10 Mar 07 Laptop Amilo Fujitsu Siemens
Whenever you have to take the decision to buy a new laptop, many, but many parameters must be considered. Do you care about the brand and their customer service or do you care just about the technical specs of the computer?. How much are you willing to invest in extras that normally are not part of that wonderful initial offer you saw on the shop?.
The laptop I am using to write this right now can at least meet most of both requirements, but it has some drawbacks. I am talking about a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo, with an AMD Turion at 704 Mhz and 2Gb of RAM memory. On the good side, it is a reliable computer, with a big screen ( 17″) that spares me from having to work with an external one ( I am a fan of big screens :-)). The 100Gb of space in the hard disk is more than enough for all my working documents, and the RAM is excellent. It comes also with the full range of USB ports, Wi-fi, TV connection, Bluetooth and slots for reading several types of memory cards, So, what is not so good with it? The battery last less than 1.5h and it is too heavy when I take it with me to work outside home.
This is a lesson I learnt. Either you take a quite big laptop to keep it more or less in one place, as a desktop, but with some mobility, either you take a lighter version with different extras (longer battery life, smaller screen and lighter) to keep it always in the move.
To find the perfect combination of “home-base” laptop and “on the move” laptop is harder that it seems, but I am planning now a short trip to Kuala Lumpur where I believe I will feel myself in paradise in all those electronic shops with very cheap prices… 
07 Mar 07 Download Accelerator Plus
If you are suffering from a low-speed internet connection and can’t even think of downloading that photo of 200kbytes from your dog, well, that’s indeed annoying :-). If you have a normal internet connection and still getting problems to download the latest movie from your favorite actor ( yep, be careful with that :-)), that’s also annoying. Isn’t there anything that can optimize and maximize the speed of my downloads whatever my internet bandwidht is?
Yes, there is something, at least is the best tool I have discovered so far and it is called Download Accelerator Plus. The name says it all. It is free, you download it and install it, give it the rights to be used as a download manager and voila! According to their publicity you get up to 400% faster downloads, I have no means to measure that, but it has improve indeed the average time that my internet connection is busy getting things from the net
05 Mar 07 Ihostasp, providing DNN hosting services
If you are using DNN and need a hosting service that combines all the features that could be needed to succesfully manage a good site, one option is Ihostasp. It is a hosting service created by developers and that it is useful either for beginners or for professionals. The installation of your DNN modules could not be easier, as it is a push-this-button and it is done.
You get your daily backup in case something happens, and in the basic version you can have one DNN installation and up to 20 child portals, more than enough for a small company having its corporate website and a few pages mores. Apart from that, it comes with a package of ready-to-install applications like wordpress, forums, shopcarts, etc.
Their stats tool is also very complete, and you get the option of paying everything with Paypal, which is right now, by far, the only thing I use when buying something on the net. And, to end with, if you need a nice template for your website, you can purchase them directly from your control panel.
