20 Things They Don’t Want You to Know
With a paranoid title like that, I had to read the article in full.
PCWorld.com – 20 Things They Don’t Want You to Know
Here’s my take on their “secrets.†I’ve included links to the most interesting.
Your CPU May Be Much Faster Than You Think: I knew that overclocking could make my computer faster, but I’m not about to rip apart things and add fans just to increase the speed a little bit.
You Never Have to Pay Full Price: Ever since Priceline.com hired William Shatner to tell me that I could get good deals on the Internet, I have been watching things like a hawk. That’s what it takes to get the good deals: logging on every day and checking the price of what you want to buy.
Faster Shipping Isn’t Always Faster: They’re right, sometimes regular shipping will get to you just as fast as two-day.
You Can Kill the Messenger: I haven’t had any trouble with MSN Messenger running in the background.
Extended Warranties Aren’t Worth It: It depends on how clumsy you are. I have used a couple of these warranties to their fullest because I tend to drop things. Make sure they cover customer clumsiness, though.
You Too Can Exploit Windows’ Bad Security: I didn’t know about these holes. We tend to keep all our necessary keys easily accessible because you never know when you’re going to have to re-install windows.
You Can Save Big Money on Big-Name Software Packages: This feels like stealing to me. If I’m not really buying it OEM, then I’m not going to cross that moral line.
That Dead Pixel on Your LCD May Not Be Covered: Haven’t had this problem, thankfully.
Your Cell Phone’s Been Crippled: Yeah, I know. Cell phone companies are evil…
High-End Manufacturers Don’t Always Make Their Products: Yeah, but they do make them BETTER.
You Can Call Amazon, EBay, and Other Web Businesses: This is the most important information in this article.
Security Center Can Be Muted: I don’t care.
Game Consoles Are Hackable: I’m not modifying my Xbox. The reason I love it is because I plug it in and it works every time. I’m not messing with that just to get a crappy Linux machine.
You Can Use an IPod to Move Music: That’s what SD cards are for.
You Can Get a Human on the Phone: Knowing the magic words to say to the automated response on the telephone is more than half the battle. Here is the IVR Find-A-Human Cheat Sheet.
MP3 Players Run Down Too Fast: Yeah, but there isn’t a fix for this yet.
Useless Specs: Another good piece of information if you are in the market for an LCD monitor, speakers, a digital camera or hard drive.
On the whole, they aren’t really big secrets, but knowing the background information is really nice. I have to make sure I write those phone numbers for Amazon and Ebay down in my Treo just in case I need them.