Apparently, the plastic parts of a laptop are called the A plate through to D plate.

The A plate is the top of the laptop, available in a variety of colours (for instance the Apple Macbook is white and silver for Air) 

The B plate is what you see when you open the laptop, the B plate hides the wiring that goes on to make the wireless work as well as power and drive the screen.

The C plate is the top plate of the inside of the laptop, housing the track pad and sometimes a fingerprint reader as well as hiding the keyboard fixings.

The D plate is the bottom of the laptop.

So those are their names in case you needed to know.

A few years ago, manufacturers supplied a copy of Windows with every computer you bought along with a driver CD for all the drivers required to reinstall a system.

Manufacturers realised that they could cheat the consumer by providing a recovery CD instead of a full copy of Windows. This usually meant that the consumer lost their personal data whenever they recovered their computer.

Manufacturers then realised they could use a recovery partition on the computer to recover the computer, thus doing away with the recovery CD. If the hard drive died, the consumer lost everything.

Recovery partitions often used up half the hard drive because the manufacturers became sloppy.

Newer computers have recovery media the consumer has to burn to their own CD or DVD, which puts the onus on the consumer to make the recovery media themselves. However, very few perform this essential task, and so when it comes to repair, the cost of reinstall is far greater.

Manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon and have started to "sell" the consumer the recovery media that should have come with the computer, so not only do you have to buy new hardware, you have to buy additional recovery media in order to fix it.

PC Pro's link is here

Starcraft 2 has a problem where it forces your graphics card to work harder and therefore get hotter.

When your graphics card gets hot and dust has built up on the card, its fan and heatsink can't cope with the heat and either crashes or shuts down the card.

Blizzard have issued a fix for Starcraft 2 so it won't shut down so quickly.

However it is suggested that you clear out your computer with an air duster. Unplug the computer, take your computer outside, open the case and blast the dust and dirt out of it. You may be surprised at the amount of dirt and dust that will be blown out of it. Your computer will respect you for it.

I've recently acquired a couple of low end Apple Macs, they are effectively obsolete now, and are comparable to running Windows 2000 or XP on a PC. The Mac world tends to move on a lot quicker than the PC world.

Consequently, some of these machines run Mac OS 9, which is no real problem since I started supporting Macs running 7.5 and the only big change came with 7.5.3 which was a software update that changed things in a big way. Mac OS 9 has the distinct advantage that its extremely compact and runs happily on 32MB of memory.

Apple decided to drop support for Mac OS 9 back in 2002, instead embracing their newer OS X. 

The family names are:

10.0 Cheetah - Originally shipped with the iMac all-in-one CDs

10.1 Puma - The free upgrade for 10.0 and the first time OSX was installed on new machines. Introduced medium compression disk images .dmg, prior to this the disk images had no compression so you had a floppy disk image the same size as the floppy disk.

10.2 Jaguar - The last version that worked with beige G3 macs

10.3 Panther - The last version to support New World ROM macs such as the imacs and ibooks, the last version to be supplied on CD

10.4 Tiger - The last version to support "classic" OS9 applications, Intel Macs don't do Classic. Supplied on DVD and the last to support G3 and slower G4 macs. The format of the disk image .dmg changed in this version to support high instead of medium compression so the format is unsupported in older versions. Also the first version to bring the dashboard, which is a set of applications like the sidebar in Vista but only appear on the click of the scroll button.

10.5 Leopard - The last version to support the G series macs. Apple moved to Intel processors. Supported both 32 bit and 64 bit operating system.

10.6 Snow Leopard - 64 bit operating system, runs on PC hardware.

When Intel announced PCI (Peripheral Connect Interface - 32bit) as a replacement for ISA/EISA (Industry Standard Archictecture - 8bit/ Extended ISA - 16bit) in 1993 it was a time when different manufacturers were trying methods of their own, such as VLB (VESA Local Bus) and IBM's MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)

PCI-X was released in 1998 in order to deal with 64 bit cards but never caught on in desktop machines, though popular in high end servers.

In 2004, 11 years after the launch of their now standard connector it was replaced by PCIe (PCI express) which offers much faster throughput using serial instead of parallel connections. It also superseded AGP graphics (Accelerated Graphics Port)

Oddly enough, Floppy disk drives are still supported on modern motherboards along with old style PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) and Parallel ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface)  which seem to be around for a few more years to come.

I know a lot of Apple Mac users that believe that their computers are immune to viruses and that its only the PC world that get viruses. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case.

While the Mac maybe more secure because of the small percentage of Mac users to PC users, as this percentage rises it becomes more of a target for virus and trojan writers.

In the latest release of Apple's OSX, named Snow Leopard, there is a trojan preventer that prevents known trojans from being installed on your computer. The recent updates show that Apple is trying to keep the fact that Macs are prone to viruses a secret by not disclosing what the updates were for.

However, this only prevents you from downloading and installing a trojan on your computer from the Internet, it doesn't stop it from entering from another source, such as a CD, DVD or memory stick.

You need an antivirus on your Mac as much as you need one on a PC.

In fact, these days your Mac has exactly the same hardware inside as a PC, ever since the G series Macs were phased out and replaced by Intel Macs.

I was shown a website that features a Bluetooth adapter that has an extending antenna. However, the antenna is fake! It gives the illusion that the product has an extended range and yet it doesn't!

Its one of those things not to buy if you ever see it!

Whilst on the subject of big memory drives, this one caught my attention. A 256GB Solid State Drive with the option of case mounting and external enclosure.

The external enclosure gives the advantage of portability, which limits the transfer rate to about 20MB/s but when used internally, the drive sports 320MB/s read rate and 180MB/s write rate for £550. 

To be honest, I never really thought someone would create such a mammoth memory stick. I know you can but 2TB (2000GB) hard drives but a 256GB memory stick is insane, 8 of these to the capacity of a 2TB hard drive!

Of course, if you have a spare £620 floating around, then you can get one. You could get sixteen 16GB memory sticks for £430, but that would be like using floppies when you have a CD. You can also get an external 1TB (1000GB) 3.5" USB 2.0 hard drive for £65 and USB 3.0 for £100.

One of the big disadvantages to this kind of solid state memory is the interface it uses to connect to the computer with. This one uses USB 2.0, with a theoretical maximum speed being around 20MB/s it would take about 4 hours to copy the full 256GB to the memory stick.

The humble photocopier and commercial multifunction printers (MFP) have a hard drive in them that records every copy you make on the glass or handler. This is so you can print multiple copies at a later date.

The problem is that so can anyone you sell or give the copier to according to this story on CBS News.

All they need to do is pull out the hard drive and they have access to everything you have done for the life of the photocopier.

Photocopier companies sell replacement drives to install when you scrap and old one, but they work out to be prohibitively expensive and you can't simply wipe the existing one without rendering the photocopier scrap since the manufacturer installed the Operating System on the drive.

Probably the first portable camcorder that didn't require a viewfinder and could be held like a mobile phone was the Busbi. The Busbi offers its customers VGA quality movies (640x480) using its 300k pixel lens. It uses an external SD memory card and is supplied with a 1GB card and retails for around £35-40.

Shortly after the success of the Busbi, the Flip camera appeared on the market. Known as the Flip Ultra, it was also capable of 300k pixels so could deliver the same VGA quality movies as the Busbi but is much more compact. 4GB is built into the camera and is called the flip because with a flip you pop out the USB connector. Prices start around £85.

The UltraHD version of the Ultra has 8GB of memory and a 910k pixel camera that takes movies in HD quality at 1280x720. The camcorder is equipped with a mini HDMI connector, to connect to a HD ready TV. Prices start around £115.

Following the success of the Flip UltraHD, the Flip MinoHD appeared with 4GB of memory and is much smaller in every dimension than the UltraHD. This also includes the rear screen resolution of 176x132 1.5" screen (instead of 320x240) and use rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries instead of AA batteries in the Ultra and UltraHD models. Prices start around £110.

The Flip MinoHD 8GB model features the same size as the 4GB version but includes a screen with much better resolution 2" screen (320x240) and includes miniHDMI connector Prices start around £150.

The Flip MinoHD 4GB and Flip Ultra have composite video connectors for connecting to a TV so you don't get HD quality to your TV.

The Flip SlideHD returns to the much chunkier design of the Ultra and UltraHD. The SlideHD brings forwards a better camera (1.6MP), bigger 3" screen (400x240) and a full HDMI connector on the base. The screen can tilt to show your content without having to hold the camera and comes with 16GB memory with 4 hours of footage. Prices start from around £180.

Both the Flip and Busbi are designed to be as easy as possible to shoot footage and upload to Youtube. They are both popular for their ease of use, unlike a conventional camcorder where quality is the thing you look for, these are designed to be as easy and compact as possible, yet they feature a tripod mount so you can take steady shots as well as in motion. 

If you want a video testimonial, you can easily point and shoot and you have the video ready for Youtube so you can show it on your website or blog.

A school in the USA issued their students laptops with webcams built in, which sounds a nice plan since students could use them to talk to their friends, only the school officials could also see what the students and their families were up to covertly.

There is a class action lawsuit against the school because of this invasion of privacy.

Windows 7 has introduced a feature called HomeGroup that helps connect two Windows 7 computers together. The 'host' machine creates a unique pass phrase that must be typed into the 'client' machine in order for the two machines to talk to each other.