 |
q+a I am an interior designer and I need to buy a new printer as my service man tells me that my old printer, Canon BJC 2100 SP, is outdated and its head is not available. I need to take colour and black-and-white printouts for my clients, but I want a printer with a low printing cost. Which printer should I opt for?
Sangeetha Cecilia
Since you need a low-cost printer with reasonable quality, I suggest you buy an Epson printer. Even though some models of Canon and HP cost much less, you will end up spending a lot on buying cartridges for these printers. Both HP and Canon use two cartridges, one for black and one for colour. By using four individual ink cartridges, Epson reduces the per print cost by tracking the amount of ink in each cartridge and then alerting users if one or more cartridges are running low. Moreover, the cost per cartridge is lower. I suggest you buy Epson Stylus C87 Plus. It costs around Rs 5,300. The important thing to look out for is that unlike other printers, here you can replace a single depleted cartridge, thus maximising your savings and cartridges. If your black ink runs out, the printer allows mixing of colour inks to be used as replacement for black.
Best configuration
q+a I am planning to build a high-performing Vista-ready multimedia PC. I want to buy a powerful processor, a future proof Motherboard, a good DDR-RAM, graphic card, an HHD, a DVD writer, a flat CRT monitor, keyboard mouse, cabinet and UPS. What is the best configuration? Which company’s/brand’s products should I go for? My budget is around Rs 55,000.
Subir Nath
The best motherboard available right now is Asustek Computer Inc P5W DH Deluxe. Your processor should be 2.40 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 64 kilobyte primary memory cache and 4096 kilobyte secondary memory cache. You should have at least 2GB RAM. For the best display, you must get yourself a Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT PCI Express display card. There are several monitors in the market from Samsung, LG to Sony. Depending on your budget see which suits you best. You should get at least a 160 GB hard disk. If you can wait, buy a special hard drive that will work best with Vista. These drives, called hybrid hard disks (or HHD), contain a few gigabytes of flash memory for instant-on and certain operating system enhancements. Vista talks to these special disk drives directly.
Mobile anti-virus
q+a What anti-virus software should I have for my Sony Ericsson K750I? How do I save documents while browsing sites on my mobile using Opera Mini?
Biswajit Baruah
First, you do not need an anti-virus software for your K750i. You are perfectly safe as long as you take the precaution to keep your Bluetooth turned off after using it. To save documents using Opera Mini, go to your email account. For example, Gmail allows you to open a Microsoft Word document as a Google document. You can even view it as an html file. Finally, there is an option to scan and download the file. Save it in the memory stick of your phone and transfer it to your computer with Bluetooth or the serial cable that comes with the phone.
Save and open
q+a I am encountering a peculiar problem these days. Whenever I try to save a page using Internet Explorer or Mozila Firefox, it shows the page is saved but when I try to open it it opens in Notepad instead of the browser. What should I do?
Soumya Dasgupta
To fix this problem, right click on the file. From the context menu choose “Open With”. Here, select the program that you want to open the file with. In this case, it should be either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Put a checkmark next to “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file”. That’s it. Your file will always open in the correct program.
Installation woes
q+a Incomplete installation of Windows XP Home by my daughter has almost destroyed my computer. It was preloaded with Me Millennium Edition 2000. But it hangs most of the time. The time is never automatically updated. My HP Scanner and Compaq IJ600 cannot be installed. It shuts down when Internet Explorer is opened. What should I do?
Jaharlal Banerjee
Get rid of Windows Me Millennium Edition. It is highly unstable. Instead, buy Windows XP Service Pack 2. Format your hard disk and load Windows XP. Remember to use NTFS when you format and partition your hard drive.
Google not good
q+a I have major problems searching on Google. Most of the search results are not satisfactory. Please help.
Amitabh Saikia
Why don’t you use Yahoo instead? You will get very good results. In fact, Yahoo has improved a lot in recent months. Another option is www.answers.com.
Send in your computer-related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com The solutions will appear soon
