Google Slashes Drive Prices
Google Slashes Google Drive Prices
Google announced today that it will be reducing the prices of it's online storage plans. It will still offer 15 GB's for free. The 100 GB plan will be $1.99/month, the 1 Terabyte plan will be $9.99/month and the 10 TB plan will be $99.99/month. These prices are substantially lower than the similar plans offered by it's competitors, namely Dropbox and Microsoft's Onedrive.
Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2
If you’ve been following the world of smartphones recently you will know that the Mobile World Congress(MWC) conference took place this week. They announced many new portable devices like the newest smartphones and tablets. Many manufacturers released new models including Lenovo, LG, Samsung and Sony.
I’m mostly just interested in the new models from Samsung and Sony, so those are the 2 phones I will be giving details on in this post.
First off from Samsung comes the newest in the Galaxy line, the Galaxy S5. There were a few hardware and design changes but overall the phone looks very similar to the S4. The screen is .1” bigger but the same resolution, 1920x1080. It has the same amount of RAM at 2 GB, which at this point is probably more than adequate for the applications available today. It come with either 16,32, or 64 Gb of onboard storage and is expandable with the addition of a microSD card. The processor is a quad core running at 2.5GHz, it is either the Snapdragon 800 or 801, I’ve heard different reports. It has a 16 MP rear camera and a 2 MP front camera. It will shoot 4k video but only up to 5 minutes per clip. It is also water resistant to 1 meter for 30 seconds.
The Sony Xperia Z2 does have the Snapdragon 801 running at 2.3 GHz. It has a 5.2” screen and a resolution of 1920x1080, very similar to the GS3. It has 3 GB of Ram and comes with 16 GB of onboard storage and is also expandable with a microSD card up to another 64 GB. It has a 20.7 MP camera and can shoot Ultra HD 4k video.
Backup your files
A good backup plan is a must for all computer users
As time goes on, we as PC users store more and more personal information on our computers. We are taking more digital photographs than ever, have huge collections of music, and also download movies to watch on our PC's or our portable devices such as Ipads and smart phones. A good number of people also store their personal finances and tax records on their home PC's. Unfortunately it seems that a small percentage of people regularly if at all perform a backup of all this data. They don't even think about it until something goes wrong, their hard drive goes bad, their PC is damaged by a power spike, there is a fire or natural disaster, or even the theft of their PC. It is often too late to recover the data from their PC when one of these events occurs. Years of pictures or thousands of songs accumulated over time are just lost.
Luckily there are several easy solutions to enable the backup of your important data. External USB hard drives are relatively inexpensive, typically in the range of $80-$150. This provides a local high speed form of backup. There are also online services that allow you to have an "offsite" backup, which can be important in cases of either fire or theft. These services, like the company Carbonite(www.carbonite.com), allow you to backup your files online to their servers. This method is slower than a local backup but also affords you some security against some sort of local disaster or damage to your home. If your computer is stolen or damaged beyond repair your files are safe on Carbonite's servers and you can retrieve them when you get a new PC.