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If you are a home computer user, two of the most popular printer lines in the world are the HP DeskJet and HP PhotoSmart printers. Each line has its own speciality so it is important that you understand which model printer is the right one for your family.

The HP DeskJet is the ultimate home printer if the majority of your print jobs are going to be documents and black and white printing. If you have a child in high school or one that is in college, this is the perfect printer for your home. Ink for the DeskJet is easy to find and install. If you aren’t very computer literate, no worries, DeskJets are computer-illiterate friendly. Inkjet cartridges can be found online, at your local store or by mail order. Simply look at the bold number that is on the cartridges currently in your printer.

The HP PhotoSmart can print documents beautifully, but it is much more a printer for photographs than for anything else. If you fancy yourself quite the photographer, than this is the printer you’ve always wanted. With the right kind of paper and the right HP inkjet cartridges, you can print photo realistic portraits of the world around you and simultaneously save a bundle on professional printing costs.  This is also the perfect printer to get if you have a young photographer in the house who is going to be experiencing a lot of trial and error while they master their craft.

Both the HP PhotoSmart and the HP DeskJet are superior printers to have in your home. They both utilize easy to use HP inkjet cartridges and shopping for ink is super easy. Simply keep in mind that one is for photos and one is for documents and you can’t go wrong.

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Do you miss the days when M-TV was actually Music Television? Well so do I. I have thought about trying to find all the old videos that I liked so much in the 80s and download them. However, the time it takes to track them down, then hope the site let’s you download them, then download them hoping your not downloading a virus instead, was just too much of a headache. Then I found “Mediaraptor” by Audials. It does all the work for you. You will search video sites for public broadcast videos and downloads them for you. Not only does Mediaraptor.com download them for you, it will also create an organized library for you. Granted it will occasionally get some with lower quality (which you can adjust the setting to filter those out) videos, and it will also occasionally grab a homemade video, but those can easily be deleted. It still saves a tremendous amount of work on your part. Just let it run overnight and in the morning, Voila! Videos!! Let me tell you how easy it was.

I went to Mediaraptor.com and downloaded their program. I ran the install, and to my surprise it asked me if I wanted to install it to the hard-drive or to a thumb drive. Alright, portable app, I love portable apps. So, I tried that first. It need 150 megs available on my thumb drive, easy enough I happened to have a 4gig drive handy, and it had space available which is a wonder in itself. I installed it to it and tried it. Worked like a charm. No hassle, no fuss, just installed and was ready to go. Now, the one thing I did find disappointing, but I have found this many times with other portables, it still had to install a few DLLs on the host computer. Not a big deal, but it does leave a minor footprint, and when I use portable apps I prefer them to be totally portable without and residue left behind. However, as I said, minor annoyance but tolerable. I then tried it on three other computers and again it worked flawlessly. It started right up, saved my videos to the thumb drive and other than the DLLs nothing else was added to the host computer.

So now that the portable was a success, down to business. I installed the full program onto a system and tried it as a local app. Just as easy, as far as I could see there was no difference in the program from the portable to the locally installed one. The program starts up in a empty list. You can click on search and look by artist or song title. You can then choose whether to look for videos and mp3, video only, or mp3 only. As I already know Audials programs work great for mp3 download, I was more interested in the video portion. So I chose video only. I did my search and found numerous listings for each search. Not only that, it told me what service would be providing the videos and the quality of each video. Not bad, I downloaded a few, it didn’t take that long, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and the quality was excellent. Okay this was great, but still time consuming if I wanted to build any kind of library what so ever. So I need something more, and Mediaraptor provided.

They have a wish list. With this you can choose an artist to search for and the program will search the providers for music and/or videos by that artist. It provides a much broader spectrum than searching individually. Type in the name of the artist, or browse by genre and then click on the artist you want it to find. You can create multiple wish lists with up to 100 artists per list. I created two. I created one for country music and one for Rock. You then click which wishlist you want it to search under, and click fulfill, easy as pie. As it pulled them, it would list them on the right side of the program, while at the same time saving the files, grouped by artist, in my music folder.

This program was a joy to use, in no time I had hundreds of videos to enjoy at my leisure, and it only took a few minutes to setup and implement. I would highly recommend this program to anyone wishing to create their own video or music library.

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Wireless gaming headset. They look very nice, but what happens when the batteries die? It does come with it’s own charging station. You can use it while it is charging which is also great. You can morph your voice like you can with the G35 Logitech headset also. I always wanted to sound like an Oger. They are a wee bit expensive at $160.

Logitech

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All of my networking equipment will auto select the kind of cable needed on all ports, but sometimes when I am on-site I need a cross-over or a standard Ethernet cable. This nifty little device allows you to roll the selector wheel on the cable to cross-over Ethernet or loop back or straight through Ethernet. Great idea. Especially for a tech.

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Usage of Windows 7 had finally surpassed that of Windows Vista. 14.46 percent of Internet users are using Windows 7 and 14.34 percent are using Windows Vista. Windows XP, is at 61.9 percent which is amazing because Windows XP is nearly 9 years old.

Apple’s Mac OS X has a respectable 5 percent for the desktop version of the OS.

Via: Techcrunch