Wednesday, 30 June 2010

Full range of Acer products now available

You may have already spotted it, but we now have a full range of products from industry leader Acer on our sites. You may know them for their Laptops and Desktop computers, but did you know they also make Monitors, Televisions and even Mobile Phones.

Thursday, 10 June 2010

Solid State Drives

I've recently been spending some time trying to speed up my PC. As usual over time, performance seemed to have become a bit sluggish, so a disk and registry clean-up, un-install session and a defrag was in order.

All done but I'm still not happy! This machine should be flying - so whats going wrong? So I set about some analysis of what my machine is actually doing. After some indepth monitoring of my performance monitor in the Windows Task Manager I realised the processor was hardly doing anything, the memory was only half used and the gigabit network card was practically on tick-over.

So why do I still sometimes have laggy performance when doing simple windows tasks. After a process of elimination my focus turned to the hard drive. I found out I had a Seagate 7200rpm SATA drive with 2MB cache. Seems reasonable to me for a year old desktop machine. But the more I monitored performance the more I realised this was now the weakest link in my machine. So on I moved to research the latest drives. Solid State Drives (SSD) and more importantly to see if I could justify the cost of an upgrade to save me a few, but an annoying few, seconds!

To my pleasant surprise I found the prices have come down to something very affordable and in terms of size I don't really need huge capacity. Most of my data is stored centrally on our server so I really just need enough space for the Operating System and some of my key applications. So I turned to my trusty back issues of PC Pro magazine. Bingo! A labs section review of Solid State Drives in the June issue. After a quick read and a check on our site for prices I'd settled on the "PC Pro Recommended" Intel X25-M 80GB Drive (SSDSA2MH080G2R5) at £174. (£20 cheaper than when it was reviewed)

The tiny drive arrived in a small retail box and comes with a mounting bracket to allow it to fit neatly into a desktop machine. I swapped the SATA cable from the existing drive onto the SSD and attached my current hard drive to another SATA connection, then set about loading Windows from scratch. Immediately there is a significant speed difference as the obligatory reboots whilst installing and applying updates are noticeably faster. After a couple of hours of re-installing all my applications I was ready to go.

Wow! Now I'm really flying! Applications appear on screen as if they have just been minimised, not loaded from scratch. There's no point trying to give you any time measurements - Everything is just the blink of an eye. It's the best £174 I've spent in years. I think our standard PC configuration will be changed to incorporate these drives as standard since non of our users need large local drive space and when you offset the cost against a normal drive then you are only looking at around £100 premium. Admittedly I did pick a "PC Pro recommended" drive, and they did find some "dogs" that gave no noticable speed increase over a normal hard drive. So if you are thinking of trying this kind of upgrade then do your research or stick to this drive. The end result of all this effort is that we now have a dedicated category for SSD's on our site that contains 60+ drives.

If you are still not convinced watch this amazing video from Intel comparing the speed of an SSD to a traditional hard drive. Good luck with your upgrade!

Wednesday, 9 June 2010

New threat: tab napping, please be aware

I'm always reminding people not to click on links inside emails as its a very insecure thing to do. The trouble is that's what IT Managers everywhere are telling people to do and as such phishing attacks are declining. That's the good news.

The bad news is that hackers are as always one step ahead and there's a new threat out in the wild. Its called 'Tab Napping'.

The basic gist of it is, you go to an online banking site and get to its login screen, then you suddenly think of something else you wanted and open a new tab to do a quick google search. Normally there's nothing wrong with that, however if you hit a malicious site the original tab could change without you knowing about it. When you click back to it, you expect to see a login page and as far as you are aware you browsed to it yourself so its in a trusted zone in your mind. If you then submit your login details, you could be supplying fraudsters with your details.

These attacks are highly sophisticated but here's how to protect yourself:
  • Make sure you always check the URL in the browser address.
  • If the URL looks suspicious in any way, close the tab and reopen it by entering the correct URL again.
  • Avoid leaving tabs open which require you to type in secure login details.

MorePhones.co.uk gets more phones

Our range of sim free mobile phones has been expanded this week. You'll find handsets from Blackberry, HTC, Nokia, Samsung, Acer and more. Plus loads of Phone Accessories