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Some time ago I wrote a very basic PC buying guide, granted it was Windows based only but seeing how they have the majority market share I thought it appropriate. But what if you’re still kinda confused? Well follows is a list of 3 recommended PCs, pictures are a representation and may differ to actual product.

Best budget PC

This is one if you just want to skim the net, use your MP3 player and upload photos to Facebook e.t.c. it’s nothing flash but only carrying a £180 (best Price) price tag. Here’s the spec:

Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Mini PC, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz Processor, 160Gb Hard Disk, 2Gb Ram, Wireless LAN, NVidia Ion Graphics, 4-in-1 Card Reader, Keyboard & Mouse, Windows Vista Home Premium, Fast Ethernet, No Optical Drive or Modem, 6 x 4-pin Type A USB 2.0 – USB, 1 x 15-pin HD-15 VGA, 1 x HDMI Digital Audio/Video, 1 x eSATA, Mini-phone Headphone, Mini-phone Microphone, Mounts on your desk or fits to the back of your monitor via the VESA mounting holes. Granted you’d have to buy a separate CD/DVD drive but you can pick one up for £35. You would also need a monitor OR plug it directly into your flat panel TV either way a cracking entry level PC for around £300 all in. A slightly ‘punchier’ model can be found here

Mid range enthusiasts system

One of the funkiest PC’s I’ve seen in a while (that won’t break the bank) is the range of Touchsmart PC’s from Hewlett Packard. It has a 22” touch screen ‘all in one’ style setup so it’s not near as bulky and cumbersome as a standard style desktop plus the added ‘family fun’ of not having to use the mouse. There are various models but I think this one is one of the best all rounders. A PC like this will set you back around £1,124 (best price). Spec. as follows.

Intel Core2 Duo P7450 Processor, 4GB DDR2 Memory, 1TB Hard Drive, DVDRW Drive, NVidia GeForce 9900M Graphics, 22″ Touch-Enabled LCD Screen, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, Touch-enabled 22″ diagonal widescreen BrightView LCD with tilt adjustment (10 to 40 degrees). resolution: 1680×1050, Communication Ethernet 10/100/1000BT integrated network interface, LAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth® wireless networking 2.0 EDR, TV (analogue and DVB-T) tuner card, High Performance 2.0 speakers, High Definition Audio 5.1 (via digital output) front headphone port, front audio line in port, rear audio line out port, rear digital audio out port, Wireless keyboard with hide-away bay and numeric keypad, wireless optical mouse. Integrated VGA webcam with built-in microphone with HP Vista Media Center Remote Control. Find HP’s Touchsmarts here

If money were no object

This is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of PC’s – the cream of the crop if you will. This PC will set you back a cool £4,338.01 but the spec speaks for itself.

Alienware Area 51ALX Black Anodized Premium Desktop Chassis, Intel Core i7 processor 950 (3.06Ghz, 8MB L2 cache, 4.8GT/sec), Genuine Windows® 7 Ultimate 64bit- English, 3 years Next Business Day service + 3 years Accidental Damage Support (paying 4k I’m dam sure I’m going to have accidental cover!), 23in SP2309W Full HD+ Widescreen Black UK/Irish (2048 x 1152), 6GB 1600MHz (3x2GB) Tri Channel Memory, 1.2 TB (2x 640 GB) Serial ATA (7200 Rpm) Dual HDD Config Raid 0 Stripe, DUAL SLI™ 1.8GB NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX295 graphics card, Alienware TactX™ Surround sound headset (with microphone), Alienware TactX™ Keyboard – UK QWERTY, Alienware TactX™ Mouse, Blu-Ray RW (Blu-ray, DVD, CD read & write), SoundBlaster XFi Titanium PCIe card.

Quite a beast I think you’ll agree, if you do have a bunch of cash lying around buy one from here

Ubuntu 9.10, the user-friendly, free, Linux-based operating system, is to be released tomorrow (the 29th of October 2009). Canonical, Ubuntu’s corporate sponsor, states that Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, ‘puts the user at the heart of its new design’, and being an Ubuntu user myself for about three years and a Linux user for significantly longer, I can certainly agree.

Having been a tester of Ubuntu 9.10 during its development, I can tell you that Ubuntu 9.10 will feature the following upon its release.

• E-mail and Chat Features – Ubuntu 9.10 will feature a built-in instant messenging client, Empathy, which can connect to many of the most popular instant messaging services, including Yahoo, Gmail (Google Talk), MSN (Windows Live), Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. In addition to instant messaging, the latest version of the e-mail and personal information management program, Evolution, is included. Evolution can manage your contacts, e-mail, schedule, tasks and memos – all for free.

• Internet – Ubuntu 9.10 ships will the very latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which is much faster and excellent for browsing modern websites and web applications which are heavy on dynamic client-side content, such as Javascript. Complex web pages such as Facebook, Google Maps and others will load and work lightning fast.

• Music and videos – Music and videos are managed with ease in Ubuntu 9.10. Simply plug in your iPod, PSP, MP3 or MP4 player and use the built-in media player, Rhytmbox, to download, store, buy and play your music collection. Ubuntu 9.10 can play many video formats with no problems and anything it can not play it will offer to download and install the required codecs automatically, and for free.

• Office and productivity – Word processing, spreadsheets or presentations can all be handled by the latest version of OpenOffice.org which is including in the latest version of Ubuntu. OpenOffice is compatible with all other office applications including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office.

• Store, share and synchronise – Ubuntu 9.10 features integrated ‘Ubuntu One’ service, which allows you to easily and seamlessly synchronise your contacts, notes, files and folders between all your Ubuntu computers. Even if you are on a computer running Mac or Windows you can still access all your files online, meaning you’ll never be at computer without your files.

• Software centre – The brand new software centre for this version of Ubuntu allows you to download and install thousands of free and open-source applications automatically with only 2 or 3 clicks.

• Gaming – Linux-based systems are generally not well known for their gaming prowess. However, Ubuntu 9.10 ships with the ability to download over 400 fun games directly from the built-in software centre. All these games are still completely free and installable with only a few clicks.

This latest version of Ubuntu provides advantages for both business workstations and home user desktops. Although not mentioned in this article so far, for enterprises and small home/offices, the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10 is also released tomorrow alongside the desktop edition.

For more information about Ubuntu, visit the official Ubuntu website.

I thought I’d stumbled onto a great piece of tech in the Powermat but digging a little deeper I’m not so sure. So what is the Powermat? Powermat is a device that allows you to wirelessly charge devices like mobile phones and portable gaming devices on a magnetic ‘board’ which can take up to 3 devices at a time.

Now as long as you have an iPhone, Nintendo DS or a Blackberry this is true but for most other devices you have to use something called a ‘Universal Powercube Receiver’ which is basically a small box that contains lots of different adapters for various devices. Ok so looking at this there are only actually 3 types of device which are fully wirelessly supported – 4 Blackberry phones, iPhone/iPod touch and the Nintendo DS lite/DSi so if you have to plug in a device to then place on the mat using the Powercube couldn’t you just save yourself a ton (£69.99 for the home and office Powermat and a further £29.99 for any of the charging devices) and use the provided cable?

I’m struggling to see where it has merit but also I don’t want this article to sound like a drubbing. Say there are 3 people in your office all with iPhone or Blackberrys (all be it limited on the Blackberry models) and you all chuck in for the mat and 3 charging cases then you’ll all pay around £63 for the ability to charge your device wirelessly. Alternatively I did look how much a second charger for each of these units would be; it’s less than £15 for an iPhone charger and for a compatible charger for the Blackberry and DS its £4! So again where’s the merit? To me it just looks like a big boy’s toys.

Personally I feel if they had waited a year or so and spoken to manufacturers about incorporating the technology into the devices it would be a far superior product. At work myself, having a HTC phone, I can use a bog standard USB 2 A to mini B lead directly from my PC with the added bonus of being able to plug lots of other things into it also. This type of cable comes with lots of modern devices and if you work in a tech environment I’m sure you have a bunch knocking about the office.

Hopefully a couple of years down the line it will be a larger part of mobile devices and I can see Powermats on boardroom tables throughout the world after all the ‘jet set’ businessman would breath a huge sigh of relief, I’m sure, if he could go into a meeting and just drop his phone onto a Powermat to charge without having to look for the correct attachment. If you still like the idea you can pick one up from here

So British Telecom has announced plans to roll out fibre optic to one in six of the population by 2012…

Could this be a hoax? Is BT planning to rip out all that dated, worn out copper wire? Will people in rural areas finally get decent speeds? – All good questions. BT initially were only installing fibre to new build areas but now, it seems, they are branching out. BT are claiming that 1.5 million homes will have access by next summer however they also say that they are only Installing fibre-optics as an integral part of local telecoms cabinets in some cases.

This means that they are putting a bang up to date technology in fibre optics and sticking it on the end of copper wire which could potentially only give you a third of the actual speed being transmitted. I appreciate it will speeds things up to a degree but why not just do the whole lot with an ongoing project. Start with the people getting rubbish connection speeds in rural areas as the above proposed ‘fix’ would help these guys out no end, then start and work on larger towns and cities as not many here get poor connections in these places. Wouldn’t that make more sense?

Let’s hope BT can hold onto enough of its customers to warrant such a huge undertaking, now that Virgin Media are dedicated to getting fibre optic to the people it could turn into a race or better still a price war…

BT’s range of goods can be found here

When was the last time you turned your phone off for the day or didn’t go online to send that all important Email, post up a status update on Facebook or Twitter? Been a while eh? In a survey carried out for Virgin Media by the analysts Future Laboratory apparently identified a type of consumer who “switched on to switch off”

A psychologist named James Brook said; “…These people know that, the modern world waits for no one and that taking a break from technology means potentially missing out…”

Hhmmm I thought sounds a little fantastic but then when you actually think about it, he’s got a point. Like I said when was the last time you actually turned your phone off? What with the advent of aeroplane mode and now being able to put your phone on silent why would you turn it off? If you come out of the cinema or step off a plane for most of us the first thing we do is check if we have any texts or Emails.

The same can be said about the internet. With social networking growing by the day it was a natural progression to integrate them into phones, Bebo on the move or MySpace on the train without need of a laptop, do we just love to chat or is it a compulsion? I’m sure there are lots of us who prefer to send 20 txt messages as opposed to just calling and chatting for a while, it’s possibly even cheaper to call after all if you work it out most texts are 10p so if you send 20 that’s £2 and it’s also 10p a minute average to call so you could have a 20 min chat. I know kids who live next door to each other but still prefer to sit at home on MSN chatting to each other. So should the question be does it cause anxiety not being able to use these social portals or would it suggest that we’re actually becoming less social because we think a short Email is a good way to communicate once a week?

“…As many as 85 per cent of full-time mothers always have the internet turned on at home, while a third of people said they no longer felt any sense of guilt about always being “connected” either by having their mobile phone or computer turned on…”

Now this is an interesting statement. Potentially 85% of full time mothers continually have the internet on? What are they doing? Does this suggest that the internet gives the majority of single mums a gateway to a social life in the day?

James Brook continues; “…At any time we might miss an important email or a phone call, an old friend may try to get in touch via Facebook or breaking news may come in. If they feel that they cannot keep up with these things because they are not connected, it will naturally have a negative impact on their emotional wellbeing and peace of mind…” – we sure do live in interesting times…