HOUR 3:
Tech News & Commentary
Victor in Spring Valley, Illinois listening to the podcast asked: ” I have an old router, three computers hooked to it, two wired and one wireless. I have a Vizio that downloads Netflix a little slow. So I think I need a better, stronger router, so my boy can get the Internet next door, also. What do you recommend?”
A new stronger router can help you extend your signal next door, but it’s probably not the reason your Netflix is a little slow.
To put this into perspective, let’s assume that Netflix is accessing the internet wirelessly since that’s a lot slower than a wired connection. With any half-modern router you’re looking at 54Mbit/s or more of wireless speed, that figure accounts for everything that is transmitted, there is some overhead that will make your actual connection slightly slower, but still, are you paying for close to 54Mbit/s internet?
We checked and the average internet connection in Illinois where you live is a little over 7Mbit/s, more than enough to use Netflix, but nowhere near the limits of your router. To improve your Netflix experience, have a look at the speed you’re supposed to be getting and talk to your ISP, it’s probably more of a question of service than of hardware that’s making Netflix slow.
Now, the WiFi signal is a different story, you may be able to benefit from either a better router with a better antenna or, like we had to do here at our studios, multiple routers.
Over here one router wasn’t enough to keep everyone connected at all ends of the building, so we had to add more routers and configure them to expand the network instead of creating a new different one, if you do that you could have one letting you connect at home, and another one either at your boy’s home next door or at yours but at the closest point to his house, that way the signal might be able to travel all the way to his without a lot of obstacles in the way.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Jeff in Mississippi asked: “Trying to figure out how to slave a hard drive. I have two hard drives that are SATA and for some reason when I put the second one in, it doesn’t even recognize it.”
SATA drives don’t have Master and Slave designations like old IDE drives did. The computer will try to boot from whatever devices are selected in the boot order function of the BIOS, and in the order they are designated there. You could, for example, boot different operating systems in the same computer by having them installed on different SATA drives and then simply changing to boot order in the BIOS and restarting the computer.
When you say it doesn’t even recognize the drive, is this drive formatted? If the drive shows up in the BIOS and under your device manager but is not recognized by your computer then it probably just needs to be formatted. But you would still see a drive letter, even for an unformatted drive, if there was a partition on it.
Another reason why you might not be seeing the new hard drive could be that it’s SATA port is simply turned off, you can change that by going to your BIOS settings during start up and make sure that both SATA ports are enabled. That’s really the key, to check the BIOS. You should be able to see all the drives listed there. If the drive isn’t recognized by the BIOS, then either the drive itself is bad, the SATA port is disabled on the motherboard, or the motherboard (or maybe the drive cable) is bad.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Chuck from McKinney, Texas listening on 710 KEEL asked: “If a hard drive fails, how can you get the information off? What companies? And in the future is it gonna be cheaper to restore information from a lost hard drive?”
Hard Drive data recovery is an important issue that needs some care. Basically, there are two types of hard drive failure:
1) Due to a software problem
2) Due to a physical malfunction
With the first, data loss can occur because of a Corrupted partition tablet, a Damaged boot record or Missing root directory information. It’s generally easy enough to recover from a hard drive failure with these problems. In approximately 40% of cases, when there is no physical damage to the drive, data may be retrieved by an in-house technical support person.
With a physical malfunction, however, it’s much more challenging to recover data from a the hard drive. In this case it is highly likely that any normal attempt to access the drive may cause further corruption. In case of physical damage, you should stop trying to access the drive immediately to avoid further damage and look for a company specializing in data recovery.
The cost of data recovery can vary widely. depending of numerous factors, including the size and type of storage media, severity of damage and parts required.
Price estimates varied from $300 to $3,900, the highest prices where reserved for highly time sensitive (1-2 days) data recovery.
For standard recoveries, the majority of estimates fell between the range of $ 500 and $ 2,500. There are many companies you can ask for an estimates, like DRG (data recovery group) or Salvage Date or Gillware Inc.
What these companies do is take your hard drive into a clean room and essentially take it apart to try and recover data from any non-damaged parts. You should never, under any circumstances, try and open a hard drive yourself. If you do and get even one speck of dust inside, your data can be lost forever.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guests in this hour:
Erik Zamkoff, Founder & CEO – MiMedia
MiMedia is a cloud-based personal media platform that allows users to back-up, access and share their digital lives, at anytime and from anywhere.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
In 1936 at the Olympic Games in Berlin the first electronic camera was tested, named “television cannon”. The cameraman was Dr. Walter Bruch himself, who had co-developed the giant machine. The lens alone weight about 100 pounds, and the whole camera was 2 ½ yards long. The images were received in 28 “television parlors”. As this was deemed insufficient, another technology during the games saw a world’s first: the projection onto big screens. Two halls were equipped with TV projection. More than 100.000 people watched the Olympics on the big screens, and another 50.000 in the TV parlors.
That’s this week’s IFA Update brought to you by Messe-Berlin. Be sure to visit IFA-Berlin.com.
Jim in Idaho listening on KBLI 1260 AM asked: “Looking to buy a new HDTV. I have one now, but want a newer one. One time I saw the speed at 60Hz and then 120Hz. I’m pretty sure I saw a 240Hz. Now, I’m looking at televisions and wondering what happened to it and why it’s not there anymore.”
For those who don’t know the 60, 120 and 240hz refers to the refresh rate of the High Def television sets. In physics, a hertz is just a unit that is used to measure cycles per second, and that’s all it really is, what 60 hertz actually means is that the TV screen is refreshed … 60 times every second, 120hz means it’s refreshed 120 times every second, 240hz means 240 refreshes a second, and so on.
Most TV viewers don’t really notice a huge difference between the 60hz sets and the 120 and 240s, but the higher the refresh rate the crisper the picture should be. Some people will swear by their 120hz sets, specially sports fans and action movie lovers, and people generally notice more of a difference between 60hz and 120 than they do between 120 and 240.
Now, as for not finding the hertz on new TVs, it’s probably up to the store, but in our experience that information is still posted by most vendors, online.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Foster from Hendersonville, Tennessee listening on WJCW 910AM asked: “You were great to help me with obtaining an inner-office online communication program (MessagePal) for my boss and I. Now, I have another issue. We are currently using ACT by Sage 2006 as a small office calendar program and basically it does more than I really need.
Do you know of any other small office calendar program for a two-person office that is inexpensive, but can handle appointment scheduling, court scheduling, to-do tasks, etc.? As always, thanks.”
It’s not exactly “software” as much as a cloud service, but have you considered Google Calendar? If you both have an internet connection you should give it a try, it’s free and it can be shared very easily (just click on Settings, share this calendar, and type in your boss’ email address). You can access it through any web browser, just go to calendar.google.com and log in, or you can use free programs like Mozilla Sunfire to view and modify it. The “Into Tomorrow” Team has used Google Calendar for years and it works very well for us — of course, you actually have to use it and count on people providing input to it!
Once either one of you makes any change to the calendar the other one can instantly see it, there’s no need to email events to each other or notify each other in any way. Although, you could if you want to. It lets you send an update notice via email whenever you make changes. For example, when we schedule phone interviews, I make a calendar appointment so our production team is aware. If I have to change the interview time, I update on the calendar and usually send a notice via email to the team. If you’d prefer to keep separate calendars and just “invite” each other to events, you can still use Sunfire, just use it’s built-in calendar instead of a Google Calendar (keep in mind that if you do this, you won’t know about anything the other person adds unless you notify each other. If you use a Google Calendar as soon as one person adds something, it will just “be there” for everyone who is using the calendar).
We have used Google Calendar for years and have found it to be an incredibly useful tool. We use it not only to keep track of our interview schedules, but also our travels. And since we are on the road as much as we are, it also helps our families keep track of when we’ll be gone. (so they can schedule their wild parties accordingly.)
Google Calendar offers the ability to share one calendar, or keep multiple calendars and overlay them on top of each other for reconciling schedules. It’s entirely cloud based, there is nothing to install on your computers, but you will have to be connected to the Internet in order to use it. It is extremely fast and free, though, so it’s hard to argue with the price. Also, Google Calendar is the integrated service for Android phones, so if you’re an Android user, you will have absolutely seamless integration with it.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
Theresa in Milington, Tennessee listening on WKIM 98.9 asked: “I was wondering if Android phones can get viruses. ”
Yes and no, there are not viruses that infect a phone and replicate and infect other phones, however there is malware.
There have been plenty of apps removed from the Android Market recently because they were malicious and were stealing information from their users.
Unfortunately, as long as people hold valuable information on a computer, whether that computer is large and sitting on a desk or small and kept in your pocket someone will try to take that information for their own purposes.
Android’s openness makes it a little more vulnerable that the other platforms, Apple, Blackberry and Microsoft check all apps before they are allowed to be distributed through their stores, that gives users another small layer of security, malicious apps that don’t hide their tracks well will be rejected, developers will be blacklisted.
The Android Market doesn’t work that way, Google doesn’t check the apps that developers submit, instead they become immediately available.
On top of that Android apps don’t have to be downloaded from the Android Market, or Amazon’s app store for that matter, they can be downloaded from any website, they can even be emailed, that makes them easy to distribute and it makes the platform very open, but it doesn’t help with security.
As a general rule try to avoid downloading apps for untrusted sources, Amazon does check apps, so whatever you download from Amazon does have that small extra layer of security built in that users of the other mobile OSs enjoy.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info,
please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
iLuv: Several iSP110 Mini Portable Stereo Speakers (in a variety of colors)
Microsoft: Copies of Street & Trips Software with GPS receiver
VSO Software: Copies of Convert-X-to-DVD 4 – Lets you convert videos to DVD and watch on any DVD player.