Once upon a time it required thousands of dollars and a professional installer to have video surveillance in your home or business, not to mention the ability to watch it remotely. Those days are thankfully gone. Today for around $50 you can purchase a camera, install it yourself in just a few minutes with no real technical knowledge and if you have a smartphone or tablet watch it from…
In the previous article we discussed the basics of wireless networking and now we will build on that and talk about how to extend the range and secure your wireless network. Extending range There are four basic ways to extend a wireless network; increase power, increase antenna efficiency, relocate antenna and install range extenders. We have already discussed the first two options so we will start with relocating the…
Wireless networks are pretty much ubiquitous these days in that virtually every business and every house has one. My wife and I just went on a trip out to a little town virtually on the border with Mexico and Texas named Terlingua, population 58 as of the last census in 2010. Even the motel there we stayed in had free WiFi. The problems these days are how far you…
The Chromebook came on with a bang, and then seemed to quiet down just as fast. Now you hardly hear much about them at all, but they are still there. So what is a Chromebook anyway? They are computers, predominately notebooks, that run on Google’s ChromeOS. This OS is a variant of Linux. A Chromebook differs from standard computers in that they run mostly off the internet. They are…
There are a couple of reasons you should use an SSD instead of a standard hard drive. Before we get into that, we need to understand both types of drives. A standard hard drive consists of one or more platters spinning inside an enclosure. Each platter has multiple heads that read and write the data to the platters. Think of a record player and its needle (showing my age…
NAS, or Network Attached Storage is basically a large external hard drive that is not physically attached to a computer. Instead, it is connected to your home or business network and can be accessed by all your computers and/or many devices. The primary use for NAS devices is for simple network file sharing. If you have several computers that need to access the same documents, videos, pictures or music…
Why are people switching from traditional computers to tablets, and should you? This is a popular question, especially from the old guard who have had computers sitting on their desks for the past fifteen years. Lets start by defining the typical uses of all computing devices today and then we can see what devices can handle those tasks. In my experience the primary use for all computing devices today…
The Microsoft Surface Pro is an excellent ultraportable notebook or heavy tablet primarily aimed at business users. Specifications: Size – 10.81 in (27.5 cm) x 6.81 in (17.3 cm) x 0.53 in (13.46 mm) Weight – About 2 pounds Screen – 16:9 aspect, 1920 x 1080, ten point multi-touch, 208ppi, IPS, glossy Memory – 4GB (not upgradable) Storage – 64GB or 128GB (128GB tested) CPU – Intel Core i5-3317U…
Few things are easier to do or provide better results than to upgrade computer memory. Unless you spent a ridiculous amount of money buying the maximum memory that your computer could come with then the time will come you need it upgraded. I have even bought a computer with the minimum RAM you could get it with so I could upgrade it immediately upon arrival. This tends to save…
The Acer C670 CB3-111-C670 is a entry level Chromebook which retails for $150 from Amazon. A Chromebook is a computer (usually a notebook) that runs Google’s Chrome OS operating system which is a Linux based system developed for delivering web applications and data. This system provides many of the functionality of a Windows based, or MacOS based computer at a lower cost. Specifications: 11.6″ 16:9 anti-glare screen with 1366…
