General Advice on Computers: If You Need Me, Care For Me, Baby

A regular care of your PC is required so that it serves you for long without fail. The most important things while buying a new PC that come to my mind are listed below. I am also listing some points for maintenance which is needed after you buy your PC. 


If any one finds any other important factor that should be included in this, can m2m me or post comment(s) on this review. Right Selection of Hardware: - Branded or assembled, call is yours but if you choose right vendor you can get very good assembled PC too. With Branded (cost difference is not much now a days) you get licensed Operating System, Antivirus and other goodies in the form of printer, CDs etc.- Before you decide to buy a particular configuration of PC, be sure to note down your requirements. 


What you want it to do for you. It is like appointing a candidate in a company. A candidature is posted only after finalizing job needs and job profile. - Always go for a new computer so that it lives its full life for you. Atleast select the latest family (P4) and you can compromise with the configuration. You can buy one or two steps lower configuration than the latest one as it will give you a good cost benefit. And go for Centrino if you are going for a laptop. 


As the hardware costs have come to ground level prices there is no point in going for a second hand PC or laptop or a new P3 PC. - If you are crazy about new games that need high resources in your PC, select high RAM (atleast 512MB or 1GB), go for a separate display Card (64MB or higher) as in most of the cases display memory is used as shared memory from the total lot. - Buy 15” or above monitor as 14” is almost out of use now. -  Select a right vendor who is a long term player in the market so that he is able to take your call in need. Maintenance: - Keep your PC away from water cooler or doors and windows as dust and moisture are the two biggest enemies of the chips lying inside your PC. - Get your system checked at a regular frequency (preventive maintenance) may be once a quarter so that the dust accumulated inside get cleared. Moisture / dust of RAM get cleaned. 


This can be done with the help of a light duty vacuum cleaner and wiping the RAMs with a soft clean cloth. Also don’t forget to check any loose cards in the slots and nuts properly screwed. - Use dust covers when your PC is not in use. - Listen to your PC: Any non-familiar, non regular beeps / sounds/ messages should be noticed when your system is booting up or running. An additional sound in your CD-ROM may need cleaning of dust.

Review On Axis Bank (formerly UTI Bank): Harnessing Technology For Service

Few days back got my renewal notice for ULIP payment which gets due in Jan every year. Since I do most of my payments (BSES Rajdhani, Airtel, LIC, Citibank Credit Card, MTNL, Touchtel) through internet on my bank website, wondered if I could pay my ULIP due also through internet. Checked on various gateways – Citibank, ICICI, Billjunction.com (it ultimately uses Citibank Gateway only) and UTI site also to find if I could pay online through my debit or credit card. Alas, could not find a single place where ULIP payment provision was there. 


All of a sudden the slogan on the envelope of UTI came into sight in which I received my renewal notice. Boldly it was printed there – “Harnessing Technology for Service”. We Indian (especially government) organization shout loudly and deliver little. On one hand we have any foreign bank with extra ordinary and outstanding unbeatable technology services (no doubt few Indian banks also in the fray but how much competitive they are and how much successful, I don’t want to comment on it.). 


I really don’t understand why really we don’t want to adopt and accept new well established and well proven technologies which are successful all over the world. May be we are happy with little progress and more manual work. Otherwise in today’s scenario there are turn key projects which get your systems established within no time, provided you are clear what you want. Is UTI backed by “UTI Technology Services Limited” really “HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR SERVICE”. Which technologies? What kind of harnessing? For Service to whom? God knows!

Take A Wise Decision While Taking Broadband Connection

When you decide to go for a broadband connection which is obviously better than a dial-up connection, you must see the return of investment whatever small amount you are going to invest. a dial-up connection 

Is required where you connect for 1 hour or so once a week and thats it. there you don’t require broadband. Broadband is required mainly for heavy users, probably who know how to utilise it, may be downloading, online gaming, bill paying, browsing, chatting, online music / radios, mailing etc. This requirement may be in home, SOHO, small office, or a big industry.

Always have minimum but best players with you. You have a phone at home already (land line), check with your phone service provider if they provide broadband, ask them the nearby customers from whom you can get the feedback, it may be touchtel, sify, mtnl, bsnl etc. 

If this feedback comes negative then do the same exercise for other providers. Once you are satisfied with a reliable feedback (check that the feedback person is using the connection for more than 4 months), then maybe decide to surrender your current land-line and go for a new connection that comprises of a broadband internet connection as well a land-line number. and both run parallel now a days. Airtel is good or MTNL is good may not be universally true. It may depend on geographical location also. MTNL has come up with very lucrative options but only problem there is it is a sarkari office where you don’t know whom to contact for what? Because the person sitting there is smart enough to never let a government office come up to a standard of a professional private company.

I am using airtel since last 18 months. When I took this connection, MTNL broadband was not there in my area and they were planning to start in next few months. Being not sure about there commitment, I decided not to wait for them to come and surveyed for the best player in the area. I found Airtel as best, surrendered my MTNL landline, took airtel broadband (landline + unlimited internet) and am quite satisfied with it. it has never been down since beginning. Whenever I logged in ( I use it almost daily for atleast 3-4 hours), it was available to me. speed was never an issue but on a few occasions. The cabling and installation was fantastic. 

I had an option of sify too at that time and in fact I had placed an order with sify first, but when they started putting their cables through poles and trees, cable swinging in the air, I dropped the idea. I preferred airtel because they have done all underground cabling with fibre backbone which is going to serve for years to come without fail.

One problem in bill paymentI face is that all airtel outlets do not accept payment of broadband connection through credit card. In fact the two outlets are still different - one for broadband and the other for mobile. I fail to understand why it is like that.

Navigation Problem On Motushut.com

This post of mine was published way back on March 6, 2006 regarding Mouthshut.com navigation issues at that point of time.

I appreciate the effort to support the consumer community by building a strong and beautiful site called ’’Mouthshut.com’’, but i want to focus today on the site itself. I am an above average user of internet and most of the time am able to understand any new website and browse appropriately for the purpose for which I have to navigate on that site. 


Apparently on mouthshut.com i found some problem of navigation. I wanted  to post my reviews on my savings account experience with some bank and i had to spend around 15-20 minutes to understand to hit at the right target. Ultimately I was able to post my reviews but most of the time I get lost on this site I dont know why and how. I think I should visit this site more often and get more familiar with the site. 


Maybe I have to visit more to this site to get more friendly with the pages and contents. I hope others do not get lost like me and get to the point where they want to reach in no time.

Quality Speaks: Product Review: DRM Removal From iSkysoft

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/quality-speaks-product-review-drm-removal-from-iskysoft/

Let us discuss today about a product that has successfully passed all Quality Control check and is available off the shelf with a unique set of features imbibed in it. Quality Assurance speaks louder in such products because after launch product capabilities’ sustenance is quite important – more than product launch.

DRM is an abbreviation for Digital Rights Management. What exactly Digital Rights Management (DRM) is? It is supposed to be a access controlling agent to any digitized copyrighted matter. What that means is if your contents in digital form are important and need to be protected, it is DRM that comes into picture to do that task. DRM in general controls a user’s authorities over digital media (hardware, disk etc.).

A classical example is if you have bought a Blu-Ray and want to copy its contents on your other music device having internal memory, it does not allow. Reason is DRM.
iSkysoft’s DRM Removal for Windows is a product that gives you a freedom of sharing DRM audio and video files without any violations of law. A DRM WMV file or files can be shared legally on different digital media devices like iPod, iPad, iPhone, Xbox, PSP, Symbian, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, PS3 or for that sake any other mobile or portable media device.
DRM Removal works on all current available Windows platforms viz. Windows XP/ 2000/ 2003/ Vista/ Windows 7. The function of this product is to disable or remove DRM restrictions from any audio/ video file(s). Once you remove DRM from WMV the files become plain and playable on any portable/ mobile media device.

DRM Removal for Windows is a legal crack available for debarring of DRM protection from media files in any format like M4P, M4V, M4B, WMV, WMA etc. It can remove DRM from a number of files in a batch also. In fact the product has a special feature of removal of DRM and conversion to different format in a batch process that can be set easily. With settings control panel, the output and input can be controlled and optimized in a personalized manner.

It is quite interesting and easy to remove DRM WMV and have desired outputs for desired media. Some other useful features of this product are extraction of audio from video files for the resultant files to be played in any audio player. DRM Removal besides supporting normal video formats, supports most of the high definition video formats for conversion and removal purposes.

So many features in any product are not built in a day. It is high focus towards quality that derives out such products.

Quality Speaks: Product Review: Wondershare Video Converter For Mac

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/quality-speaks-product-review-wondershare-video-converter-for-mac/

Mac products are high in demand among Mac user’s community. Buying one format of audio or video media and finding oneself constrained to not able to play it on other audio/ video devices available is always a point of frustration for buyer. If you have an Apple Mac and suffer through the same frustration of not able to play Mac Video/ audio files on your other portable/ mobile devices, your frustration ends when you use Wondershare Video Converter.

Wondershare Video Converter has a capability of converting your Mac audio/ video (any format) for playback on any other portable/ mobile devices. If you are looking for flv to mov converter, Wondershare Video Converter is the ideal solution. It converts most of the audio/ video format files on Mac OS to desired formats. The converter does three things quite smartly. It converts any standard format audio/ video to any other standard audio/ video format. It converts high density (HD) video formats to any other high density or standard video format. It also has a capability of extracting audio from video to play it on audio portable/ mobile devices.

FLV to MOV is not the only thing that Wondershare Video Converter does. The beauty of product lies in its capability of producing output video for almost all possible portable/ mobile devices – like Windows, Blackberry, Android, PSP, Xbox, Zune; to name a few.

If you have to convert flv to mov you will definitely require Wondershare Video Converter. But the power of this product is far beyond what we have discussed so far. Wondershare Video Converter converts video compatible with most of the applications like iDVD, Adobe Premiere, Quick Time, iTune, iMovie. Besides this the product has another capability or feature of sharing the converted video on any of the popular social media, video sharing or personal blog site quite easily. The Wondershare Video Converter can easily share converted video to picasa web, youtube, facebook, myspace, tumblr or personal blog site.

Bulk files can be configured in a batch process for conversion with standard (default) or customized settings. It can quite easily play well with videos in terms of ripping, cutting, cropping or joining them. Real time preview is another best feature to select best options for optimized output. While playing video or previewing video, still pictures (snaps) in BMP or JPG formats also can be taken.

The actual product in real is far stronger than what has been described above clearly states highest level of quality in Wondershare Video Converter for Mac.

Software Project Management and Quality Assurance

Software Project Management and Quality Assurance