Digital News and Review

Archive for March, 2009

The unusual rise of interest of consumers towards netbooks have caused their sales flying like anything. All because of global market slump, the sales of desktops and laptops have dived to some new lows, thus the ever-growing sales of netbooks seem to give a much needed boost and balance to computing appliances industry.

Netbooks, termed by many as mini notebooks, have made latest inroads into the schoolbags and backpacks of students. Interestingly, they prefer it to their heavy notebooks(don’t mistake them as laptops). Thus the parents have no option but to buy their children a netbook instead of heavy desktops or bigger laptops. Even the parents seem to learn a lesson from their offspring. It might be the first time in history when parents are trying to fill in their children’s shoes. They are denying themselves conventional computers for their professional use and making a beeline to grab a beautiful and easy-to-carry netbook.

Though these netbooks are not as efficient as a conventional desktop or a laptop, remember they comprise very few features, buying something at a price less than half of a desktop is not a risky deal. After all it can cater to the all basic necessities successfully.

However, the crazy success story of netbooks was hardly remarkable when it was launched. The customers had shut their doors completely to those primary netbooks. After all, who likes to operate a crap with a screen measuring only 7 inches? Though they were required to pay around $300 only.

Thus the manufacturers, learning from the previous mistakes, have flooded the stores with netbooks with a screen bigger by two to three inches. Even the price is not going to burn some holes in your pockets. You need to pay not more than $400. One thing more! Unlike the very previous models, the new products can run the versions of Windows.

Statistically, it has left behind not only the desktops and laptops, the much hyped Apple’s iPhones are distant runner up. DisplaySearch, a market survey agency, reported that sales of netbooks grew by 160% at the end of third quarter. More clearly, 5.6 million netbooks were sold, in that period, as compared to the sale of 4.7 million iPhones.

For anyone who has ever needed to test a new network architecture, implement a new routing protocol or simply study for a Cisco exam has needed access to a real live router or a router simulator. But buying a bunch of routers just test up an idea or for study is expensive. And until recently good fully functional router simulators we just something we could only dream about.

Some company’s, like Boson have router simulators you could buy to help you study for the CCNA but it was extremely limited with limited functionality. There was also some open source software like dynmips and the hypervisor engine that could be used to simulate a router but these applications were really difficult to configure and only support limited models.

Well now there is GŃ – a multi-platform Graphical Network Simulator. GŃ builds on dynamips and dynagen to create a nice graphical front end for building complex Cisco networks. I was completely amazed at how easy it was to install and build a new network, configure routers and switches and have a nice simulated network up and running.

GŃ is a free open source router emulation software application developed in Python and uses the PyQT libraries for creating the UI. It uses standard vector graphics similar to Visio to create the network digrams and layouts. GŃ uses real Cisco IOS for creating fully function emulated routers and switches.

GŃ supports many types of interface configurations (pretty much if its in the IOS its supported). Frame Relay, Frame Relays Switches, ATM, Ethernet, OSPF, EIGRP, BGP, and more.

The only draw back that I can say so far with GŃ is that you need a pretty hefty machine to simulate a large network. Especially if you are trying to build it on a Windows machine. I havent tried but I have heard that running GŃ on linux is much more manageable.

Another application that has similar functionality is Cisco′s Packet Tracer. Thought originally designed as a group learning tools for Cisco Academy students, it make for a nice router simulator. And because its build for Cisco Academy, the only place to get it is if your enrolled in Cisco Academy. Another problem with Packet Tracer is it only runs on Windows. It’s a bit more limited than GŃ, as it comes preconfigured with set models of routers and switches. It is very stable and less resource intensive than GŃ by a long shot and will do the trick when you need to test out a quick config. To find Packet Tracer is pretty easy if you look out on the bit torrents, you should easily be able to find it.

So if your looking for a cool router simulator and have been frustrated thinking they dont exist. Think again! Here are two really cool simulators right here!

There are many ways to speed up Windows Vista. Some methods are more straight forward than the other and some will help you see huge improvements to the performance of Windows while others offer less noticeable results. Here we will look at 7 most effective ways to speed up Windows Vista from my personal experience.

Turn off unnecessary Windows features.

By default, Vista comes with tons of features that are enabled based on assumptions which may or may not apply to you. Hence you get a system that is running lots of background processes, most of which you do not need at all. So one of the great ways to speed up Windows Vista is to disable them. To see the list of Windows features and turn them on or off, go to Control Panel, change to “Classic View″, click on “Program Features” and then select “Turn Windows Features On And Off”. Some examples of features you may want to disable are:

- Remote Differential Compression

- Windows Meeting Space

- Tablet PC optional components

- And so on.

Graphical features.

One of the better ways to speed up Windows Vista is to turn off fanciful graphical features if you are not too much into aesthetics. One example is the Aero feature. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in ‘systempropertiesperformance’. At the Visual Effects tab, uncheck ‘Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing′. This will do the job. There are many graphical features that you can take out from here. This can give you more immediate results as compared to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Turn off Windows Indexing.

The Windows Indexing service was initially designed to be one of the ways to speed up Windows Vista by shortening the search time for files. However, as the volume of hard disk increases exponentially, the service has proven to be a resource intensive program causing massive slowdowns when Windows start to index the millions of files in the system. Select Start then choose Computer, right click on your C Drive and select properties. Under the General Tab, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching″. On the next dialog box, choose “Include subfolders and files”. Do the same for the other Drives.

Remove Spyware and Trojans and protect your system against future attacks.

Out of the many ways to speed up Windows Vista, this has to be one of the most crucial things you need to do. This is because not only your system performance is at stake, the security and confidentiality of your data is too. Use free tools such as Avast for anti-virus protection, Spybot for spyware removal and protection as well as Zonealarm for firewall protection. There are other good tools around but make sure they are not spywares themselves!

Remove unnecessary start up programs.

When Vista boots up, many programs run at the start up either in the background or as pop up Windows. Many of these you do not need. You need to take control and eliminate these memory suckers that are lurking in the background. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in ‘msconfig′, choose the Startup tab and uncheck any items that you do not want to auto-load and click OK.

Defrag your hard disk.

This may not be new to you but if you are thinking of using the Windows Defragmentation Tool in Vista, you can forget about it. Instead, use a free 3rd party tool known as Defraggler (Google it for the download link). It is still quite effective in comparison to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Clean your registry.

One of the often neglected portions of Windows is the registry itself. Many do not realized that one of the best ways to speed up Windows Vista is to make sure the registry is clear of invalid entries that causes Windows to perform unnecessary tasks. Cleaning the registry has other advantages too. In certain cases you can remove Windows errors that pop up during boot up.