My Experiences of Gadgets, Computer Hardware and Software That I Have Purchased and Used

I would not call myself particularly knowledgeable when it comes to computers, but through purchasing and installing hardware and software for my PC, I hope you find these pages useful and easy-to-understand if you are considering using any of the products I have listed.  Please call back often, as I will be updating as I purchase and intend to review all software and hardware I have had experience with.

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Electrical, Gadgetry & IT Websites

Comet: When it comes to bargains and competitive prices, I have always found Comet to be great as a high street store. On-line, their website has a lot to offer too including an auction where end-of-line & similar products can be bought for a fraction of the original cost. Click here to read full review.

Dell Computers Several years ago I purchased a Dell PC as a second PC for my wife. The delivery of our order was quick and the machine worked fine from the start and is still going strong, so I have no hesitation in recommending Dell products for reliability and performance.Click here to read full review.

Jessops.Com. If someone was to ask me where I thought it best to shop for equipment, I would have to say Jessops both before and since I have had Internet access.  I have truly found that dealing with this company has been great in every respect. Click here to read full review.... Special deals at Jessops.Com....

Kelko.co.uk is an excellent search site where you can search for the best deals on Boos, Cars & accessories, Computer software & hardware,  DVD, Video (Rental and purchase), Electronics like cameras and MP3 players, Gifts, gadgets, games & consoles, health and beauty products, Home and Garden, tools and appliances,  business and office, supplies, mobile phones, sports & fitness products. Travel, flights, car higher and auctions. Click here to read full review.

Maplin Electronics Ltd is in the top 10 websites in the UK within its sector. Having a huge selection of electronic gadgets, PC parts (for the enthusiast), their website if well worth a visit. Whenever I have wanted that hard-to-find component, I have nearly always found it on the Maplin site. So if you want something a simple as batteries, or computer parts, digital cameras, MP3 players, DVD recorders, drives, flash memories, USB or much much more, Click here  to go to their website.

MicroDirect.co.uk is a large, easy to navigate site with everything you can think of  for the computer enthusiast and amateur alike. This is a professional looking site the oozes professionalism. Done out in blue and white (blue being my favourite colour) I find is refreshing and easy on the eye.Click here to read full review.

Staples suppliers of office supplies, furniture and technology, serves consumers and businesses (including home-based businesses) worldwide and offers business accounts to business people requesting them. This can be all be done on their excellent web site. Click here to read full review.

My Hardware Experiences

Adding more RAM: I had been told by many friends, both off-line and on-line that it was so easy to add extra memory a child could do it. And it could make a real difference to my computer's performance. Click here to read full review

The Logitech Cordless Desktop LX 700 - For some time I had been seeing cordless keyboard and mouse set-ups on the shelves of the local computer stores wondering what all the fuss was about. But due to another birthday, I went cordless and all I can say is that I'm impressed. Click here to read full review.

The Belkin Router, is what I learned from talking to people to share cable broadband such as NTL. And the package displayed on Amazon had the following features. I could network our computers and they could share the broadband Internet access independently of each other with transfer speeds of up to 54Mbps. It has a built-in firewall to protect our network from intrusion from hackers and we could connect up to 4 wired computers if we decided that the wireless connection was not effective enough. Included in the package was a USB Wireless adapter. It's suitable for PCs or macs. Click here to read full review.

Canon Powershot A80

Epson Printer: I have owned an Epson Stylus Colour 880 printer since 2000 and it has given me trouble-free printing.  Previously I had owned the Espon 740 model that was similar in design, but tended to be somewhat noisy. So in my opinion, Epson tend to make a robust machine that will last years, so without a doubt, my next printer will also be an Epson. Click here to read full review.

The Benefit of an External USB 2.0 Hard Drive - 7200RPM: The problem with my video hobby is that movies copied to my computers take up a huge amount of space and before I realised it, my  80GB hard drive (HDD) was in not time full to its limits and what was worse was that my wonderful 3GHZ machine was getting slower and slower. An external portable hard drive was by far the easiest way to add the extra storage I needed. Click here to read full review.

The Microtek Filmscan - from around £129 with measuruements of  268mm x 66mm X 16mm (LxWxH) and weighing 750 gramms , is a cost efficient and ideal way of scanning your old negatives and slide films on to computer as up to 1800 dip resolution Click here to read full review.

The Wacom Graphics Tablet - Good for for Pen based drawing, sketching and illustration . Transparent photo frame for  tracing hard copy document.. Eraser for quick corrections Add your signature to documents by using the pen. Click here to read full review.

The Nikon D50 Digital SLR camera - Packed with features this camera is for the more serious photographer and amateur alike (it has a "point and shoot" capability). A great camera that has a 6-megapixel resolution. Click here to read full review.

Samsung 19inch TFT Monitor: Looking around the computer stores, it soon became obvious to me that the ones with the best quality flat screen monitors seemed to be the Samsung and after visiting a relative and seeing that he had a Samsung, I was sold on this particular make. Click here to read full review.

SanDisk Cruzer Micro 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Here is an incredibly small, USB 2 (backwards compatible to USB1.1) storage flash drive, to store up to a gygabyte of your photographs, music or other computers files on. The device will fit on a keyring for easy transportation, and is well worth £30 for anyone wanting to store and transport files. Easy for the novice to install and use. USA Link

My Software Experiences

All In One Computer Tools: I tend to notice that when I buy a new piece of equipment and load the software that comes with it, the start-up of my machine seems to get slower. This is because, if I don't stay vigilant and customise the installation of this software, all sorts of unwanted stuff loads up and adds itself to my start-up sequence! I don't like to leave my machine on 24/7 and shut it down if I am going to be away for several hours, and definitely shut it down over night. Click here to read more.

Article Notepad  is a great peace of software if you write articles for the Internet. It allows you to create, edit and save your articles all in one place so they are not scattered across your hard drive in various .txt or .doc files - also full resell rights.. Click here to read more...

Adobe Elements 4 is a great, reasonably priced program for beginners, intermediate or experts in the field of digital photography on the PC. Click here to read full review.

Advanced Windows Optimizer is an award winning collection of tools to optimize and speedup your system performance. it contains utilities to clean registry, temporary files on your disks, erase your application and internet browser history, cache, cookies and much more. Other useful facilities are that it can control startup programs (those programs that load automatically with windows, find duplicate files, fix broken shortcuts and uninstall software.

The built-in scheduled task manager allows you to schedule the cleaning tasks that take place automatically, other features include secure file deletion, shred recycle bin, application protection, split and rejoin files, backup and restore the Windows Registry, remove unsafe BHOs, and much more.

The designers of this software,, YL Computing, Inc was founded in November 2002 and located in 3831 Valley Center Dr. Suite 706-295 San Diego, California. Click here for price and more information..

Audio Manipulation Downloads

Award-Winning Home Video-editing software – Buy Pinnacle Studio Titanium Edition today and Save up to $30 My personal choice for video editing. The Pinnacle Studio is a consumer-level, video editing software with which you can connect your camcorder to your computer. I connect mine via firewire, open the program, click on the "Capture" tab and it will capture the movie to where you wish on the hard drive, automatically splitting it up into shots. My camcorder is a Sony that has an iLink that most modern camcorders have. Click here to read full review.

Brain Train: It is generally accepted in scientific circles, that doing mental puzzles - things like crossword puzzles etc, stimulates the brain and is thought to help avoid deterioration of mental abilities as we age. It is even agreed, that is can help ward off the onslaught of  brain diseases like Alzheimer's. The software known as Brain Train Age presents quick mental activities that help keep your DS brain in shape.Click here to read more...

Convert Your Music Files: For those interested in converting a wide variety of sound files,  SoundTaxi is a great program and for a price of $14,90(£8.40 GBP) you can download driectly from their site at www.soundtaxi.info. Click here to read full review.

DVD Authoring: If you own a DVD recorder and you have a DVD burner on your computer and are running either Windows XP or 2000, TMPGEnc DVD authoring program from Pegasys is a great way of compiling your own DVD customised disks - either of your home movies, favourite TV programs or movies downloaded from the internet. Click here to read full review.

FX Audio Editor With FX Audio Editor, you can do more than just quickly rup a CD or convert between digitial and audio formats... You can add special sound effects and filters, and change voicemail files so that you can play them badck on any standard audio player. Click here for more information.

Mooma DVD Creator 2.0 - Here we have a great DVD tool that can change the way you view your photos and downloaded movies. Mooma DVD Creator is a powerful DVD authoring program that can convert nearly every type of video format and burn it on to DVD disk. It allows you to convert photos to video and then burn them to disk ready to use in your DVD player. Click here to learn more.

PerfectDisk 7: Fragmented files can considerably slow down your computer, yet doing a defrag using Windows Disk Defragmenter can take several hours. I did my 80GB seriously framented hard drive in 1 hour and 10 minutes using this incredible piece of software. Click here to read full review.

Organizing your digital photos: What is Picasa?  What can it do?  Picasa’s tagline is “Picture Simplicity.”  It truly is one of the simplest digital image programs to use.  It can help organize, edit, share, print, backup, or create photos.  While all of those features sound good, organization is one of the best features.  Picasa allows you to move and rename pictures easily, and make picture labels for your albums. Click here to read full review by Corey Nelson.

Magix Photos on CD and DVD - One of my favourite things to do on my computer is to mess about with photographs. There is something that is very satrisfying (not to mention flattering) to iron out the odd face wrinkle here and there. However, as enjoyable as digital photography is, it is all very well to have all your photos on your hard drive, but it means that everybody has to huddle around your computer to view them, unless you are lucky enough to have one of the latest entertainment centres with computer and TV all in one. Here's where this software package really comes into its own. Click here to read full review.

Music Match Jukebox. As a music lover, one program I wouldn’t do without on my computer is MusicMatch Jukebox. I could burn them as MP3s and get a whole load more tracks on a CD that way. Click here to read full review.

Nero 6 - The day I purchased was Nero 6 I can say that I haven’t looked back. In fact I would say that Nero must be one of the most powerful CD burning facilities around and one of the easiest to understand.  All I need to do with is to pop a CD disk into the CD burner, launch Nero and not even worry about my previous formatting problems Click here to read full review.

Useful Free Software
Magic Jelly Bean Software: Here's a very useful freeware utility that retrieves your Windows Product Key (cd key) should you need to re-install windows. It has the options to copy the key to clipboard, save it to a text file, or print it for safekeeping. For Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Office 97, and Office XP. This version is a quick update to make it work with Windows Server 2003. Click here to go directly to the download site.(Opens in fresh window so you may have to disable your pop-up blockers)

Watch TV for Free on your Computer:  Here's a handy little program which IMO is well worth $19 (or £7.99 GB pounds)of anybody's money. It's called I-TV++ Platinium which allows you to watch near 1000 live TV channels from all over the world. As well as the TV channels there are almost 1400 radio stations and somewhere areound 250 webcams - again, all world wide. You do not need any extra hardware because the channels come through your Internet connection.  However, you will need a modem speed of at 56Kbs, and for high quality broadband TV you will need a minimum of 250Kb/s. The software automatically updates stations so you will never be out of date.

Once you buy this software, there are no subscriptions and it has a very friendly user interface. To run the software, you will need the latest version of Windows Media Player and RealPlayer which you can download for free - a link is provided on the download page. Your system will need to run Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows Server 2003.  Click here to purchase or for further details  

Windows Advisor. This website promoised that I would learn how to get rid of errors, protect my machine from viruses, learn about functions in Word, get rid of computer errors and ban computer freezing and more. To say I am very sceptical is an understatement, but seeing could view the package free of charge (an that means send no money at all) I thought well, what have I got to lose? And sent for it. Click here to read full review.

Computer Security Programs

Computer Security: Apart from picking up viruses and spyware, there is also a risk of identity fraud on line. To someone considering purchasing a computer to make it easier to shop, bank, send and communicate by sending receiving emails, the Internet may seem like a "dangerous place" full of thieves waiting to pounce and relieve one of one's hard-earned cash.  Click here to read full review.

Computer Virus Software: A computer virus is a program just like any other program that is installed on your computer. The only difference between the two is that the latter is uninvited and it’s main purpose is at best, to cause havoc for the user and at its worst will destroy everything on the hard drive and render the computer inoperable  Click here to read full review.

Defendgate Security Center Has a host of good security software that gives peace-of-mind during your internet activities. Click here to visit their website or read more about some of the products....

Defendgate Security Suite: This software is designed to provide your PC with comprehensive and superior protection against computer viruses, worms, hackers, and other threats. It also has an intelligent Spam filter and will provide  cover in a way that your system keep working at its optimal speed.Click here for immediate download..

Defendgate Smartfix: This software allows web surfing without exposing your personal information. It will also destroy unwanted files using a high security NSA standard file shredder. It will safeguard your system using high security lockdown mode. Fixes Internet Explorer bugs and other vulnerabilities; gives your system/network that extra security against attacks; monitors systemto detect applications such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other malware; has an integrated online anti-virus feature so you can get rid of malicious viruses and worms and a built-in firewall.  Click here for immediate download.

System Cleaner 4 in 1: I have just downloaded a great little piece of software called System Cleaner 4 in 1 and scanned my registry. Some 480 registry errors were found and corrected. I knew my computer was slowing down a little and doing weird things on start-up - I have to admit though, that I'm always downloading programs to try out and leaving bits and pieces on my registry. Well no matter now, this little program took less than a minute to download and install and now my machine is running great again.. Click here to give it a try... .

Apple Mac

If you have any questions about any products on this site, please   to email me and I will do my best to help you

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Software From ZZZ Technologies
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