I’m guessing many of you reading this will answer “no” to this question, please read this article and see if by the end of the article you actually answer “yes”.

File sharing, is it legal? This is a major topic of conversation which has been in the media and has people with strong feelings for and against it.  Thousands of people break copyright law on a daily basis and don’t really know they are doing so. Some areas of file sharing are very obvious and the opposite is true.

A major problem is actually understanding what file sharing is.  In law there is no single term which states what “file sharing” is. An example is if you download a file from the internet using a product such as Limewire (this is peer-2-peer software) you are technically making a copy from another users laptop or PC. Unless you are paying the copyright holder the fee, you ARE essentially steeling it. If someone uploads that file from your laptop, they are making a copy themselves but you are providing them the file and again this is illegal. This is the case with most digital media (games, Films, Music, software). So you might be thinking if I save a radio station streaming music, I am making a copy and not paying the copyright holder and so breaking the law. The answer is yes and no.

This area could be covered by “time-shifting provisions of the copyright Act, as long as the copy is made within domestic premises, for private use and solely for the purpose of enabling it to be listened to at a more convenient time”. In just this example you can see copyright and file sharing is not a black and white case more black, white, grey, silver and a million other shades of grey.

You might have just downloaded an album from a file-sharing site on to your laptop which you have purchased from a shop that day,  that must be ok, I’ve just paid the copyright fee. I’m afraid not, in the eyes of the law you are making another copy of the album on your laptop hard drive. On the other hand if you “rip” a CD or DVD on to your iPod this is technically called “format shifting”. This is a very grey area UK law, although it is an infringement it is unlikely you will be prosecuted for it. The UK government are currently looking at making this a legal practice.

Having File Sharing Software on your laptop is not illegal, in fact during the 1^st stages of BBC IPlayer it used the same P2P technologies as the File Sharing software does today (ie Bittorrant, Lineware etc) it is what the software is used to download and how it is promoted by the them. When Napster was going to be sued by the RIAA in 1999 it was not the software they had an issue with it was the fact it allowed people to distribute copyrighted software. Another case was PirateBay, they were sued by Sony, Columbia pictures &  Warner brothers, a main part of their defence was they said they provided the software but it did not host any of the copyright material (this was true) but the fact they “encouraged” the use of the software to download illegal software cost the 4 owners $3.6 million and 1 year in jail.

So as you can see the law is not straight forward and a lot of people are breaking copyright law in 1 way or another, you just might not think you are

It was calculated that copied and counterfeited digital media has reached £10 billion and a loss of 4,000 jobs. Although this seems very high the numbers might not be conclusive. The BPI funded the report written by Jupiter giving us the figure of £10 billion, but read the calculations and make your own judgement on this.

Jupiter said there were 7 million file sharers in the UK. The actual figure was 6.7 million and rounded up.

This number was reached from a survey only looking at 1,176 households who admitted to have used file sharing software (11.6 %) and this figure was “discretionally adjusted up” to 16.3% on the assumption not everyone asked would admit to using file sharing software on their laptop.

The 6.7 million figure was based on 40m people in the UK having internet access in 2008 when the Office of National Statics found this was 33.9 m people.

If these figures had of been used the government figurers and not rounded their number up you would a total in the region of 3.9M and not 7M. As you can see the figures can be wildly different. It does show however money is being lost but it’s the amount which is difficult to give an accurate figure on. So back to the question at the start File sharing, do you have illegal software I am sure many of you will be supprised but will have to answer yes !!

“74.2% of statics are inaccurate”.

 

In this day and age when you don't really need a laptop or a computer to get onto to the internet which applications are then better at others in their league?

One of our favourite blogs recently conducted a review of the top 5 music streaming services available today. We at British PC Repairs think that the article is absolutely brilliant and will be of immense use to all the music lovers out there.

 

The top 5 services are

 

1. Grooveshark

2. Spotify

3. Pandora

4. Last.fm

5. Lala

 

You can read the full article here

If you have ever wondered why your laptop is starting run slowly, have low disk space or generally becoming unstable it could be a hardware problem (i.e. laptop motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive etc) or software. Over time files collect on your laptop which are not required and can cause some of the symptoms which may require you having your laptop to be repaired. You might have to seek advice from a laptop engineer.

A possible start to repairing your laptop is with a free piece of software called CClearner

“CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space” and has been downloaded “375 million times” * (quotation and statics from www.ccleaner.com)

Below you will find a step by step guide to installing  CClearner on your laptop, notebook,  netbook or other Windows XP based computer.

Download CClearner from http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
1)    Click on the link at the top right hand side of the web page to download Cclearner (A green button “Download Latest Version”)

 

When you click on the “Download Latest Version” button a new page will be displayed and CClearner will automatically start downloading.

 

Depending on your browser settings (in this tutorial we are using IE 7.0) the download might be blocked and a message will be displayed saying  “To help protect you security internet explorer blocked this site from downloading files to your computer, Click here for options”

 

 

Left click on any part of this message and a popup menu will be displayed.

 

 

Click on Download File and you will be prompted with 3 Options, 1) Run, 2) Save, 3) Cancel.

 

Click on Save

 

Select a location to save the Cclearner file in then click on Save.  The file will start to download and a progress bar will be displayed

 

 

(Progress bar displaying how long CClearner will take to download to your laptop)
Once the file has downloaded you will either need to browse to the directory where you saved the Cclearner setup file or Click on open

If you have browsed to the file double click on it to start the installation

 

(Location of CClearner installation file on your laptops hard drive)
If you have either double clicked on the installation file (ccsetup228 with this example but the file name might change)  an “Open file - security warning” will be displayed, click on the “run” button, this will start the installation wizard.

 

The 1st question is to select your language, Click “OK” if this is the correct setting.

Click on Ok

Click on Next

It is important you read the licence agreement, if you agree to these then click "i agree"

 

You can change the installation options but in this guide I will leave it as the default.
Click on “Install”.  Cclearner will start to install and is nearly ready to be used on your laptop

 

 

Once the installation has completed successfully you can run it on your laptop.

This program is usually $19.95 but today it is complete Free courtsey of GiveAwayOfTheDay! You can download this program here

 

SoftChronizer is a very easy to use, fast and versatile double-file search program, that was designed to help you keeping your private or corporate book, music or picture collection in order, as well as for other use cases.

SoftChronizer can reliably search for any type of duplicate file in a single hard drive directory (with subdirectories), or simultaneously in different folders on different drives.

SoftChronizer displays MP3-ID3-Tags (displays the bit rate, i.e. a statement about the quality of the music, as well as the duration of a track in minutes and track’s album-name of a song), as well as for images, their size in pixels and their color-depth! – So if you see several duplicate files, you quickly can decide which picture, or which MP3 file you want to keep, or not.

 

 

Brought to you by British Pc Repairs. Your local friendly experts in laptop repairs

 

Folks at one of our favorite blog "Lifehacker" have shared this excellent tip that can radically change your online shopping experience. This is a new internet based service called "Q-Compare" which lets you compare E-Bay prices for an item against Amazon prices! With few clicks you can find out whether a particular item is cheaper at Ebay or Amazon! What's more this app unlike Google search results only lists current and active ebay auctions. Thus no stale results and no dissappointments!

 

Take Q-Compare for a ride by clicking here

 

Brought to you by British PC Repairs..Your friendly one stop shop for all laptop and computer related queries

Here is a great free app for your iPhone which tells you just how safe your neighbourhood is. This app will tell you what percentage of people in your neighbourhood have had ASBOs issued to them and also how does your neighbourhood compare to the rest of the country!

 

More details on the app here

 

Download the app here

One of our all time favorite magazines PC Pro recently offered this excellent article on how to easily improve the quality of photos clicked from your digital camera. Here have a look at the results yourself

 

Starting pic

 

 

 

After the sixth step is over

 

 

 

 

You can read the complete article here

There may be many reason why your laptop or notebook needs to be repaired by a professional laptop repair company and can often be a very complicated process. If you find your laptop is starting to run slowly, has low disk space or generally becoming unstable it could be a hardware problem (i.e. laptop motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive etc) or software.  Over time files collect on your laptop hard drive which are not required and can cause some of the symptoms which may require you having your laptop to be repaired. A possible start to repairing your laptop is with a free piece of software called CClearner

“CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space” and has been downloaded “375 million times” * (quotation and statics from www.ccleaner.com)

Below you will find a step by step guide to installing CClearner on your laptop, notebook,  netbook or other Windows Vista based computer.

To start with you will need to download CClearner on to your laptop.

Bring up a new Internet Explorer window and enter

Click on the green button at the top right of the screen (It will say "Download Latest Version". In this screen shot from there web site it says the file is 3.21mb, this might change over time but dont worry about this)

(Download CClearner button on website)

 

You will then be taken to the actual download screen where the CClearner installation file will start downloading automatically to your laptop.

 

(Main web page for downloading of CClearner on to laptop)

Depending on your security settings on your laptop the download might be blocked and a message will appear at the top of the window saying "To Help protect your security, Internet Explorer blocked this site from downloading files to your computer". If this does happen left click on any where on this bar and select "Download File" from the menu which is displayed.

(Popup box to allow download of CClearner on to laptop)

Next you will be asked what you want to do with the file, you can eiter Run the CClearner install or Save the CClearner install.

Click on "Save"

(File download security warning - save window)

 

You will then be prompted to select a location to save the file. Select a destination and

Click on "Save"

(Save location on windows Vista laptop harddrive)

The file will start downloading to your laptop and a progress bar is displayed telling you how long the file will take to download to your laptop.

(Downloading of CCleaner on to Windows Vista Laptop)

Once the download has been completed the message below will be shown.

(Download of CClearner sucessfull)

You have 3 options from here you can either run the install straight away, open the folder on your laptop where you have saved the file or Close. The easiest way is to

Click "Run" (If you select this option ignoire the next step)

If you either clicked "Open Folder" or clicked Close and have browsed to the folder on your laptop where you have saved the install file,

double click it.

(CClearner installation file on laptop hard drive)

Part of Windows Vista Security is when ever an application wants to install on your laptop you will be prompted to carry out an action. In this case it will prompted you with the message below.  As long as the message states CClearner is the application which is going to be installed click on continue.

(Security warning message displayed during install on laptop using Vista)

Once the installation starts you will be asked to select your launguage. With this "how to" i am going to leave it with English.

Click on OK

 

You will be presented with a welcome screen. You should read any instructions which are displayed here.

(If you are unsure  of any of the recommendations you should seek advice)

 

 

It is very important you read the terms and conditions. As long as you agree with these T&C's click on the "I Agree" button.

You can change the location on the lap top hard drive you want to install CClearner but in this "How To" I am going to leave it in the default location"

Click on "Next"

 

You will next go to the "install Options" screen. Again in this "How To" I am going to leave the default settings.

Click on "Install". Once you have done this a progress bar will be displayed showing how long it will take before CClearner is installed on your laptop.

 

Once the installation has been completed on your laptop you will be shown the above screen. If you wish to run the application make sure there is a Tick in the box next to "Run CClearner".

Click "Finish"

 

When CClearner loads the above screen will be shown. At this point you can run the application on your Windows Vista laptop.

On December 17th Twitter was hijacked by "Iranian Cyber Army" who managed to compromise DNS server records which in layman's term means that they were able to redirect requests to twitter.com to their own servers. Users who tried to login during that time saw the screenshot which is presented in this post above.

 

While this does not necessarily mean that any passwords were compromised, it would have been very easy for the attackers to set up a fake login page and harvest user passwords as the unsuspecting users tried to log in. We would however suggest that if you haven't already done so yet, please change your twitter.com password to be on the safer side.

 

 

 

A great news for all of us who own iPhones here in the UK. O2 is now letting customers officially unlock their iPhones! This service is free for people who are on a pay montly contract and costs just £14.69 one off charge for customers on a pay as you go tarriff. Once unlocked you can use your iPhone on any network that you desire. However please note that you still have to honour your contract with O2 if you have one!

 

For more details and to get the process started visit http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/unlockmyiphone.html