Visualizing Your Home Theater

Visualizing Your Home Theater

What do the words home theater mean to you? A big screen TV in your living room with surround sound speakers hidden behind the couch, or a custom designed room with every possible high-end audio/video equipment and dedicated theater seating? The choice comes down to your level of use . . . and your pocketbook.

Start with the room you plan to use as your home theater. If it’s your multi-purpose living room, think about mounting a flat-panel LCD HDTV on the wall and finding one of the many artistic solutions for hiding the screen when it’s not in use. Make sure the furniture that houses your audio/video components has a cable management system to hide power cords and sufficient ventilation. Rear wheels on the cabinet make accessing your connections much easier!

There is a large range of possible entertainment centers: a plasma console or wall system, an entertainment center with bookcase or storage, cabinets to hold a large screen display. Be sure to measure your room accurately to know what will fit best in the space you have available. If you’re redoing a room or moving to a new place, now is a good time to prewire the room for audio, video, security and communication needs, including cabling for future technologies. It makes for an elegant, nearly invisible installation of equipment, with more leeway in the type of furniture you choose. Another possibility — if your “home theater” room also includes your computer desk, think about using your PC to store and play your favorite MP3 files, patched through an amplifier.

There are so many choices — media stands, audio stands that hold 5 to 10 AV components, TV stands for any size television (some loaded with features like wire management systems, adjustable shelves, open ventilation, tempered glass) — as well as choices in styles and finishes, from the beauty of natural hardwoods to contemporary design elements. With such a broad variety of audio/video and other furnishings, mounts and accessories, even the most demanding A/V enthusiast or home decorator will be satisfied with the way your home theater looks.

Once you’ve housed your components, the next most important choice involves your seating. Do you prefer watching movies in your home theater from the comfort of a recliner, cuddled with someone special on a couch, or from dedicated custom theater seating? Do you prefer seating covered with micro fiber fabric, microfiber suede, faux leather or premium leather? Does a home theater conjure up visions of kids with large tubs of buttered popcorn, beer and chips for the guys watching the big game, or romantic glasses of wine? Choose an easy-to-clean surface, and have sturdy tables close at hand to your seating.

As long as you’re visualizing your perfect home theater set-up, remember to connect the lighting and the home theater system to a master remote control. With a few taps of your finger, the DVD spins, the lights dim, you sink into your seat, and enter a galaxy far, far away . . . right from home.

Remove Spyware 2

Remove Spyware 2

Arm you Computer against Spyware

You might have received all those cool pop-up advertisement, screensavers stuff in your computer. Cool isn’t it? Well, it might be cool to have that stuff downloaded and installed in your computer but you’d better be careful there. That stuff could be one of the many spyware.

What really is spyware? Any malicious software that is designed to covertly gather user’s personal information or intercepts the computer’s operation without the user’s consent is called spyware. There are misconceptions between spyware and adware. Adware is the term used to refer to any software which displays advertisement with or without user’s consent. Spyware collects information and sends it out through a background internet connection without user’s knowledge. There is a more malicious version of spyware that can try to intercept user’s passwords or even credit card numbers. Spyware also silently tracks and gathers user’s information and data for advertisement purposes. The functionality and form may differ depending on the intentions of the vendor.

How this spyware get installed in your computer? A common way to become a victim of spyware is to download peer-to-peer file sharing applications. There are freeware and shareware programs such as Limewire and GoZilla that has spyware. Unlike virus, spyware does not usually self-replicate. However, virus and spyware both exploit and infect computers for the same purpose which is for commercial gain.

Spyware exists as an independent executable programs which means it has an ability to read cookies, snoop other applications, monitor keystrokes or scan files on hard drive. It can even install other spyware without your knowledge. Spyware can affect the system performance and stability of your computer system such as, disk usage, can interfere network traffic which causes difficulty in connecting to the internet.

If your computer is infected with this spyware, how are you going to remove spyware and make sure no more spyware that can be installed in your computer? Spyware is a costly problem.

You can manually remove spyware but this can be very difficult and can be very complicated in searching for the hidden components that has been installed in your computer. Some of these programs got to great lengths to hide on user’s system and you might still require assistance.

There are free Anti Spyware and Spyware removal programs that are designed to safely remove or block spyware. The two most popular anti spyware softwares are Lavasoft’s Ad-ware and Spybot. These two have both gained their popularity as effective tool than can remove and intercept spyware. There are recently anti spyware programs that can help remove and protect your computer from spyware. These are the Spy Sweeper of WebRoot and X-cleaner from Xblock. There are also the earlier versions of these anti spyware programs such as, SpywareBlaster, GIANT Antispyware which has been recently acquired by Microsoft, PC Tools’ Spyware Doctor and Anti-Spyware by Trend Micro.

There are also some released numbers of suspected fake anti spyware programs that does not remove installed spyware. These fake anti spyware are suspected to install spyware in your computer instead of removing them. If you have used any of these suspected fake anti-spyware programs it would be better if you rescan your computer for installed spyware using those reliable, credible and tested anti spyware that can really remove spyware.

Some used firewall and web proxies to block access to sites that are known to install spyware as an approach to blocking spyware. Other uses other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox.

Exchanging of vital information in the Internet is very common nowadays; as a result there are also malicious people that would try to steal this information for their own gain. It is best to combat yourself and your computer against them.

Windows 3x Operating System

Windows 3x Operating System

When Microsoft first released their Windows operating system, it was named Windows 3.0. Subsequent versions were named after this original version as in Windows 3.1, Windows 3.2, etc. The entire family of the Windows operating system based on that original version is referred to as Windows 3x.

Windows 3.0 was released in 1990 and was hailed as the next big version of the operating system. It would soon take the computer world by storm and be hailed as what every computer user needed to effectively and easily operate a computer system. The Windows 3x family of operating systems would be the basis for many new and exciting developments in the world of operating systems.

With the release of Windows 3.0, virtual memory and loadable virtual device drivers were present in the operating system which allowed the system to share arbitrary devices between multi-tasked DOS Windows. Because of this, Windows applications could then run in 16-bit protected mode and gave them access to several megabytes of memory. It also removed the obligation to participate in the software virtual memory scheme.

The applications still ran inside the same address space where the segmented memory provided a degree of protection and multi-tasked cooperatively. For Windows 3.0, Microsoft also rewrote critical operation from “C” into “assembly” making this release faster and less memory-hungry than its predecessors.

With the introduction of 32-bit Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the family of Windows 3x operating system could finally stop relying on DOS for file management. The most important novelty of this version of Windows was the possibility of running 32-bit multi-threaded preemptively multi-tasked graphical program. However, the necessity of keeping compatibility with 16-bit programs meant the GUI components were still 16-bit only and not fully re-entrant which resulted in reduced performance and stability.

Nevertheless, the Windows 3x family of operating systems was still one of the most innovative designs for an operating system seen to date. Even though in 1990, operating system technology was still evolving, Windows 3x operating systems were technologically advanced way over their competition.

This version of Windows would introduce the graphical user interface making it easier for anyone to operate a computer system. Point and click technology would soon become the norm, but it all started with the Windows 3x operating system. The computer world, at the time, hadn’t seen anything like Windows 3x, but they would sure see more with the advent of technology.

Operating systems have evolved over the years, but the Windows 3x family of operating systems set the groundwork for the operating systems we know today. Constant updating and improving gave us the capability to use our computers in new and exciting ways. And it all started in 1990.