Quality of R5 version Movies

If you have been downloading free movies online, you should come across different version of released. The quality order from worst to best start from CAM, R5, DVD-rip, HD DVD and Blu-ray. As you can see R5 version released is better than cam but worst than DVD, so how is the quality? Well I'm not sure what r5 means, but the quality is good, clear wide screen with no shadow moving over the screen. The downside of r5 version is the sound quality, actually it's not that bad, it's clear enough and loud but there is buzzling sound in the background which might turn off some peoples.

Anything starting from DVD quality is the best you can get. R5 quality is acceptable if you can't wait for the DVD and not too picky over the quality of sound. As for CAM version, it's not worth the time downloading at all, the quality and sound is just too bad to enjoy. Watching movies is a form of entertainment, don't waste your time watching a cam version of movies, it'll just frustrate you more than enjoyment.

If you can afford a ticket in the movies theater, it's still the best way to watch & share a movies with a group of friends. The feeling of what you have paid for a good movie on big screen is still different from watching on a computer.

Coding Plays a Big Role in Site Speed

Ok, one of my larger site which receives around 4000 unique visitors per day is having problems again recently, this time it's caused by Mysql database. My website have a large user base, it has around 150,000 members and it's increasing daily. In all honest, I have no idea if the slowness of my site was caused by the constant mysql connection or the VPS hosting I'm with is just slow. If you have been keeping track of my blog, you know I just moved from shared hosting to VPS a month ago. At first, the server was fast and I'm happy with it, but recently it's taking longer and longer to load. The average of the site speed was 13 seconds, and sometime it can be as long as 30 seconds plus! The recommend loading speed of a site should be less than 4 seconds on a 10mbps connection or visitors might just click back and go to other sites. It'll take longer to load if the visitors are on DSL or dial-up connection. So if you sites are slow, it's something you should be worried about.

Anyway I asked my hosting about the issues and I was told it was caused by high loads of Mysql database. Some of the processes are not dying off and it's eating up a lot of CPU resources. After numerous communication and fixing the database, it does seems to be improving but the average speed of the server still stay at around 8 seconds which is extremely slow for a VPS server. Hey I pay 4.99 per month on a shared hosting and it even run faster than my current Vps which I pay 49.90 per month. If there isn't any concurrent limitation on a shared hosting, I'd definitely considered going back. In the end, I still haven't figure it out what is really causing the slowness of the site, I attempt to close a few more function on the site to test the speed. Every time I send a new ticket to the support, they always come back with new excuses. Even picking on queries that don't run very often. I'm not a programmer or expert in these hosting thing, so I'm not sure if what they are telling is truth or not. Maybe it's possible that my site coding is causing the problem, but is it enough to make a VPS server this slow? I have already killed off a lot of unnecessary queries in the database, but it's not helping a lot. What baffled me was it run fine before and I haven't change anything, why so slow all of a sudden. I can understand If it was slow on peak hours, but the server seems to be slow all of the time. That just doesn't make sense.

I have thought about moving to another provider, if it wasn't for the huge files I have, I think I've already moved. As for now, all I can do is try to optimize my script and database and hope it'll get better soon. Worst come to worst I can just find another hosting and move, that's really the last resort I'd want to take. I'll let you know if I find the real causes of this slowness.

What I want you to know is that coding plays a major role when you have huge database and visitors. One bad line of code could affect the speed of your site. Remember to close Mysql process at the end of the code, and set a timeout to kill off processes running in the background.

Homepage showing apache page. How to fix?

I'm having the same problem when setting up new site in my VPS hosting. That's the good thing about VPS, unlike shared hosting you can host as many sites as you want as long as you don't overused your server allocated resources. Anyways, I was trying to set up a new wordpress blog. After creating a new account for the site and uploaded all wordpress files, the homepage was still showing temporary apache page. Initially I thought I should just wait for a while for it to sort it out itself, but nothing is changing after an hour. So, I decided to contact my host servint for solution. As a side note, if you are looking for an VPS hosting, servint is one the best around. It's a little more expensive than other vps hosting but the speed and support is top notch.

Before the support could give me any solution, the site itself solved the problem itself again. The email support was fast though, I waited around only 15 minutes. While waiting for an answer, I haven done something to the account, and it could be the solution to the problem. If not I'm not sure what's causing it? As this is the only thing I've done to the account. If you happened to have the same problems, here's my solution.

You need to create an A host for your new site. If you are using WHM Cpnel, login to your account, find the option edit DNS under DNS zone. Scroll to the bottom and insert your server information for A host, example:

ns1 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.1
ns2 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.2

It doesn't seems to take effect immediately for my case. Wait for around 5-10 minutes and check your site again. If it's still showing apache page, I think you should contact your hosting and ask them to fix it for you.

What's Class C IP

I've just recently searched for the same information and I thought some webmaster might be interested to know what are class C of IPs. If you are doing link building for your site, you should heard something like don't exchange link with the same C class of ips website as it's bad in the eyes of Googgle bot. Google discourages unnatural cross linking of your own sites using the same anchor keywords to achieve high ranking. No one know how true the information was, it's just a rumours how google search engine works to prevent site owner from buying lots of domain and cross linking among the sites to manipulate the rankings. Of course google se has other ways to prevent spamming such as the age of the domain & how trustable the site is. So if you want to make your link building campaign more naturally, it's advisable to get a link from different Class C of IPs than yours.

Let's see how does a normal IP looks like: aaa.bbb.CCC.xxx - I think now it's very clear to you even without further explanation. Did you see the C parts? That's the C class of IP. To determine if your sites are in the same C class of IPs, for example:

111.111.111.1 and 111.111.111.2 are in the "same" C Class
111.111.111.1 and 111.111.222.1 are in the "different" C Class

Some smaller hosting companies manage a single or very few C classes of IPs, thus it's hard to get multiple different C Class of IP with the same hosting company. Some larger hosting companies have wider range of C Classes Ips & even B Class but unless you request your sites to be on a different C Class of IP you might still end up on the same C Class of IPs.

This information was found on a forum, it might not be accurate. But it's an easy way to understand what's class c ip and give you an good idea on what you should look for in finding host for your sites.

Can I make money online without building my own website?

From my experience, the best way to makes money online is through selling products or making your own website. Selling product isn't an easy task, you have to search and negotiate with local suppliers for a good price. Then you need capital to buy these products online and sell on the internet. It's a time consuming procedure and it doesn't guarantee that you would make any money from it. Of course you could do dropship, but the profit margin would be much lower than holding stock yourself. I'm not going deep into selling product online, instead I'm going to focus on building websites.

It's no surprise why most peoples prefer building website over selling online. Because it doesn't requires a lot of initial investment, you can even do it in the free way if you want. Once you launch your site, you just need to focus on writing contents for your site, there's very minimum maintenance needed. You don't have to answer customer question or deal with return orders. That's the best thing about building a website, if you do it right, the chances of making money online could be much more easier & profitable than selling online.

Don't ever think building a successful website is easy, I've seen a lot of success cases but a lot more failed to make any money online. It takes time & patience before you can see good money coming in, probably a year or two and of course it could be shorter or even longer.

I know it's hard for newcomer, I've been through this before. There's one way you can make money instantly if you are willing to invest good amount of money. I'm not talking about get rich quick scheme, MLM or buying eBooks. Trust me, those what called expert selling making money ebooks online are pretty much useless. Most of them are just a compilation of guides which you can easily find it online for free., there's no what they called secret in making money online. I've bought some and regret every time. So don't ever waste your money on these ebooks, you are just throwing away your hard earned money into the seller pockets.

Yes, the way to make money instantly is to buy an already money making website. You can find a lot of peoples selling it for a year of profit. But be very careful not to be scammed by the seller, make sure the information he gave is accurate and ask if you are confused. Never transfer money to the seller account before he transfer the site to you. You can request the seller to transfer the site first to be safe or use escrow service to do the transaction. It'd be safer for both party.

Be patient not to jump right into BIN (buy it now), do more research and make sure it's what it claims. If there isn't any good site for sell, check the selling forum everyday, some good one will definitely comes by. If you bought a stable source of income, you can easily make it back in a year and that's isn't long at all. After that, every cents you make is your money to keep and you can reinvest it back to different source of income. Another good thing about buying website is that you don't have to learn everything from ground up which takes a lot of time. Through the courses of maintaining a successful money making website will give you a lot of experiences. The website is your properties on the net and all the statistics are valuable information for your future venture.

Buying a website is probably the best way to make money online fast. The biggest profit site you buy the more you have to pay, if you can't afford to buy a large site, try something smaller that's well within your budget. For an established money making website to sell for just a year of profit, I think it's a good deal and investment. But if you sees something that are too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

Do I need a VPS hosting?

Let's first understand hosting. You rent a server from a company and use their resources by paying monthly or yearly fees depends on which company you host with. Shared hosting means you share the same IP & resource (CPU, RAM) on one server with maybe hundreds of other users. While VPS gives you your own unique IP addresses & more control over the server such as root access, and also you share the resource with less users. Why do you need root access? Well, this is quite a difficult question for me, but one thing I do know is that you can freely install any third-party software in the server, there's more to root access beside that. If you are interested you can try wikipedia for more information. And dedicated means you are the only user of the server and you have full control over it. Some company even let you customize your own server such as more hard drive space or more RAM in case you need it.

When you are looking for a shared hosting, I recommend you to search for company that allows more concurrent connection or maximum user connection at a time. The more resonable one would be over 50, the more the better. Ask the hosting company if you can't find such information on their site, most if not all have concurent limitation on shared hosting. This is to make sure your site doesn't slow down other users on the same server and it's also one of the bad thing about shared hosting. Normally, if you just start out a new site with little traffic or less than a thousands visitors per day. You should be fine on a shared hosting. But that really depends on the nature of your site, for example if you provide large downloads for user, that'll result in many constant connection to your site, your shared server might not be able to handle even there's only 500 visitors per day. So it's your job to keep track of your own site and traffics, if you see constant downtime of your site or keep receiving 500 internal errors. It's about time to move to VPS. For your first hosting, I do somehow recommend godaddy. Their server is rather slow but the uptime is good. On top of that, they allows 100 - 200 concurrent connection on their shared hosting depends on the plan you decide to buy. I have to say it's quite a lot for a shared hosting, I've seen company offer 50 and even as low as 25 concurrent limitation. It's good for new site if the price is really cheap, but if your site grow fast you'll need a new server very soon.

What's Google Sandbox? And how long does it takes to come out?

It's no secret that Google is the biggest search engine out there and you'll probably get the majority of traffics from google. You might get more from Yahoo or Bing in rare occasion if they favor your site. Anyways, either you want to know what's sandbox about or wondering why you still haven't get any traffics from google, it's because of the sandbox.

Sandbox effect is a word internet webmaster use to referred to the penalty Google search engine placed on new domains. This is to prevent search engine optimizers (SEO) from manipulating the search engine ranking by creating hundreds or thousands of incoming links in short period of time. Every new domains will be placed in the sandbox for 3-12 months depends on the competiveness of the market. Although there's a lot debating over whether the sandbox effect exist or not in webmaster community, there's indeed some sort of filtering and observation period for every new sites. Sandbox basically is just a part of google search engine architectual to determine a site ranking. So either you agree or not, sandbox or whatever you want to call it does exist to prevent spamming or low quality site. As for how long, it's hard to determine. I've created 3 new sites 3 months back with unique content updated daily. Although it's getting little traffic from google, the index rate is extremely slow. Even if my new content pages were indexed, it doesn't rank well at all for the very long exact keywords. In comparison, another site which I built long time ago, new pages were indexed in almost hours and rank well instantly even though the content is duplicated. You see the difference just because the age of the site? I still can't tell you exactly how long, but i'll let you know when the new site I created is out of sandbox.

Another issues webmaster like to debate over with is the competitiveness of target keywords. Yes, it's true that if the keyword you target doesn't have any or very little competition such as your domain name, you can rank on the first result immediately after google indexed your site. Unless there's any searches for the keyword, it's pointless anyway. Remember the most important parts of getting high traffic is through all your content/inner pages, all these little traffic adds up. If you are in google sandbox, you can't rank well for all these pages. That's the reason why I think the sandbox does exist. But that doesn't mean that targetting one top searches keyword is bad, it's not advisable if you don't want what you are doing. Try concentrating more on your inner pages and create unique articles everyday.

What you can do while you are in sandbox is to build more incoming links to your site, adding more contents. Another things I'd like to mention is that the effect of the link doesn't take effect immediately. You can say there's some kind of link sandbox too, you'll only see result after 3 months, the longer the better. So it's wise to start building in early age. But do not over build incoming link, let it flows naturally. Otherwise, google might put your site in sandbox for a longer period of time. Quality is over quantity. Look for high quality links instead of low quality links. Google have the top phycologist working for them, they know what you'll do to try manipulating the ranking. But they are pre scripted bots afterall, work smartly and you'll beat the sandbox effect.

Best Netbooks

There is no deny that the netbooks is the current hottest portable computers on the market. What's a netbooks you ask? Basically it's the smaller & lighter version of laptops/notebooks, and the screen size are usually under 11 inches to be categorised as netbooks. So what's the big deal? Many people seems to wondering why the big fuss over netbboks, isn't it just a smaller laptops? Yes it's, and that's what people want today's. Netbooks are much lighter and featuring longer battery life up to 10 hours compared it to 3-4 hours laptops. And that fits the purposes of having a portable computer! Don't you agree?

I myself bought a netbook a few months back and loving it. I need a portable computers that are light to carry around and last long enough with a single charged, ntebooks serve the purpose well for me. You think 6 pounds and 3 pounds are not much of a different, believe me it does make the difference. I owned a 14 inch Dell laptop before and I gave it to my brother after I bought a netbook. It feels so much comfortable when using it on a bus/car because of the size and weight, and it doesn't take up too much space on a coffee table with friends. Hey, Starbucks we can sit there all day long and we doesn't need your plug!

Now to the main parts. What's the best netbooks out there? Before I bought my netbooks around 6 months back, I've done a lot of research on net and decided to buy the Asus eeepc 1000HE. Asus eeepc 1000HE is one of the most popular netbooks out there because of what it offers and price. It's not perfect, but it's a well rounded netbooks for its price. To tell the truth, I haven't found one that's perfect yet as there's always one bad thing or downside in all the netbooks I researched. Even the best netbooks, you can easily find a few bad reviews from users. The best netbook for you is all depends on the downside you can oversee, either to be the hardware or price. For example, the Asus eeepc 1000HE has great matte screen that's bright and crisp. There's very mininum flex on the keyboard and it got the top of the line specs in the netbook categories. But the mouse button is some of the worse on the market, it's stiff and very hard to press, and you can hear very loud clicking sound which is the main reasons why some peoples give up on this netbook. Do a search on amazon reviews and I guarantee that's the most complaint on Asus eeepc 1000HE. It's unbelievable that the manufacturer can't even make a decent mouse button, did they even try it themeselves? I can get over with this is because I'm used to using sensor pad, the multi gesture touch or whatever it is called is working very well dor me. When I'm at home, I'll just plugin a usb mouse.

My second candidate was the Toshiba NB200. The price was a little bit higher, but what you get is a stylish and very well desgin netbook that stands out of the crowd. It could be the best looking netbooks out there at the moment. I'm was tempted and seriously considered to buy. What kept me from choosing the toshiba nb200 is the higher price and most importantly the speaker sound. The sound volume when set at maximum is just around 30% of what you get on asus eeepc 1000he. Personally I don't like to use a earplug or headphone, but some people prefer to use headphone and they can get over with this. As for me, this is a break deal. Some times it's just personal preference.

After I bought my netbook, I haven't been reading or searching for the newest out there. There might be a better one that came out after I bought mine. If you ever come across the two model I mentioned above when researching, you know what's good and bad about them. Compare to the other ones and see which suit you best. I heard the Samsung nc100 is not a bad netbook either and I think it's even cheaper than asus eeepc 1000he with the same specs.

Why Build your Own Computers?

I still remembered building my own very first computer and it takes me over an hour to double check everything before I pressed the power button. It was more than a decade ago where the manual instruction sucks and you have to cmos your computer? I'm not too sure what it's called, basically you have to tun on the power for 3 seconds and shut it off just to let the electricity run through the motherboard, then change the jumper back and turn it on. Luckily, you don't have to do all this shit nowadays and most manual are very well written. Manufacture even made their motherboards easy to work with by implementing some safety features that prevent you from plugging the wrong way.

I just recently built another new PC, it wasn't too difficult but unfortunately I got a defective board! So I have to drive all the way back to the shop and have it tested and changed. That's the downside of building your own computers when it's not working as it should. The very critical moment is when you turn on the power, if you sees something on the screen, cheers! You can start installing Windows or whatever in your computer. If you sees nothing, black screen but cpu is still running, you are most probably got a defective board. That's the reason why people don't want to build their own computer, instead buy a new one directly from companies.

Let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of building or buying computers. Why build your own computer when you can buy the whole set? Because it's cheaper and you got the choices over your hardware. If you are a gamer or you are very picky with the sound system, keyboard or other hardwares, you might want to consider building your own. With the same price, you can easily build a computer that's better than buying in a set. Maybe a better keyboard, better graphics card, more RAM or faster CPU. This is the scenario where you want better specs on a tighter budgets. The downsides of building your own computer is time consuming and got the higher chance of getting defective products.

If you have the money and willing to pay for your time, then buying computer might be a better choice. Buying computer in the past might not be as good as building your own, but companies have gotten cleverer in offering different computer targetting different gropu of users. If you are a gamer, they would include a more powerful graphics card, cpu or more RAM. If you just need a computer for internet and wording, then an integrated graphics is more than enough. And this should lower the cost for budget minded consumers. If you buy from HP or Dell, they already tested it and make sure the computer is working fine before you buy it. OS for your choice such as Windows is already installed and ready to use. All you need to do is plug in the power supply and you are ready to use. If there's any problems in the middle, just send the whole computer back within the warranties and they fix it for you. Computers from HP and Dell some times includes bloatware or unnecessary software in your PC. If you have the proper knowledge you can uninstalled it though.

If you want hassle free experience and don't care too much about the hardware as long as it works, buying a computer might be a better choice. I know some user doesn't care their keyboard sounds like a piano as long as they can surf the net and play some movies. If you are very picky person over quality of products, you might want consider building your own. It might takes long time in researching and building, but I think it'll save you more time in future. Once you have experience building a computers, whenever you meet a problems or hardware failure, you'll be able to fix it on your own. Sending back to manufacture could possibly left you with no computer for weeks or even months.

Building a computer might not as hard as you think, you just have try it once. The computer you build will last you years to come.

Proof for the Future

Hey, by the time I was writing this, I'm sure there isn't a single visitors here yet. I didn't keep track of it, it has been 3 months since I started this blog to post my random things. It's still fairly new and I really didn't do much.

The reason why I'm posting this message is to let my future visitors know that I'm not earning any money from this blog at this moment, and hopefully I'll be able to earn decent income in future. I don't know when will the day come, but if it does, I'll post it again and refer back to this post.

I'm the kind of person who believe in working hard and I'll prove it to you through this blog.

Make Money Online

How to make money online or work from home is some of the most popular searches on the web. Hey, who doesn't want to work comfortably at home and spend more time with family and friends or even travel? These are some of the priveliege working from home, no more boring day job. But it's possible to earn enough money to live a comfortable life? Yes, it's possible but not easy either. Internet is a free market, peoples comes in and out fast, once a market becomes over saturated it falls. If everyone can make money online so easily, then they'll be no more day job. It's about balance. Remember not to put all eggs in one basket, diverse it. A venture that' s making you a lot of money today does not mean it'll continually making you money in future, internet is a fast changing market. Once you have made enough money on the net, invest it in other areas or set up an offline business. Also those who live in 3rd world countries would be easier to live off with the same amount they earn in developed countries because their living cost in so much lower.

There's many ways you can earn online and it's hard for me to get in details with every one of them. I'll guide you to the few that you can actually earn money in long term and tell you which you shouldn't even try. I've been in this market for a while now but sadly I'm not making a lot of money. I can tell you my experience that takes me years of research, don't ever try to get into get rich quick scheme, MLM program, paid to surf, paid to read, paid to click or paid survey. It might earn you a little money, but think long-term and don't waste time on these program like I do before. Believe me and you'll save a lot of time.

So what's the working method of making money online. Here's a quick list: eBay, selling, affiliate, adsense, CPM or publising ads on your site.

eBay can earn you good money only if you have product to sell. I've done dropship before and it's earning me good money, but it also takes time to manage the business. What's dropshipping? Dropshipping means you don't keep stock, you work with the company and sell for them. You can get your order through eBay, your own site or other portal than forward your customer order details to your dropship company and they'll ship it for you. Normally, you set the price yourself, the dropship company will charge you at wholesale price and you sell it for your retail price. The price in between is the money that you'll earn. Actually, it might not sound as easy. First you need to find a dropship company who are willing to work with you, the best way is to visit them directly. Then, there's a lot of fees involve in the transaction such as shipping, ebay fees and other charges. If you can't markup the price high enough, you might not make decent enough money. So before you decide on dropship business, calculate all the fees invlove and make sure you can actually make enough money through this.

If you don't like the idea of droshipping, then affiliate might be the right one for you. Affiliate is where you refer peoples to purchase at the company you associate with, and they pay you commision for it. It's kind of hard to explain how you should do it, every affiliate marketers have their own way to promote a product either through free or paid ways. The idea of paid way is you create a selling page, then buy traffic through companies such as google adwords, Yahoo or Micorsoft adcenter. You pay these companies for each click they send you, we also called it PPC (pay per click). Get these peoples to click on your affiliate link and buy at the company site. To make PPC marketing works, you need to research and find the best niche that doesn't have too much competition and the affiliate commision is high enough to cover your cost and also earn you good money. It's not easy at all and it can takes a lot of time to research and trying to make it right.

The free way is what I'd would recommend, but you need to be patient. Building a site from ground up and start receiving traffic from search engine isn't an easy task either. If you are determine and willing to update your site daily, I'm sure you'll do very well after a year if not shorter. The trick is to get traffic to your site through the free way such as forum, search engine and social bookmarking site. There's a lot more to talk about such as how to do SEO and such thing. For your first time building a website, I don't really recommend you to go deep into that. SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to manipulate the search engine (mostly google) to rank high on search result. It's all about traffic we are talking about it here. If there's no traffic/reader on your site, that's mean no sell and no money. The good thing about building traffics through content is that you can either put advertisement such as google adsense, affiliate link or even sell link on your site (google doesn't recommend this). There's way for you to make money from your site as long as you got good traffics to your site. So what's considered as good traffic? Well.. it really depends which market you are in & where you want to earn money from (adsense or affiliate). If I have to explain everything clearly, I'd probably need to write another 2000 words.

The bottom line is don't think about making money first when you just start out making a website. Keep writing good content everyday and you'll eventually receive traffics from many sources. Then start out by using google adsense on your site and see how much it can make for you. After you gain more experineces through your course of building website and researching, you can easily start out another website with clear direction. If you want to learn how to build your own website, read our previous post. The keyword is Wordpress. Want the free way, use blogger like this site.

More Webhosting Company

I lost track of some info while I was writing the basic of webhosting. I keep telling myself not to forget to include a list of popular web hosting, but I forgot. Guess my memory is going downhill. Back to the topics, while I was searching for web hosting on different sources I always came across some of the same company name. This list of web hosting companies might be the one you are looking for. Once you have come down to the final list, look up for reviews before you decide. Here's the list of webhosting companies that seems to be more popular: Hostgator, lunarpage & bluehost.

Hmm... I thought the list would be longer, I guess my memory is getting on me again. Anyways, if you are looking for VPS host, here's some good one: Servint, wiredtree, futurehosting & burstnet. As for dedicated server, sorry I'm still far from using a dedicated server and haven't had time to check it out.

Basic to Webhosting

Since I'm providing guides to subdomain in my last article, I thought I'd write a little more about it for those who are interested in finding a good host. There's literally hundreds of provider on the market and the competition is fierce. It's good not to get tricked by all the false advertising. If you are not sure which to chose, it's always best to do some research on the internet and look for reviews. webhostingtalk.com is a good place to start your hosting searching and ask question. But before you ask, try to read the beginners guide and search the board topics first before you post a question as many new comer question has already been answered. Be careful when you are on some top web hosting reviews site, those comparison site could be made by some hosting company itself to promote their own products. Thus, the best way to find the web hosting company is through forum and community site.

I'm not going to promote any web hosting company here, so don't worry. Instead I'm going to tell you my own experience with some of the hosting company I use. Before I start talking about my own experience, I'll give you some tips in finding the right hosting company for the right price. If you don't have a Paypal account or credit card, you might find it a little hard to buy a webhost, in that case you might want to seach for your local hosting company that accept direct transfer as payment method. If you have paypal, then everything would be much easier and also you got a lot more choices. Through my research I still found US based hosting company provide the best speed and price, I could be wrong though.

We are talking about basic web hosting here so I assumed that you are new to this. For your information, there are 3 basic hosting on the market, shared hosting, VPS and dedicated. Since you are hosting a new site with little too no traffic, you might want something cheaper. I know it's always tempting to use hosting companies that offers unlimited bandwidth and that kind of shit even if you don't really need it, those are just their marketing ploy. No company can provide unlimited bandwidth out there, if they can they will be out of business long ago. They knew a new site isn't going to use even a tiny bid of those bandwidth, in fact they have ways to deal with even high traffic site on shared hosting. What you don't know is most shared hosting if not all have concurrent connection limit. What does that mean? That means if the shared hosting have 50 concurrent connection limit, it only allows 50 connection to the site at once. If there's more than that, other of your visitors will be prompted with errors page. Most hosting company should have this information stated on their site, somewhere deep and well hidden that not even 1% of chance you'll come across. Most people doesn't know that, and the company will just laugh at you at the back saying yes we can provide unlimited bandwidth only if you can use it.

Most shared hosting have all basic software and stuff that comes with your hosting. Some allows you to host more than one site and some offers better service. But it all comes down to price when you are on tight budget. And I'm one of those webmaster that are constantly looking for cheap web hosting. Currently, there's two I use namecheap and godaddy. Namecheap was relatively new to web hosting, and I found their server rather slow and their support basically can't help you at all. But they have the cheapest at just $2.99, the catch is you have to pay for the whole year. So if you are not satisfy with their service after few months, you can't get any refund. From my experience, I host my site with them because I know I wouldn't receive too much traffic in the first years but I'm looking for long term, so I don't mind paying them one year of hosting. I check my site very often, the speed and uptime wasn't too bad either, although I do have problem with one of my site that keeps going down and it frustrate me.

Most shared hosting with priced under $5 requires to pay one year in advance. Only godaddy I know of requires to pay just 3 months. Godaddy was much cheaper in the past at just $3.99 and they allows monthly pay which is great for testing. But that's the past. Now it cost $4.99 per month for shared hosting, and you have to pay 3 months in advance for the first time. Although I hate godaddy doing some sneaky thing to one of my larger site, they are not a bad hosting for smaller site. I can't complain as other host might just suspend my site. Both namecheap & godaddy are reputable companies and they are some of the biggest domain registrar out there. So you have one less worried about getting scam. I recommend them both for your first web hosting, chose between them based on your preference.

I'm just telling you my experince with the web hosting I've been with, there might be better and cheaper hosting companies I'm not aware of. And that's your job to find the best one out there for your needs. There's one thing I do realized is that you'd probably stick with your first web hosting company longer than you wanted even if you don't like it. So choose wisely. Good luck!

How to point Subdomain to another sever host?

I've just recently done the same thing for one of my site. It's actually quite simple, but I don't know how I spent so much time in looking for guides on the net. It's frustrating.

Alright, here's my situation. I have a site mydomain.com and just recently I've created a sub.mydomain.com and wanted to point the subdomain to another sever host. Why? Because it's a huge traffic site and I don't want to add anymore strain to the main server, therefore I bought a new cheaper host for the subdomain.

Are you looking for imformation to do the same thing? You are lucky to find my blog as I'm going to tell you based on my experince and guide you through step by step. Peoples might have thought you are using 2 server, you must know hosting very well. No! I'm just a webmaster and my programmer do all the shit for me except the hosting thing of course. There's a lot of information on the internet actually, if you are willing to spend some time researching, you'll find a way to fix it. The problem is most information they provide are very brief, maybe they thought it was easy and you should be able to understand. I admit I'm not the brightest one, but I can at least understand and follow instructions. When I saw peoples posting something like NS, A record or Cname, I started to get headache. How the hell am I suppose to understand all of them without more explanation, I'm searching for guidance because I'm new to this so please expect everyone to be hosting junky.

Skip above part if you just want to know how to do it:
Please excuse for my whinning, I just have to let it out as it's taking me freaking long time to figure it out. Before you follow my instruction, there's one information you should know. After you edit anything on your server or domain register, it does not reflect on your site immediately. Most of the time you should see changes within minutes to an hour based on my experience. Patience is the key to success, so wait before you start scratching your head. It could be the delayed on your hoster side too, I'm not sure. Anyway, I made some changes yesterday and it doesn't work after waiting for like half an hour, so I just go to bed and guess what happens? Yes, everything is now working as how it should be!

I'm not going to assume you already done the domain part, so here's what you should modify in your domain registrar side. I'm using Namecheap:
1.) Go to manage domain
2.) Select the domain you want to modify
3.) If you already pointed the domain to a nameserver(NS), click transfer dns back to us. After you done that, you should now have the option to modify "All host record". Now click on All host record under the sub-domain settings, enter your subdomain name in the first field, your subdomain hoster namesever on the second field (example: ns22.domaincontrol.com) then chose A (address) from the drop down list. Continue the same with the next line, ususally you have two namesever with the hosting company.
4.) Click save.
5.) Trasnsfer back your main domain dns to your main host by clicking transfer DNS back to webhost. (your main server)

The second part is adding A record on your main domain server. Remember it's not the subdomain server, you don't want to do any editing on your subdomain server. It's going to be a little different depends which company and control panel you use. I've experience in both WHM Cpanel and Godaddy. I hate Godaddy, but their control panel is quite good. Anyways I'll teach you how to do it in both.

If you are using Godaddy hosting:
1.) Login to your account, open your hosing list. Click on manage account and it'll open another windows.
2.) There's bunch of options on top of the menu. If I remember correctly, hover settings or something else, find and select DNS manager. It should open a new window again.
3.) Now you should see your main server DNS information. At the very top, you should see the A record settings and this is where you should add your A record pointing it to sub.mydomain.com IP.
4.) Fill in the A record information. Enter your subdomain name and the IP of the second server, then save it.
5) You are done. Wait until it takes effect.

If you are using WHM Cpanel:
1.) Find the option Edit DNS Zone and click on it
2.) Select your domain and click edit. (I found out that it's not working in firefox, use IE if the same thing happen to you)
3.) Scroll down to the bottom and add a new entry. Eample: sub.mydomain.com. 14400 IN xx.xx.xx.xx A
4.) Click save and you are done. Just wait until it take effect on your site.


Here's some of the main point you should remember. You only edit information on 1) Your domain registrar & 2) Your main domain server hosting. You are not doing any editing on the new host you bought for your subdomain. Basically, all you need to do is add an A record on the main domain server and point the subdomain to second server IP. Tha's it, you are done. Simple!

How to Build your own Website

Building a website is not rocket science, maybe it was difficult in the past where there isn't any tools to help you. You need to learn basic html coding to create a simple page, but updating and maintaining the site can be time consuming. Who have the time to do all the shit? The other reason why peoples don't build their own website is because the hosting is very expensive. Even if you get a free host like yahoo geocities, anyone still remember that? You get full of ads at the side bar, who like a site that stuff with annoying ads that pop right in your face? And just very recently, yahoo has finally closed their free web hosting geocities after such long time. Why? Simple, because there's other free service out there that are hundred times better and it's free of advertisement. On top of that, they even provide free tools to help you set up the site.

Web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper in recent years thanks to the fierce competition in the market. Additionally, free open source website development tools such as wordpress, joomla make building a website much easier, as simple as this blog. If you are looking for a totally free and the fastest, simplest way to blog, blogger which you are looking right now is the best for you. You create you own account, if you already have an gmail account just sign in with the same user and pass. Blogger.com pretty much gives you every control over your site from simple choosing a list of existing blogger template and colors to practically change the whole look of your site if you know what you are doing. My blog which you are looking right now is the default template with no modification at all. There's a lot of free template for blogger made by other users on the net you can use, just follow the instruction and paste the code in and you are done. I'm too lazy to find my blog a nice template, I just want to post my random post as fast as I could. Anyways, just letting you know that there's choice for other template than this.

Alright, for those who are a little more tech/web savvy and have your own domain and hosting. You might want something a little more complicated and flexible. I'd recommend you to use wordpress. Wordpress is an free open sources website development tools, in a nutshell it's a ready built website that you can set up immediately. I don't want to go through the complicated process, I'll just make it simple. Assume that you already have a domain and hosting account. First you need to create a database, then upload all wordpress files in your hosting root directory. After it's been completed, visit your site and follow wordpress instruction to have your website set up. Once you are done with the configuratio, your site is basically ready to use. Wordpress is a very powerful open sources tool and it give you full right access to the code. That's mean you can modify however you liket if you have knowledge in PHP coding. If you don't, it's okay, you don't need it anyway. Wordpress have thousands of free template and plugins developed by the community for you to download. You can find literally all kind of add on script such as comment, rating, poll voting...etc. Adding all these plugins is simple too, log into admin backend, chose plugin installation, upload, activate it and you are done. Just read the developer instruction to learn how to properly install and use the plugins.

Beside Wordpress, there's other similar website building tools such as Joomla and others. Wordpress and Joomla are few of the most popular one out there. Both are free to use and features powerful CMS (Content management system). The cms is something similar to blogger where you can add new, edit and delete post. It manage every part of your site on the backend. I personally prefer Wordpress as it's the most popular blog tools out there with many developers supporting it. It's much easier to use and edit compared to Joomla. I've used Joomla before and it's very hard to do even simple modification unless you are an expert programmer. On the other hand, I found wordpress rather easy to understand and modify. I'm by no means a programmer, but I do have basic knowledge of PHP through my course of maintaining various site on the web.

Of course, if you are willing to learn there's nothing impossible. Since you are searching for how to build your own website, you must be new to website developement. I highly recommend you to use wordpress, I knew someone with no prior experience in building website successfully set up his own site. You just need a little patience and reading, that's it.

The best combination of Software to stay Virus free

Ever since I lost over $100 in my account because of Trojan virus as I believe, I started to be very careful with my web activity & the security I chose to use. If you too have a Paypal or internet banking account associate with your personal information & credit card details, you'd want to be extra careful when using the internet. Viruses, spyware, adware, malware, trojan horses are everywhere and it's on an upward trend since the start of internet days. Maybe it's not as scary as it sounds, with the necessary antiviruses software and some other securit tool, you can keep your PCs free of viruses. Don't ever think... no my computer can't possible get infected with viruses as I just only check my email and login to my facebook account most of the time. I learnt my lesson and hopefully you are not the next victim.

I use 3 security software, avast, zonealarm and trojan hunter. I have all sort my banking account on the internet as I'm a web developer, it's necessary for me to check my account very often. I've been using the combination of these 3 software, and it kept me safe for more than 5 years since I lost my money. I'm pretty sure my PC isn't fully clean, some spyware or malware might still be hieen within my files, but it keeps the dangerous high security risk viruses and trojan away from my PC.

You might think that with 3 software installed in my PC it's going to cost me alot? No exactly the opposite, it doesn't cost me any money! And I don't mean I'm getting pirated software. There's a lot of good antivirus, firewall, trojan horse software out there for free. But don't expect to get the full protection out of a free software, but with 3 free security software, that's probably more than enough to keep your online account safe. Of course, that's my own opinion, if you have the money to spend, it's always recommended to buy the full version of the software. It never hurts with a little extra protection, don't you agree?

Before I changed to avast, I was using norton. Both are good in my opinion, avast and another great antivirus software are AVG. I changed because norton is working slow on my PC and eating up a lot of computer resources. To tell the truth, I never really use the antivirus a lot, well yes it's there active in my taskbar icon, but I never bother to do any scanning or it catches any viruses intruding either. In fact I started to update the virus definition database longer and longer in between. It's bad, but sometime I'm just too lazy. There's an auto update of course, but my internet connection was too slow and I turn it off and do manual update from time to time.

The security software I think it's a must is the firewall. Everytime there's suspicious connection trying to access your computer, it'll block them and ask for your permission. For example when I open my firefox browser, zonealarm will pop up with a message and ask for internet connection confirmation. It's a little more work, but it's not as bad as you'd have thought. On a side note, you can give absolute access to those software you trust so zonelalarm won't keep asking for permission everytime you open the program. You can get zonealarm free version at its official site. I highly recommed you to get the full version as it also includes spyware protectio. Zonealarm for me is the most important security software on my computer that I cannot live without. It's a great software and I've paid for it. For me, firewall got to be the best and other just average or a free version is enough.

And if you are like me have banking account on the internet and do a lot of transaction. I recommend you to use trojan hunter for some extra protection. Trojan hunter are specialized in catching and blocking trojan horses which is important for us as it trying to steals your password by placing backdoor script on your PC. It's recommended for you to update the virus definition very often.

Last but not least, these security software are necessary and it gives you extra protection against viruses, trojan horse, spyware and adware. But there's always precautious steps you can do to reduce the risk of getting infected. First, never click on a link on your email. Check who is the sender first and check the link location by hover over the link. Even it's from a friend, it's always save to double check before you click on it. If you accidently click on it and it brought you to some weird website, close the site and scan your computer with your antiviruses software before you access any account on the web. Second, avoid download an attachment from annoymous. Third, visit only autorized website. By taking these pre-cautious step, it'll definitely helps to reduce the risk.

Free Online Games

Are you looking for free online games? If so, I'll tell you some of the sites I found which you can play games directly online. When you search for free online games on google, the result in the top few spots are pretty good and they are more or less the same. I particularly like to play my flash games on gamestertown.com. These games which I'm talking about right let users play flash games online for free right on the browser. If you are asking me this 5 years, I might have some doubt in the games quality. But now these flash games are as addicting and fun as a desktop game. I swear you can find better games on the internet instead of those comes free in Windows, specifally Windows 7 games. There isn't much new games in Windows 7 which are disappointing, I thought would have at least keep and enchance some of those old game like pinball. Well, it did enchanced most of the games bundled with Win 7, but the game I like most is not in the list. It has been removed totally from the game list! It's a huge disappointment for me, but if you like Chess, Solitaire, it's still there with better graphics.

If you are looking for more interesting online games than the one in Windows 7. Head over Gamestertown and you'll find thousands of free online games that you can play right away. No sign up, no bullshit, but you have to wait for the game to load. A side note, some games on the site are pretty old, not to say all of them are bad, but most of them are. Yuo could just try those games that are listed on the homepage. In the past, you don't see much big developers doing flash games, most of the makers are individual home developers. In recent years, there's more and more companies joined the casual gamers crowd and have made some very cool flash games. Some notable one are Mirrors Edge 2D & Alien Hominid. Go and search for them, they are free to play. Once you try it, you wouldn't believe it was made by flash software if you haven't really plat much flash games before. There are other big companies are also making flash games constantly, the most active one I can think of is Nitrome. Nitrome makes very unique pixel style flash games. All of thier production are in high qulity, some games might not to your liking, but you'll find some that you love. They produce wide variety of gameplay incliding arcade, classic, action, puzzle and shooting.

Since I'm talking about free flash games, there's another few series I'd like to recommend to point and click adventure fans. Mind you, the following games I'm going to recommend here are for hardcore puzzle fans. You could try it though and see if you like it since it's free anyway. These amazing adventure puzzle games are submachine and covert front series. These series has been out for a while and it's among the best in its genre. It's extremely hard though and might piss off some newcomers. If you are more into casual style of games, I definitely recommend you to try out Desktop Defense or Balloons Pop. I'm pretty sure you'll get addicted and keep playing for hours.

Beside the free online games I recommend above, there are some others that I recommend, but it's not for those who don't have to time to check everyday. Since free online games could means a lot such as the MMORPG. Here's a text based game that I really liked to play, it's called Utopia. If you haven't play it, you should try it totally, but beware of the addictiveness. I've been playing this games since I was in high school, that's 7 years ago! And the game is still as addicting as before, nothing has been changed much since then besides some balance tweek and a few gameplay changes. The game doesn't have any graphics like mmorpg beside some pictures. Everytime is text based, that's mean you'll be reading only text and inputing number to play. Also it's web based so you don't have to download anything to your pc, all you need is a free accout with them and you can start playing. Each game round last around 3-5 months and you'll be playing with a bunch of kingdom teamates. You can't decide which to join, it's all random. You can join the game anytime you want even the game round is about to reset. If you are first time player, it might seems a little hard at first, keep playing and learn how it works everyday. I'm sure you'll becomes better by the next round of game. It's very addictive, I warned you!

How is file hosting site better than torrent

Torrent has been on the internet for a while so are file hosting sites. So why does file hosting getting such popularity in recent years? In the past, offering unlimited download isn't a feasible plan because the bandwidth cost is freaking expensive. Although it's getting cheaper and cheaper each year, it's still too expensive to offers unlimited download. So their plan is offers one free download at a time, that's mean you can't download 2 files at the same time in any given time, unless you are using two different IP addresses of course. And they also offers premium account which give you unlimited download speed & slot which means you can download as many files as you like at a time. Premium account comes with a price vary for each sites. Take rapidshare as example, they offers premium account at low as $3.99 per 24 hours, and it gets cheaper of you subscribe longer for a month or year. It's rather cheap and tempting to get your favourite files as quick as possible, even faster than using a torrent, torrent is free though.

There are both advantages and disadvantages using either torrent or file hosting site. It depends which works better for the users. Torrent has been involved in illegal download activities since it released and it gets lots of controversy and attention from the companies and internet provider. Your internet provider might limit your torrent download speed or block it totally as it's eating up a lot of the bandwidth & might slow down other users internet experience. Thus, peoples starting to look for alternative solution, that's file hosting sites. As you are downloading through the site server, it looks like normal downloading process and you aren't sharing anything. There's no way they can block it, but some internet provider gets clever enough to limit your bandwidth. Whatever you are doing, you can only use that much of bandwidth each month.

If you are th type of person who does not like to "seed", meaning "sharing". Using file hosting site is the best way to get free download. You'll be able to get what you want eventually if you are patient enough. Most file hosting sites even download as a free users, you can get a very decent download speed. But the bad thing is if there's no one uploading the file, you can't download it. And sometime files might be removed by the site because of inactivity or illegal content. It happens a lot, that's why you need to be fast or wait for the next upload. A lot of peoples are now using file hosting site such as rapidshare, badongo, mediafire, hotfile...etc to share their files. So it wasn't to hard to find one that you are looking for.

As for torrent, although it can be slow sometime because of less seeders. It's still the best for more stable download as you don't have to worry about disconnecting or file has been removed issues. The files will be there as long as there's seeder and you can continue where you left off anytime whereas file hosting sites don't normally support resume download. If you stop at 90% foe any reasons, then you'd have to download it all over again. It's a pain in the ass. But still, both way are free and you should be happy about it.

Run Java Games on PC

So you have downloaded some mobile games on the internet and would like test it before sending it to your mobile. Is there any way to open these mobile games on the PC. Yes, there is. But you need software to run it. You download and you run it. It's a no brainer. Unfortunately, out of the 2 software I downloaded contained spyware that will install additional tools to your PC. Thus, I don't really recommend you to use it, but if you really really need it, you can download the software from some mobile site. One of the site I know of is mobileddl.com. Try to do a search for sjboy or kwyshell

The malware that comes with the software is not impossible to remove. If you are done using it, unintall the software. If the additional software that installed in your toolbars still existed. Download ad-aware or others spyware/adware clearners sofwtare from download.com. Do a complete scan and remove all malware it founds.

How to extract .RAR

I'm surprised how many people's online asking the same question again & again on how to extract .rar file. It seems like a rather easy question for me and I always thought everyone should know how to do it. Maybe the software has already been sitting in my PC for quite a while, thus it turns into a normal process for me to install it whenever I reinstall my PC. There's always something new for you to learn and soon you'll turn into a geek like me. Just kidding.

Winrar is a very popular software for users to compress numerous files into one smaller size .rar file. Many peoples are using it to compress and upload their files to the internet for others to download. But some peoples don't know how to open the file as Windows doesn't comes with a software that can open .rar file, so you need a third-party free software called "Winrar" to open the file. You can download the free software at: www.rarlab.com/

What's the different between .zip & .rar? You can said that .rar is an improvement over the .zip format. Basically it's the same function, but rar does a better job in compressing file. And recently, there's another new format that became quite popular known as 7 zip. Yes, more or less they are all the same. 7 zip is another improvement over .rar. If you ever see a files that are in .7z format. You know what you should do. Do you? Download the free 7 zip software at:www.7-zip.org

We have already mentiond about various compressing format in our previous articles. To keep it short to open
.rar go to www.rarlab.com
.7z go to www.7-zip.org

If you have more question regarding software problems, you can leave us a meesage and let us know. We'll try to post a solution to your question asap. Thanks for reading.

How to open .iso files

What's an .iso file? .iso is an image file of a CD or DVD without the physical CD/DVD of course. Many people's use it to backup their CD/DVD in case in spoil after some time. To create .iso file, you can use free software burner tools to create a duplicate image of your CD's. But how do you run the iso file? Easy, there's free software online that let you create virtual drive and run your iso image file. It's just like placing the actual CD's in your optical drive, instead you do everything on your PC by mounting the iso image into the virtual drive. The virtual you create will act just like the CD/DVD drive on your computer.

The two most popular virtual emulation software are "Daemon" & "Alcohol 120%". I preferred the former as it's easier to use. Daemon doesn't have any fancy interface or whole lots of options, after you installed the software, it'll display as a small icon on your taskbar. Then to use it, right click on the icon and create a virtual drive. You can create as many as 5 virtual drive and mount different iso image into each different drive. This will save you time un-mounting and mounting different iso file that's always in use. It's also something that your optical drive can't do, every time you want to change a cd's you have to take the cd out and place the second one in. Although such issues has been fixed considerably when DVD becomes the standard format of external storage. Daemon emulation software also comes with security bypass system, you can easily turn it on by selecting which security system you want to bypass. Why do you need this? A lot's of games today's have third party security software installed to prevent pirated copy's from running, some even install it in your PC without you knowing it and it can't be remove unless you reformat your hard drive. The biggest annoyance of these security software is that it could slow down your computer. Daemon let you bypass these software and install the game in your computer. But make sure you have the latest version of daemon.

The second emulation software is Alcohol 120%. I have used it before but that's quite some time back. From my faint experience, the whole software is too complicated to use. Daemon does a good job for me that's why I haven't thought of changing another software. Alcohol 120% has a free trial & paid version, maybe that's the reason why I don't like about Alcohol 120%. I'm a free software supporter, but I know the company are trying to make a living too. As long as the software is good, I'll definitely recommend it. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with Alcohol 120%. I have been to a lot of forum and community, most feedback and recommendation are on the positive side, so I guess the software should be good. Alcohol 120% not only let you mount virtual image, but it also let you create backups of DVDs and CDs which daemon doesn't. Daemon software only let you mount an existing Iso or others virtual image file, it can't be used to create an image file. If you need a software that can let you create backup cds or dvds, then Alcohol 120% might be a better choice. But you might need to spend money on buying it, I'm sure there's some limitation on the trial version to an extent.

How to extract .001 .002 etc extension file

Since file hosting sites are getting more popular, we have seen some new type of uploading style. Most file hosting site have file upload size limit, some smaller some larger. I personally would prefer smaller file size as it reduces the chance of broken file or sudden file lost due to lost of connection, especially when your at 90 over percent. Since uploader can't upload a file that's larger than the limit, they have to split the original file into smaller separate file. In the past, most people's are using Winrar to do the job, but it has less choice in size and harder to use. So a free software called hjsplit comes to the rescue. Although the software doesn't compress the file, it can easily split a large file size into various smaller size file & join it together again with a few clicks of button.

So next time when you see extension such as .001 - .(whatever number), you need to download hjsplit freeware at: www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/ and join the file back together before you can use it. If you can't see the extension of the file, read my previous post and learn how you can activate it. The free software doesn't require any installation, download the .exe double click the software and you are ready to use. The software is only about 300 Kb in size, so it can be downloaded within seconds depends on your internet connection.

It's not only useful when using to upload file online, I also found it useful when transferring large file from my netbook to my PC. If you have a large pendrive then transferring large file would be easier, but if you are like me only have 2 1 GB pendrive then you'd have to split the file using hjsplit, so you can transfer those smaller file to your pendrive then to your PC. Once you have transferred all files to your PC, use the free software again to join all the bits together. There's various reason why people's need such software, I never thought of it before I need it and it's really useful. I found myself using it quite a lot to transfer file from my netbook to my PC or PC to netbook. Even if you don't need it now, remember this freeware hjsplit, some day it might becomes handy. Especially when you download a lot from file hosting site, you might come across such extension in future.

It's time to move from Windows xp to Windows 7

Before I start talking my experiences with the new Windows 7 RC version which will be released on 22nd October this year, I have never use Vista before. You might be wondering why I never want to try Vista but willing to test the RC released of Win 7? That's because I heard too much bad thing about Vista, on the other hand, Windows 7 has been getting positive review since the Beta released & my friend just happens to have the RC version on his pendrive, so out of conveniences I decided to install Windows 7 in my netbook along with Windows xp.

To tell the truth, my experience with Win 7 has been overwhelming, the first thing you would notice is the graphically impressive interface. I know it's weird but it gives you a classy and professional feel to it that makes using Win 7 a great pleasure. But still, the most important thing is the innovative features. I know some of the function such as Aero effects is in the vista, but it slows down even the most powerful computer as I heard, it's a badly optimized OS. Fortunately, Windows 7 is as fast as it can be with Aero effects even on a 1.66 Ghz, 1 GB of RAM netbook. Sometime it even feel faster than XP with all the very cool desktop effects, and the boot & shut down time is on par with Xp, maybe a little slower. Beside the old Aero effects, there's also some new and improved features in Windows 7. Let's talk about the improvement first, the gadgets which is one of the favorite features. In Vista there's a limited space on the right side that let you drop your favorite gadgets in it, but you can only use very limited of gadgets as there's very limited space. In Windows 7 you can drop it wherever you want on the desktop and design it on your own. There's a lot of useful gadgets already in Win 7 such as clock, calender, cpu meter..etc. Beside the one already in Win 7, users are allowed to develop their own gadgets and share it on Windows official site. Some cool gadgets I found including one button shut down, hibernate. I'm sure when Windows 7 is release, you'll be able to find more cool gadgets.

Now let's talk about what's new in Win7. There's quite a lot, I'm just going to briefly go through it such as jumplist & pin any program to taskbar which is also very cool & useful. Every time you point on the program for example your firefox browser, it'll show you a list of all browser. Point at it and it'll display the browser on the background, click on it and it'll stay. Pin any program to taskbar let you place your most use program on the taskbar for quick access.

I've been talking about how great Windows 7 is, but is it really flawless? Unfortunately no. I have some driver problems with my modem and the company hasn't update any new drivers since XP. So if I want to use Windows 7 and my internet connection, then I might have to buy a newer broadband modem. Although Windows 7 have a compatibility mode called xp mode which let all software that run on Windows xp also run under Windows 7. But to use the xp mode, you need some kind of intel virtualization support which my netbook doesn't support. It's a great addition for those who are still using old software, but the need of hardware support itself is a problem. Thank god I installed Windows 7 as an additional so I can dual boot both xp and 7.

Even though there's still some driver problem with my modem, I still seriously thinking of buying Windows 7 when it release later next month. It's a great OS, it looks great and run fast. I think it's time to move from a 10 years old os, you can really see the age of xp after you use windows 7. If you are buying a new PC or notebook, wait till the release of Windows 7, you won't regret it.

Free software to check your computer system information

Recently my friend has this problem, he reinstalled windows xp because malware are slowing down his PC. After the installation every thing when smoothly, in fact the PC start and work faster like never before. But the problem start here, he doesn't have the necessary software CD for his sound card driver. You might be thinking that what's the big deal, just search the internet for the driver. Unfortunately he doesn't know the manufacture of the sound card either. Thus, first he needs to find out what sound card he is using before he can search for the right driver.

There's a few way you can check your sound information directly on the Windows.
1) Go to "start" select run, then key in dxdiag & press enter. Wait for a while for the program to load, it takes some time. You'll see some of your hardware information on the first page such as processor, motherboard, ram...etc. Never mind that, click the tab "sound" & you should see your computer sound card information. This method doesn't work for my friend, it says no sound card detected.
2) Second method, go to control panel & open "system". Choose the tab "hardware" on top, then click on "device manager". Now select option sound and see what you can find.

If the above two method doesn't work for you either. Then you might need the help of third party software. There's a lot of free diagnostic software on the internet, and following two is my favourite.
1) The first one is called fresh diagnose. The software will show very detail of your computer system information unlike dxdiag on the windows which shows briefly information. Download free version of fresh diagnose at: www.freshdevices.com/freshdiag.html

2) If for any reason the above doesn't help at all. Try out this second software which I found through user recommendation on some website. The software is Belarc Advisor, as for the official download site, you'll to do the work yourself. Just search for Belarc Advisor and you should see the company website on the top result.

Free ftp software

It seems like internet is getting more popular when video streaming & social networking is made available. We got a reason to stay on the internet a little bit longer & stay away from the television. Eventually, people's get more tech savvy, then we learned about using blog & create our own website. Blog is free to use & you can share whatever information you want just like this blog. But if you want your own domain, you'll have to spend some money on it including a ftp software that will allowed you to upload files to the server.

So is there any free ftp software out there. The answer is Yes! Note: Beside using a separate ftp software, Internet Explorer has a ftp built-in function that will let you access to your ftp server. To find free ftp software, do a search on google. Here's what I found:" filezilla-project.org, www.coreftp.com, www.smartftp.com". These are the top three result on google, I never use them before, so I'm not sure if they are good or not. Since they are free, download and try it yourself. Beside the three I posted above, there should be more free ftp software around. You can try searching through the pages or go to download.com for more free software. The good thing about download.com is that you can easily determine a decent software by the review. But still the best free ftp software might not be on the site, so you might still need to do more research if you want the best. Otherwise, the three I mentioned should do the job just right.

Personally, I preferred cuteftp and still using it. If you are willing to pay, I recommend you to try out cuteftp. There's a free version of cuteftp on its official site, you can try it first before buying it. Though, I'm not sure if cuteftp is the best ftp software out there.

The best p2p software

Torrent & p2p? Are they the same? Basically yes, both share files among computers. But there's some differences in functionality, each with its advantages & disadvantages. To download a torrent, first you need a software, you can download it free on the internet, bitcomet & azureus are some of the most popular out there. Second, you need a torrent tracker, without it the software is useless. How do you find these tracker? You can find it on website or forum that let user's to share their tracker. The only website I can remember right now is mininova.org. Search for the file name and download the tracker of that file. If you can't find it that's mean there's no one sharing the file you are looking for.

P2p is quite different from torrent when searching for a file. You don't have to search for website or forum to find tracker, such function has built in the p2p software itself. Depends on the p2p software you are using, it'll search on some of the most famous network such as edonkey & gnutella server. Those who are connected to the p2p network server will be sharing files among their computer's.

Now, the question you have been waiting for, which is the best p2p software? In my own experiences, limewire & shareaza are among the best. Limewire are only good for downloading songs/music. Personally, I preferred shareaza as you will be able to find some rare video as well beside songs. Shareaza is more versatile, you can find lots of music, video, software across gnutella & edonkey server. There's a lot of file in the network, but also a lot of junk file containing viruses. So be extra careful when you are downloading files in .rar compressed format. It's very important for you to scan every files you downloaded from torrent or p2p before viewing the actual content. This is the disadvantages of using p2p software, you wouldn't know if the file you are downloading are fake or not. And you can't find any comments on that file like torrent. Since you'll be downloading tracker from a website or forum, usually you can find some user's discussing the file assumed that it's popular. That information can be used to verify the authority of that file. If the file is not working or contained viruses, someone will post it there to warned others.

How to remove software from pc

This is a guide for Windows beginner. Windows is an operating system, to run other third party software, first you need to go through the installation process. Now the important part, how do you remove these installed software from your PC? There is two way:

1) Go to "my computer" on the left hand side under "other places", click on "control panel". You should be able to find "add & remove programs", double click and open it. Now search through the list for the software you want to uninstall, then click on remove.

2) Go to the folder of the software where you have installed in. Check all the files within the folder and see if you can find an icon that's an uninstall word on it. If you find it, double click and follow the instruction to remove the software. Most popular software have this uninstall function built in.

Actually there's a third way but it's not recommended. Just delete the whole folder of the software, by doing this you'll leave the registered keys and other information on your pc, and eventually stored up useless information in your PC. But there's another way to fix this problem, download free registry cleaner and do a clean up.

Remember the two recommended way sometime just remove the major files of the software from your PC. It all depends on the software company. Some might let you delete everything associate with the software but some will leave some files & registry in your PC. To tell the truth we I hate it as it's not right for the company to do that. It's an invading of our privacy. So in the end you might still need to do the third way by removing every files and folder manually. But do this after you use the first two method. The download software such as registry cleaner and other files cleaning tools software to help you to remove all useless files from your PC.

How to get rid of spyware

Spyware and adware are starting to be a serious issues, companies are placing spyware in your computer when you visit their website to track your internet movement or collect personal information. We called this privacy and they are invading it. Spyware is nothing new on the internet, but it's getting out of control when they are everywhere. Most spyware would just collects data such as your internet surfing habits..etc. But some other would install additional software in your browser and interfere user control. Some even change your computer setting, reulting in slow computer & internet speed, pop up advertisement..etc.

Some spyware can be cleaned easily by clearing your internet cookies and temporarily folder. But some others are not so easy, they'll try to hide behind your eyes. Fortunately, there's some pretty good spyware removal software that would help you to get rid of spyware. Here's three that I recommend you to try out
1) Ad-aware
2) Spyware Doctor
3) Spybot

These are some of the most popular spyware and adware cleaner out there. They both come in free and paid version. Try it yourself and see which works best for you and you might want to consider buying the full version.

Trojan horse removal software

Virus is a common word that will harm you or your computer, of course we are talking about harmful computer viruses here. But is there any computer viruses out there that could potential harm you physically? Well.. if there's one, it'd be trojan horse. Trojan horse are considered as one of the virus too, but instead of messing up your computer, it drops a backdoor script or keylogger in your PC and steal your personal information such as password and credit card information. Nowadays, more and more people's are doing their purchasing online using credit card, we use it to buy items or pay our bills. Some people's may also have internet banking account or Payal to do their daily transaction. And trojan horse is mainly targeting at such groups of user, placing keylogger into your PC to track your internet & keyboard movement without you knowing it. They might even steal your email addresses since it's usually linked to many other sensitive information.

There are software out there to help you to remove trojan horse from your computer, but still the best solution is to prevent it. If you have antivirus software in your pc which more people do, update your virus definition database from the company website or update directly through the software auto update function. If you don't habe one, you seriously need to get one, try avg or avast it's free to use and it's pretty good.

Although antivirus software are good in detecting viruses, they might still let one or two slip through. To make sure your computer is clean from trojan horses, I recommend you to use trojan hunter. This software focuses on detecting trojan horse, removal & prevent it from running on the background. You can find a trial use at: www.misec.net

Beside a good antivirus & trojan removal software, you also need a good firewall. I already mentioned this in my previous post, but I'll say it again in case some of you missed the article. Zonealarm is currently the best firewall out there, you can get it here: www.zonealarm.com

Combining with these three software, you are pretty much safe. The rest is up to you, try not to download from unauthorized site or install software from unknown sources. Use your antivirus software or trojan removal software to scan the file before opening it. And make your software are up to date.

How to edit File extensions

This might not be the biggest secret out there, but it might be new for some users. As you may already know, by default Windows XP doesn't show the extensions of a file. Some users don't know that and keep wondering how they could change the extensions when it's not even visible. In my last post, I talked about 7z extension, if you didn't turn on the extensions visibility, all you'd see is a winrar icon if you have it installed of course. It showed in Winrar because that's your default compress software and the file is compressed. But that doesn't mean that it's .rar file and you'd never know that if you can't see the extension of it. I'm not sure why Microsoft would want to hide the extensions by default, even though it says it was for security reason, but I think most users are clever enough to know what they are doing. Maybe Microsoft should disable the delete button so we couldn't accidentally delete any files? That's what happened with Windows Vista, Microsoft think they are only the clever one. Every action you do in Vista is pampered by the UAC, and keep asking you if you are sure what you want to do. That's why the most searches word for Vista are "how to disable UAC".

Anyway, I'm off topic again. So to enable the extensions, goto my computer, on the top menu select tools and folder option. A new windows will pop up, select view tab. On the second bracket, scroll down a little and you'll see "hide extensions for known file types". Untick the box and click apply. Now go back to your deskyop and you should be able to see the extensions. To change it, just click on the icon once, then you'll be able to change the file name or extension as you like.

How to extract .7z file

It seems like .rar has dominate the market for a while until we start seeing quite a lot of .7z compressed file being uploaded to the net. Actually, .7z is just another file compress software just like .rar, so why do people start shifting to 7z? That's because .7z compress the file better than .rar, in another words, 7z software can compress file into much smaller size than winrar. Another advantage is 7 zip software support all kind of compress format including .zip, rar, 7z...etc. But Winrar doesn't support 7 zip format yet and it might never happen. 7-zip is another innovative free software that people love, it's easy to use and the features are much better. It's no surprise why people would want to change what they have been using for years. Well.. I was kind of forced to use but I'm glad I did. I have downloaded a 7z format but unfortunately winrar can't extract the file. So I start searching for some software that can open the file, it's not too difficult to find. As its format 7z, just type in 7z into google search and you'll see the site on top of the page. Here's the official site: www.7-zip.org

7 zip overall is a great freeware that do exactly what it says. Although the interface doesn't look as great as Winrar, the features is unbeatable. It's more practical than a pretty software that eats up your computer resources. Winrar is not bad either, and I'm still using it. But one thing I do notice that the new version is not compatible with the old version. That means that if the file is using newer version of winrar to extract, you may not be able to extract the file using an older version of the software.

MP3 Music Player software for your PC

There's a lot of free mp3 music player software on the internet, and winamp is probably the most popular one out there. I have used it before, but that's quite some time ago. I don't listen to a lot of music on my PC, at least not playing constantly on the background. Thus, other video player such as VLC, KMplayer and Windows Media Player are doing a fine job. But the best music player among these three I'd have to vouch for Windows Media Player which I hate it totally as a video player (You can read my previous post to know why). If you are a heavy music user's, you should have hundreds if not thousands of song on your list. It'll gets boring very soon if you keep listening to the same songs over and over again. Windows Media Player (WMP) have this function to save your music list in different album. You can choose what to play in each days, maybe you like some heavy music in the morning, and prefer softer songs in the night. WMP do just great by separating the album. You can always delete or add new songs to the album anytime. WMP save your list so you don't have to select and add your favorite songs again next time. As for vlc & kmplayer, it's good to play one or two song randomly in a day as it doesn't save your playlist like WMP and Winamp. It's fine with me as I preferred quite most of time, but listem to one or two of my favorite songs from time to time.

Wmp is a good music player and it's free bundled with the Windows. But if you perfer individual software other than WMP, I'd recommend you to try winamp. It's not famous without a good reason. As I mentioned, I haven't been using Winamp quite a while, so I'm not sure how far it evolved todays. From my experience, the music player is light on resources and very easy to use. Basically, you just click on the add button and select all songs from your PC you want to add to the list, then press ok. There you go, it'll start playing all the songs you have addded one by one after you click on the play button. There's also this repeat function that will continue playing the list of songs over again and again, you can choose to switch it on or off. It's the same as in Windows Media Player.

Ok, I just visited Winamp official site and it has three different version, pro, bundle & full. There's just one free version back then as I remembered. So of course, you'd want to download the free version first, it's around 10 MB in size. You can download it at http://www.winamp.com/player

It seems like there's a lot more features now, not sure if it's a good thing. Winamp also available in 16 different language version. Try it and let me know how it compares to WMP. Is it better or more of less the same.

Clean up Adware, Spyware to speed up your PC even more

No matter how hard you try, there's always a hole for adware & spyware to slip in your PC. Some time it's not your firewall fault, but you yourself let them in without knowing it. There's no guarantee that trusted site wouldn't place some sneaky code to track your internet movement. Or some free software might install some other extra software in your PC without your conscience. Did you experience slow down on your PC? Did you always gets some weird advertisement pop-up when surfing the internet? This could be the act of adware and spyware. And these malicious software are everywhere on the internet, website, software & email. They may not be as harmful as a virus, but they can be anonying casuing major slow down or errors in your system. There's no way you can block them totally, unless you cut ties with the internet. But some company developed some nice adware & spyware removal tools to help you clean up your PC fast and easy.

The one I'm using right now is Ad-aware from Lavasoft. I've been using it since 5 years ago and it's also the best I've used so far. I haven't been trying a lot of different adware removal software since then, and I know there's some other good malicious removal software on the market including spybot. But personally, I haven't try it yet. Adaware is doing a good job cleaning up all useless junk from my PC, and it's still one of the most popular adware and spyware removal software on the market. The best thing is, most of them are free for the normal version of course. If you love what you use, you can buy the more advanced paid version of the software.

In our last post, we talked about how registry can slow down your PC. It does slow down your computer if you install & uninstall a lot of software and never clean it for a long time, but it's not significant, you might not even notice the difference. The real culpit that can really slow down your computer are adware & spyware. Many of them could be running on the background and eating up your system resources. If you notice your computer is not running as fast as before, you may want to do some clean up.

Many antivirus these days does find & clean adware & spyware, but they are still not in the league of standalone malicious cleaner. I'd still recommend you to download the free version of adaware and test it out, there is no harm trying it. You can find all these software at download.com

Clean up Registry & speed up your PC

Ok, some of you might already knew that every time we install a new software, whether it's Microsoft words, video player, antivirus or any other third-party software, it creates entry in the registry. But when you try to uninstall these software, the entry in registry doesn't remove along with the software. The registry list just keep building up every time you install a new software and eventually slow down your computer.

If you are an advanced user, you can do this manually by deleting the useless entry. To do that, click on start on your taskbar, select "run", type in "regedit" and click ok. Important: Do not randomly delete any entry in the registry, it might cause errors in your system or crash your Windows. But even the most advanced Windows user wouldn't want to do this themselves, it's a time consuming work and doesn't guarantee result. Therefore, software developer came out with all types of registry software that will clean, repair and fix your registry at the same time! It's an easier process with one mouse button click.

The problem now is which is the best that actually works? There are countless of such software either for free or paid. I normally won't use the paid version as there's a lot free version that actually works better. But if you try a trail version of a paid software and it does actually speed up and fix your registry problem, why not consider buying the software to support the developer. Still, most registry software I found cost around $29.99 which I found it quite expensive for the little speed improvement on the PC.

Here's the best free registry cleaner I found with the best users review, Auslogics Registry Cleaner. You can either type the name & search in Google or download directly through download.com, it's free and small in size, just a little over 2MB. Auslogics Registry Cleaner is light and fast, it'll clean up and speed up your PC in no time. It does what it supposed to and it's better than the defragger that comes with Windows XP & Vista. The software developer claims that after the cleaning, you will see a 2% increase in performance. It's not a lot and may not be noticeable, but hey every little bit helps and the software is free!

Best Download Accelerator Download

All browser we are using have built in download function such as IE & firefox, but they are only good for small size download. If you are downloading file that's over 20MB in size, I highly recommend you to use a download accelerator software as it is much more faster and most importantly it support resume download. Of course, such features must be supported by the site too, or else it'll be useless.

I'm using firefox as my main browser, I don't use IE too much. I love firefox because of its speedy browsing speed and addons, unfortunately firefox built in download function is not as good. I often had this problems where the download just stop in the middle and totally not moving. It frustrated me especially when it's over 90% complete and end up downloading it again from the site. As I mentioned, if you are downloading files that are large in size and the site support resume download, use a download accelerator software to avoid such problems. Most software & major website should allowed the use of download accelerator, but most file hosting site are not except for mediafire.

There's two download accelerator I used before, netants & flashget. I haven't been using netants for so long, so I don't really have any comment on it, but it was good at the time. Currently, I'm using flashget for my download, the download speed is a lot faster that the firefox. I'm not sure why, but it just download faster on flashget. Maybe it's because it can separate the download work. It's like 5 download going at once at a single download. Flashget is a freeware, you can download it from its official site for free.

Flashget is an individual software. If you're using firefox and preffered to have it built in your browser, you can download the download accelerator addon on mozilla site. This will definitely save you trouble to open up the software everytime you want to download. By using firefox download plugin, it'll pop up with the choice of using the firefox download plugin. The plugin from what I heard is much better than the current firefox.

There's also another very cool firefox plugin that let you download files from site such as rapidhsare hands free! How do you fo it? Basically, you just copy all the rapidshare file URL into the software and let it run by itself. The software will automatically check every URL and make sure there's no broken link. This happened a lot when the file is too old or has been removed by the admin or uploader. After done checking, it'll start to download all files added in the list one by one. Now you don't have to go throguh rapidshare clicking this and that, and you don't even have to wait for the timer. The software will automatically wait for the rapidshare timer and download it, how cool is that?

So if you want the best download accelerator software, try flashget. If you want the best download tools for file hosting site, try the firefox plugin!

Free Pdf Reader software download

Until very recently I started to read a lot of ebook in pdf format, and that's the reason why I started searching for a good pdf reader that are fast and easy to use. Unsurprisingly, the first result using the keyword "pdf reader" was adobe reader. I've downloaded and tried it, it's a good pdf software in general. The interface is sleak and looks really great, but it's not without a cost, the reader load slower compare to the other pdf software in the market.

And I heard about another pdf reader somewhere on the net, it's called foxit reader. So I head to its official website (if you look more carefully, foxit is just on the second result in first page on google) and try to download the software, to my surprise, the pdf reader was only 1 MB plus if you compare to adobe 20mb. You see the huge difference! It doesn't take long for me to download the free pdf reader and put it into test. Foxit reader is now my best choice for pdf documents and I never bother to going back to adobe. It's fast and easy to use, it load all documents I tested almost instantly. Adobe pdf reader isn't a bad software, it works great and looks great, but it's just too slow for my taste. I don't really care about the graphics as long as it's fast and do the job right. If Adobe was fast in first place, I think I'd have never try another pdf reader.

I talked about individual software up there. Actually there's a firefox addon which you can view pdf document directly on your browser and it's quite popular in demand. Unfortunately, the current one offered for firefox doesn't work as good as individual software. Although it's an addon for firefox browser, but it actually install the software in your computer as an individual software rather than an addon. And there's some complaint about the software crashing users system. Honestly, I haven't try it yet, though I'm using firefox as I normally doesn't install any addon or software that received bad reviews. This is just an extra information for those who are interested. Yes, there's such addon for firefox, you can do a search on mozilla firefox homepage for plugins.