In recent years, computers and their parts have gotten cheaper and cheaper. That’s great for when you’re looking to buy a completely new system. But what about your computer when it breaks? Sometimes, they’re just not worth the money to repair, and you might as well buy a brand new one. There are quite a few factors when considering fixing your computer.

Image from rockvalleycollege.edu

First of all, is your system a desktop or a laptop? Desktops have a separate tower and monitor. They’re usually easier to fix because their parts are larger and more inexpensive. Laptops, on the other hand, have components buried behind other components and there are tons of screws holding each part in place. Computer repair stores will normally charge more to fix a laptop than to fix a desktop due to the increased difficulty and expense.

Next, do you know what the problem is and are you capable of fixing it yourself? Identifying the problem is an easy way for computer repair stores or Best Buy’s geek squad to lure you in. Then they give you a price and let you know you can pick up your machine in 48 hours. Before you do that, however, try Google. No matter what your level of skill, it doesn’t hurt to google your problem and see if someone else out there came across the same issue and knows how to fix it.

For example, the problem could be software instead of hardware. That’s easy enough to remedy. A new install of the operating system might be all it takes. Many computer manufacturers even pack restore disks with each computer they sell so that if the software becomes corrupted or unusable, you can wipe the system clean and start over fresh. Even if your computer didn’t come with this disk, calling the company’s toll-free number and asking for one usually only requires you to pay for shipping.

Hardware problems are usually indicated by a computer suddenly displaying a blue screen with an error message or refusing to start up. One of the most common hardware problems are fan failures. You can tell if your computer’s fan is dying when it begins to make a noticeable noise. In laptops, the keyboard will feel burning hot even if you’re not running any labor-intensive programs. The good news is that fans are easy to fix, even in laptops. There are many help guides to walk you through this simple hardware replacement process online.

Image from protocolcomputers.ca

Other hardware options may be more expensive. Hard drives in desktop systems are relatively cheap, but motherboards are not. Newegg lists motherboards between $100 to $300, with some upper end variations, and hard drives for as little as $84.

The biggest thing to consider, of course, is whether or not you want to waste money on an old machine when the opportunity presents for a new one. Computers are usually outdated in about three years, five years maximum. The average computer user can get away with the five year limit, but if you enjoy playing games or using intensive programs, you need a new rig at the three year minimum. A gaming computer can cost anywhere from $800 to $1500, while a gaming laptop can easily hit $2000. Someone who uses only the Internet and few other programs can buy a system between $300 and $500 and be happy. A laptop for casual users could be between $500 and $800.

Now that you have some more information, all you need to check is your budget. How much are you willing to invest in your old system? How much of that money could be put toward a new laptop or desktop? Quality hardware and software is worth saving up for and comes with protection to ensure your next computer is protected from software to hardware.

=== About the Author ===
Tom Demers is a tech blogger who writes about prevention of advanced persistent threat.

I have been using iOS5 for over a week now and though the new features like instant access to camera from lock screen and the new notification center in iOS5 is worthwhile upgrading, I have been facing constant issues with apps crashing all the time. This even happens in the middle of a game, while reading an email or even using the App store app on the device or using Safari.

It looks like I am not the only person who is facing this issue since there are several threads out there which discuss the problem. Based on most of the threads I was able to fix the app crashing (fingers crossed). However, most of the solutions don’t work so you might have to continue trying different solutions till the apps stop crashing.

Here are some of the solutions you can try out if the apps on your device crash constantly after installing iOS5:

• Close down all the apps running on your device and try opening up apps to see if they crash. If you are not sure how to check open apps, you can read a guide on multitasking in iOS
• Download a free app on your device through the App store on your device. This method has known to fix the crashing for several users
• Reboot your device.
• Update your apps to the latest version
• Turn of iCloud sync on the device

If none of the above solutions work for you, try to reinstall iOS5 on your device and then manually sync the apps to the device. Make sure to make a backup of the device before you restore it.

I will keep an eye for more solutions that should fix the app crashes after installing iOS5 and update this post. Please leave a comment if you continue to have problems or used another method to fix the app crashing problem in iOS5.

Google recently launched a new design which sports a new Black menu bar with grey colored text. The new menu bar is an eyesore and is being hated by many people.

If you are someone who does not like the new design change by Google, here are few ways to disable or change it back to an earlier version with white background and blue links (coming soon). Right now you completely disable the black menu bar on all Google pages.

The trick uses a Greasemonkey script so you will need a compatible browser or user a workaround to run Greasemonkey scripts in Opera, Internet Explorer or Safari.

Like I said, right now I just hide the bar completely, but I am working on modifying the script to change the black bar to an earlier version of Google. Stay tuned for updates on this post to know when it has been updated. I have tested the script and it works in Opera, Firefox and Google Chrome. I am still testing it in Internet Explorer 9.

In the meantime, have fun without the ugly black bar in Google Search. You can download and install the Google Black Bar hider script from here.

Update: You can also return back to the classic toolbar for Google by installing this script.

I have been a Windows Live Mail user for a long time now, however, it looks like I am going to dump it and go for Thunderbird or maybe just use my iPod Touch to catch up on email from multiple accounts.

The latest version of Windows Live Mail which is included in Windows Live Essentials 2011, worked really fine for me for a while, however, it has become a pain in the posterior. I have 25 email accounts set up (don’t ask how I have that many, those aren’t even all) in it and it chimed well and downloaded all my messages without any trouble.

However, of late, whenever I start Windows Live Mail, my system (i7 processor/6GB RAM) becomes slow and crawls. This is annoying at best. I tried looking for solutions to the problem but couldn’t find any.

From my experience with Outlook, I am pretty sure that the problem is related to the disk storage. Outlook too used to crawl if the size of the PST file reached 2GB or higher (I am not sure about it now), but you could always fix the Outlook issue by creating a new storage file. That though is not the case with Windows Live Mail.

I absolutely love Windows Live Mail, but unfortunately I cannot seem to figure out how to fix the slowness it causes on the PC. I will continue looking at how to fix this issue and post updates when I come across them.

Do you use Windows Live Mail? Are you seeing similar issues when you have lot of email accounts or have tons of downloaded emails. Do let me know through your comments.

I have been using the "free version" of PC Tools Spyware Doctor for quite some time now, however, the only purpose it is there is for my laziness to clear tracking cookies, or clear my cache every day. I do have scheduled tasks on my Windows 7 PC to clear all cookies and trash every few days, but this bugger tried to be useful, but as far as I am concerned it is becoming useless, and I uninstalled it.

Above you can see a "Legal Notice" the latest version displayed to me. It is not only deceptive, it has lawyer words written all over it. For the record, as I said earlier I use a free version of PC Tools Spyware Doctor, and other than the browser this program tracks nothing else. Of course, I use several other programs to track what goes on my PC.

However, this new legal notice has sent me into a foul-mouthed cruise of my own. Come on, why would a program send a legal notice like this when they just clear cookies. When I try to clear cookies manually in my browser, all I get is a "Do you want to clear this data". I click "Yes" and I am on my way. However, I hate this reverse psychology ways of companies to get people to think what they are doing.

I am not afraid of saying that many of them are "dumb", nor am I afraid of saying that many of them will fall for this and not remove potential tracking cookies because of this notice. It is a really bad thing on PC Tools part to put this notice up. They are just trying to save their ass (or advertisers) while making more people exposed to potential cookies that track people.

I am assuming that they did tie up with several tracking sites to ensure that they put in a fear before people removed cookies from their PCs. Eff them, I would highly suggest you use CCleaner, Malware Bytes and Microsoft Security Essentials (links at end) to clean up your cookies or mess going forward, just duck and uninstall PC Tools once and for all.

• http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
• http://www.malwarebytes.org/
• http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Happy Defending.

I am not thrilled every time I get a email from Microsoft, but over time I have definitely started to get miffed at the way they send out newsletters to their users.

It is a generally known fact that images in newsletters and emails are blocked by most of the email clients, including most of those owned by Microsoft. However, they always decide to send out emails which look like this.

Now this email could be viewed in browsers by users, so are Microsoft developers so scared that their code won’t work on Internet Explorer that they decide to opt for images instead?

Come on Microsoft, can you at-least teach your developers to develop HTML emails without using images for everything, so that we can read something that you want to tell us about? We really cannot make out what you mean with the "x" signs, or do they have a coded message for us?

For those who are interested, here is the what the actual Microsoft email looks like.

Ouch, using images for text is just so 2050. Could we have some non-cryptic email’s next time please? Listening Microsoft? If you can’t, then the least you could do is ask your designers to not create something which can be cut/layered using Photoshop, and then pasted into a newsletter with a disclaimer at the bottom.

Note: Before you go ahead and rant, I agree that the design is great, but what is the use if I cannot see any part of the message you intended to send to me?

WordPress.com has gown down apparently taking down millions of blogs with it. We were one of them too, however, we are not hosted on WordPress servers, but were using a plugin called WordPress Stats for analytics purpose.

However, our site was down and out for almost half an hour, the reason apparently because we used the WP Stats plugin.

So if your site is down and you have no clue why, just login to FTP and delete the WP Stats plugin and everything should work fine again. Let me know if your site has gone down after WordPress.com went down.

Update: You might see downtime on your site if some of your plugins try to access WordPress.com, this might not just be for the WordPress Stats plugin.

Update: WordPress.com looks to be back up again.

Update: Source was The Next Web

About thirty minutes ago, I received an email from Microsoft concerning the status of my Windows 7 test beta (screenshot below). It underlined several key ideas, most importantly the annoyances that will be caused to those who do not switch from the RC version to a retail version, or an older OS (XP, Vista).

The key points of this email were:-

• It is time to replace the RC.
• Though Microsoft said that the RC will expire in June, 2010, they are going to make your computer nag you consistently for a month (i.e. starting March 1st) before it actually expires.
• What kind of nagging you ask? Well for starters the computer will automatically shut down after 2 hours of work without saving your work. Second, the wallpaper will change to the static you are using the RC! Give us money and we’ll give you the retail version! Switch before this month! Switch switch switch switch!. Okay, not exactly that but it will change to a persistent black with a message on it.
• To revert back or upgrade, you need to do a clean installation. A normal installation keeping the files is not possible. As the letter sweetly puts it as with any clean installation, you’ll need to back up your data then reinstall your applications and restore the data.

So it is time to switch to an older version or buy the upgrade if you wish to continue working uninterrupted. I still do not know why Microsoft would start nagging a month before it actually expires. The worst part is that I cannot say much against Windows 7, it is pretty good. If only Microsoft stopped annoying the hell out of us, it would be much better.

A couple of days ago, I was having some fun watching the last episode of the Tonight Show hosted by Conan O’Brien using Hulu, however, I could not watch the entire episode. To my surprise today, the show has now disappeared off the Internet forever, thanks to NBC and Hulu.

The Conan O’Brien and NBC saga is well known, however, it is really sad that both NBC, and NBC owned Hulu pulled off the show from the Internet. All Things D reported about the removal and it is really sad to see the show scrubbed off the Internet.

I am a big fan of Hulu, and it does allow me to catch up with shows that I usually miss in the day, but doing something like this, which is more than monopolistic, is definitely not done. Agreed that you do own the rights to the show, but it is totally unjust to pull off something that the viewers would like to see.

Heading over to YouTube now, hope that they don’t pull off the Conan shows from there too.

Hey PayPal,

You Lousy and freaking son of a eBay and Amazon Gun, I don’t care who you are and what you do. Why? Because you charge more than a bank, always charge me some amount of my hard earned and sweat induced money and I still keep quite. I have never raised a voice whenever you have milked me of 2-4% of my hard earned money every bloody time.

Well to start out with, I was definitely upset and pissed off when you pulled out six payments from my account, but more than that, I was pissed off that you pulled off several payments I sent out to people who create an ecosystem around this website and that pissed me off to no end.

Why did I rely on you in the first place to send out payment, because, you are the only so called payment system which allows worldwide payments, and I came to rely on you. I was not really upset that you pulled off so called operations in India, I was more pissed off because you did so without intimating anyone and for the matter of fact you did not even intimate anyone before reversing payments.

If you have any clues about what you did, you might want to read the comments here. I certainly could not pacify them that they lost their hard earned money, all I could assure them was that everything would be alright. But a paunchy ass that you are, you had to go and ruin it by threatening someone that their credit card would be charged for no fault of theirs. At this point I lost both ignorance and patience about you. Why, because for such a long time I had only believed in you and did not withdraw money, but now seriously, if you ask me, I do not even want to keep any money with you.

You would be curious at my outrage, other than the enormous money you have earned from me by milking me every time, along with the Interest you earned on investments, because I trusted you more than a bank.

Well, here is why. First of all I sent a payment to someone who withdrew it to his bank. After a blue moon and when you realized your own problems, you decided to withdraw the money I sent to him. Now that would be fine, but you did not intimate him or me about it. Now after all is said and done, his account went into a negative balance. OH AND WELL IT IS OUR FAULT, WE SINCERELY APOLOGIZE FOR THAT, but still you threaten him that you will charge his mother’s credit card account to recover the dues??? Are you bloody fucking serious? Why the hell did you reverse the payment in the first place? It is our fault that you did not intimate us? Is it our mother’s fault that she decided to activate a credit card with PayPal.

Why the hell should we pay for your fault you mother sucking MoneySucker? Every time you charge us for payments we keep our mouth shut. Every time we send payments and other’s receive it, they have to keep their mouth shut. It is high time we fucking shut PayPal once and forever.

We need a PayPal alternative that is not sleazy and does the job. If you are one, let me know. I will use you and if I like you I will promote you. But, good luck PayPal, you just earned my middle finger.

As a honest and sincere user of PayPal, I ask every other user to withdraw their money and BOYCOTT PAYPAL, BOYCOTT PAYPAL forever. Never accept a payment in PayPal, if you think that this is the last time those assholes did this, you are wrong, if someone really cared about you and YOUR MONEY, they would first tell you about it, it does not matter if you lost $1 or $10000. PayPal fucked up by not intimating its customers before doing what it did. And believe me, when you play with someone’s money without telling them, you not only fucked up, you also lost every bloody fucking credibility you carried around.

Cheers
Keith

Disclaimer: The views in this post are my own and do not reflect that of Techie Buzz.

P.S: I apologize for all the profanities included in this post.