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The Editor's Blog


>> Postings for August 2007

Find out who's top of the ISP speed league

August 29, 2007

We all know by now that ISPs' promised broadband speeds should be taken with a pinch of salt. But comparison site Broadbandchoices.co.uk claims to have exposed the full extent of the disparity between what individual ISPs claim they offer and what they deliver.

According to BroadbandChoices' July survey - based on speed tests performed by users - Tesco customers are most likely to achieve the broadband speeds they pay for. But even the supermarket giant has little to be proud of – its customers get 53.8 percent of the maximum speed Tesco promises them. Broadband subscribers using other ISPs get a far worse deal, however - on average they get 39 percent of the speed promised to them.

Paul Trotter | Read more...


Free music: Is Deezer the new Napster?

August 28, 2007

Five years ago a host of peer-to-peer services claimed they had the legal basis to challenge old media's archaic views on music copyright. Sean Fanning's Napster was born on the premise that we shouldn't have to pay inflated prices for music, and for a while, it seemed he was going to get away with it. Fast forward to 2007, and Napster is a legitimate service, Apple's iTunes is the world's most influential music downloading service and even the likes of Kazaa and Limewire are attempting to go legit. But despite these high-profile about turns, the free music bandwagon keeps on rolling.

The newest service to hit the headlines is www.deezer.com – a music streaming service based in France that allows you to listen to tracks from a vast number of major artists, for free. You can listen to songs by the Rolling Stones, U2, Daft Punk and even PC Advisor forum member (and the winner of Britain's Got Talent), Paul Potts.

Paul Trotter | Read more...


Does your mobile fancy a Quickie?

August 21, 2007

In fifteen years, the mobile phone has evolved from a brick-sized telecommunications device owned by business execs to a pocket-sized gadget even pre-teens regard as a must. The upshot is that we can't leave home without one, we can't remember phone numbers and we live in constant fear of the battery life indicator. We could be standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square but once the phone's out of juice we're effectively cut off from the world. But fear no more.

According to UK developer N5, coin-operated mobile phone chargers will soon be installed in thousands of hotels and coffee shops across the UK. N5's Quickie machine can give phone batteries a 'powerful emergency charge' in just 10 minutes – and all for £1 a pop.

Paul Trotter | Read more...


Windows reality check

August 16, 2007

Six months on from Windows Vista's consumer release and Microsoft has finally admitted that sales of the new OS have failed to live up its bullish predictions. So what's behind the apparently indifferent attitude to what was supposed to be the most important Windows release of all time?

Dozens of Vista PCs and laptops have been through the PC Advisor Test Centre over the past six months and we've failed to spot major operating system-related problems with any of them. Those Vista issues that we have picked up on seem to occur either when people upgrade their previous XP PC, or when they connect an ageing peripheral to a Vista PC only to find the drivers haven't been updated to allow the two to work together. Other than that, we regard the OS as a decent upgrade and most members of our Windows Vista forum seem to agree with us.

Paul Trotter | Read more...


iThumb hoax as dumb hoodwinked by dumber

August 14, 2007

iPhone and iPod fever encourages journalists to stick an 'i' in front of pretty much any word in a headline in search of a few clicks.

And so last week's story about a man who had his over-sized thumbs surgically altered to help him control his beloved iPhone spawned countless 'iThumb' headlines on various websites around the world (not here, I might add).

Paul Trotter | Read more...


Amstrad - A British PC legend?

August 1, 2007

So, Sir Alan Sugar has sold Amstrad to Sky, and since he's remaining as head of the sub-division, he now effectively works for Rupert Murdoch.

Conveniently forgetting the Radio Shack I have vague memories of owning in the early eighties (my best guess is that it was a TRS80), the Amstrad CPC 464 was my first-ever computer. It was described as the UK's first mass-market computer, was a direct competitor to the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum and could perform word processing and various business tasks. I used it for games.

Paul Trotter | Read more...


Paul Trotter
Blogger Paul Trotter has been addicted to online news since ditching newspapers at the dawn of the internet. He's been writing about the IT market for ten years and is editor of PC Advisor.

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