How's that 8 day delay working for you?...Not good

When it came to watching a rerun of your favorite tv show online, you used to be able to do it the day after the show premiered.  With Fox, not anymore.  In an effort to get you away from watching TV online, Fox started a policy of only posting new shows 8 days after the show premiered.  What this meant is that if you relied on the Internet to watch shows, you would always be 2 weeks behind in viewing your favorite show.  Well, what is a smart Internet user to do about this problem?  According to TorrentFreak, everybody is stepping up and pirating at a staggering rate.  Since the policy went into effect, illegal downloads of shows have increased over 100% over periods prior to the delay.  Hell's Kitchen downloads have increased 114% and Masterchef, 189%.  Seems like the grand plan is backfiring.  Instead of using the Internet to hamper or inconvenience your fans, Fox may be better suited in trying to use the Internet to make them happy or gain new fans.  Read the full story here.

Firesale! HP Touchpads on clearance

Thursday, HP announced that the recently released Touchpad Tablet was being discontinued.  I suppose those poor sales would account for that.  Suddenly a $500 tablet was on sale for $99.  I headed out to my local Best Buy store to find out that a Black Friday line was out this morning and all of them were gone.  I'm still mourning the fact that I missed out on such a good deal, but did I really?  Every review that I came across indicated that the tablet was mediocre in need of some software fixes.  Since HP has discontinued that, maybe I'm the lucky to have missed out.  If you find one, congratulations, if you didn't, well it seems like we didn't miss much.

New "How to" page entries

How to clean your LCD Display correctly and how to clean and disinfect your mouse and keyboard are the newest entries in the how to section to your right of this page.  They are under the Help Desk section of this website.  Happy reading!

Firefox 6 available now

Hard to believe it, but true.  Firefox has just released version 6 today.  Except for being version 6, you probably will not notice much difference between the current version 5 and the new release.  You should be prompted to update automatically over the next couple of days from Firefox.  If you do not want to wait, go here.

A great place to buy spare computer parts and accessories

Two weeks ago, Goodwill opened a computerworks store in Lawrenceville (51st Street).  I must say that it is a great place to buy parts and accessories.  As I wondered around the aisles, I thought to myself, "this is ebay without the shipping!"  I will be back.  There were many things I wanted to buy, but did not need, but the prices were so good that I was tempted anyway.   All laptop bags are $4.99.  The computer prices are decent as well.  As someone who mourned the loss of the computer show at the old Expo Mart in Monroeville, this store brings back the hope that I can get good computer parts without Ebay!

Eating up your cell phone's data limit

Recently, a customer asked me how she could be using so much of her monthly data quota from AT&T.  They had called her with a friendly reminder that some members of her family were approaching the monthly limit.  She wanted to know what could they possibly be doing to use so much data in a month.  My first thought was tethering, but quickly ruled that out for some other reasons.   Well what could do it?  The two biggest culprits are typically streaming music and streaming video.    Each, if done on a regular basis will eat up your data plans.  Use Wifi as much as possible and turn off some of the unneccessary location services that some apps use.  For more data eating solutions, check out this PCWorld article.