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Laptop users know the horrors of low battery situations. It’s no different from cellphone low bat warnings you get just when you need to call or worst, intruding right in the middle of a call. For laptops, the consequence of low bat is even more sinister and disastrous. It can come just as you are finishing an excel report and you have only a few seconds to save it. If the laptop dies on you while saving a long file, then that’s it. You just lost your file. In some models, you won’t even get any warning, especially when the battery is a year old. It just suddenly dies or goes into hibernation in the middle of your work.

What Can be Done with The Battery

Todate, Lithium-ion or Lithium polymer batteries are the focus of attention as they have the longest current storage among rechargeable batteries. But they still can’t provide at least a full-days life on computer laptops. Even sophisticated smartphones at their sizes fall short of a full-day’s power on a single charge. Until new battery types are made, we just have to contend with them and see how best to conserve and optimize use of battery power. Here are a few things to do towards this end.

– Lessen the monitor brightness. Laptop makers can claim they have the brightest and most brilliant monitors but in real world use, you have to turn that brightness down if you want to conserve battery power. Try to keep them at their useful minimum when working on word processing and spreadsheet application. Turn them fully down or just close the laptop when using it as your mp3 player. The only time you need them at their brightest is when watching a movie or editing an image. But perhaps a desktop PC is better for these two functions.

– Eject any disc you are not using. People often forget they have a disc inside its optical drive. Take it out right away when not in use. Any kind of mechanical action like your optical drives spinning unnecessarily drains your battery power. Game discs and CDs or DVDs eat the most as the drives spin continuously when they are in use. If you have the option to load the content of these discs on your PC, you can take out the discs and conserve battery power better. Hard disk spin consumes less power than optical drive spin.

– Turn off Bluetooth and WiFi. Just like cellphones, laptop Bluetooth when turned on drains battery power. Same with WiFi as both regularly checks for the presence of either and thus consume energy. Activate them only when you intend to use this wireless facility. And if you are low on battery, surfing the net on hotspots should be avoided. WiFi is a radio facility that consumes more power when sending signals over the airwaves.

– Remove external USB devices when not in use. Connected devices like wireless PCMCIA cards and USB flash drives and dongles consume power. Learn to use the touchpad because an external mouse on the USB port consumes power needlessly. Wireless A2DP earphones are great listening to mp3 music while doing your work. But like any Bluetooth function, A2DP earphones can drain your battery faster.
If you can get a spare battery on long trips, by all means do. You could also replace its battery with more powerful one that typically can last twice as long as standard batteries that came with it. GP

Personally I feel it’s cool to view your house via a Satellite View. If you want to catch a glimpse of your house in a satellite’s view, you can scroll down at the bottom of this page where there is a link that will allow you a satellite view of your house, provided by Satellite Views.

Satellite Views can be able to provide satellite views from over 5.9 million locations universally . With the use of mapping service of Google and geodata from Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) databases, they give you very clear pictures of your avenue, block and rooftop.
Satellite Views have been present since December 2005 and are not affiliated with or sponsored by Google nor GNIS.

Satellite Views provide Satellite pictures for many countries such as USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. More countries will be total up to the checklist as and when Google Maps put together in other countries.

Besides providing Free Satellite Views and Maps of Over 5.9 million places, they have made it easier for users to analyze other views of the world by categorising them. In the USA, states that are listed: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington DC, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii , Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Other countries include Africa, Asia, Europe, Egypt, China, France, Kenya, India, Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Italy, South Africa, Russia, Norway, Uganda, North Korea, United Kingdom, Middle East, Afghanistan, Gaza Strip, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, West Bank, North America, Australia – Oceania, South America, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, Hong Kong, Brazil, Guatemala, Malaysia, Chile, Panama, New Zealand, and Nicaragua.

Please visit http://www.feedfreeloader.com/satelliteviewofmyhouse/ to see your house via Satellite or click Satellite View Of My House.

In January 2005 Carlisle was hit by wild weather which plunged half the county into darkness and brought boats on to the city streets. Floods of up to 13 feet deep put Cumbria into headlines worldwide. It is no wonder that in the aftermath of such a disaster, the residents of Carlisle feared any warnings of flooding.

Determined not to be defeated by flooding again, Carlisle residents took measures to protect their homes and businesses, so that when heavy rain had caused flood warnings to be issued in October 2008, they could be ready.

One such Carlisle-based business, Malcolm Dodds Solicitors, took out a hosting policy with DPS Software in order to protect their IT infrastructure in the face of such disasters.

Hosting is the process by which software that is traditionally run from a desktop PC is run over the internet in virtually the same fashion. All that is required is broadband internet access to the DPS data centre, other than that, users go about their work in exactly the same way. As IT infrastructure and maintenance is carried out off site, flooding and other such disasters do not effect IT systems and provided the building is accessible, hosting allows clients to carry on working as normal.

Hosting ensures that software is kept up to date while the host carries the burden of keeping hardware performance checked and maintained. In addition, the need for IT staff and expertise is removed to the hosting provider. This allows firms to capitalise on not only a wider variety of software, but also more advanced versions of hardware. This is beneficial for firms as they can use the same software as much larger competitors offering high levels of client service without the major upfront costs.

Malcom Dodds commented: “Hosting guarantees a trouble free software system. I no longer have any networking problems and I have not had to call on engineers since I went hosted. This has saved me a considerable amount of money, time, and lowered my blood pressure to acceptable levels!”

He added, “Updates were becoming a problem with crime as the LSC introduced contract changes on a regular basis and I was having to install all these on the computer on my network, but these are now dealt with by DPS.”

“I have always found the support staff at DPS to be excellent since I became a client over 14 years ago. It also makes the system more mobile and I can access my case management system from anywhere and particularly with the advent of digital dictation working away from the office becomes a viable alternative. It is all worth serious consideration.”

The next 10 years promises to be an exciting period in the history of computers and networks as nanotechnology takes off to redefine a new level in the way computers are manufactured. It’s not entirely radical as the Lithographic principles behind the manufacturing process can be adopted for nanotech processes. What is revolutionary are the minute molecular-level sizes at which those circuit boards can now be made. This is the core of nanotech – derived from the Greek nano which means tiny. And in this case, we’re talking molecular tiny. In quantitative scientific terms, “tiny” is in the area of a billionth of a meter or around 1/500th the width of a hair strand. That’s “nano” mathematically.

Nanotechnology in Computers

Nanotechnology ushers in a more meaningful and useful age of miniaturization. The Integrated Chip of the 70s did the same thing that was seminal in manufacturing increasingly smaller chips that now power our cellphones and computers. But they have their limits and we have reached that.

With molecule-sized nanotech based manufacturing of processor chips, memory modules and storage devices, these limits can be breached that will eventually bring two things: (1) more powerful, more cost-effective and more power-efficient computers across all platforms, from mainframes down to laptops; and (2) smaller computer footprints for the same power and efficiencies we currently have.

– Nanotech Microprocessors

With greater transistor densities, processor chips these days have grown so powerful that they require more effective cooling systems employing fans and even water-based coolants usually reserved in mainframes. Lithographic technologies that create those wafer thin circuits containing millions of etched transistors have reached practical limits. Nanotechnology’s molecular-level lithography is the next step. Not only will it produce more powerful computer engines, it can make them operate cooler and with less bulk. Associated circuits in the motherboards and even add-on daughterboards like video graphics and sound processors can be integrated into smaller boards so that computers over the next decade can be no larger than the largest cell phones of today.

– Nanomemories

Memory modules in the 1GB to 2GB range are becoming common these days. Even cellphones have memories in that magnitude. But just like processor chips, you have a manufacturing limit to contend with which bears down on the maximum speed, size and powering efficiency of memory chips. Over the next few years, more powerful RAM with higher capacities and speeds but lower costs can be made from nonmagnetic technology.

– Solid State ”hard drives”

Disk drives have likewise reach the size and capacity limits. If you look at your flash drives now commonly sporting 4, 8 and 16 GB capacities, they are all solid state storage devices that hold the promise of greater storage capacities and efficiencies in computers.

They are also immune to physical shocks or mechanical crashes that hard disks are prone to suffer. But they are expensive to produce and have the highest costs per megabyte of memory compared with a 1Terrabyte hard disk we have at this time. Nanotechnology should take care of that. Expect nanotech-based flash drive technology to evolve with higher memory capacity that will eventually make it more cost effective to replace current electro-mechanical hard drives. GP