Tipstrain

First time buyers,with beginners knowledge of inner workings of a PC, are generally in a fix. Whether to go in for an Assembled PC aka Customized PC or go in for a Branded one. Both have their own pros and cons. Here are the 5 buying tips to consider before deciding which one to buy.

1. Parts Used:-

“Assembled PCs use the same quality parts as their branded counterparts.”

This can be a myth or a reality. This is the most important aspect to consider. Parts used should be of optimum quality and genuine in nature.

For choosing an Assembled PC, make sure you hand pick the individual components that go into building a PC. Make sure the individual parts of the PC are first hand. Before you set out to buy the PC, get to know all the parts that a PC is composed of and any peripherals you plan to add on. Here is a list, known as specification of a PC

• Processor – The chip that does most of the computing in a PC. It is defined in core speeds of GHz.
• Mother board – This is an electronic circuit board on which all the components fit or attach to.
• RAM – Random Access Memory. Helps in rapid access of data during program execution, measured in MB & GB.
• Hard Disk – Storage Device to hold your programs and data. Storage capacity measured in GB.
• Optical Drive – Known as CD or DVD drives. They come with writing features also, Speed measured in X – factors.
• Cabinet/ Casing – Forms the CPU in with all internal parts are fitted.
• Graphic Card – Can be on board or a dedicated one.
• Monitor – The Screen used to view. Higher the resolution, better the picture display. CRT and TFT LCDs measured in inches.
• Keyboard – For typing your data into. Can be a simple one or with additional MM keys.
• Mouse – Used as pointing device that won’t run away. Optical ones used mostly with a scroll in the middle.
• Speakers – “This one I know”. Can be 2:1, 4:1, 5:1, or 7:1 home theater types.
• UPS – Uninterrupted Power Supply, provides short backup in case of power failure. Single or Double Battery, Measured in VA.
• Printer – Laser-jet, Ink-jet or Dot-Matrix ones.

Survey the market with your list. Get the best prices.

For Branded PCs, you should make the same list and compare it with the specification and pricing of the PCs offered by different brands and models. Though sometimes you can get the specification of a Branded PC changed to suit your requirement, but remember to check that the changed component is from the same brand and quality and of course it should be first hand.

2 Pricing :-

“Assembled PCs are cheaper than Branded PC”

Again a myth and a reality. When comparing the two on a price point basis, make sure the specification of the PCs match each other. Also consider the cost of other factors, such as On site warranty service any other hidden costs and taxes, installation charges or assembling charges. Sum up all the costs and then compare where the Assembled and Branded PCs stand against each other on the cost factor.

3. Service and Support :-

“Branded PCs offer better support than Assembled PCs”.

Yeah, a myth and a reality again . If you opted for an on site service for both Branded and Assembled PCs, then it basically boils down to how your service center or dealer treats your support requests. He/ She might be able to fix your problems on support depending on his/her knowledge and experience for both Assembled as well Branded PC. For faulty parts replacement and repair, again if its under AMC, you should get a standby till your parts are returned. But if you did not opt for an AMC, you might have to do without your PC for a while if its a vital component for the functioning of the PC, or go and buy another new one and keep the replacement as a standby or add it on to your PC later.

There have been horror service and support stories on both the fronts. On equal service and support platforms, the choice between the two can be difficult at times. One way to decide is ask for customer references in your area and inquiring from existing customers.

4. Built Quality:-

“Branded PCs offer better built quality than Assembles PCs.”

Some what a reality than a myth. Branded PCs are made in facilities with quality control checks, drop teats, burn-in tests. PCs are tested in a controlled environment.

Assembled PCs might lack these tests, but the rate of failure is almost the same as in the Branded PCs for the same quality of components used. This is so because the individual components themselves go under quality and endurance tests from their respective manufacturers. And if you are more enthusiastic, there are several software tools available to test out your components.

5. Bundled Offers :-

“Branded PCs offer a better value for money with bundled offers and freebies than Assembled PCs.”

A myth and a reality. Nothing is free that’s bundled as freebie. The cost might have been jacked up a bit to cover the cost of freebies or it might be to attract you to an end of season sale instead of offering a discount, or a new better model might be on the anvil.

You might get the same value for money with bundled offers from dealer selling a built up Assembled PC as a whole with freebies as a combined offer. But keep in mind the quality and nature of the individual components the PC is made up of, before taking such offers.

After considering all these factors, you might be able to save some money on your planned budget, or you could add more RAM, or go in for a higher resolution monitor with the money you could have saved on buying an Assembled PC. Maybe you can extract a better deal on a Branded PC or get some more freebies bundles in. Which ever way you swing, make sure you buy a PC that preforms to your satisfaction for the environment you have chosen it to buy and it gives you optimal cost for your investment.

Sometimes you might want to display old or archived posts on your home page as featured posts or just to highlight some popular ones that you had written months or years ago. An excellent and simple way to do that is using the Archivist WordPress Plugin.

Though this plugin hasn’t got an admin interface under the settings tab, you can easily edit the archivist.php file in a text editor and change its parameters.

You can change the values for:

1. Number of old posts you want to display.
2. Whether the posts are selected randomly or not.
3. How long you want to display the posts for. This is set for 1 day by default, but you can alter its time period to suit yourself.
4. You can change after how many recent posts this plugin should display the old archived posts.
5. If you want to include posts from a certain category you can give its category ID or a list of IDs by separating them with commas.
6. You can even set the time range to include older than or newer than specific days for old archived posts to show up on the home page.
7. Then you can set limit of posts per page to include or exclude the pulled in old archived posts.
8. Lastly you can set the title to differentiate between recent and current posts.

A few pointers about using this WordPress Plugin.

1. When you try to set the limit of posts per page to keep the number of posts intact on including the old posts, you might lose continuity. Though this could be because of the theme you are using. So you might have to set this parameter to show old posts in addition to the recent posts making the total number of posts on the first page greater than 10.

2. If you are experimenting with this plugin while installing, you might not notice change in posts after altering some parameters. You will have to reduce the time for displaying the posts to say around 60 seconds and refresh the page to see the changes. After you have successfully configured all the parameters you can change back the time to display the posts to the original 24*60*60 or whatever time you want to set.

3. If you leave the category ID blank for showing old posts from all categories, any Pages that you have created might also be shown instead of just the old Posts as these come under the ‘Uncategorized’ category ID. To over come this you have to specify all the categories from which you want to display old posts from excluding the ‘Uncategorized’ ID from the list.

4. The title of the old archived posts will include the HTML code when you hover the mouse pointer over the titles. If you set something like this:

<small>Blast from the Past: </small><br />%title

For making the hovering over the title to display the heading properly you will have to edit your index.php file that displays your home page and change a line as follows:
Go to line containing:

title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”

and change it to:

title=”<?php echo strip_tags($post->post_title); ?>”

This will strip all the HTML tags you use. You can even use this to change the style of your old archived posts to highlight them differently.

This plugin has been tested to work on WordPress 2.6.5 and 2.7. Great plugin to display old archived posts.

Everyone wants to be a leader or at least act like one. By leader it doesn’t mean that you have to be in politics. You can be a leader in your team, you can be a leader of your school, you can be a leader of your class, you can be a leader to yourself.

Leader is someone who takes initiative at doing things. Leader is someone who makes things happen as he/she wants them to. Leader is someone who guides and helps others.

It should not matter how big or small a leader you are. You should first be a leader to yourself before you can be a leader to the outside world.

Being a leader to yourself is not only tough, but it is the fundamental quality that will differentiate you from the rest and take you leap and bounds ahead.

It does not matter if you are an introvert or an extrovert. These things come to play only when you decide to be a leader for the masses. But before that you have to introspect yourself, to find the leader in yourself.

There is just one core aspect in becoming a leader, taking the initiative.

Take the initiative to do things yourself, to act on your desire for making things happen in your life. You have to set an example for yourself in doing things that you can do and learn to do things that you expect others to do.

Start with yourself. If a tap is leaking, instead of just complaining, you can either fix it yourself or call a plumber to fix it. Do not just go complaining about it and waiting for someone else to call the plumber or fix it. Take the initiative. Fix it yourself or get help to fix it.

That’s what leadership is all about.

If you are a parent, you can help you child in developing leadership skills early. If you have been brought up differently, does not mean that your child should lack the basic leadership qualities.

Do not discourage them from doing things you would have not done as a child. Help them to help themselves. If your child wants to do something constructive on his/her own, let him/her do it under your supervision. Participate in their activity to encourage them. Appreciate them when they try to accomplish something on their own.

Not only will you be building self confidence in them, you will also feel proud on their achievements. Making them do small tasks themselves will help them build a better future. Even if they fail at times do not discourage them. Instead make them understand why they failed at a task. Make them learn to do it again and finish it.

Taking an initiative and being a leader can give you a learning experience that you will never get by complaining or letting someone else take the initiative. It will not only help you in your personal growth, but you will also be in a better position to help others and inspire them to be leaders in their own spheres.

The other day I was doing a random search using some keywords regarding a project and I chanced upon taking a peek at the source of some top ranked web pages. I was a bit surprised to see how some of them were coded. Getting more inquisitive, I tried a few different keywords and found web design and development sites showing the same trends.

This set me on to think, what should an individual or an organization hoping to get a web site designed and developed should consider before hiring someone or what should be a guided outline to follow if one has to design it him/her self.

Here are 5 things to consider as a start-up guideline.

1. Standard Compliance :

The code to be written should be in compliance with web standards, whether its plain HTML, XHTML, XML, or CSS. The main reason behind having a standard compliant code is that it’s very close to cross browser compatibility. I have seen sites look wayward in one type of browser and for the other it displays perfectly. With the browsers moving towards standard web compliance, you make your code a bit future proof and it tries to display the same across different browsers with fair accuracy.

2. Cross Browser Compatibility :

Just by writing standard compliant code is not enough to ensure that browsers will display everything the same. The website code has to be checked using different browsers for greater cross browser compatibility. You might have to look for some tweaks and hacks to achieve the desired result across browsers, or you might have to make changes to your code. The only way to check is to use different browsers when building and testing your site.

3. Screen Resolution:

Another aspect greatly ignored. Some Websites designed, occupy more or less, half the screen resolution on higher resolution monitors. With laptops and wide screen LCDs and bigger monitors making inroads, your design should be flexible. It should be fluid in nature to support a minimum or a maximum resolution. The web pages should expand and contract horizontally along with the content without breaking the page layout.

4. Text Reader Compliant:

Can you ignore text readers? Though your viewers would be limited in number who would use text readers to browse your site, but you cannot ignore them. Even if you are sure that you can safely ignore their limited presence, can you ignore Search Engines? Yes, Search Engines crawl through your website as if they are text readers to index pages to show up in search results. If your website is difficult to browse on a text reader, the same difficulty could be faced by Search Engines on going through your site.

5. Ethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Seeing top ranked web pages using unethical means to gain a higher position on search engine searches, is really what you should avoid doing. Not only is this a short term gain, it even might put off a potential visitor or client or your search engine rankings could drop suddenly when the search engines rectify the index. What’s worse is that the trend is fairly common among web design companies and it’s visible on their web pages. Repeating keywords on the top and bottom without any real or relevant purpose in small fonts or using same color as the background to hide planted keywords all over the web page are a few unethical ways to get higher rankings on Search Engine searches. What you should look is at building your content around the keywords you want to target and writing more content for your site that’s going to help your visitors and clients. You will gain a visibly higher ground in the long run on the Search Engine Searches.

As parents we often feel hopeless against the type and quality of TV and gaming content being fed to our kids day in and day out. If you fear that uncensored TV and gaming content can corrupt your child, then with a little bit of introspection and creativity you can cope up with the situation.

At times it is often argued that there should be no ban on violent games or shows, as kids do not turn violent or rash by playing games or become influenced by TV shows. But those concerned about child safety and parents feel otherwise. They tend to directly blame games and TV content for the behavior of kids and teens.

Yes, it’s a kind of eternal debate where each end will hold the other responsible, with some taking sides for and against.

But then these are our kids that we should be concerned about. The marketeers and content producers will continue to target kids as they know they have a huge audience at their disposal that can be hooked on to anything no matter how mindless it might seem just in the name of entertainment. We should continue with our protests and debate on the issue as long as we can and as parents we can do more than that to help our kids.

Times have changed since we were kids. Over two decades ago there were few channels and fewer shows and gaming was limited. Today the kids are being hit with God knows what. With each passing day new ones are popping up now and then with 24×7 feed and access to all sorts of games is one the rise.

Though every kid or teen will not become violent, rash or naughty, but there is a chance that one in a thousand will try to imitate their adored fictional characters or heroes and end up hurting himself or some other kid.

How can you make sure that your kid is not among that one in thousands?

1. Take time out:

Our life has become too busy. To earn money and save some for the future we work hard and need some time for ourselves too, to unwind. But we have to be a little selfless here and take time out for our kids. We often find it very convenient when we are busy to make the kids watch TV or let them play games to keep them occupied.

But as soon as you finish off work, make sure that you can distract your kid’s attention away from the TV or game. You might have a job or even your spouse might be out on one. Whichever category you are in, spend some quality time with your kids whenever you are free even if you have to sacrifice a little time of yours.

2. Be Creative :

Think about some activity to distract your kid’s attention. You can do this by persuading him/her that the next thing you are going to do is more interesting than watching TV. So plan for some activity and make it sound very attractive as the marketing guy does to sell you stuff you never want. The only difference being here that, you are trying to sell your planned activity your kid needs.

3. Help your kid to differentiate:

Kids often tend to try out jumps and stunts that are depicted in the TV shows or games. Make them see the difference. It is not easy and takes some time before you can get your point through. You will have to often repeat the same points over and over, till your kids can learn to differentiate.

You have to do this patiently and it’s very important to be repetitive. Why? Because, the TV content is repetitive and that’s why your kid gets hooked to imitate the actions of the characters without understanding their fictional nature. TV content is less harmful if it’s not repetitive. More the repetition the more you will have to make you kid unlearn and learn to see the difference between fiction and real life. And avoid letting your kid see repeated TV shows of the same nature if you can. You can do this by alternating the locking and opening of different channels every other day.

4. Make a TV free zone:

Not everyone will be able to do it but you can give it a try. Make a no TV zone where your kid spends most of the time at home and sleeps. This way you can practically cut down the hours he/she is exposed to seeing a TV set. If you can’t remove the TV physically, you can try to unhook the Cable feed to the TV for a few hours. But remember you have to attend to your kids or make them busy in an activity to keep them occupied.

If you can save your kids early on from this uncensored TV and gaming content, you can help them through their teens and turn them into fine young adults. You were once a kid too. Introspect and proceed. Don’t be too dictating or harsh with your kids. Too much of coxing has a negative effect. Instead be patient and understanding.

Remember you can win this debate by simply spending more time with your kids and channelizing their energy creatively and constructively.