GaretHofer.com

Just wanted to say happy new year to all. Good bye 2008 and welcome 2009. Hope it’s a year filled with a lot of excitement.

Would liike to explain what we are going to be doing as 2009 comes around:

The TechieGuy show will be doing video game reviews on some of the major games out for pc right now this includes games such as Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, Neverwinter Nights, and many more.

Amongst this we will be doing more reviews on printers as the next year approaches.  After these video have been made they will be posted on viddler. We however still can’t post them on youtube due to how long they are.

Amongst other things i will be planning on building a pc right on camera. I will still remain doing tutorials on youtube those haven’t changed. I will be doing more tutorials on camera as the year comes. And then we will throw in here and there a movie review or two from the new movies out there in theaters. Will give detailed feedback as to the movie being approiate for the younger crowd.

Look foward to the things to come. This is not the only new things that i have in store for you all. But some of what we are planning. So stay tuned ….

First off some announcements before i get to talking about what happened during the last broadcast on Ustream.tv.

The broadcast for next friday November 28, 2008 will be canceled due to the holidays. However join us later this week for another broadcast from the coffee shop.

We discussed some of the features that you can expect in the newest release of windows 7. We watched a video from Microsoft as they gave a features list presentation at one of the WDC conferences.

You can check out the youtube video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8AqXaNr8ag

Some of the few notable features of windows 7 so far are:

OSX like dock in windows

Switch between windows and applications.

Taskbar for switching windows

Windows lock into place for easy comparison

Automatic wireless device connecting as seen on osx.

Watch the broadcast recorded at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/883779.

Gadgets can be moved around the desktop.

Windows mail, calendar, and other apps users were complaining about in the *bloated* vista will not be included in windows 7. Instead they will be offered as a seperate Windows Live essentials update.

This version focuses mainly on performance upgrades or getting the os to run faster at lower amounts of memory or to run more efficiently.

I also shared my ideas on Windows 7 Build 6801 which is not the current one they used at that conference. Build 6801 was the only released one i could beta test. As soon as it comes out in the microsoft technet pack i will post a review on it.

So with that all said i talked about how i thought the future versions they should’ve focused more on fixing the problem of why most people switch to mac. In my opinion people switched because of A. the bloated os. B. the Notion that macs don’t get viruses.

Macs may not get as many viruses as pcs but there still out there. As the apple marketshare goes up so will the amount of viruses for mac. There are viruses out there just the amount of them isn’t as great as the pc side. Doesnt mean you shouldn’t get virus protection on your mac and treat it like i can visit any site i want and not get any viruses. Its like walking outside naked in the winter. Your just opening youself up to getting sick or getting a *virus*.

Share your opinions with me here in the comments.

1. Getting yourself known. Meaning appealing to your target market or target audience. For example i am running a computer forum or computer poll of some kind. Whether most people use pc or mac ? I will appeal to the computer forums out there or advertising sites.

2. People telling people - I can’t tell you how much word of mouth advertising is so much better then google ad words. Easy way to get known liked and trusted by friends who are thereby known liked and trusted by others.

3. Use Myspace, twitter, facebook, and twitter to your advantage. Especially twitter because you start following people then they start following you. Thus your followers or the people who know, like, and trust you is built up.

4. Signatures - So your registered to here and other message board services or what ever service it may be that requires forums. So your registered on 5 different forums. Where their are 100+ members and you are an active poster. Think about it 500 + people are viewing your message you posted.

5. Facebook and myspace - Keep in mind what your posting. Like the old saying if you don’t want your momma to see it then you probably shouldn’t be posting it. ** Keep in mind universitys are now checking myspace and facebook profiles to see what your branding yourself as **

Written by me Garet Hofer

We started out with this and then got into talking more indepth about mac and pc. Really mac and pc are the same on the inside. They are both truely PCs or personal computers as once defined as. They’ve begin to be split into two different categories of windows and mac really. The only keen difference between a pc and a mac is software. Software is it. You purchase a mac because you like osx or want to use iphoto, imovie, or final cut pro.

Business professional - Mac would have to be my recommmendation. A lot more reliable really because if your the business professional and you get apple care warranty you can take it to any authorized apple retail store. Get your files off or the computer repaired absolutely free. Since the apple centers get reimbursed for their labor on every apple care warranty mac they work on.

College student - Your a college student and you want a reliable computer. I would recommend again a mac. The college student has access to time machine which is only available on a mac. If they back up their hard drive they can recover a lost document for class.

Family or personal computer - You can pick up a mac mini or a pc desktop for around $500-$600 sure you can get computers at $400 but why ? Why would you want to spend that little on a computer. The saying you get what you pay for applies here. All about opinion really.

Lower income family - I understand not everyone has money to go buy a mac and that is fine. PC i would recommend for this. You can put together a decent machine around $500 with a decent graphics card on a pc.

Gamer - Pc for sure. The market changes so much you don’t know if microsoft is going to make further restrictions in the future on running games. PC’s you can make the graphics cards better where as a mac you are locked down. I think though a mac is every which capable of running the higher end games as a pc is.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/865016

We had a discussion today in the live stream. Various different websites were mentioned so i will list them below
So much went on i talked about the upcomming announcements we have. Talked about the car accident i got into last friday. We welcomed our latest guest. Talked about windows vista and windows 7. Talked about the difference between intel core duo and the intel core 2 duo.

pretty good explanation i can’t seem to find the http://tomshardware.com one i used.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2808&p=4

http://www.box.net

Free online storage up to 1GB for all. No demonstration was done but will be done in later shows.

http://www.logmein.com

Access your computer from home. Will do demonstration in next tuesdays show.

http://www.simple-share.com

sending files bigger then 5 mb to your friends. Did infact do a demonstration using my email account through gmail.com

http://www.playlist.com

Create your own free online music playlist for all to hear. Share it with your friends or post your playlist on your public social media site.

Thats about it

the stream can be found here at

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/828601

A shoutout to our latest guest pcnovice91 and thanks for comming to the show.

So i thought this was interesting, Yesterday at church which for those of you who dont know i run a get your computer fixed evening to where if people in the church cannot afford to get their computers fixed they can bring it to us. We then take and clean them out. As you can see in the past ustream live vids we do that and manage to have fun at the same time.

But i was working on a machine last wednesday where the user had made a claim that the machine was slowing down periodically. We did a number of cleanups on the machine for both viruses and spyware and found absolutely nothing. We do these scans periodically in an application called linux. Runs the apps that we need from a third party disc.

We started up xp and it must’ve been over 20 min it took the machine to start up. The machine itself was an intel core duo 2.4ghz or something like that. So my thought was the machine itself was powerful enough to start up quicker then this. By the time it got into xp i noticed the machine was loaded down and i mean just packed with scanners. It had avg, norton, macaffe, spyware doctor, spybot, adaware, and more. Wow so i called them up and we began removing the ones not needed. Everytime you load a computer down with a scanner i dont care whether its a pc or a mac it eats up ram and causes your machine to slow down. FYI guys they make norton for mac to. But anyways my point is max you only need one scanner maybe two but dont load your pc or mac down with a bunch of scanner apps.

When you do a virus scan or spyware scan it is always best to have it going when you are not using the computer. If you use the computer and try a scan expect the computer itself to slow down. Unless you have a significant amount of memory. For example a lot of my computer support customers tell me that spyware doctor is a major resource hog. Honestly its simple, leave the scan going when you go to the supermarket or run an errand somewhere and by the time you get home the scan is done.

Well thats my thoughts on virus and spyware resource hogs. Tell me people if you have any input just leave a comment below …..

We covered a lot of topics in this stream. The video itself the first part you might notice a bit of lag time in the first video. I apologize about that the problem wasnt corrected until i began the second part of the video.

Anyways we heard from paul cooley who talked about his experience loosing all of his information on his laptop computer. He explained to us exactly what he lost and how i was able to help him recover some of that information.

We next went on to http://www.cyberguys.com and looked at harddrive enclosures. You can get 2.5″ enclosures for laptop HDs or 3.5″ for desktop HDs. We found both enclosures to be around $20-$40.

We then looked at http://www.frys.com and looked at a $79.99 for a 500GB external HD.

We looked at how to back up your HD at either the paid product Norton Ghost at http://www.norton.com or the free Windows Backup software that comes with some new windows machines.

Windows backup: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/maintain/backupfiles.mspx
Watch the videos to see for yourself.

Click here for part 1

Click here for part 2

Domain brainstorming session. Look how hard we work at it haha.

If you need help this is the video to watch.

Check it out here

Want to learn more about internet security ? watch as we discuss the pitfalls and the possibilities of www.pctools.com spyware doctor. AVG - Anti-Virus www.avg.com. Avast at http://www.avast.com. Finding out the validity of companies that are out on the internet.
Go to http://answers.yahoo.com.

Check it out here

Voice over ip or skype it is. The telephone used by everyone at one point or another. Invented by Alexander Graham Bell to be able to communicate with one another. Amazing it is though technology continues to evolve over time. I am going to talk to you today about voice over ip VO-IP or Skype. Skype its called which was invented by a team of developers from Estonia. One of the developers orginally helped develop Kazaa an illegal downloading service. Skype works over p2p networks or in another words the same network that illegal downloading works over.

Now skype being as cool as it is. Let’s me talk and converse with friends over the phone for free. For free ? Thats my kind of price. Voice over ip has been used in the business workplace as an easy way for phones to be linked together in a network.

So skype i can call using a logitech premium headset (not mentioned on live stream) can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Premium-USB-Headset-980374-0403/dp/B0007SXHP0. I would have to say overall the headphones have been proven to be very comfortable on my ears. I actually prefer it over the other logitech headphones i had which went behind my head. Anyways you can call using any brand headset it really doesnt matter. http://www.cyberguys.com has the cheapest i’ve seen but i don’t know how well the work. I plug this into my computer and if my friend or friends has a webcam we can talk and even see each other through the computer. This service is absolutely free.

Now lets say i wanted to use this service to replace as my current house phone. I can go visit http://accessories.skype.com/store/skype/en_US/DisplayHomePage. That is a list of their current for sale phones that can be linked up with skype. Generally you want to look more for the phones that don’t require the computer. Like the Phillips USB phone is 29.99 but requires a computer to use where as the Philips VOIP321 - Duo which is $99.99, comes with two phones, and doesnt require a computer. I can then link it up to skype and make calls from my ordinary looking house phone.

Skype also has a built in public chat feature that allows the user to be able to create chat rooms based on topic. You can then take these chat rooms and promote them online at your website, myspace, or whereever else you see fit to promoting them. These chat features also including banning, editing posts, and removing posts. You can also promote moderators of the chat.

Well thats it i hope you enjoy the product skype that i’ve found here.
i can be found here at http://www.garethofer.com
http://live.garethofer.com

Check it out here

The lastest review i’ve done to date: this will be published into a video for youtube.

In the meantime the script for the video is here.

Well Hello to the community of youtube. My name is ghofer, I am a pc technician here in California. I use computers I own 3 pcs and one mac. I am telling you here today please leave all negative comments at the door if you have a comment on how this review could be made better then by all means leave a comment. Any destructive comments will  be removed. My goal here today is for my first video doing a review of google’s newest browser Google Chrome. Now this is an unbiased review I will be providing.

As you can see here google chrome has this very sleek interface. First thing I’d like you to notice is when you begin typing in the address bar on google chrome it begins to do a search on google. So for example I type in hotels in southern California it begins to look it up for me. Then at this point I can simply click on the link to the website and there we go. Google chrome also has this feature as well as Mozilla firefox. Also I might point out the tab feature as in firefox is in the title bar of the program instead.

One of the more significant features is what I’ve heard referred to many as the porno mode of web browsing. It is referred to by google as incognito mode. You can access that by simply clicking on the what looks like a page image at the right hand side of the window.  Also I might want to add google has put into this browser a bunch of shortcut keys in which the link will be provided in the comments window.

Now if you are a web developer or a web programmer this will provide a useful feature for you. Google chrome actually has a built in javascript debugger program. Simply click on the page icon and scroll down to the bottom until you see developer. There you have a task manager and a javascript debugger so you can actually see what is causing a page not to load the particular line of code that contained the problem.

Now if we go and download a file you will notice that the files now appear in the bottom of the screen in which you can easily click on them and review what your downloading.

I will now demonstrate google chrome playing a youtube video and a couple of other flash games. Here you can see the functionality of google with these extra plugins.

A few problems I’ve been experiencing are on certain videos on youtube I will fast forward through the videos and the flash plugin for google chrome will suddenly freeze. In my opinion it is a good browser I would wait though a while until google chrome comes out of the beta stage.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/security_flaw_in_google_chrome.php