Dust Kills

22/02/2012 General Tech / Guides
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Dust and Hairballs are the biggest killer of PC’s, Laptops & Games Consoles by far. It builds up in the internals of equipment and causes over heating which is bad, VERY bad! An overheated Processor, Ram or GPU will have you reaching for the wallet (the one place dust can be good!). In addition to the overheating dust can also cause static shorting if it gets into the wrong place.

This is why we offer a PC Clean Up and Health check for just £20. It includes a physical and virtual clean up of the PC or Laptop including removing all the dust from components and prolonging the life of the equipment. On the virtual side we check and clean the Windows Registry, Settings and Security such as Virus & Mal-ware to ensure your Computer is running in tip-top condition and as fast as it can.

Most people find problems relating to dust when its to late, when the PC or Laptop has died and requires expensive parts, or at worst, complete loss of all your data!

£20, not much is it….

Notes: To book a PC Health Check simply call us on 02920 020409 or email info@rapidpcrepair.co.uk and we’ll get you sorted out at your home or office, so there’s not even any inconvenience!

Windows 8 is coming…

19/02/2012 General Tech / Reviews / Windows
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Just as we were getting used to living with Windows 7, granted, a vast improvement on the terrible Windows Vista, along comes Windows 8 to taunt us with a brand new shiny interface.

Windows 8 Metro Interface

The shiny new front end of Windows

We’ve been testing the Developer Preview for a few months now and whilst its Metro Style Interface is very nice and does work well, its essentially Windows 7 under the hood. That said, Windows 8 will certainly transform Tablet PC’s and the app’s are a nice way to quickly access things such as Internet Explorer and Twitter.

The success of Windows 8 could in fact come down to whether app developers take up the platform which is based on the Windows Mobile platform, which so far, hasnt seen the take up microsoft would like compared to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

We’ll take another look on the 29th February when the Beta, sorry, “Consumer Preview” comes out which should give access to the Windows App Store which the DP doesnt.

Notes: Windows 8 is the Next Generation Operating System (OS) from Microsoft.

Beat the Bloatware

19/02/2012 General Tech / Guides / Windows
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When buying a new PC or Laptop from a high street store or major manafacturer such as Toshiba, Acer, Asus and HP it comes pre-loaded with lots of less than useful program’s in addition to their old staple Norton!

Most of this software is useless to the average user and bloats out your PC hence the term “Bloatware”. It can include such things as Toolbars, Ebay, Amazon and games demos. (We’ll come back to Norton later!)

Why do PC companies do this? Put Simply, £££££££££££! Software makers pay these companies to have their software on new PC’s hoping you the customer will think “oh well its recomended by them surely” and keep/use it.

Bloatware on a Toshiba Laptop

Bloatware on a Toshiba Laptop

Ok, lets mention Norton now. Virtually every computer coming out of PC World, Comet et al comes bundled with a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus. Norton pays HUGE amounts of money to have this in the hope that you will just continue the trial rather than uninstalling it and putting something else on. There is one problem with this, Norton is by far the worst anti-virus in the commercial market. Not only does it miss a large amount of viruses, it slows down computers and worse still, hacking group “Anonymous” recently provided evidence that they have the master source code rendering all Norton/Symantect products unsafe and insecure.

So what do we recomend? Just have a look at the software thats pre-installed and ask yourserlf, do i want or need it? If the answers no then uninstall it via the Windows Control Panel and reclaim that hard drive space. It has no bearing on your warranty.

As for Norton, uninstall it and install one of the brilliant FREE anti-virus programs such as AVG or AVAST as they work better than Norton and dont slow your computer down (oh, and havent been hacked!)

Hello world!

19/02/2012 General Tech
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This is our first post and is a bit of a test really to check everything is working as it should.