home and office computer support for D.C., Virginia & Maryland
The free site Gazaro allows you to look up products and see pricing trends. You can see if the product’s price has dropped regularly or if you are at a high blip. Gazaro also identifies products that have recently dropped significantly in price. Sign up is required, but there is no fee.
This is an example trend chart showing that Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 recently dropped in price at Amazon.
We previously mentioned several online real estate tools. Some other sites include:
This is one of the few sites that also list foreclosures. The online foreclosure information is a bit of a racket. It should be easily searchable free information as it is provided by local courthouses. But all sites that offer foreclosure information charge regular fees. Even HotPads does so, but if you know a neighborhood, you can often determine the house under foreclosure using their detailed maps.
HotPads is good for market research, as it breaks down household income, population density, age, and rent ratio. You can see in this map that the very north of Arlington has relatively few foreclosures, while everything beyond it in Virginia is near or above a rate of 1 in every 150 houses under foreclosure. D.C. and Maryland have fewer foreclosures, presumably because state laws there have made foreclosures take longer for the banks.
Homesdatabase is another search site that allows you to search for MLS listed houses without needing a realtor.
SUPERAntiSpyware is very good antispyware that is free for personal use. While Antivirus software is very important, Antispyware can help too in making sure that you aren’t getting hijacked by Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, Dialers, Worms, and Key Loggers.
You can run it whenever you want, not needing to take up resources when you aren’t using it.
Since HD began, widescreen TVs have been 16:9 ratio in screen size. But widescreen computer monitors have always been 16:10 ratio. If you’ve got a 24″ LCD, it is undoubtedly the 16:10 ratio of 1920×1200. But just over the last few months, a few 16:9 ratio monitors have come out and many think this will start a new trend since computers will be used for HD content more and more.
An example of this new even wider ratio is the Samsung 2343BWX 23″ LCD. It just came out in February and has a 2048×1152 16:9 resolution. This has 3 major advantages. The first is that if you play HD video, it can completely fill up the screen since it matches the 16:9 ratio. The second is that if you cut the screen in half, you’ve got 2 windows of the width 1024. This happens to be the magic width that most web developers try to build for. The result is that you could have 2 browser windows side by side on this monitor. The last advantage is that even though this is 1″ smaller than its 24″ older brother, the 2048×1152 resolution actually has more total screen real estate in pixels than the 1920×1200. You cut about 4% on the height but add about 6% on the width. Dell has gotten into this game too with the SP2309W which has essentially the same specs as the Samsung. At Dell, the monitor is so popular it now has a 3-5 week wait if you order today.
Gmail is Offline
Google’s Mail, Gmail, is best free service, more reliable than Hotmail or Yahoo. But it can have outages. It was out for a few hours this morning starting at 4:30AM EST, causing some people to call it “Gfail”.
According to the Google blog:
If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after
109:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.
“Offline Gmail” can help
This should encourage people to either set up a mail client (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail), or begin using Offline Gmail though Gmail Labs’ Google Gears. This creates a local copy of all mail all within your browser so that you at least can see your old mail and draft new messages. Because it has your messages locally on your computer, it can make working with email faster too.
Offline Gmail Video from Google: