antivirus, positively zooming along.

Cheap PCs

OK heres a deal for you bargain hunters...a full PC (2.4GHz, 40 GB hard drive, genuine windows XP) with keyboard, mouse, and (get this) a 15" flat screen monitor. all for only £50. This is only available to blogging viewers, contact supergeek now.

bundled programs and toolbars

OK Im back after a long blogging break! My moan today is about bundled programs...you know you get ccleaner and it comes with Yahoo toolbar, you get foxit reader (try it, its 20X faster than adobe reader) and you get its stupid toolbar with loads of crap on it.

I understand the necessity of advertising and marketing, but when are they gonna learn that you make your own product less attractive by forcing this stuff on you...why not bundle it but have it unticked by default, and give the users a choice? Makes more sense to me!

Oh and talking of toolbars why do people not realise that their web page viewing area is getting smaller and smaller by having these waste of time toolbars? If you dont use them more than five times a day get rid of them (view/toolbars/untick) and just maske a bookmark link instaed. I mean if you dont want to see the websites why dont you just get AOL? And if you dont use Google as your home page (how do you cope?) Firefox has a google search link on top anyway.

happy new year

So welcome to the new year, and I hope the doom and gloom we`re all promised doesn`t materialize. I personally hope the year carries on as it started! We had a lovely weekend away in Broadstairs (a real hidden gem if you`ve never been there), then back to work on the fifth......and what a lot of work!

The repairs never stopped coming in, or the phone ringing. Its never been busier. Is this really a reaction to the credit crunch with people repairing their computers rather than replacing?

No, I dont think so, most of them are virus/spyware cleanups which just means the virus writers have no friends and just write more viruses over christmas. The others are results of cold computers being turned on after a long time and blowing various things.

Just goes to show, leave your computer on and keep it regularly checked.