Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Working wirelessly: What you need to know
Many companies are making the leap to wireless networks in the office for both financial savings in overall equipment and sheer convenience for their employees. They also often provide mobile PCs with wireless capabilities to their employees so that they can be productive anytime anywhere, hence enhancing the company's bottom-line.In this article, I will explain what WiFi is and how it works. I will also discuss what you need to start working wirelessly as well as what you can expect to gain from doing so. Finally, I'll discuss the precautions you should take when working on the go.
What is WiFi? Learn the lingo
Wireless, or WiFi, technology is another way of connecting your computer to the network using radio frequency and no network cables.
Wireless works similarly to cordless phones; they transmit data from one point to another through radio signals. But wireless technology also requires that you be within the wireless network range area to be able to connect your computer. There are three different types of wireless networks:
- Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN): WLAN are wireless networks that use radio waves. The backbone network usually uses cables, with one or more wireless access points connecting the wireless users to the wired network. The range of a WLAN can be anywhere from a single room to an entire campus.
- Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN): WPANs are short-range networks that use Bluetooth technology. They are commonly used to interconnect compatible devices near a central location, such as a desk. A WPAN has a typical range of about 30 feet.
- Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN): WWANs are created through the use of mobile phone signals typically provided and maintained by specific mobile phone (cellular) service providers. WWANs can provide a way to stay connected even when away from other forms of network access. Also, be aware that additional charges are often associated with the usage of WWANs in some locations.
How do I get started?
The only thing you really need to go wireless (in addition to a mobile PC) is a wireless PC Card. Depending on the age of your mobile PC, the card is either built-in or needs to be inserted in the PC Card slot and includes an antenna. In addition, you can also use wireless keyboards and mice, which can provide more freedom and flexibility when you're working in your office.
It's always good to research the available hotspots in the area you're planning on visiting (whether a neighborhood in your city you're not familiar with or a city on the other coast). You can use Bing to find hotspots when you travel.
As you head out in this brave new world of wirelessly connectivity, you can connect to a wireless network (whether at home, at work, or on the go).
Connect to a wireless network
Working wirelessly: What's in it for me
Working wirelessly can offer you the following benefits.
- Flexibility: The lack of cables that comes with wireless networking enables you to roam with your mobile PC. You can roam from your office to a nearby conference room for a meeting, or from the couch in the living room to a kitchen for a snack. For example, if you're working wirelessly in a meeting you can printout a report for a co-worker without having to leave the meeting.
- Time-saving: If you're waiting for an important response you can use your mobile PC to monitor your email even when you're in meetings or at lunch. As soon as you get the data needed, you can promptly forward it to your customer rather than wondering whether the information has come in while you were away and having to run back to your office between meetings and other commitments.
- Increased productivity: Working wirelessly enables you to turn down times between meetings or while in transit into productive time. For example, you may be attending a conference and just found out that one of the sessions you were planning on attending has been cancelled. Rather than waste the next hour, you can check email, start compiling your trip report, or order your son's birthday present.
- Easier collaboration: Using wireless mobile PCs, you can easily share files and information with others. For example, you can collaborate on a presentation with colleagues during a flight delay in an airport lounge, or you can share the syllabus of a course while attendees so that they can take more digitally during the class.
What should I worry about when working wirelessly?
When working wirelessly from hotspots and public places, you are responsible for ensuring the security of your files and your mobile PC.
To make network access easier for their users, public hotspots typically leave all security turned off. This means that any information you send from a hotspot is most likely unencrypted, and anyone within range of the wireless LAN, whether at a next table or in the parking lot, can access and use your Internet connection, and look at your unprotected information.
For more information, see tips for working securely from hotspots.
WiFi gives you the freedom to go anywhere and still be connected to your office, your family, and other important aspects of your life. Your virtual office can now be an ice cream parlor in a seaside resort. Embrace and enjoy the flexibility that WiFi affords you.
This article was written by Armelle O'Neal.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Removing IT Policy on Blackberry
Unlocking the Blackberry.
First of all, this is not a guide on how to remove carrier information from a Blackberry. If you're unable to use a different SIM card than the one that was originally supplied with your device, look elsewhere. However if, like many others you have a Blackberry that is locked by a BES, meaning you're unable to change certain settings, or install Third Party Applications then read on. Essentially, the problem is that your Blackberry has at some point been connected to a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), and this BES has placed a restrictive Security Policy (or IT Policy) on your device. A quick check to see if this is the case can be done by going to Options/Security on your Device. If you see any references to IT Policy whatsoever, then you have a potentially restrictive IT Policy that can be removed.
- The Disclaimer/Intended Use.
- This guide is intended for use by people that own their own Blackberry, and for whatever reason, have inherited a company's IT Policy on their Device. Really, there are two scenarios where this guide is useful.
You, like me, bought a Blackberry on EBay and are unable to make changes to the settings or install Third Party Applications. You have a Blackberry that was previously connected to a company's BES and, for whatever reason; you no longer intend to make connections to that BES. If you're still connected to a Company BES, and simply want to install the latest and greatest Third Party Application I wouldn't recommend this approach. Go talk to your administrators and ask them to grant you the appropriate rights. There are two problems in using this guide to bypass your Company's Security Policy. Firstly, whenever you reconnect to the Company Server, your security settings will revert back to how they were. Secondly, and (perhaps) more importantly, you run the risk of getting fired.
Procedure
Method One
Method 1: IT Policy Removal (Preferred)
If you have any 8xxx or 9xxx device the best method for removing IT policy is to update it to OS 4.3 or higher (if possible) and you can use JL_Cmder's "resettofactory" command to remove ALL IT policy, Firewall restrictions and Application Permission settings. After you've upgraded to OS 4.3 or higher, simply backup the device using Desktop Manager, close Desktop Manager, then run JL_Cmder and execute the "resettofactory" command. The device will do a security wipe of the device; (meaning wipe your data but leave the OS, DO NOT use the "Wipe" command in JL_Cmder) then reboot leaving the OS, 3rd party apps but no data AND, best of all, NO IT policy whatsoever. When you're done, simply restore your backup and you're good to go with no policy or locked firewall. You can downgrade back to the old OS if you desire, too.
Download JL_Cmder from this link: http://www.blackberryforums.com/general-blackberry-discussion/18789-jl_cmder.html
If your 7xxx or 8xxx device is running OS 4.2 or lower (look in Options >About) and you can't upgrade it to OS 4.3 or higher you will NOT be able to use method 1 above and you will need to use method #2 below:
Method Two
Step 1
Ensure the Blackberry Desktop Manager is installed using Blackberry Internet Service, and not Blackberry Enterprise Server. If you are unsure, it would probably be a good idea to uninstall the Desktop Manager and start again.
If you don't have the CD that came with your Blackberry, the Software can be downloaded here. BlackBerry Software Site
Step 2
Download the file policy.bin Download Here. and save it in your Blackberry installation directory (C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry).
Step 3
Wipe your Blackberry, creating a backup if necessary. Select Options/Security/Wipe (Newer 4.2 OS Devices Goto Options/Security Options/General Settings/Wipe) on the Device.
If this option is unavailable, you may have to install the latest software on your Blackberry. You need to Download and install the latest Desktop Manger Software, then the latest Handheld Software. Connect your device, open the Desktop Manager, select Application Loader, and follow the prompts.
Step 4
Close the Desktop Manager if it is open.
Step 5
From the Windows Start Menu select Run..., and at the prompt type regedit. In the tree on the left hand side, navigate to:
HKEY_Current_Users\Software\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\PolicyManager
Right-Click the Policy Manager Folder and select New/String Value. Name the value Path. Now, Double-Click the Path Subkey and set Value Data to:
C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\policy.bin
Step 6
Open the Desktop Manager.
Step 7
Connect the Device.
Verification
Once complete, the Options/Security screen on your Blackberry should not contain references to an IT Policy, you should now be able to change all settings (including password prompts), and install Third Party Applications.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Operating Systems, Hard Drives, Partitions, and You!
By Ryan Morse - November 21, 2010 | |
 Your operating system: it’s that collection of data and programs that makes all your desktop PC orlaptop computer hardware work together. Where your operating system is installed on your PC’s hard drive, as well as the type of drive it’s on, can have a big impact on your system’s performance.Whether you’re starting with a fresh, blank hard drive or reinstalling, this Tech Tip will tell you where you should put your operating system and why. Your hard drive is where most of your system’s data lives and, in most cases, it’s a critical component. Without a hard drive, you don’t have much of a system. Similarly, without an operating system installed on that hard drive, you’re not going to be doing a lot of computing either. Since your operating system is in charge of making your hardware work together, it’s important for it to have as few bottlenecks as possible. This means the best place to install your operating system is on your fastest hard drive on its primary partition. Your operating system also borrows a certain amount of space on the hard drive for something called paging, which treats a portion of your hard drive as spillover for your system’s random access memory (RAM) in the form of a pagefile. When your RAM gets full, operating systems switch to using the hard drive as “virtual memory.” Depending on how much RAM your system has, you’ve probably experienced this at one time or another. When you’ve got a lot of applications running and your system begins to hang, paging is usually the culprit. But paging is also necessary, so you can do your best to avoid it by running only a few applications at a time or adding RAM to your system, but for the time being, paging is always going to be there waiting. The secret to less painful paging is using a fast drive! For disk-based hard drives, like most of the drives found in PCs today, speed is generally determined by spindle speeds, also known as rotational delay, measured in rotations per minute. Spindle speeds, in turn, are limited by the physical size of the disk and the power required to move it. You can compare other factors like seek time and transfer time, but the difference in spindle speeds, compounded by the many times you access a hard drive during usage, is the most noticeable difference when dealing with hard drives. Spindle speeds range usually from 4,200 RPM in notebook hard drives and low-power computers all the way up to 15,000 RPM in high-performance servers. With higher spindle speeds usually come higher costs and lower capacities since the power requirements to spin larger disks are too high to be practical. When selecting the drive you want for your operating system, choose the one with the higher spindle speed. If you’re looking to upgrade with a different drive, make sure you go with a higher spindle speed that your previous one, but keep in mind, if power requirements are an issue (and in notebooks that depend on battery life, they are), you’re increasing your consumption with a faster-spinning drive.  For solid-state hard drives(SSDs), there are no moving parts. That means greater durability, rotational delay, and much faster access times. Unfortunately, the cost per gigabyte of solid-state drives has kept them from completely knocking their disk-based predecessors off the market. You can get a couple terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of disk-based hard drive capacity for the price of some of today’s solid-state drives. But what they lack in storage capacity, SSDs more than make up for in speed, and fortunately, you don’t need much more than 20 GB to install Windows 7 and even less for Mac OS X or popular Linux distributions. For this reason, solid-state drives normally play excellent hosts to operating systems. If you can’t afford a solid-state drive, a 7,200 RPM disk-based drive should hit your sweet spot between price, capacity, and performance return.Once you’ve selected the type and speed of drive you’re going to use, you’ll go through the normal steps. If you’re reinstalling, back up your data to a separate drive first! Boot into an appropriate application, usually the disc you’re installing from is bootable. If you’re starting with a fresh drive, the drive is not partitioned and you must create at least one for files to be written to it. If you’re reinstalling, you’re going to wipe away the existing partitions (and the data they contain!) and create new ones. Partitioning will let you keep your operating system separate from your lesser-used applications and archives, which, when stored on the same partition as your operating system, can decrease performance as the hard drive has all the data in one giant clump. Partitioning a drive tells your operating system to treat each division as a separate drive with their own drive letter. If you have to wipe away the data in a partition, you can easily format it without jeopardizing the other partitions. This is handy for quickly reinstalling operating systems while keeping the rest of your data safe and sound in other partitions. Additionally, you can install more than one operating system to a hard drive if it is partitioned properly to create a multi-boot setup. Unfortunately, partitions are not actually separate drives, so if your partitioned hard drive fails, all the partitions and they data they contain could be gone. For this reason, I recommend a second hard drive, whether internal or external, as a back up option for your other files. In most cases, the software you’re booting up with will include some partition tools, but if not, I recommend Paragon Partition Manager  . It’s easy to use, works with all major operating systems and is free to download. It even gives you a few more options when partitioning, like resizing. If you’re just using one hard drive, create a small partition that will be used only for your operating system and a few of your most-used applications. If you’re using a solid-state drive, you can create a partition that uses the full capacity of the drive or reserve a small section for your most-used applications. Check your operating system for the minimum hard drive requirements and add a few gigabytes on top of that for what I like to call elbow room. You can create another partition that will be especially for storing your pagefile, but I can’t say that I’ve noticed a significant advantage in doing that. Use the remaining hard drive capacity to create as many or as few partitions as you’d like. These will be where you will install your lesser-used applications, store larger files like music, photos, and movies, or even secondary operating systems. When you’re done divvying up your drive, format your partitions and install your operating system. Once the installation is complete, you can begin installing applications and generally filling it up with data again.I like to keep separate partitions for music and videos. If you keep your partitions organized, your operating system should be able to perform better and you’ll be able to manage your data more efficiently. I Hope you have enjoyed this Tech Tip on operating systems, hard drives and partitions. If you have a learned anything and would like to share it with everyone or just have a question please leave a comment! | |
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Windows Media Center – Making the PC Cool Again
Windows Media Center is one of those programs that has been around for a while but doesn’t seem to get much notice. Built into most versions 
of Windows since Vista, but often neglected by a large segment of the computing public. In this Tech Tip, we hope to open your eyes and look at some of the cool things that you can do with Windows Media Center. While this will not be all inclusive (for that, you can always visit the official Media Center website), it is meant to give an overview of some of the cooler aspects. Please note that we’ll be concentrating on the version of Media Center found in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
of Windows since Vista, but often neglected by a large segment of the computing public. In this Tech Tip, we hope to open your eyes and look at some of the cool things that you can do with Windows Media Center. While this will not be all inclusive (for that, you can always visit the official Media Center website), it is meant to give an overview of some of the cooler aspects. Please note that we’ll be concentrating on the version of Media Center found in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Out of the Box
If you have a laptop computerwith HDMI the first thing you can do is plug in your PC into your TV since Windows Media Center is optimized for these behemoths. Not sure how to do that? Then take a look at our previous Tech Tip onwatching your tv on a pc. Also, if you don’t already have one, pick yourself up a cheap Media Center remote control. They usually consist of a remote and a USB infrared receiver. The nice thing about them (besides being incredibly cheap) is that they are usually plug-and-play and can be used across platforms (for example, an HP remote control can easily be used on a Dell). If you don’t have a remote and are not into plugging the laptop into the TV – that’s fine, you can just as happily turn your PC into a TV all on its own!Now launch Windows Media Center – either simply click on start and in the “Search Programs and Files” box type in “Windows Media Center” (be sure to launch Media Center and not Media Player) or if you have a Media Center remote control press the green “Media Center” button on it.
TIP: If you have Windows 7, you may wish to also permanently pin it to the taskbar for quicker desktop launching in the future. The first time you launch it, some of the options mentioned in this Tech Tip may seem to be missing. Once Media Center is fully (automatically) updated however, these should appear.
If you have a laptop, you may want to close the lid and do all your navigating with the remote control. To accomplish this, you need to tell your computer to not “go to sleep” (the default setting) when closing your lid. Click on the battery in the task tray, and then click on “More Power Options.” Once the Power Options box is open, on the left hand side click on “choose what closing the lid does” and in the drop down box choose “Do nothing.” Now close your lid, use the remote to navigate the menus and let the adventure begin!
Internet TV
OK, we all (hopefully) know by now that we can watch various television shows on different websites. Windows Media Center cheerfully aggregates many of them into one convenient place. Slide the menu down to TV , choose “Internet TV” and voila! You literally have dozens of shows at your fingertips. Not sure what to watch – why not go to the Guide submenu (also under TV) to see what is available. You can also search as well – though you’d need to either break out a keyboard for that (why not also pick up aninexpensive wireless keyboard when you pick up the remote?) or use the built-in virtual keyboard by clicking “OK” on the remote control. A back button can always take you to a previous menu if you get lost.
TIP: If you have a TV tuner card in your PC, you can also watch live TV as well.
Movies
One of the nicer aspects of Windows Media Center is using it to access your Netflix account and their streaming movie library. Once logged on, you can easily check your Netflix “instant queue” or easily search for titles you may want to see. If you’re more the DVD type of person, you also have a Play DVD submenu option available in the Movie menu. Not to be overlooked is the ability to also watch any videos that may be on your PC (though that is under the Pictures + Videos menu).
Music
Of course Windows Media Center will pick up the music that is on your PC as well. If you have music stored in other places (perhaps on your home network) you can also use the Settings submenu located under the Tasks menu to add additional libraries (tasks>settings>media libraries, choose music and then “add additional libraries”).
Perhaps you may want to listen to some tunes using Internet radio. It may be a little counter-intuitive, but all you need to do is go to Extras menu (not the Music >Radio menu, as all that does is look for an FM tuner until you “add” Internet Radio.) From there, choose the “extras gallery” submenu, and looking at the top, you’ll see some choices - choose “music + radio”. Here you have a link to live365.com and their collection of thousands of stations. Click on the button marked “Add to My Radio” and will place this into your Music>Radio submenu.
Adding it up
Windows Media Center is one of those cool programs built into Windows that people just either under-utilize or never use at all. Here’s a callout to all of you Geeks and Geekettes out there! At your next party, why not use Windows Media Center and your TV to be the multimedia guru of the night. And if you’re already a hip-slicken cool Windows Media Center geek, drop us a comment and let us know of some of your favorite Media Center features; tips and tricks; or other innovative ways that you use Windows Media Center!
Monday, November 8, 2010
Tech Myths Debunked!
By Mark Tiongco - November 7, 2010 | |
In this tech tip, we expose the myth and reality surrounding some of the biggest trends in our technology-oriented world. Hopefully, this will shed some light which can help you better understand how these crazy gadgets work!
| |
1. Why a cable Internet service provider's (ISP) advertised speeds are not actually reality
2. True or False - Your CD burner's 52X speed is
4. Why your 500GB 
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 Megabytes (MB) - Base 10 (10 ^ 9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes)
False-ish - Similar to how a car with 236 lb-ft of torque provides 100% of it at a certain engine rpm speed, PSU manufacturers know that power supplies hit their max wattage at certain points in time.
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