Satellite Internet service is the only option available for many rural Americans looking for a high speed broadband connection. Not so long ago DirecTV was the only game around, offering DirecPC satellite Internet. Today we have two choices, Hughes-Net (HughesNet) and a new upstart called Wild Blue (WildBlue). They both offer bi-directional high speed Internet requiring only a small dish on your home (just like the little dish used by Dish Network for television), yet the difference between Hughes and Wild is night and day!

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Newegg.com is an online technology store selling primarily computer hardware. It was founded in 2001, in California, by two Asian immigrants. The company is often mistakenly confused with the old “Egghead Software“, but there is absolutely no relationship between the two. Newegg’s explosion from primarily eBay sells to their own direct online store was a welcome phenomenon. Unfortunately, their customer service has deteriorated in recent years and product quality has reached a crisis.

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Microsoft Windows Live Messenger Version 8.1 has made instant messaging a bit more fun. You can sketch in the message window in addition to typing regular text. Only other Live Messenger users will be able to see the sketches and other enhancements in this upgrade to msn messenger, sorry GAIM (now Pidgin) and Trillion users. With p2p file sharing, media snapins, sketching, and more, Windows Live Messenger is more than an IM. But what you also get are intrusive multimedia advertisements, a bulky non-intuitive interface, and a lack of chat window consolidation. So, what’s important to you? Fun addin knickknacks or an efficient communication application?

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The actual truth is that the limitation has more to do with the size of the total email rather than the number of messages. In a default installation, Outlook saves all messages into a special file called a “.pst” file. When your .pst file gets to big, Outlook gets temperamental… even more so than it usually is. Do you want Microsoft Outlook to run as stable as possible for you? This article explains how to properly manage your saved email without having to delete your message history.

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With new CPU prices ranging from $28.00 low end to well over $600.00 high end, the consumer is wise to analyze the current price curve. The best deal, which is a compromise between speed and price, is to buy the fastest processor on the shallow part of the curve, just before the incline goes steep. Why? Because it is foolish to buy a top speed CPU for $600+ today that will be worth $28.00 within a couple years! Consider the same AMD Athlon 64 Venice 3400+ which was $280 this time last year, and now can be purchased for only $40, an 86% price drop in one calendar year!

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It’s no secret to most computer users that files are not actually deleted until the storage space has been written over with new data. Even gone from the Windows recycling bin doesn’t really mean “gone” from the drive. Flash media, like the CF card in your digital camera, as well as computer hard drives can have files recovered if accidentally deleted. Finding a good quality, free (as in no cost) software that contains no spyware or malware of any kind has been a real challenge up until Piriform introduced Recuva - and this little tool is a real gem!

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Yes, many of us have had to upgrade to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 to meet the requirements of online software used by our companies or employers. The new menu bar, command bar, and buttons layout leaves much to be desired. For better or for worse, many find the changes confusing and just want to make the radical new layout go back to the classic style. With a little registry fix we found, you can put almost everything back where it belongs, making your new MSIE 7 feel a bit more like the infamous browser you have been familiar with for years.

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Daylight Saving Time has been rescheduled this year from first Sunday in April to an earlier time… yesterday. If your computer did not automatically change the time yesterday then you may not be at the current update patch level. If you use Windows XP with SP2 and have all the current updates installed, your computer will be aware of the Daylight Saving Time change. For those of you having problems getting the time to change, or are manually changing the time just to have Windows move the hour back again, this story provides help. Although this story mainly covers Windows XP, resolutions for other versions of Windows and Macintosh are also discussed.

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Linux Netfilter has made it possible for people to turn outdated computers into high performance network routers and firewalls. When a PCI WiFi card is added, it also becomes a wireless access point. Yet those old computers are still relatively large, noisy, and consume a lot of power, and the components may not be as reliable as needed. Commercial firewall-routers are expensive, and low-end SOHO network equipment is extremely limited. So what are the options for someone looking for a low cost, fanless embedded firewall device with enterprise level capabilities? Easy, they use OpenWrt and turn a cheap consumer wireless router into a powerful router-firewall-wifi traffic shaping security appliance! It all started when hackers cracked into a low-end Linksys and installed a custom Linux firmware.

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Windows users have been converting their CD music collection to mp3 files for several years, many using an old version of Winamp in combination with the free Nullsoft MP3 output plugin. With this combination of shareware and freeware they produced acceptable bitrate mp3 audio files of 128kbps or better. It is kind of an outdated method, but it is still useful to quickly make mp3’s. This is a tried and true method using stable software that won’t cost you a dime. Although newer versions of Winamp have a built-in encoding option, they are not free. The method described in my article does not reference the commercial “pay” versions of Winamp.

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