Short answer – YES

For the long answer read on ….

Ever wondered why a good quality computer power supply costs Rs.3000 and upwards whereas you can get a Cabinet+PSU for 1000 Rs. What is the difference ?

Cheap PSU does not include the the following to save costs

AC Filter and Transient Suppressor – This is a relatively simple string of capacitors and surge suppressors which protect the input side of PSU from noise and surges in the utility power. Many local and cheap PSUs omit this stage altogether to save cost.

Power Factor Correction – Power Factor Correction helps to reduce the reactive current in the upstream Utility/UPS systems. To give you an example for powering a 100W load with a PF of 0.5 you need a 200W Utility/UPS power, whereas if the PF was 1.0 you would require only 100W Utility/UPS capacity.

Protection Mechanisms – Good quality PSUs have additional circuitry which monitors output load and shutdown when the PSU capabilities are exceeded. Cheap PSUs does not have such protection mechanisms and causes catastrophic failure when PSU capabilities are exceeded often frying the computer components.

Low quality components

Capacitors – Capacitors are used in PSU circuits to filter the DC to remove the ripple. The ripple content in the DC voltages can cause malfunctioning and premature failure of electronic circuits. Cheap PSUs may not have sufficient ripple control hence significantly reducing the life of your computer components.

Active Components – Cheap PSUs often use low quality MOSFETs and Rectifier Bridges. Further they wont have sufficient safety margins which may cause faster degradation of electrical characteristics. This adversely affects the life of the PSU and may result in premature failure of the same.

Efficiency

Efficiency is the percentage of output power / input power. Since there are AC/DC conversions occurring in a PSU, there will be losses in these processes. A cheap PSU doesn’t care about the conversion losses and will have an efficiency typically in the range of 65-70%. That means if you have PC needs 200W power, a cheap PSU will draw 285W from mains input. The extra 85W is wasted as heat. A good PSU will have efficiency in the range of 80 to 85% where the loss is just 35W and thus less heat is generated in the PSU. Due to less wastage an efficient PSU lower your electricity bills, and also extends the life of the PSU components.

Some of the best PSUs you should consider :-

Seasonic S12-II 430W
Seasonic S12-II 520W
Corsair VX-450

Is it worth paying Rs.2000 extra for a good PSU ?

I would say YES. Questions and Comments are welcome

The user account can be hidden from welcome screen but can be used while sharing etc.

Steps

Create a new account from User Accounts

Make the following changes in registry

Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\Userlist

Create a new “KEY”  if “SpecialAccounts” is not listed, under special accounts create “userlist” too (again KEY).

Create a new “Dword 32 Bit value” with name of the created account name with the default value  “0″ (Zero), If  Dword value is “1″  account will be shown.

When we trying to share a printer connected to a Windows XP machine with Windows 7, getting an error message like “Cannot connect to the printer, Printer processor does not exist”. If you get a Windows 7 machine, it makes sense to share that printer so that any computer can print to it. Unfortunately, trying to print to a shared printer on XP machine for Windows 7 Machine is not as simple as it should be.

If you got this error please do the below steps, in both machines,
Step1: Share the printer normally in Windows XP machine. (Reffer Pic. 1 & 2)

Step 2: In Windows 7 machine goto the ‘Devices & printers’ option, then click on ‘Add printer’ button. Then select ‘Add local printer’ option ( Reffer Pic. 3 & 4)

Step 3: Click Next and in the Port name box, type in the path to the shared printer. It should be like \\Ipaddress(Hostname)\Printer sharename,

Step 4: Now choose the printer driver from the list or download the latest driver for the printer and choose have disk. If your printer is a little older, download the Windows 7 driver for the printer and click ‘have disk’.

That’s it, Windows 7 will load the driver and you’ll be able to print to the Windows XP machine from Windows 7. the main things are for doning this sharing the Windows XP printer and downloading the latest driver for the printer on the Windows 7 Machine.

This application is just for fun also learn the usage of %random%. Here we used  %random%, this is for getting some random numbers. This command can be used to create some random values in other scripts. We have described color function in earlier posts. Here “color a” for green text. You can see the loop also

Copy the bellow text and paste to notepad then save it as ‘filename’.bat

@echo off
:top
::To change colour into green
color a
echo %random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%%random%
goto top

Open Device manager

Run command (devmgmt.msc)

Take the properties of the device which you want to identify

Go to “Details” tab and select Hardware-id’s

Here you can see some code like below

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_81681019&REV_01

Find the highlighted text. There you can see Vendor and Device

Now go to http://www.pcidatabase.com

And find out the device information by giving that 4digit value to the site and you can find make and model from there.

Once you find out the device you can directly download all divers from OEM (Original equipment manufacturer) site itself. See OEM driver download links.

Disable wordpress  3.1 Admin bar using plugin, ( All users including admin )

Appling a plugin is the easiest way to disable admin bar, Download this plugin from  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-admin-bar/ and activate it. By activating the plugin admin bar will be disappear from the site.

Disable Admin bar by editing functions.php  ( All users including admin )

Find and append the following lines to you functions.php which is located in your theme directory.

function my_function_admin_bar(){
return false;
}
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar' , 'my_function_admin_bar');

Code to disable admin bar for all users other than administrators

function my_function_admin_bar($content) {
return ( current_user_can("administrator") ) ? $content : false;
}
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar' , 'my_function_admin_bar');

I am blessed to attend  ILUG-cochin (Indian Libre User Group) meeting on 4th Sunday of January 2011, where I met with lots of Geeks, who were happy to share their knowledge. Why can’t I be the part of ILUG earlier……. God only knows………

So… I am sharing the technique which I learned in ILUG meeting, with you guys, thanks to Hari, Sreenath for sharing this information with us.

Let us start………

Step 1 : Checking GRUB version

grub-install -v

GRUB 2 should display a version number of 1.96 or later. Legacy GRUB is version 0.97.

If you are using Legacy GRUB, update your GRUB by referring the following link

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

So… now you are upgraded to GRUB 2……. let us proceed…..

Step 2 : Get into GRUB command mode

1. Reboot your distribution

2. Hold down SHIFT to display the menu during boot ( ESC in GRUB legacy)

3. Press ‘c’ to get grub command line

Step 3 : Prepare ISO to boot

loopback loop (hd0,1)/iso/ubuntu10.4.iso

hd0,1 is the partition where the ISO file is located

/iso/ubuntu10.4.iso is the location of the filename

Change these two parameters that suites your environment

linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=ubuntu10.4.iso

This command loads the vmlinuz file from ISO,

In Ubuntu vmlinz is stored inside casper , This will change in different distributions, for example in Red Hat/CentOS server vmlinuz is located inside isolinux

Filename=ubuntu10.4.iso use the appropriate file name instead of ubuntu10.4.iso.

initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz

This command loads the initrd.lz from ISO, again the location of initrd.lz will change in various distribution, but both vmlinuz and initrd.lz will be in the same locaiton, for example in Red Hat/CentOS server initrd.lz is also located inside isolinux

boot

Boot the system….

Now the system will be booted with ISO you specified…..

Buddypress is an open source plugin for wordpress. buddyperss can change wordpress as a social networking site. Anyone can create their own social networking sites in 10 minutes. It can be integrated with organizations intranet sites, institutes, small communities etc.  Application is working on PHP platform and MySql database. It support Gravatar as well as manual uploads, so it is easy to manage profile images.  Go through following installation procedure.

Step by step Installation

1. Download and install Word press

Download WordPress package from here and install

http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

2. Install Buddypress Plug-in

Download Buddypress plugin from here and activate the plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress

3. Change theme

There is a default theme bundle with the Buddypress. Go to themes and activate it. Tehre are many buddyrpess ready themes are available. Go here and find suitable one. There are many themes similar to popular social media sites are available in the internet. Facelook is one of them its look similar to facebook.

4. Change wordpress Permalink settings

Change WordPress’s default permalink stricture to following one. application wont work properly with wordpress default permalink structure.

/archives/%post_id%

5. Change wordpress user settings

Go to setting > general  and change “Membership” as “Anyone can register”

Your social networking site is ready.

Download Windows 7 Christmas theme.

Click the wallpapers to download