What do you do when you cant sleep? I have been up many nights these past few weeks suffering with mild insomnia. Due to the lack of late night entertainment on the television I have found myself to be stuck at my desk surfing the net.

Over this period of time I have discovered a few uses of being up so late; While everybody else is sleeping you have better chances of winning near ending auctions on ebay and other auction sites. Also if like me your Internet connection is not a 1:1 contention ratio then you may notice that your download speeds are a lot quicker as you now have no one else hogging your bandwidth enabling you to download files much quicker than during the day.

So if your a night owl or your struggling to sleep, why not use this for your advantage and catch yourself some late night bargains and utilize your Internet connection.

Scientists at the IBM have shown off a prototype device which is layered with thousands of minute cooling veins. Scientists say it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components. Heat is seen as one of the major hurdles of producing ever smaller and quicker chips. It is the by-product of the movement of electrons through the tiny wires connecting the millions of components on a modern processor.

YouTube is facing a one billion bollar lawsuit from  “American media conglomerate” Viacom. The lawsuit is being put into place as Viacom claim that they have identified over 150,000 unauthorised clips on Youtube.

YouTube’s owner Google has stated that this claim threatens the way hundreds of millions of users use there service to legitimatley share and post videos.

The Internet search giants legal team  is battling to keep YouTube from being closed down. In papers submitted to a Manhattan court, Google said it and YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works”.

Viacom originally started legal action last year and filed an amended version last month. Earlier this month Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone told Dow Jones: “When we filed this lawsuit, we not only served our own interests, we served the interests of everyone who owns copyrights they want protected.”

He added: “We cannot tolerate any form of piracy by anyone, including YouTube…they cannot get away with stealing our products.”

For its part, Google said the only way the legal action would be resolved was in court.

Google’s vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: “We’re going all the way to the Supreme Court. We’ve been very clear about it.”

After the legal action was first started, YouTube launched an anti-piracy tool that checks uploaded videos against the original content in an effort to flag piracy.

Is it me, or do all wireless mice seem to lag? I have purchased many wireless mice and they all seem to be useless! if anyone knows of a good wireless mouse please tell me!

I have just installed Ubuntu on my laptop as I have read good things and wanted to test it out for myself! I have to say I am impressed with the speed of the O/S it has very quick load times and boots up a lot quicker than XP or Vista!

I have seen this feature known as Beryl which looks the part but I am struggling to figure out how I install the thing! If anyone reading this knows then please feel free to drop me a hint or two…

Not too long before Christmas Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008, this new release is packed with many new features allowing for developers to create applications that will run on many different platforms such as:

• The Web
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Office 2007

The new release caters for novice users to high end professionals, allowing for simple applications to be built and also highly complex next generation applications which are constantly being worked on by Microsoft developers and advanced programmers. Packed with new features Visual Studio 2008 now has more ways than ever before to allow users capture ideas and turn them into real life applications.

As a student and as a hobbyist I have found Visual Studio 2008 to be very easy to use. Quicker and easier than ever I can find my way around tools and features and when I get stuck, help is just a click away, the inbuilt help features always point me in the right direction where I am greeted by online tutorials and videos which have always helped me get the results I want.

There are many different types of free Antiviruses available for your download on the net, from personal use and trial and error I have found these two to be the most worth while.

• Avira AntiVir (Free Edition) - Free.grisoft.com
• AVG (Free Edition) - Free-av.com/

Both of the above are what I personally use on my Desktop and Laptop and I find these to be extremely efficient at keeping me Virus free. Both Antiviruses are very easy to configure and also they do not use as much system resource as some of the popular paid for services which hog your RAM and can even slow down your machine.

There are many reasons for why a computers performance deteriorates over time, the main reason being the lack of regular maintenance followed out by users. Simple tasks such as disk cleanup and disk defrag can keep your computer running like new. I’m going to take you through what I do to keep my computer running like new at least once a month.

First off my computer checks for spyware and viruses automatically night while I’m asleep, if you do not have your anti-virus or spyware software configured to do this then it may be worth your while to look into configuring it as this saves you time and keeps on top of running checks for you especially when your not using the computer as this can slow down system performance.

Here’s what I do

• Check through files and folders and sort out what is needed and what needs to be backed up etc…

• Uninstall any unwanted or obsolete software

• Run a registry cleaner to ensure the integrity of my system is not being slowed down by unused registry values.

• Run system disk cleanup

• Run system defrag

• Then I would re-run the registry cleaner to ensure that there are no more dead values as now the hard disk has deleted records.

• Reboot

After doing this, you notice that your system is a bit faster, so imagine if you haven’t done this for a long time the build up over time of clutter on your hard drive would slow down your system immensely so try this out and see if you can make your computer run like new again.

In Windows Vista the power button on the start menu only puts your Computer in to Sleep mode and does not actually shut down your machine. If you would like to change this so that when you select the power button your machine powers down follow the instructions below:

• Go to the Control Panel and click on System and Maintance

• now click on the Power Options section

• Under the selected power plan click on “Change Plan Settings”

• Click “Change Advanced Power Settings”

• Open “Power Buttons and Lid” and then “Start Menu Power Button”

• Change the setting to “Shut down” and click on OK

Now when ever you want to shut down your machine, just click on the power button and the rest is history.

Windows Vista as you may already know is the latest version of the Windows operating system. Many people often as what’s the difference in Vista and XP apart from a new task bar and aero, well here is a few unique features of Vista that XP doesn’t have. Here are just a few examples of what new features are available.

SuperFetch

This is a new feature in the memory management which is a background service that is constantly running from the moment you boot your machine. This basically works by keeping track of what programs you most frequently use and preloads them into memory leading to quicker response times when accessing applications.

Start-up and Shutdown

Windows Vista has a new power state feature known as ‘Sleep’ this feature of power management combines the quick resume benefits of Standby with the data protection of Hibernation. It really is impressive how quick your PC will go into Sleep mode once it has been selected, and again as soon as a key is pressed or the mouse is moved the system will be back up and running in seconds.

Windows ReadyBoost

This is a very neat tool that Windows has introduced into Vista which allows for more random access memory (RAM) to be added from flash memory devices such as USB flash drives and Memory Sticks cards. The memory gained by using this feature serves as an additional cache which allows for data to be accessed more quickly than having to access the hard drive.