ISPs and Internet Connection Speed

Cable and phone companies are giving each other a cut throat competition to provide faster internet connection. Most of the Americans have no idea how fast their internet connection should be. According to a recent survey, still nearly 71 percent of the people said that they felt their connection speed was as fast as promised by their ISP. But the truth is, no one gets anywhere close to the speed, which the ISP is offering, at least when it comes to web browsing. Actually it is not entirely the ISP’s fault. The ISPs claim that general rates are for sustained download of an individual file. Generally a webpage is made up of several other files like the HTML code, graphics, flash drivers and so on and then there are all the delays of the internet as the data hops from router to router before it reaches its destination.

There are many good bandwidth testers that you would find in the market these days including speetest.net or consumer Broad band test. But these tools generally test the download speed of a single large file and it provides a result not relating to web browsing.

All that You Need to Know About Recycle Bin

In MS operating systems, Recycle Bin is a holding area for files and folders before they are permanently deleted. Recycle Bin was introduced in Windows 95 by Microsoft. Files and folders can be deleted provided they are not deleted via the command prompt or windows API.

When data is deleted, it is stored in the recycle bin (unless you press shift + del). Of course it also depends on how the data has been deleted. If a shift + del is used, then it can’t be retrieved normally as it is a command for permanent deletion of the data.

If data is deleted and is laid in recycle bin, then the data can be restored by right-clicking on the file in the recycle bin and then choosing ‘Restore’. Once you do that, you will find the deleted file back to its location.

On the other hand, if you want to completely clear the recycle bin of its contents, then just right-click on Recycle Bin and Choose ‘Empty Recycle Bin’. This will clear the contents of the recycle bin.

By default, in windows XP, the size of recycle bin is 10% of the size of your HDD. That means, if you have a HDD of 50 GB then you will have a recycle bin space of 5 GB.

Now if you want to increase the size of the recycle bin, then right click on the recycle bin, go to properties and then General. Here you can change the size of the recycle bin.

MAC OS X WITH A VIRUS DETERRENT

It seems that Apple has started acting on the security threats. In the 10.6.4 release of the Snow Leopard operating system, it has included the security code known as “Xprotect” in its kernel. It is meant to deal with the Trojan horse, which comes as threat known as the Pinhead-B attack. With this, it seems that Apple has started acting on the security wake up call. This actually proves the vulnerability of the Mac OS, which according to the popular myth is immune from virus and malware.

Although it is an appreciable step towards securing the computer OS against malicious software but it is still in the rudimentary form and it does not protect against a lot of other MAC related malware no matter how less in number they are. The illustration given below is the security alert that you might expect from the OSX.RSPlug.A malware embedded in the FlashPla.dmg if you visit some untrustworthy sites.

There are third party antivirus software, which are well equipped to deal with the malware issue quite successfully.