Best place to buy Android Smartphones?

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Hi everyone! I’m making this blog post since time and time again I keep getting asked the same question. Where do I go for my Android phones?

Having been a owner of two Android phones, a HTC Desire and a Sony Xperia Play, I always look for one of the cheapest place to buy the smartphones. I’ve always recommended going to the network provider themselves for the simplest process. For me, I find O2 the best Network provider for the UK having tested several others in the past few years, since around my area, mobile signal isn’t great at all. Mainly because they not only offer the best deals for Android (Pay-As-You-Go or Tariff) devices.

You can find the O2 Webstore here. It will guide you through the Android platform and also show you some of the best Android devices around today!

For example, they were selling White Sony Xperia Plays a couple of months ago for just £149.99! Obviously they got snapped up quick so you have to keep your eyes peeled and act fast!

I hope this article helps several readers who are looking to make the leap into the Smartphone world or who are looking for an upgrade from another phone.

Dell DW 1360 Wireless in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

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The Dell DW 1360 (BCM4311) is a fantastic wireless card for every osx86 user out there since OSX supports the card right out of the box. Unfortunately it doesn’t work straight out of the box for Ubuntu and there is a lot of old, messy and confusing methods out there to get it working. This is mainly because these methods have changed because of newer releases of Ubuntu.

Using my experience with Ubuntu and this wireless card, installing the driver can be very misleading without any tutorials. Especially since when you first install Ubuntu on your system it indicates that there are restricted drivers that needs to be activated. With this wireless card this is NOT the case. Please make sure this isn’t enabled for the wireless card, instead plug in an Ethernet cable and go into the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

This installs the needed firmware for the wireless card, now all you need to do now, is simply reboot and enjoy!

Viewpad 10 + Windows 8: Missing CD/DVD Driver

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When trying to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on the Viewpad 10 via USB Booting you might get an error alerting you that a CD/DVD Driver is missing. Which doesn’t sound right considering the Viewpad 10 is a tablet so it doesn’t even have a optical disk drive.

I’ve seen several possible solutions while searching the internet such as downloading the image again, trying a different USB flash drive, changing to a different USB port when you get the error message or simply upgrade from an existing Windows 7 installation but none of these were suitable solutions for me or never worked.

One solution I found which worked on my Viewpad 10 was to instead of booting from a USB device, swap it for booting from the MicroSD card slot. This should allow you to install Windows 8 Developer Preview without any error messages preventing the installation of Windows 8 to be successful.

Did this work for you? Comment below!

LXDE Tip: Power Button not working?

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Using LXDE and the power button on your desktop, laptop, netbook isn’t working? This is because LXDE has no interaction with ACPI on your computer by default. I came across this problem when I was using Lubuntu on my Acer Aspire One A150 and I couldn’t find a setting to configure the power button to shutdown when I’ve finished with my session.

A quick solution to get the power button to shut down when pressed is to install a small application called, acpid. This application will simply shutdown your Linux powered device once the power button has been pressed.

To install on a Debian/Ubuntu based system simply fire up your terminal and enter in:

sudo apt-get install acpid

And that’s it! Once installed simply press the power button and it should now start the shutdown process!

Optimize PC Gaming Performance

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Want to get the most out of your PC when gaming? I’ve been PC Gaming for many years, below is a brief guide to get the most out of your computer’s hardware if it doesn’t quite run your game as smoothly as you like.

Tune Software

Make sure that you have tuned your Operating System by making sure that no unneeded programs and services are running in the background and using your computer resources. Make sure that your computer is clean as possible so make sure to uninstall any unwanted programs and install utilities such as CCleaner which will get rid of any hard to reach files such as browser history which is clogging up your system. CCleaner also repairs any Registry errors which can noticeably boost your Windows PC responsiveness. 

Game Booster is also another handy utility to run while playing on a game, it will stop any background services that aren’t needed when playing a game and will also free up spare RAM. The program also features other helpful tools such as checking to see all your drivers are up to date.

Old Processor or Old Graphics Card?

A computer processor and graphics card are vital hardware needed to run any computer game, finding out which piece of hardware is bottlenecking your system’s performance can help boost your PC ‘s gaming performance. It’s all about finding the “sweet spot” for your PC, getting a fine balance between utilizing your hardware’s maximum performance. For example, if your processor isn’t as strong as your graphics card then you want to alter the Game Settings in order to ease the strain off your processor and add it onto your Graphics Card. So adding more graphics detail can actually boost your computer performance in most games like Call of Duty: Black Ops. Or if it’s the other way around and your processor is more powerful than your Graphics card (Such as having a built in Intel GMA Chipset) then you want to put the strain on your processor by lowering the Graphics settings inside your game in order to ease the pressure of your graphics card/chipset.

Not enough RAM?

A memory upgrade is very cheap these days so that would be the best solution if you’re low on RAM. Other than that there are a few solutions to help get the most out of your computer’s RAM such as reducing the memory usage your Operating System uses such as turning off visual effects and unneeded themes.

HTC Desire Gingerbread Update coming this month?

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On Friday, HTC announced from their Facebook page that they will start rolling out a release of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) for the HTC Desire at the end of July. It seems that HTC update their phones yearly since Android 2.2 ( Froyo) was released at a similar time last year. In order to check to see if the update is available for your HTC Desire simply access the Settings menu then scroll to the bottom to the “About Phone” option. From here you simply select “System Updates” and then press the “Check for updates” button. A notification will appear if you have a update pending.

 

Gingerbread_Desire

Gingerbread brings several new features to your phone including the ability to download Applications from the market which file size is larger than 30mb, better application management viewer and cool development options such as being able to kill an application by holding down the back button on your Desire.

Enjoy your Gingerbread powered Desire!