PC Memoirs

If you read my article on Quisple, the program that lets you listen to Youtube songs without having to visit the Web site, you might also be interested in the new and upgraded version: Quisple Prestige!

Quisple Prestige includes many new features: The program can communicate with your YouTube account and download all your playlists! It can play a specific playlist continuously and it gives you full control over it. You can navigate through a playlist, add/remove clips, add/remove playlists, and everything will be synchronized with your YouTube account!

The program has an elegant and expandable interface. Navigation buttons were added to allow easy scrolling through playlists and playback history, and the menu was redesigned as well.

Unfortunately, Quisple Prestige is not free, because financial support is needed to keep the Quisple community up and running. The serial number will cost you only US $3.99.

Once you download and install Quisple Prestige, it will start in trial mode and run for a limited period of time. You will have enough time to test it before you decide whether you want to buy it.

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Here at PCMemoirs.com I often write about laptops, but I don’t really review them and give them ratings. I simply don’t have access to all the latest models and so I’m unable to test them. I can only refer my readers to other sites if they wish to read a laptop review.

Fortunately, there are many Web sites on the Internet that are dedicated to testing and rating laptops. Therefore, today I’m going to list some of the sites that, in my opinion, offer impartial and good quality latop reviews.

Here are my favorite sites:

1. Laptop Mag
2. Notebook Review
3. Laptop Logic
4. Laptopical
5. CNET Reviews
6. Laptop Advisor
7. Top 10 Reviews
8. Test Freaks

If you know of any others that you can recommend, please add a comment!

There was a time when I didn’t think much of the Acer brand – especially when it came to laptops. I thought Acer made the worst laptops and I swore I would never buy one or recommend it to anyone. But times have changed! Acer has improved a lot over the years and now they make decent laptops. There are different models that provide all the specs you’d expect, and you don’t have to pay a fortune.

I just found two great Acer laptops on the UK Web site Tesco Direct:

The first one is Acer Ferrari F0200. It features 1.2GHz AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, 11.6″ screen, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. It costs only £399.00 (about US $635.00). This model also includes an in-built webcam and the battery lasts up to 5 hours! It scored a mark of 8.4 out of 10 in independent reviews.

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With the emergence of the new downloading technology called torrent and its increasing popularity, I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate a post to this subject.

I’m sure we’ve all downloaded a fake file or two, or even more, while looking for that special audio or video file. You spend minutes (or hours, depending on how fast your connection is) and waste many MBs waiting for the file to get to your hard drive, only to find that the file is either not readable, not the one you wanted, or even worse: a disguised virus. There are many scammers who phish for people’s identities in order to steal money or just to damage their PCs.

So, how do you make sure you don’t download a fake torrent? Here are some tips for you:

1. Always read the comments. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and see if any users have left feedback on the file. I’ve seen many sites that include user comments that either praise the file and thank the host/uploader, or curse them because the audio/video is bad or the file is fake. If you see more than one negative comment, keep looking elsewhere.

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Today almost everyone uses one of the Big Three search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. But what about the rest? As you may know, there are others, obviously less popular, but good search engines. A friend of mine gave me the idea to search the Internet and see what else is available. Many years ago my favorite search engine was Infoseek, but somehow I switched to Google, and I don’t even remember when or how. It just happened.

Now, I wondered if Infoseek and other old engines still existed. I was sure there are more than just the Big Three. It turns out, there are many…

So here they are:

1. Ask – ask.com – Popular search engine that offers results groupings. Clean presentation of results and easy to read.
2. AOL – aol.com – America Online, very popular search engine in the US.
3. Ecosia – ecosia.org – A search engine that aims to protect the rain forests. Each search saves 2 square meters of forest.
4. Dogpile – dogpile.com – This metasearch engine displays results from the Big Three engines, Ask.com, About.com and several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers.
5. Clusty – clusty.com – This deep Web engine helps you locate sites and articles that are usually tough to find.
6. Mahalo – mahalo.com – A human powered search engine, where editors review thousands of pages of content. You get fewer results but they are more relevent and better quality.
7. DuckDuckGo – duckduckgo.com – Here, all your answers are displayed on the first results page and there is less spam than on Google. This engine features help to clarify what you are really looking for.
8. Webopedia – webopedia.com – This is an encyclopedic resource dedicated to searching techno terminology and computer definitions. Great learning resource.
9. Cuil – cuil.com – Offers column format like a newspaper, and either tabbled and columned groups to help you search a topic. Doesn’t rank the results in the same way as Google.
10. Internet archive – archive.org – Offers snapshots of Web sites from the past. You can see how Web sites looked years ago.

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