The patented device by Kaspersky will connect inside of the computer or machine between the hard drive (HDD or SSD) and the computing unit, between the CPU and RAM. The device is also connected on the system bus or integrated into the disk controller. This mean’s it wont be connected by PCIe like other hardware is, it will be an intercept on the hard drive.

The hardware-based anti-virus will effectively allow or block any writing to the hard disk, preventing viruses from starting in the first place.  Users will be alerted of the potential risk, preventing or denying the infection from being written to disk.

The patent shows that the device will be self-supported with an ARM processor and RAM, so it will not take away from the machines performance what so ever.  The device will also have its own database for malicious code and faulty records during definition updates.

Kaspersky did mention this could be sold and used on a consumer based market, but will help prevent miscellaneous code from spreading in servers and specialized machines initially, such as ATMs. So don’t look for this any time soon, but know that you will be more safe getting your money out of those conveniently placed boxes.

Case – 13 Pounds – $80

Everything needs to start with a frame. Something that will hold everything that is to come. Something that is sturdy, and does what it is made to do. In this case we are looking for something that is, essentially, geared towards lanning. Thermaltake has been creating excellent products for years, and this is one of those excellent products. Thermaltake’s LANBOX Lite is perfect to show off to your friends, and also perfect for the traveling PC gamer. From Thermaltake, a company that has remarkable cooling products, you can only imagine that amount of vents and fans that are correctly placed to keep your precious hardware cool and keep you above the rest of the pack when it comes to performance. Sporting a cool side window and some sleek blue LED fans, your friends will rival you and your rig, no doubt about it.

Power Supply – 4 Pounds – $90

Powering the beast we are about to create will be a Corsair CMPSU-650TX, definitely perfect for our build. The 650watt output is great to power all of the fans for cooling, and of course all of the processing power and graphical power needed to jump ahead of the competition. Also we have all the power on one 12V rail which will keep it from ending with an early demise. With it’s nice color scheme of black and gold, it will look like it belonged inside our Thermaltake LANBOX, and have more than enough power to shred the competition.

Motherboard – 1 Pounds – $120

This motherboard is rated quite highly among the microATX form factor motherboards, and it is obvious to see why. This board takes full advantage of the new Core i7 and i5 processors from Intel, and because of that they will keep you multitasking like never before. Play multiple games at the same time if you want! Some gamers call that hotboxing, I call that purely extreme. With this motherboard you can have a maximum of 16GB of memory installed, not like that would really be necessary for our type of build, but it certainly is nice knowing you have the room to upgrade. With a whopping 10, yes TEN, USB 2.0 ports in the back of this beast, you will always have room for all of your gadgets to hook up at your LAN station. You have as many hoola-girls you want, as long as you save room for your favorite mouse and keyboard, of course!

Processor – Really Light – $195

This is probably the lightest part of our lightweight lanning beast, and also the most expensive. You might think that with a gaming computer the videocard is going to be the most expensive, but to get the most out of your computer you don’t want it to bottleneck at the processor. New games are coming out with multiprocessor capabilities, which means that it will take full advantage of your brand new processor. The Intel Core i5-750 running at 2.66Ghz is remarkable, quad core meaning you have more processing power than you can handle. You will be able to quickly switch your computers focus and of course, this is just another one of those components that will put you ahead of your friends, and probably even further ahead of your enemies.

Video Card – 2 Pounds – $135

This is the part you have been waiting for, I am sure. The BFG Tech GeForce 9800GTX+ video card is all the power you will need. Lot’s of guides will tell you to go all out and spend more money then you will need to, but this is supposed to be a lanning machine! If you need more power than this I suggest you take a step back and stay at home. This puppy will do just what you need, with high clock rates and great overall power, you need not worry about framerate lag with this bad boy. You will be able to run almost all of your games at high resolution and max your settings out. What more do you need? This will keep you up to date for quite some time, and you aren’t spending $300-$500, making upgrades possible without emptying your pockets fully.

Memory – Really Light – $105

G.SKILL has been an up and comer for quite some time now, which is great. I love seeing companies like this come up and break forward to become one of the top memory companies around. This one doesn’t change anything, with two 2GB modules, you have a total of 4gb of memory to again, keep you from bottle necking and keep your computer from running out of power. Since your motherboard has a maximum of 16GB of memory you could always buy two of these packs, netting you a total of 8GB of memory for only around $200. And I mean, with a description attention-getter like this, why wouldn’t you want this for a LAN box? Pwn the competition and frag your enemies with fast DDR3 1600 SDRAM at a price point that lets you upgrade on a budget.

Hard Drive – 1 Pound – $160

This was a really tough decision for me, not because of the part itself, but because of the cost to space available ratio. I suppose that we aren’t really trying to keep our costs extremely low in this post, but I always like to try to work on a budget. My goal for this bad boy was to stick under a grand, and so far I am pretty sure we are under that.

We have here a 150GB hard drive. Yep, only 150GB. Why so low? Because we are going for speed here. This is a 10,000RPM hard drive from Western Digital, aptly named the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM is 25% faster than the standard harddrive, which makes the cost of this drive go up as high as it is for the amount of space capable. This speed, for instance, will make your game load 25% faster than your friends game if he has the exact same parts besides the hard drive, and with all the parts we have picked out so far you will be guaranteed to finish first 100% percent of the time, and kick your friends butts without a doubt.

If, however, you need some more space for other things like music or videos, then you could always spend a few more dollars, for another Western Digital drive, such as the Caviar Blue, which will give you 640GB more space for only $70.

DVD Drive – 1 Pounds – $26

LITE-ON is great, and a DVD drive may seem like any other DVD drive, but sometimes you just need to know about the manufacturer before you purchase, and LITE-ON is one of those where you just know. This drive will read any disc, and play any disc, with some speed behind it. It also burns discs if you need to, but all we would really need this for is to install our games and maybe to throw in a CD once in a while. This will get the job done for only $26.

Summary – 22 Pounds – $900

Twenty-two pounds. All of this power and under than 30 pounds? I’d say that is worth it! Topping at $890, plus a hundred or so depending if you want to beef up your memory, I would say that having a 2.66Ghz Quad core with 4gigs of ram and a kickass video card to boot will teach your friends and enemies a lesson! And of course you will have a sleek and stylish case from Thermaltake to let them know that you really mean business. This installation will also be incredibly easy due to the fact that inside the case, everything is done with cages and thumb screws. You might not even need to own a screwdriver to get this one fully put together! I did not include prices for the operating system, or games, but for a good copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from NewEgg you will still barely be breaking the $1,100 mark. For this kind of cash, if you are a true gamer and your computer keeps freezing up and crashing in the midst of every important, explosive battle it’s worth it.

It’s time to upgrade folks, you gonna do it?

UPDATE: I have asked NewEgg for the opportunity to have a full build log with the above hardware. Hopefully I will be able to show you guys exactly what everything does and give you bench marks and actually weigh it when it is all put together! Just waiting for a response from them, can’t wait!

If you have ever installed Vista or XP or even Windows 7 from a DVD, you know that it can sometimes be a consuming drag of waiting and watching status bars, well why not make things a little bit speedier the next time you need to install this 4 month old operating system? I think it’s about time you learn!

Step One

The first thing you need to do is get Windows 7. It doesn’t matter the version you get, from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate, from x68 or x64, it just simply doesn’t matter. Which makes this whole situation so much more enjoyable! Once you have the disc (or an ISO..) you need to make sure you have a few other things to make this go smoothly.

Step Two

A flash drive is important for this operation, I promise you! You will need a flash drive that is at least 4gb in size so it can fit all of the goodies on the drive, we are doing a full copy here not a “Streamlining” or what have you.

Step Three

Plug the flash drive into your computer, and make sure you know what drive letter it is assigned to (ex. Drive E:). You are then going to want to load up the Command Prompt and type in “diskpart“, which will load the utility you need to set the drive up to become bootable.

This part kind of got me mad at the beginning, because I realized I was trying to do it with XP. If you are using XP then you need to find someone who has a version of of Windows Vista or Windows 7 installed, or you need to find a copy of VMWare and use that to setup the flash drive. Sadly there is no way around this, I did a lot of research and I ended up using the VMWare method myself.

So as long as you have Vista+, have disk part loaded up, and have your flash drive and Windows 7 DVD inserted in the computer, you can continue! Awesome, right?

Step Four

Next you will want to type in “list disk” in to the command prompt where it says  DISKPART>. This will show all of the disks that are attached to your computer, find out which one is the Flash Drive that you want to format. For this demonstration, let’s use Disk 5. You will then want to type “select disk 5″ in the command prompt, which will set that as the disk you are editing.

Step Five

After you have that all setup and good to go, your next step will be a long string of commands, followed one after another:

clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

What did we just do do your drive? Destroyed it!!! No, just kidding. All we did was create a primary partition, make it the active partition, and then format it with FAT32 file system. Easy!

Step Six

This is the part that seems to be the most time consuming, you need to copy all of the files from your Windows 7 DVD to your Flash Drive. It is pretty simple it just takes about 15 minutes or so to fully copy everything, but this of course depends on your system and your DVD reader. For this demonstration lets say we are going to have our DVD player set as Drive D: and our USB Drive is just one drive down the line, Drive E:.

Again:
Drive D:   -   DVD Player
Drive E:   -   USB Flash Drive

xcopy d:*.* /s/e/f e:

The drive letters may be different that yours, but that shouldn’t be a problem. If you got this far, hopefully you know the alphabet at least a small bit.

When it is done copying, it will say something along the lines of “791 File(s) copied), then give you a C: prompt again. The number of files changes depending on build, edition, etc.

Step Seven

The last and final step before you get on your merry way would be booting from the USB Drive. Lot’s of guides make you go into your BIOS to change your boot order, but I don’t really see myself booting off a Flash Drive every day, so all I do is simply Hit F11 when the computer is starting up which loads up the “One-Time Boot Menu”. You then chose the drive that you want to boot off of, every computer is different, but hopefully since you did all of the previous steps, you can figure it out from there. It isn’t always F11, on most Dell computer’s you need to hit F12, ASRock is F11, some are F8. You will have to watch your screen when you first load up the computer to double check, or even check out motherboards manual for more help.

I think that is just an all-around better way to install Windows 7, it is easier to carry around a Flash Drive, it is faster than a DVD, and it’s just easier, period. I hope this guide has helped you out some how, and I hope it makes your future a little bit.. smoother.

If you’ve found that quad-core processors simply aren’t robust enough for you, then here is a bit of good news. PC Advisor is reporting that Intel’s 32nm 6-core processors will be launching in the first half of this year. This processors will be built on Intel’s Westmere architecture, which means power savings compared to older 45nm products, and, of course, six cores instead of the four that we tend to see these days. The desktop variety of the 6-core processors will be Gulftown, which will be sold as a high-end variant of the Core i7 line.

These won’t be Intel’s first six-cored processors though, those were Intel’s 45nm “Dunnington” processors from the server-focused Xeon line.

PC Advisor went on to report that in addition to the extra cores the new Westmere processors will be getting an updated instruction set and that they will feature the advanced power management tools that Intel has been rolling out lately, which enable the processors to limit the power consumed by idle cores when performing tasks that can’t take advantage of all of them.

Read more at PCAdvisor.co.uk. HotHardware has a ton of details on Westmere as well.

[via Geek.com]

That, however, is not the point of this small tidbit of information. Thankfully, for both you and I. This is more about the importance of said printer, and how vital it is for your business, no matter how large and no matter how small. The printer is definitely one of the best things for your business to have, be it to scan, to copy, to fax, or even to do what it’s name dictates, print! It is stunning to think of all the things that the printer will be able to do in just a few short years.

These days, most printers come as “All In Ones”, which basically do the four tasks I previously mentioned. These fours tasks are getting seeminlgy basic, seemingly repetitive as each day goes by. We are looking into the future every day, scanning and copying at the same time, scanning printing and faxing at the same time, many many multiple tasks. I am not a think tank, nor am I very creative in terms of the future, so I really don’t have many ideas of my own. Darn.

This all in one pocket knife of techonology is brilliant, and also quite complicated. To be compeltely honest, it is my bane. Printers are just about the one thing that have always tried to get away from my intelligence, and at some point in our chase, it got away from me. I have never quite mastered printing or how a printer fully works, that’s why I stick with more internal hardware and software.. but that’s another show.

If a printer doesn’t seem to want to work, the very first thing I would say is shut it off. Let it cool its’ jets, let it relax, let the power that is stored up inside this dangerous machine dissipate into our atmosphere, because that might be all that it needs, a little time to meditate; so to speak. That has solved certain problems throughout my grind of the computer world a few times, but was never the ultimate solution, sadly. You need to then look up exactly what your error what might be, it can be just about anything; from a paper jam, to a memory error..such as mine.

If there is no documented reason as to why your problem seems to be coming up, try to narrow it down to when exactly it is happening, such as whenever you are saving a document, or whenever you are scanning a document to a PDF, whatever the case may be, you need to try to keep your reasons down. If you get to vague, and come up with too many possible solutions, the only answer to your worst problem would be some aspirin of some sort, to cure that blaring headache you are building up.

It is best to keep trying, though.

If your one method fails, go on to the next. If that method falls through, go on to the next again; just remember to take your time and maybe even a break every now and then, because again, that aspirin wont get you through woods, just over the next ridge. When you are running through the woods, take a minute to stop and look at your compass, it will save your printers life.

But who knows, maybe you can’t save it’s life! Scrap it. Printers are a dime a dozen, so replacing a printer normally isn’t too difficult of a thing to do. Just make sure you get one that is of pretty decent quality, and also make sure that it can do what you want it to. And by that I mean color quality and also quantity of pages printed.

Printers can come in a some what simpler form as well as all in one printers, they come as, well, printers. These printers can either be simple such as black and white only (which is rare), or a few types of color printers. If you look deeper, you start seeing that the ink cartridges are different. There are tons of them! And they are normally the most expensive part of the printer, most of the times you can buy an entire new printer cheaper than the ink for the printer. You can get inks that have all the colors in them, Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black (CMYK), or you can get the type of ink that has each one seperated. It really depends on your choice when it comes down to it, sometimes the “All In One” inks are easier to install, so if you just dont care and plan on printing everything in color, go for those. If not, aim for the later, you might save yourself a buck or two…not much though.

All in all, printers are printers. Sure you might be able to do all sort of different things with printers, and they shouldn’t really be called printers any more, but who knows what to call them besides that. I sure don’t. I hope you have a good friend sitting next to you, waiting to be aligned, waiting to be fed some paper, waiting to do it’s job. Take care of that friend, because when you want to run through the forest, you might not have any aspirin in your pocket.

<3 Mike

Getting a monitor is great, and lot’s of times people will say “Oh did you get a new computer??” You can brag and brag saying “Oh yeah I got this great new computer, isn’t it nice and bright?” That’s always the best thing to do, but that doesn’t always happen I suppose, only with the type of people that aren’t really sure what they are talking about when it comes to computers. It is still nice to brag about getting a new monitor in general, especially if it looks as nice as an Apple monitor.

Apple monitors are pretty much the aliens in this category, and by that I mean they are the most rare, the most extravagant, and quite simply, the best. Apple monitors are created with LED technologies that I really am not qualified to explain, but to be short they are the brightest, clearest, sexiest monitors that I have seen. Ever. They are definitely expensive, ranging into the thousands for just a monitor, so if you are going for a bargain then this is definitely not your deal. If you are going for pure awesomeness, then this is definitely your deal! If you want something cheaper, shoot for Acer or similar.

The monitors that I use at my home are both 22″ Acer monitors, and they are both pretty nice for the price I paid for them. I purchased them about a year and a half ago, and they are still working pretty nicely. There is never any trailing or flickering, and there has not been any sort of ‘ghosting’ effect or what have you. I paid about $200 back then, but now you can get them for a lot less from NewEgg. They are pretty wide so they take up a lot of desk space, but obviously that is something you can not avoid. On the other hand, it is a flat panel-style monitor, so that means that if you are changing from a CRT to a flat panel, you are gaining a whole lot of desk space no matter what you do.

Desk space is becoming more and more valuable, and with my desk space shrinking every day with piles of paperwork and certification books I would gladly give up a CRT in exchange for a nice wide flat monitor any day, even if it costs me a couple hundred dollars.

Lot’s of times old CRT monitors tend to be smaller in overall viewable size, which is why I stated “Is it.. both?” in the title up there. Often times I come across a CRT monitor that is simply put, tiny. Tiny in viewable area, but HUGE in actual desk space taken up. Monitor’s can be as small as 13″ sometimes, and can weigh nearly 30lbs. That is just immense, and this means it is definitely time to get a new monitor.

Let’s Just Get Down To It

The following are a few monitors that I think are great. I have seen or used most of them, and they can all be purchased from NewEgg for a great low price, just click each monitor to get some more information on them from NewEgg’s website.

23″

22″

21.5″

20″

19″

A device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device. -Wikipedia

There you go! That pretty much sums up just what a driver is!

I guess I can explain it a little bit nicer, because that probably doesn’t mean much to you. If it does then that’s great! I hope I get the translation correct.

Basically, that quote says that a driver is an application that runs in the background of your computer that you really don’t know is there. It’s not like other programs that run in the background, like virus’, it is very helpful and allows certain programs to communicate with peripherals or hardware inside your computer.

Just about everything has it’s own driver. Whenever you connect a new device, say a camera you got for Christmas, you’re computer will pop with a little box that says “Installing new hardware..” or something similar to that. When it is doing this, it is putting the drivers application files into the correct place to make your camera pop up and say “Hey! I’m here!”

Hardware inside the computer needs it as well, most often video cards and sound cards need to be updated frequently to stay up to date and in the best working condition. You might think to your self “but my video games are loading just fine, why do I need to update my drivers?”. Lot’s of times you may not notice what is going on in the circuitry on the physical card, there might be a small bug that is creating a lot of heat in the video card, or maybe the game could just run a little bit smoother than normal.

It is more important to just have a drive installed, if you don’t then the operating system will not work correctly with anything! This is the reason why when you first install a video card your icons on your monitor might be really huge, that’s because the resolution is really small and the drivers aren’t even installed. After they get installed, everything is good to go! This is the case with a lot different programs and applications, and that is why drivers are always needed to be installed and kept up to date.

Driver updates are important and should always be kept up to date, go to your manufacturers website and check to see if you have the most up to date drivers for just about everything, it won’t hurt

If you think your memory is the cause of all of your computer problems, then you need to get it checked out, most of the time computer technicians will use MemTest to actually check out if your memory is the root of all the evil on your desktop, this will help show you without having to go to an expensive technician.. like myself.

I found the easiest way was just to use HP’s USB Disk Storage Tool, which you can download from BayWolf by clicking on this link right here, then by downloading Windows 98 system files, yes, Windows 98.. by clicking on this link right here.

After that, install the HP tool and run it from Start -> All Programs -> HP, odds are it will show up as a newly installed application, so there shouldn’t be much hassle finding it. Then when that pops up chose the Flash Drive that you wish to format, yeah sadly this will format your flash drive all together, but in the end I think that this will be more helpful to you. Chose Create a DOS startup disk from the Format Options box, and then browse to the directory that you that you extracted the Windows 98 system files to. Click OK, then click Start. It will warn you that everything will be lost, so click Yes and let it do its thing.

That’s it. Your USB flash drive is now bootable, nice and simple, right? Now you will need to get the MemTest application from this link, and put that mt400.exe file (that’s inside the zip) in your flash drive. Odds are it will look like the flash drive is already empty and wont be bootable, don’t worry the files are just hidden system files, they are there

After you put mt400.exe on your flash drive you will need to reboot your system and make sure you load up boot options by pushing F12 or something similar right when the computer starts up, it varies depending on which motherboard you are using so make sure you got it right, it might take a couple reboots to get the timing down but I am sure you can manage if you got this far..

You will then have a DOS prompt, a simple DOS prompt with a blinking bar, type in “mt400.exe” and memtest will start! Run whatever tests you want to make sure your memory is working up to par, after you find out it’s severely damaged, I suggest you head over to NewEgg and get yourself some new memory

Have you had troubles getting MemTest to work on a USB drive? Did this help you? I hope it did because if I had a guide like this in the first place it would’ve saved me a lot of time!