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Tech News & Commentary
Terry in Nunley, TN listens on SuperTalk 99.7 WTN asked: ”
I have an iPad and the only time I can get on the Internet is when I have Wi-Fi. I wanted to find out – because I’m electronically illiterate – if there was a way I can pick up Internet other than that way.”
Drew, as long as you’re looking at modern laptops, Photoshop shouldn’t be a huge issue, high-end gaming on the other hand will require some power. There are a few companies, like Alienware that make some very powerful laptops for relatively reasonable prices. For example, a 14-inch laptop with a latest generation Core i7 processor, 12 GB of RAM and a 2GB graphics card will cost you $1500, for what you get, it’s not a bad price.
For about the same price you can buy an iBuyPower 17-inch laptop also with a Core i7, but with even more RAM at 16GBs. If you’re willing to spend a little more money, NewEgg.com lists an MSI laptop with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of HDD space, and 128GB of SSD storage for $2300.
Basically, you want to look for laptops with a lot of RAM and a solid graphics card, if possible not just a regular integrated one, higher processor speed will help you too. The rest is mostly about your budget.
If you’re talking price-is-no-object and you want to play the latest 3D games in full HD resolution at max video settings and a high frame rate, there are only two ways to go: NVIDIA GT680SM SLI or AMD Radeon HD 7970M Crossfire.
These are both dual GPU configurations and they will play anything made, maxed out, with buttery smooth frame rates. But they’re pricey. A computer featuring that NVIDIA setup, the Alienware M18x R2, will run close to $4,000. (You can ignore the $1,999 starting price for that model line, since we’re talking SLI here.)
For most people, the single NVIDIA GT680M GPU will produce adequate performance. You might have to scale back the video settings on some games, or live with a 40 to 50 frame per second (fps) speed. And you will drop the price of your computer dramatically. Now, obviously, any computer capable of running video games like this one will also run Photoshop without breathing hard.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Tom in Dover, Delaware listening on News-Talk WXDE 105.9 FM asked: “I have a small fleet of cars in my business and I was looking for a really inexpensive way to track my cars on the Internet. I know there’s a bunch of services out there that cost $100 a month or more but what device or service could I use that’s really inexpensive?”
Tom, a few months ago we reviewed a device called the Live Trac EZ, it may be a good option for you, it costs around $160 to buy, but your monthly fees are $30 or 40 depending on whether you want 10 second updates or 5 second updates, and the installation literally consists of plugging it into your car’s OBD port.
The most obvious downside of going with this system is that it can very easily “become disconnected” when, say, your driver hits a bump or decides to take a half an hour nap under a nice shady tree…
You can also look into a GPS tracking USB device, it will not track your cars in real time, so if you want to know where your drivers are right now, this is not for you. However, if you want to know where they’ve been, how long they were there for, and you are ok with retrieving that information manually later, for a few hundred dollars and no monthly fee, these kind of unit might be for you.
Depending on how small your small fleet is, this type of tracker may be a huge hassle for you, since you do have to manually plug each tracker into your computer to see their stored information, but since there’s no data plan to cover, they will be far cheaper in the long run.
For something in between, you can look at the SmartTracker, it will locate your vehicle in real time, but you will be prepaying for a set number for “locates” so, for example, you can have 15 locate request to run anytime during an one year period for $30. If you only plan to look for your cars in case of emergency, this might be the option for you, but if you want to keep an eye on your drivers this will end up being very costly.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline
Vince in Chicago, Illinois listens to the podcast calls in: “I have a BlackBerry Bold 9650. I download podcasts to the podtrapper on that phone. Is there a way to copy the podcasts from the phone onto my Windows 7 PC?”
Podtrapper, by default, will save the files it downloads to your memory card, to the folder “Blackberry/podtrapper”.
To access that folder, plug in your Blackberry to your computer and when it asks, select USB Drive, that should give you access to your phone’s memory card.
Find the memory card in Windows Explorer, it should show up as a drive called Blackberry, and inside of it navigate to the “Blackberry” folder and then the “podtrapper” folder and you should find your file there. Just drag the files from there to any Windows folder an you should be set. Your files will be on your computer.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
Drew in Clinton, Missouri listens to the podcast asked: “I’m looking for a new laptop to play high-end games and use Photoshop. I need some pointers in the right direction.”
As long as you’re looking at modern laptops, Photoshop shouldn’t be a huge issue, high-end gaming on the other hand will require some power. There are a few companies, like Alienware that make some very powerful laptops for relatively reasonable prices. For example, a 14-inch laptop with a latest generation Core i7 processor, 12 GB of RAM and a 2GB graphics card will cost you $1500, for what you get, it’s not a bad price.
For about the same price you can buy an iBuyPower 17-inch laptop also with a Core i7, but with even more RAM at 16GBs. If you’re willing to spend a little more money, NewEgg.com lists an MSI laptop with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of HDD space, and 128GB of SSD storage for $2300.
Basically, you want to look for laptops with a lot of RAM and a solid graphics card, if possible not just a regular integrated one, higher processor speed will help you too. The rest is mostly about your budget.
If you’re talking price-is-no-object and you want to play the latest 3D games in full HD resolution at max video settings and a high frame rate, there are only two ways to go: NVIDIA GT680SM SLI or AMD Radeon HD 7970M Crossfire.
These are both dual GPU configurations and they will play anything made, maxed out, with buttery smooth frame rates. But they’re pricey. A computer featuring that NVIDIA setup, the Alienware M18x R2, will run close to $4,000. (You can ignore the $1,999 starting price for that model line, since we’re talking SLI here.)
For MOST people, the single NVIDIA GT680M GPU will produce adequate performance. You might have to scale back the video settings on some games, or live with a 40 to 50 frame per second (fps) speed. And you will drop the price of your computer dramatically. Now, obviously, any computer capable of running video games like this one will also run Photoshop without breathing hard.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
Jesse in Windale, North Carolina listening on NewsRadio680 WPTF asks: “TI’m having trouble not receiving messages people are sending me. These are friends with normal e-mail addresses. For some reason they’re getting a message back saying that their message to me was Spam and it would not let it go through. Need to know what I can do to make that stop happening.”
Jesse, are all those people using the same email provider? If they are, it’s possible that the email server you use is classifying them as spam based on something that happened a while back. That probably wouldn’t happen if they were using big name email providers like Yahoo!, Microsoft or Google, but it may be happening with smaller ones.
As far as what you can do about that, what you personally can do is see if your email server allows you to “whitelist” addresses, whitelisting is just telling the server “I’m ok with this address sending me email, don’t bother checking their emails for spam.”
That should work for those friends that tell you that their emails are getting bounced, but whitelisting is a one-address-at-a-time solution.
So if, for example, a contractor offered to email you an estimate you may still not get it because that contractor’s particular email address was not whitelisted as your friends’ addresses where.
Since this is happening with several different accounts that you’re aware of, you may want to get in touch with your email provider’s customer service and see if they can do anything for you, maybe they can whitelist a whole server at least for your own account, or review their blacklisting policies.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Vinny in Rochdale, England sent the following email: “Hi Dave, I got an lg 3D smart tv because it had internet but I find the internet doesn’t stream video ,movies,tv programs, I don’t mean youtube or netflix, I mean just normal websites that host tv and movies. I think its somthing to do with flash player or something. Are there going to update the os so we can watch normal websites.
”
Well Vinny, we were able to speak with LG and they informed us that there’s currently no update that’ll let you watch those videos outside of the Youtube App. If they ever do come out with an update it will automatically download and upgrade your SmartTV, but for now there isn’t anything out there or any update coming out.
Also, keep in mind that Flash is losing support even from Adobe, so it’s likely that LG will simply plan for it’s replacement rather than spend development resources on Flash. Even Adobe is focusing its product line on HTML5, so if LG is working on any kind of “regular website” support it will likely be that and not Flash.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Glenn in Mississippi listens on Supertalk FM calls in: “I travel a great deal. I have depended on Google Cloud/Drive a good bit. I have just discovered that Western Digital had a hard drive that connected on Ethernet can be used as a cloud. Not know anything about them I turn to you. Any word on them? Worth the 200 cost?”
It depends on what you’re using Google Drive for. If you use Google Drive to edit documents then having your own private cloud with Western Digital won’t help you much. If you use it for storage though, it could give you much more storage for less money in the long run.
The cloud enabled hard drive that Western Digital makes is called the My Book Live and it comes in 1, 2 and 3 TB models. Paying for 1TB of storage on Google Drive will cost you $49.99 a month. If you really need access to all of that data all the time, then one of these might work for you.
Then again, do you need access to all of that data at all times? Because a lot of it may not be usable to you over the Internet anyway. You may have access to a high definition movie from anywhere, but can you really sit down and wait for it to download or stream on your home connection? You may be better off just continuing to upload what makes sense to Google Drive and accessing it from there for free.
Now, if for some reason you want to have access to a huge number of files from anywhere, then yes, this hard drive might be of use to you. Just think about whether paying a premium is worth the extra connectivity or not.
You also have the option of using a computer to share a regular hard drive (internal or external) using FTP server software, but the set up will be far more involved than just turning on your new cloud enabled hard drive.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
Joe in Martinsville, West Virginia listens Online calls in: “I’m a Blackberry fan. I’m not gonna change. I’m looking for a small projector that’s compatible with Blackberry that I can carry around for meetings. I’ve looked at several but I’m not sure what the compatibility is.”
There are some projectors that you can use with Blackberries. The Aiptek PocketCinema V100 is compatible with Blackberry. The Optoma PK320 will also work with Blackberry.
You won’t find a huge amount of projectors that work with Blackberry, but you might also benefit from the ones that work from MicroSD cards, just pop yours out of your phone and use it with the projector, or simply buy a small capacity one to keep in the projector.
The M MPro 150 fits that category and it also comes with 1GB of internal memory, the iGo up2020 pico will probably work for you too.
Tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast for more details.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Eton: FRX3 – Hand Turbine AM/FM/Weather Alert Radio
Intuit: Codes for TurboTax Deluxe & Premier — File your Federal & State Income tax online.
Covington Creations: Earbud yo-yo — Now with Dave’s face on them! — A clever solution to tangled earbuds.
Magix: Music Maker 2013 Premium — Easy to use software for getting started in the world of music production.