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"  Casting a Wider NetI live in a rural area that is not serviced by cable and my local phone company doesn&amp;#039;t offer DSL. I looked into satellite Internet service years ago and was disappointed to learn that it was slow, awkward and expensive. Are there any reasonably priced, easy-to-use satellite ISPs? The earliest satellite broadband services were launched in the 1990s and were generally sold alongside satellite TV service. The main drawback in those days was that the broadband worked in only one direction. These &amp;quot;telco return&amp;quot; systems delivered high-speed downloads through the satellite stream, but uploaded information was sent over a slow-as-molasses phone line. This patchwork technology proved awkward and left satellite broadband with a bad rep. Now, when you are at the Internet sites of satellite TV providers DirectTV and Dish Network and look for Internet service, you are guided to partner companies, such as Verizon and Qwest, that sell DSL. But several companies, such as WildBlue, StarBand and HughesNet, sell satellite broadband, offering two-way service with no need for an open phone line. The services are still expensive compared to cable and DSL--expect to pay $50 to $80 per month, depending on the bandwidth you choose. There are also equipment fees-you&amp;#039;ll need a dish and a modem--that can be at least $500 or more, depending on the lease agreement, although many installers are happy to roll those fees into a one- or two-year contract. (Portable dishes that can be mounted on RVs cost even more.) Nevertheless, it&amp;#039;s a far more affordable option than it used to be. That&amp;#039;s good, because according to a WildBlue estimate, over 15 million people in the United States do not have access to fixed-line broadband. If you decide to go with two-way satellite service, keep in mind the limitations. While download speeds are decent (more than 12 times faster than dial-up, on average, for basic packages), it&amp;#039;s still slower than most DSL or cable services. Plus, the latency--the amount of time it takes for your request for information to be answered by a remote server--is very high (around 0.6 second). That&amp;#039;s because it takes some time for the signal to be shot into space, shot back down to your ISP, then back up to the satellite and down to your PC with a response. The latency makes two-way satellite Internet unsuitable for playing real-time video or online games that require instant reaction times. For nearly everything else--downloading files, e-mail and browsing the Web--satellite Internet is an acceptable connectivity choice. Computer chips are faster and memory is more powerful than ever, so why does it still take so long to turn your machine on? A messy desktop or intrusive software could be slowing you down. Here&amp;#039;s how to clean house and pick up the pace. 1: The simplest way to speed your startup time is to keep your system clean. Windows loads the files and icons on your desktop and in your recycle bin into memory every time it boots--so delete anything you don&amp;#039;t use regularly from your desktop and empty your trash. Another potential slowdown could be hidden viruses and spyware. Root out these menaces with free removal tools such as AVG Free Edition from Grisoft or Ad-Aware from Lavasoft. Finally, an organized drive is a faster drive. Right click the icon for your boot drive and run Windows&amp;#039; defragmentation utility. 2: Still not fast enough? Try holding down the Shift key during boot. That will tell your computer to ignore all the programs that are scheduled to automatically load at startup--it won&amp;#039;t permanently change any settings. If the process becomes significantly faster, then you may want to use Windows&amp;#039; search tool to find your &amp;quot;Start folders,&amp;quot; and do a little culling. Next, check your Scheduled Tasks folder (Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools) for anything that might be programmed to run at startup. If you don&amp;#039;t feel you need to run it every time, you probably don&amp;#039;t. 3: Unless you are an expert user, we generally advise that you leave your system settings alone. However, there are a host of background, system-level programs that may be wasting valuable time at startup. If you&amp;#039;re feeling brave, you can disable them. Using the System Configuration Utility (Start/Run/type &amp;quot;msconfig&amp;quot;), select the General tab and choose Selective Startup. Go through the list of programs and cautiously deselect anything you clearly don&amp;#039;t need running in the background. If your tinkering causes problems on reboot, go back to the System Configuration Utility and change Selective Startup to Normal Startup. Squeeze PlayDo I need to keep old compressed files after I&amp;#039;ve unpacked them? I&amp;#039;ve got tons of them stored in my downloads folder but I&amp;#039;m afraid to throw them away. If you have the hard disk space, I&amp;#039;d say keep them. I tend to take all my temporary Internet files, downloaded applications and other detritus of Internet life, and toss them--unorganized--into dated archive folders every month or so. Why? Well, it&amp;#039;s nice to keep a local copy if possible in case you need access to, say, a video you&amp;#039;ve downloaded when you aren&amp;#039;t able to get online. If you&amp;#039;ve purchased software online and downloaded it as a zipped or self-extracting file, it&amp;#039;s definitely a good idea to keep the original download file after installing it and burn it to a backup disk if you can. You never know when something&amp;#039;s going to go haywire with your software and you&amp;#039;ll want to start fresh and reinstall. There are also times when you might prefer an older version of software to the newer one, but the older version is no longer available online. For example, my favorite firewall application was recently purchased by another company; the once free version now has pop-up screens that nag me to buy the more expensive software. I preferred the previous, nagfree version, so I reinstalled it from my old compressed file. And, don&amp;#039;t forget to keep the support software for your hardware. If something goes wrong with any of your installed devices, it&amp;#039;s good to have all the device drivers backed up to a compressed archive on a CD or DVD, because there&amp;#039;s never any guarantee that you&amp;#039;ll be able to find them online when you need them. Seeing DoubleAfter consolidating the music collection from my work computer onto my home computer, I now have over 50GB of music, much of which consists of duplicate songs. Is there any easy way to weed out the dupes? I wish I could tell you otherwise, but the answer is no. It&amp;#039;s going to be a pain to get rid of the duplicate files, as evidenced by the dozens of software applications out there designed to fix this very problem. This software can make the process easier, but not by much. To understand why, pretend you&amp;#039;re a computer faced with two identical-looking music files. It&amp;#039;s easy to tell the files are the same--you&amp;#039;re a computer, and matching things is one of your better tricks--but it&amp;#039;s hard for you to tell which file should be deleted. Should it be the older one? The newer one? The one sitting in a folder with other, similarly named files making up an album? Is one file a live version while the other one is a studio recording? Many of the applications--Duplicate Finder from Ashisoft.com, as well as iTunes&amp;#039; built-in duplicate finder--will help you find the doubled files, but you (and I mean the real you now, not computer you) will still have to make the decision about which file to keep. (Many duplicate finder tools will let you select an &amp;quot;automatic delete&amp;quot; option, but I wouldn&amp;#039;t recommend it; learn from my mistakes.) While you&amp;#039;re busy organizing your unwieldy collection, you&amp;#039;re likely to find that many of your music files lack proper file names or ID3 tags. If you&amp;#039;d like a quick and easy fix, take a look at MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org). The database uses digital audio fingerprinting to compare your sound files with those of thousands of other users, allowing you to name files without listening to each one. Like weeding out duplicates, it takes some hand-holding, but it&amp;#039;s still a timesaver. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/how-to/a748/3365161/>