This computer has been opened today for the first time after 5 years. Dust settling is a major problem for fans, and computer health in general. Dust sticks to the grease and accumulates there, eventually interfering with the action of the fan and causing that horrible grinding noise.

Fan problems are by far the most common age-related computer hardware health issue, unless you habitually work in a really clean room.

Common computer fans include the CPU heat-sink fan, possibly the most essential mechanical part in your computer. Problems with this fan can cause all kinds of crashes and software errors due to heat. If that fan stops, so does your computer, potentially forever.

Other important fan is the Power-supply fan at the rear of the case, which is often the only source of airflow in and out of the computer, and any case fans that may have been added to promote air movement and stop the dust from settling.

If you decide to clean the inside of the computer of all visible standing dust using compressed air be sure to hold the can as close to vertical as possible to prevent liquid spray that could harm components.

Even when your computer is off, all those peripherals you have plugged into it continue to suck up precious energy. Be it your printer, your speakers, your monitor, or an external hard drive, they all just love wasting expensive power.

This brilliant USB Ecostrip is a smart way to make sure that everything that runs on your computer turns off when it does. You simply plug the USB cable into your computer, then plug the power cords of all your peripherals into the strip. When it senses that you've shut your computer off, it'll cut the power to everything else, making sure you aren't sucking power that you don't need. It's a simple and clever idea that's sure to show up at the end of the month on your power bill.

What you're looking at is a gigantic 1GB hard drive from 25 years ago. The 32 kilograms, belt-driven disk is positioned next to someone holding up a 1GB flash-memory card for comparison.

The IBM 3380 Storage Device was introduced in June 1980. It used new film head technology and had a capacity of 1 gigabytes with a data transfer rate of 3 megabytes per second. Due to problems encountered, the first units did not ship until two years later.

Depending on the features selected, purchase prices at time of introduction ranged from $81,000 to $142,200. Lease charges ranged from $1,800 to $3,713 a month.

First developed for pilots, noise-cancelling headphones block the background noises which drown out your music. Noise-cancelling headphones reduce unwanted ambient sounds by means of active noise control. Essentially, this involves using an hidden microphone, placed near the ear, and electronic circuitry which generates an "anti-noise" sound wave with the opposite polarity of the sound wave arriving at the microphone. This results in destructive interference, which cancels out the noise within the enclosed volume of the headphone.

Although there have been some very good noise cancelling headphones available for a while, most of them are very expensive items from high-end audio manufacturers. What are the best noise-cancelling headphones with a price under $100 ?

CREATIVE HN-700

These are very impressive at reducing noise, even in noisy environments. The HN-700 have a full, over-ear fit for decent muffling, while the noise-cancelling cuts more background rumble than many rivals at this price. The treble could be a little sharper, but the general audio quality is solid for the money. The cable is removable for tangle-free snoozing and they are completely foldable so you can slip them in your bag.

SONY MDR-NC22

Sony makes a larger ear-covering model (named MDR-NC60), but these in-ear phones are better all round. Tiny enough to take anywhere for everyday use, they also excel at reducing noise - and not just because they sit snugly in your lugholes. A mini control pack houses a power switch and "monitor" button to mute sound. Give the small size and relatively low price, the NC22's audio performance is excellent, with virtually no side effects.

Super-fast USB 3.0 technology may begin to supersede USB 2.0 in 2009. Drawing on technology developed by HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP, Texas Instruments, and Intel, a USB 3.0 Promoter Group hopes to deliver by mid-2008 a proposed specification for USB ten times faster than today's technology. The Promoter Group was spearheaded by Intel, in cooperation with the USB Implementer's Forum.

The main two goals of SuperSpeed USB are to provide a 10X boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 Gbits/s in USB 3.0), while dramatically lowering power consumption.

The upgrade should allow for high-def devices, such as HD DVD or Blu-ray players, to use the standard to send data. As of now, today's USB cables aren't fast enough for such heavy transfers, sending data at 480 megabits per second. USB 3.0, on the other hand, will increase that tenfold to a whopping 4.8 gigabits per second.

One example of their speed goals is to transfer a 18GB HD movie to a portable device in 47 seconds. The same thing would take 10 minutes or more with HighSpeed USB 2.0. In addition, USB 3.0 will offer greater energy efficiency.
It will be backward compatible, so current USB 2.0 devices will be able to plug into USB 3.0 ports: the SuperSpeed devices will use the same connectors and the same programming and device models as existing devices.

The gadget in this pictures is the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard (VKB). This tiny device laser-projects a keyboard on any flat surface and you can type accompanied by simulated key click sounds.

About the size of a small cellular phone, (90 x 34 x 24 mm), the Virtual Laser Keyboard enables users to type texts or e-mails as easily as with an ordinary keyboard: the Virtual Keyboard uses a light projection of a full-sized computer keyboard on almost any flat surface.

VKB’s adaptable technology studies the user's finger movements to interpret and record keystrokes. Because the virtual keyboard is an image projected by light, it disappears completely when not in use.

Some important features are missing on Apple iPhone:

1. Cannot send text message to more than one person.
2. Cannot search for a contact to call by type in name. The scroll down and alphabet on the right side of the page is much slower than just typing in contact name with the name appearing after you type three letters.
3. All e-mails appear in phone inbox even if they are SPAM, Junk on the computer. Apple said the phone can not filter between inbox, SPAM, and junk.
4. Camera can not record video. Only still pics. This should be able to record & send video clips recorded from phone.
5. Speakerphone / earpiece is very disappointing. Needs to go several levels louder, especially when using external speakerphone. Should be able to place on armrest in car (with windows up) and have conversation. Not even close. Have to hold phone right next to ear, which defeats purpose of external speakerphone.

Did you notice other important missing features ? Post them here. Thank you.

Do you like to spend time every month staring at your computer monitor watching those coloured block moving during hard drive defragmentation instead of leaving it alone doing its job ?

There's something "magnetic" that attract you to waste time in this way. Maybe it is a likeness that reminds you the things you liked (or still like ?)

Well.. i'm sorry to tell you that disk defragmentation is going to vanish as soon as new solid state disks will replace "old" hard disk drives (HDD).

The big reason fragmentation has a harmful effect on hard disk drives is because it forces the drive to do more physical work to retrieve the same amount of data. The read/write heads have to move back and forth that much more, and the system sometimes has to wait on the drive platters to spin all the more, which incurs a cumulative performance penalty.

In short, the reason fragmentation causes perceptible performance problems is because drives have moving parts (look at this video); they're not solid-state units, and they can't respond equally fast to every request for data.

The best recommendation for keeping HDD performance at an acceptable level is to "defragment" the HDD regularly. There are even some utilities (Diskeeper, for example) which continuously defragment the HDD so it never gets defragmented very much.

A Solid State Disk (or Solid State Drive) is really different: while not technically disks, the term Solid State Disk (SSD) may be used because they are going to be used as an alternative for disk drives (Samsung recently announced that it has developed a 1.8"-type 64 Gigabyte SSD).

SSD have no moving parts. It takes an equally long time to retrieve any one byte of data as it does any other—or, if there is a delay because files are fragmented on data locations that are apart from each other, it's not something that is cumulatively measurable or perceptible to you. If a file gets fragmented on SSD device, it takes no measurably greater amount of time to retrieve it than if it is contiguous: it takes much less time for an SSD to electronically change the memory address to the next cluster in a file than it does for an HDD to move the heads and wait for the cluster's sectors to rotate under the head. You will hardly ever need to defragment an SSD. If it makes you feel better, you could do it once a month to eliminate cluster fragmentation, but you will not notice any good effects.

Then there's the question of what "contiguous" means on SSD devices because they use wear-leveling strategies, which places an additional layer of abstraction between the data and how it's organized. This is done to keep the number of read/write cycles for any given block of memory from being prematurely exhausted.

This is why talking about a given file as "fragmented" on a solid state drive is essentially meaningless; it could be stored by default in a number of blocks that are entirely disparate, and you'd never know.