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/2009/08/04/quick-data-visualisation-in-cell-bar-graphs/ http://www.netbookexpert.co.uk/index.php/2009/08/04/quick-data-visualisation-in-cell-bar-graphs/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:08:35 +0000 admin http://www.netbookexpertwp.co.uk/?p=5 Quick data visualisation , in-cell bar graphs.

Spotting trends in large volumes of data can be tricky! Thankfully Office 2007 introduces a feature that allows you to format columns of data according to their value, allowing you to see at a glance the distribution of data and any significant outliers!

Excel in-cell bar graph

Illustrated here is a sample of data in two columns. To visualise the data in the second column:

1. Select the contents of the column
2. Select the “Home” tab in Excel 2007
3. Click “Conditional formatting”
4. Click “Data bars”
5. Select a colour scheme to suit your taste!

The visualisation will appear as illustrated! Helpful huh?

You can customise the colours and rules by which the cells are formatted by clicking the “More Rules..” button in the data bars menu.

If you don’t have Excel 2007 – not to worry! There is a work around for previous versions of excel, one of which can be found here:

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/lightweight-data-exploration-in-excel/