Plain English Technical Advice

HDTV or not HDTV? That is the Question

Firstly, I must say that providing support on digital TV is well-outside my area of technical competence.

However, I was inspired to write something on the subject when I recently received an email from Richard Buckton who runs a very useful site providing advice on all aspects of digital television.

The site is mainly about the forthcoming digital switchover and provides a simple guide to the various service options together with a number of local focus pages covering specific areas of the country in considerable detail.

Richard's email reminded me of the time that I was caught out when buying my first 'stereo' TV from a major high-street retailer.

As I soon discovered, there were no stereo broadcasts at the time and my TV was still unable to deliver stereo when these were subsequently introduced using the NICAM system.

In describing this product as a 'stereo TV', the retailer was not exactly selling under 'false pretences' though a salesman for this organisation subsequently explained 'off the record' that it was a stereo TV provided that the signal came from a stereo source (which did not happen to include the internal TV tuner).

I mention this because I now see the same confusion around television sets described as 'HD Ready' which generally need some sort of external decoder before they will reproduce a high-definition picture―though, as I understand it, there are some TV models becoming available with internal FREESAT tuners which will handle HDTV directly.

It is also my understanding (as I mentioned, I am not an expert) that existing FREEVIEW boxes and internal TV tuners will not handle the HDTV services shortly being introduced as part of the FREEVIEW service. 

I hope and believe that Digital TV Advice will provide a shining beacon in this sea of darkness.  

  

Mobile computing for the blue-arsed fly

My mate Jim is a high-powered executive (that's his story) who never stays in the same place for more than a couple of days—he travels extensively throughout Europe and beyond with fixed bases in both London and France.

Jim's obvious method of handling his IT requirement is to carry a lap-top wherever he goes but this is not always practical and he much prefers to work with a full-sized PC where possible—also, his fixed-base computers support a variety of devices such as printers, scanners, cameras and cordless dictation headsets.

Carrying files around using the Windows briefcase methodology requires a great deal of discipline to keep the data synchronised and is rather error-prone if you are rushing here, there and everywhere.

Accessing email remotely via webmail services can also be handy but is no substitute for having your complete correspondence and contact information easily accessible in one place. 

As Jim was already using small portable 80 gigabyte USB disks (about £50 from eBay or Amazon) for backup, we decided to transfer all of his live data and his Outlook.pst file (containing email, email account information and contacts) to one of these.

It helps, of course, if you stick with the Windows data structure as ordained by the creator, by maintaining all user files in 'My Documents' or subsidiary folders.

NB Just to keep us 'on our toes', My Documents has become simply Documents in Windows Vista.

The end result is that all user information is permanently maintained on the USB disk with no need for synchronisation when plugging into various PCs—the USB disk can be carried around in your pocket.   

All software remains resident on the individual computers which reduces the need for regular backup as change is less frequent—it is easy enough to set up software, such as Word and Outlook, to address the external disk as the default location for files.

When travelling, any internet connection can be used though there is generally a problem with using the outgoing mail server of one Internet Service Provider with the internet connection of another—this was overcome by using a totally independent outgoing mail server provided by www.authsmtp.com.

You can generally access any incoming mail server using any internet connection.

Like a lap-top, the portable disk is potentially vulnerable to loss or damage so we have simply reversed the back-up procedure which now copies the external disk contents to the fixed-base computers whenever convenient—we have automated this using Norton Ghost so there is no great need for discipline.

My favourite supplier of external disk drives is www.smalldrives.com