The following site lists the latest broadband and free netbook deals!

http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/compare/broadband_free_netbooks/

The broadband industry in the UK has been central to the development of Britain`s digital infrastructure which in turn has allowed huge societal shifts in the way that people communicate with one another and go about their lives.

The amount of new broadband customers signing up for services is increasing despite the credit crunch having a negative impact in other areas and with such choice and variety of service in the market there`s very little restriction on which provider or service you wish to use.

The one downside of this is that it can be difficult to choose a broadband provider to cater to your needs and in many cases people either pay a premium for unnecessary extras or are left with a service which doesn`t meet their broadband needs. Never fear though, as following these tips will help you decide.

Connection Speed and Service Availability

Arguably the most important aspect of any broadband connection is the speed at which data can be sent and received and this is dependent on a number of factors.

Firstly there`s the type of service you choose and what’s available in your area. ADSL broadband, using your existing BT landline, is cheap and widely available, but speeds usually reach a theoretical maximum of 8Mbps and in real life are lower for most customers. Cable broadband can reach up to 50Mbps, but cabled areas account for around 50% of households and the fastest speeds are more expensive. Mobile broadband, which uses 3G networks rather than physical landlines, is also coming down in price and gives you the freedom to surf the net wherever you are in the country, but speeds vary between 3.6Mbps and 7.2Mbps and coverage differs depending on your provider. Check out the top providers listed below to see the connections they offer and the extras in store for new customers:

BT – The BT home hub is the crown jewel of BT`s ADSL broadband package, offering as it does the best Wi-Fi coverage for your home thanks to the Wireless N technology.

Virgin Media – The UK`s only cable broadband provider for consumers offers between 2Mbps and 50Mbps to its broadband customers. You need to take a Virgin Media land line and pay line rental, but they add on extras like free evening and weekend calls and include a free wireless router.

Tiscali – Their 8Mbps unlimited ADSL broadband is certainly value for money. Things get even cheaper if you take a Tiscali home phone package, meaning you don`t have to pay line rental to BT anymore and you`ll get free unlimited off peak calls to UK landlines.

O2 – This mobile provider is consistently voted one of the best broadband providers for home customers in the UK and the prices are even better if you`re an existing O2 mobile customer. Speeds of up to 20Mbps are available on their ADSL broadband package and all the usual extras like a free router and cut rate calls are available

I recently got sick of trying to get the lastest version of VMWare server to play nice. I need to run an Ubuntu Linux server on my Windows XP machine for testing various pieces of software.

After a bit of research i downloaded Suns VirtualBox, which seemed to have all the features i was looking for without all the fluff i didn’t need!

Download, installation and configuration was a breeze. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu iso, mounted and installed. Bingo.

However, i need to SSH to this machine from my desktop and i also need to access pages from the apache web server on the Ubuntu installation

By default the networking for the virtual machine is set to PCnet-FAST III(NAT) and the guest machine will reside on a different network.

Looking through the Virtual Box documentation i found what was needed to forward ports on my host (Windows XP) to the guest (Ubuntu) so that i could ssh and access http on the virtual box.

I hope this saves someone else a few minutes:

To enable port forwarding from the host to the guest OS, the guest must be switched off..

using the command prompt, navigate to where the VBoxManage executable is located, on my system this is:

cd “Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox”

Then 3 commands need to be run for each mapping you wish to create.. with the following syntax (replace tokens in []):

• VBoxManage setextradata “[name of your virtual machine]” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/[friendly name for rule]/Protocol” [protocol]
• VBoxManage setextradata “[name of your virtual machine]” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/[friendly name for rule]/GuestPort” [guest port]
• VBoxManage setextradata “[name of your virtual machine]” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/[friendly name for rule]/HostPort” [host port]

So to enable forwarding of port 2222 on my local machine to port 22 on the Ubuntu virtual machine i issued the following commands:

• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/Protocol” TCP
• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/GuestPort” 22
• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/HostPort” 2222

And to enable forwarding of port 8888 on my local machine to port 80 on the Ubuntu virtual machine i issued the following commands:

• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestmysql/Protocol” TCP
• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestmysql/GuestPort” 3306
• VBoxManage setextradata “Ubuntu Testing VPS” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestmysql/HostPort” 3333

i can now access the ubuntu ssh server via ssh -p 2222 user@127.0.0.1

and i can now access the apache server on the ubuntu virtual server via: http://localhost:8888/

Windows XP can load programs it thinks you need before you actually load them yourself! This is done by a process called pre-fetching. This process can consume memory and slow your XP experience.

Windows XP will retain a copy of a portion of a program you have run in the prefetch folder even if you only used it once. If you are unlikely to use this program again, this will adversely affect the performance of your system and is of no benefit to you!

You can see the contents of the prefetch directory by navigating to %systemroot%\prefetch

If you would like to selectively remove programs from the prefetch folder, you can manually delete the items from within the directory listed above. If you would like to disable the service entirely however, please follow the instructions below.

Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory] using regedit:

1. Find the EnablePrefetcher key
2. Set the EnablePrefetcher key to 0

If you are using your Netbook on the move, it can be very frustrating if you have to wait a significant amount of time for Windows XP to shut down. The following tip will show you how to reduce shut down times, by altering the settings that dictate when windows will shut down tasks that are hung (a common cause of slow shut down speeds). Note: This article assumes that you know how to edit registry settings. You should always backup your registry before making changes.

Navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\desktop] using regedit:

1. Set AutoEndTasks to 1
2. Set WaitToKillAppTimeout to 4000

References to the above settings can be found at the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/34637.mspx?mfr=true ]]> http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/netbook-windows-xp-performance-tuning-speed-up-shut-down/feed/ 0 http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/netbook-windows-xp-performance-tuning-adjusting-xp-for-best-performance/ http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/netbook-windows-xp-performance-tuning-adjusting-xp-for-best-performance/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:23:24 +0000 BenWilder http://www.netbookexpertwp.co.uk/?p=47

Windows XP can be set easily for best performance or for best appearance. Setting Windows XP for best performance will disable a number of graphical user interface features, improving the speed and responsiveness of Windows XP noticeably.

To set Windows XP for best performance perform the following:

1. Right click My Computer
2. Click Properties
3. Click the Advanced Tab
4. Click Settings under Performance
5. Click Adjust for best performance – or select your own from Custom if you are feeling adventurous!
6. Click OK
7. Click OK

Screen real estate is at a premium on most netbooks and large icons in the start menu can take a lot of room and seem out of proportion for the screen size offered. A simple change of settings in Windows XP can be used to show small icons in the start menu, giving you a lot more room.

To set Windows XP to use small start menu icons, perform the following:

1. Click Start
2. Click Settings
3. Click Taskbar and Start Menu
4. Click Start Menu Tab
5. Click Classic Start menu
6. Click Customize
7. Scroll down the Advanced Start menu options and select “Show Small Icons in Start menu”
8. Click Ok
9. Click OK

The Microsoft Windows XP indexing service is a topic frequently discussed when it comes to performance tuning. The indexing service can adversely affect performance and especially when you are running Windows XP on a Netbook, you’ll want to disable any services that may slow down or hinder your experience.

The following instructions will show you how to disable the indexing service within Windows XP:

1. Double-click My Computer, point to Explorer Bar on the View menu, and then click Search.
2. Click Change preferences, and then click Without Indexing Service.
3. Click No, do not enable Indexing Service, and then click OK.

The above instructions can be found on Microsofts web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899869

Use of the indexing service however can be useful and can be tweaked to your requirements. If you do require the use of the indexing service, if for example you would like to search your “my documents” folder but not others, the following article explores the Indexing service options in more depth:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5533688.html ]]> http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/netbook-windows-xp-performance-tuning-turn-off-the-indexing-service/feed/ 0 http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/why-buy-a-netbook/ http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/06/why-buy-a-netbook/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:10:13 +0000 BenWilder http://www.netbookexpertwp.co.uk/?p=35 This article will help you decide on the right Netbook for you, or indeed whether a Netbook is right for you!

What do I want to use if for?

The first question to ask yourself before purchasing a Netbook is “What do I want to use it for?”. The answer to this will greatly influence your choice of Netbooks.

Netbooks have been designed to offer great portability, but this is at the loss of other functions such as processing power, memory and storage space. I discuss below the suitability of the average Netbook for a number of common computing tasks that you might involve yourself with.

Netbooks traditionally come with either Microsoft Windows XP or a flavor of Linux. This author owns a ASUS Eeepc 904 HD with Windows XP, and so the following discussion is based predominantly on his experiences with a Microsoft based Netbook.

Whilst the Linux Netbooks are often cheaper, if you are not familiar with the Linux operating system, you may be better rewarded by spending slightly more on an operating system that you are comfortable with!

Music editing / production

Music editing and production typically requires specialist and often expensive software to get the best results. These pieces of software typically consume a large amount of RAM and can use a lot of processing power as they perform complicated computing tasks to produce high fidelity sounds and effects.

Arranging of medium to large scores also consumes a lot of RAM as sound assets are often stored in memory as they are being manipulated.

Samples and virtual instruments can often take a large amount of disk space, and certainly the higher fidelity sounds and samples that you wish to operate on, the more disk space you will consume.

The quality of sound hardware in Netbooks is rarely up to the high standards offered by most of today’s higher end laptops and certainly below that of dedicated sound cards found in modern desktop PCs. It is netbookexperts opinion that your average Netbook is not at all suitable for any remotely serious audio editing and production purposes.

The author has attempted running fruity loops studio on his ASUS Eeepc 904 HD, with less than satisfactory results! Mind you, you are unlikely to want to listen to the garbage he comes out with even on a high powered desktop!

Graphic design

Graphic design software such as Adobe Photoshop typically requires a large amount of RAM to deliver adequate performance, coupled with this, graphic design soon requires a large amount of storage space as file formats such as Adobe Photoshop’s .psd format quickly grow to rather large sizes.

Graphic design is also benefited by a large screen, to allow the designer to better visualize and organize his / her creations. Most Netbooks have a rather small screen (7 Inches – 12 Inches).

Due to the average Netbook lacking in storage space and RAM in comparison to your average desktop, it is this authors opinion that most Netbooks would not make a good mobile computing platform for a graphic designer.

The author does himself use Adobe Photoshop on his Netbook, and this has often been the cause of much frustration as a lot of scrolling around the canvas and a lot of waiting occur!

Games

Today’s games require a lot of processing power, usually an optical media drive (CD / DVD), high fidelity sound, lots of RAM and frequently a large amount of hard disk space!

Your average Netbook is really not suited to offer an adequate gaming experience! the author does however run Trackmania Nations on his ASUS Eeepc 904 HD, and has a great time when the graphics options are turned down a little! Today’s games are really best played on a higher end desktop PC or a higher end laptop designed for gaming!

Office documents

Whilst Microsoft’s office and open office require a moderate amount of RAM and hard disk space, your average Netbook is more than capable of dealing with their demands and makes a great mobile office platform for the traveling salesman or remote worker!

If you are going to be authoring a large number of documents, then you should consider the storage space available when purchasing a Netbook.

A lot of Netbooks come with a VGA port, allowing you to plug in a projector to present your PowerPoint presentations or a CRT / Flat screen for a slightly less cramped working environment.

Music playing

Whilst your average Netbook does not contain the highest end sound hardware, they are usually perfectly adequate for running Itunes or the likes of Spotify to keep you from boredom whilst working.

The headphone jack available on most Netbooks can be plugged into headphones or a HiFi to a better sound than the often low standard built in speakers! The author has plugged his Netbook into his HiFi and whilst the sound quality is not great, it is perfectly acceptable for most occasions!

Web browsing

The average Netbook is the perfect tool for browsing the web on the move! The author plugs his into his O2 PDA and uses the 3G connection from the phone to browse the internet!

Screen size can become an issue on larger sites, but tools in Firefox and IE allowing you to zoom in and out, or change the sizing of a website can be a great help! Performance can be degraded by having lots of tabs open, due to lack of RAM, but for most purposes, the average Netbook performs admirably!

Coding

Developing applications can often involve the use of a large number of different tools and complex development environments, these usually consume a fair amount of Hard disk and RAM. It is the opinion of this author that your average Netbook is not the most suitable computer for a serious development platform.

The author however comfortably runs Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Mysql databases and a number of other tools on his Netbook – a very handy mobile development platform!

Watching films

Watching films or video usually requires the use of an optical drive such as a CD or DVD player. These very rarely come with the average Netbook, limiting the ability to watch a good film on them!

You can generally pick up cheap USB external CD / DVD player for under £70, but with the small screen area of most Netbooks, they do not make the best home entertainment platform.

Watching online video, YouTube etc, is absolutely fine, as the smaller video size and lower fidelity of the content is perfectly suited for watching on a Netbook, your average Netbook does indeed make the perfect platform for wasting a large amount of your morning browsing entertaining videos on YouTube!

Disclaimer

This website and all the information and sugggestions contained herein are provided “AS-IS”, without warranty of any kind. While the author aims for accuracy, and has tested the content in various systems, the author assumes no responsibility for your use of these suggestions. The author will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential or indirect damages due to loss of data or any other reason.