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The laptop charger connects between the mains electric socket and the laptop, converting high voltage AC to low voltage DC. If the charger fails then the laptop battery will eventually discharge when you turn on the laptop. If the charge indicator light on the laptop does not illuminate when you connect the charger to the electric socket and the laptop, then no power is getting to the laptop and the charger might be faulty. There are usually three parts to the charger, any of which can and occasionally do fail.

Firstly check or change the fuse found inside the mains plug; depending upon which country you live in you may or may not find a fuse in the mains plug. If the fuse has failed then replace it with one of the correct type and current rating. If a fuse blows more than once then this usually indicates a fault with the charger or power cable. Whilst checking the fuse make sure that the brass screws are tight where the cables connect to the plug contact pins.

Secondly check the power cable that connects from the mains plug to the charger is not damaged. You should carefully check each end of the cable where it connects to the mains plug and the socket that connects to the charger. If you carefully bend the cable you may see where it is becoming detached from the plug or socket. You must replace the complete cable plug assembly if it is badly twisted, bulging or shows minor damage.

It’s almost a necessity to have a computer these days. We use them for so many things – games, work, bills, emails, instant messaging, and video messaging – and we are used to having them around. We don’t expect our computers to give us problems. On the contrary, we expect them to run smoothly, without any problems.

Unfortunately, computer problems happen to everyone. There are many reasons that this happens. One reason is because we don’t take care of our computers. They require maintenance, just as a vehicle. Updates must be made to keep our software current. Virus protection is necessary, along with firewalls to prevent infection from other sources to enter our own systems.

At this time, we begin to panic, knowing that it could be serious. We find another computer that has Internet access and begin to search for error code messages. We try to find someone else who has had the same problem. We may even call customer support. They will ask if you’ve installed any new programs lately. They will suggest a system recovery. Sometimes, however, you can’t even do a system recovery once you are in this much trouble.

The blue screen of death is known officially as a stop error or a bug check. It is an error screen that is displayed by the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It indicates a critical error, unable to be recovered, which in turn causes the system to crash. The term “blue screen” simply comes from the fact that the screen turns blue when the error occurs.

An online presence with a personal or business website is almost part of our everyday life. To design your own site could be quite an interesting exercise. It also does not need to cost you the earth to make this become a reality either. There are many open source tools available to aid you on this journey. We will share five types of open source software necessary to create your own CMS web site.

When you consider using a CMS as the basis for your web page, you will require specific types of software for the design process.

Web Server

The first piece of software you will need is web server software. All web pages need to be loaded onto a web server to be visible on the internet. One of the popular web servers which I use as well is called XAMPP. It is created and maintained by Apache and Friends, and consists of the Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP and Perl.

CMS

The CMS is what will be used to write and arrange the code for your website. A CMS is quite useful for giving your site a uniformed appearance. There are many CMS available, with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal being the most popular. All of these CMS have extremely active communities involved with the development of numerous themes and other add-ons.

Graphics

With the tablet PC becoming real competition against the iPad, it’s safe for us to assume that for some time now, this device will experience tremendous growth. With the large variety of brands, capabilities and specifications it can be rather difficult for one to determine which is best for you to invest in, based on the price. The likelihood is that you will spend a lengthy period of time shopping around for something. There are tons of places where you can find a tablet PC which is decently priced, such as Best Buy, eBay, Craigslist and many others. Before you make any investment decision, it’s best that you consider these few things that I have listed below:

The Vast Majority of Us Love the Big Screen

The screen size is one of the most important aspects of the tablet PC which you must consider. One concern that many people tend to have when it comes to purchasing such electronic devices is the view size and its quality. Even half of an inch is a fairly significant difference when it comes to writing an essay or watching your favourite movie. The screen size of these devices range from as much as 10 inches to as low as 5 inches, one disadvantage of the larger screens is the weight, which will ultimately make the device less portable.

I was called to visit a small business in Chichester this week, the owners laptop wasn’t booting because the operating system was corrupt and although he had the original setup CD he was unable to repair it. One of the first questions I asked was “do you backup your computer and your important files?”, unfortunately the answer was no.

Luckily I was able to mount the hard drive, transfer the files he needed to my laptop, run a fresh install and then move the files back. Some of the data included accounting files, customer contact lists, design files and a lot of other important documents.

When I asked him later why he never backed up, he replied with the same kind of answers I hear a lot. The most common reasons I hear when visiting customers include:

• I never had the time to set it up.
• I didn’t know how to set it up.
• I thought it would be too expensive, etc.

When I asked him how important those files were he realised that he might possibly be out of business without them!

Hard drives have moving parts, they tend to break now and again, laptops are stolen, operating systems corrupted, important files accidentally deleted you get the idea… We often tell our customers “there are only two types of hard drive, those that have failed and those that will fail!”

How do you know if your computer has a virus, a worm, a trojan horse infection, spyware, malware, crimeware or any of the other known types of infection? Obviously, everyone’s PC is different, so it is up to each person to keep an eye on the known and documented causes.

Although not all of the following symptoms will necessarily indicate your PC has an infection, if you note more than just one of them happening at the same time, there is a high probability and you would be advised to look into it further.

1. Performance is sluggish now compared to what it was when the computer was new. Unfortunately, there is no single cause; it is likely to be any of the following or a combination of them: virus, worm, spyware, Adware, rootkit (provides remote access to a PC without the user’s knowledge).

2. PC taking longer to boot up. This happens anyway as you load more and more programs, especially if your computer is older and you’re trying to run the latest resource hungry applications, but it’s worth checking for malware or other infection that has been added to the start-up sequence.

3. Unexpected shutdowns and restarts. This can be very frustrating if you are doing original work, especially if auto-save is turned off or infrequent. A virus is the most likely cause of this problem.