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A Dead Computer, Backups and Living On a Cloud

Have you ever considered using an online backup service before? What would you do if your computer died on you? Have you thought about how you’d cope in terms of potentially losing your important files forever?

Well I’ve recently got to find out that for myself as one night last week my computer’s power supply died with a loud bang, plunging us into darkness as it knocked off the whole house’s electricity and left me with the definitive smell of dead power supply – definitely not something that I like the smell of in the morning, evening or any other time of day!

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GMail Is Finally Out Of Beta!

Ever since Google released its webmail service; GMail over 5 years ago it’s still been in beta for the entire time, in fact it had become somewhat of an ongoing joke in certain sections of the tech-world that Google Mail was still ‘technically’ in development and had not officially been released as a finished product or service.

Well it looks as though Google now finally believe that they’ve developed it to such a point whereby they can tear off that beta tag from the logo and continue to develop it as a proper live service (the service already provides more features than any other webmail service including Google Mail Themes and Google Mail Voice and Video Chat) – perhaps they’re hoping to gain more market share from the other big webmail systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo – has that dastardly beta tag been putting off huge numbers of potential users?

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Google Chrome TV Advert

Have you seen the Google Chrome advert? Yes that’s right Google have stepped into the medium of TV advertising for the first time in an effort to publicise their Google Chrome web browser which they launched in September 2008 stating that they wanted their own custom browser developed to allow the optimal, high performance running of all of Google’s online services and applications (as well as all the other websites on the Internet).

Many saw it as the pre-cursor to a Google O/S (now perhaps more in conjunction with Android) to challenge Microsoft and Apple at their own O/S game or even move beyond it, however given Chrome’s current very low market share of the browser market (just 1.4%), this is perhaps why Google are now starting to more aggressively push their custom browser – just the other day I spotted a big graphic advert for it on the frontpage of Google.co.uk.

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Google Chrome Browser (Internet Explorer Alternative)

I downloaded Google Chrome browser on launch day for XP/Vista (the only version available for the moment, although Mac and Linux versions are to follow) and the phrase “bare bones” just doesn’t quite say enough about this minimalist offering. Those used to IE7 won’t be too disturbed by the lack of a menu bar, although pressing the “Alt” key won’t do anything in Google Chrome. Oddly, the home button is not on-screen by default – You have to enable it in settings.

The only tinkering you’ll be doing is by clicking the spanner in the top right corner, which leads to a VERY basic config menu. With tabs such as “Minor Tweaks” and “Under The Hood”, it isn’t going to replace you installation of Firefox and it’s 214 plug-ins. I don’t think that’s what Chrome is about though, it’s designed as a solid cloud-computing platform, which it is.

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