So you’ve devoted the dark days of late December and early January to unpacking your brand new PC; now what do you do with it? No matter what kind of bargain you may have sniffed out over the festive period, a new computer is an expensive investment – and therefore worth getting the most out of.
Getting connected
Perhaps the top priority in this day and age is to get connected to the Internet – at the very least it will allow you to access countless help-forums in order to solve the inevitable technical glitches that any new piece of kit brings with it. Fortunately, getting online is a cinch. If your PC came with a good-old-fashioned 56kbp/s modem, it’s simply a question of connecting to your phone socket and using one of the many Internet Service Provider’s (ISP‘s) dial-up services. You will have seen the software needed to do this on shop counters and the front covers of PC magazines for years. A better option and an Ethernet port is shipped on all new PCs as standard, is to go for broadband. Back in 2003, broadband cost around €100 per month, after you had paid a very nasty connection fee. Thanks to increased competition, it’s now available for as little €9.99 per month – and connection is often free. You can get broadband into your home in a number of different ways – via satellite, cable, wireless and digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies. Which one is the best for you depends very much on local conditions, such as the distance to the nearest telephone exchange or the line of site to the closest wireless base station.
There are also a large number of providers to choose from (such as BT Ireland, Eircom, Digiweb, Netsource, Perlico Telecom and Smart Telecom). So, yes, a little research is necessary in order to make an informed decision; a good place to start is www.irelandoffline.org, which hosts a number of informative articles and price comparisons.
Peripheral pointers
Most family PCs have a printer stuck on to them at some point, useful for everything from running off airline tickets booked online to producing Christmas cards. Recent years have seen a growing market for ‘multifunction printers’; devices that fax, print, scan and copy that can cost little more than a family printer did a year ago. However, according to Paul Carter, marketing manager, PC World, 2005 was the year of home photography. “This technology has more than halved in price through the course of the year and home printing is now comparable to the cost of lab printing – and you don’t need to print the photographs that you don’t want”, said Carter. With prices for photo printers coming in at under €90, and the latest small format models being able to run off 10cm x 15cm prints directly from a camera memory card, it’s easy to see why this has proved a tempting prospect for consumers.
Another expanding area is the home wireless network. With many households owning two or three PCs, a wireless network allows them to share resources, broadband access and documents, without a veritable spaghetti junction of cables. “With wireless networking products available from under €30 and complete networking kits for under €90 it is not only an attractive option but now much more affordable,” said Carter.
Don’t forget the software…
There’s little point in investing in the hardware if you don’t choose the best software to run on it. The most enduringly popular piece of productivity software is still Microsoft Office –after all, what would a PC be without the familiar spreadsheet and word processing applications? Available for around €129, it’s still not as cheap as it could be – but chances are your PC shipped with it pre-installed. Time then, to branch out: given the present trend towards home photography, a good photo editor is an interesting option. There are plenty of them out there, and you might find that the software that came with your camera has enough features for your family snaps. However, if you want to get a little more serious about your digital pics it’s worth taking a look at something like Adobe Photoshop Elements – it’s a fraction of the price of the full-blown Photoshop, and isn’t that far off it in functionality. Its true beauty lies in the fact that you can dive in and get started with a minimum of knowledge, but spend the every evening of the rest of the year getting to grips with the myriad of creative features it contains.
Of course, when you’ve created these digital masterpieces you will want to keep track of them. Many of us survive quite happily by simply shoving them into the ‘My Pictures’ folder and letting them fester, but if you want to introduce a higher level of organisation to your images you might want to take a look at something like ACDSee 8 Photo Manager. For around €40 it will provide you with browse and search tools to help you sift through thousands of pictures, find the best ones, and organise them into common sense categories that make your photos easy to find later. You can also touch up your pictures using editing features, create inspiring Flash slideshows set to your favourite music, burn your images to CD or VCD and share your photo albums with friends and family online or by e-mail.
It’s good to talk…cheaply
Internet telephony is all the rage at the moment, and if you’ve got a PC with a decent Internet connection you’re missing out on a lot if you don’t give it a try. At its most basic it involves installing some software on your PC, investing in a headset (although a microphone and speakers will do) and chatting to other users that are online and have the same software installed. This is entirely cost free – whatever part of the world the person you’re chatting to is in. More sophisticated software, such as Skypeout (www.skype.com), allows you to dial ordinary telephone numbers through an on-screen interface. Provided you have a good connection (Skype claims 56kb/s will do, but 256kb/s is a better start) you can call just about any phone on the planet for a fraction of the cost of traditional means. Skype, and other providers such as Callserve, operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. You can use your credit card or make an online bank transfer (Skype has a bank account in Ireland) to pay for calls up-front, usually with a €10 minimum. There’s no monthly subscription fee, nor any need to sign a contract, which means it’s easy to give the service a try without making a dent in the wallet.
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