This is the last Public Newsletter of 2009. The next Public Newsletter will appear on this blog on Friday 15th January 2010, in just under a month’s time; 4 weeks to be precise. There won’t be a Public Newsletter on New Years Day, unless there are exceptional unforeseen circumstances that the public need to be notified about.

In this final Public Newsletter of 2009, I’d like to draw your attention to a few new features on this blog: -

The first of these is the poll, which is happening in the sidebar. Although I appreciate that a number of my visitors only come here to get what they want and then as soon as they’ve got it they disappear, and don’t seem to care if the blog vanishes or blows up so long as they have what they want, (This doesn’t apply to all visitors by any means; but I’m certain that a number of visitors have this attitude.) I’m actually trying to reach out and interact with everyone. – So if you’d be so good as to participate I would be grateful; considering I provide this service.

If the poll’s not working for any reason at any point then I’d be grateful if someone would let me know: This brings me on to the next newly-added feature of the blog; that being the “Send Me Your Feedback” page, on which is a form, with which you can communicate with me. (Horror of horrors!) – Well if you’ve read what I have to say then, unless you’re totally brain-dead, you’ll obviously form an opinion as you read. Use the form to tell me your opinion, and do let me know which article you’re referring to when you do so. – Also tell me if something like the poll isn’t working, or anything at all: Surely somebody must have something to say? Surely you don’t hold me up as a goddess and obey my every word unquestioningly? This is also good for people who don’t like the Disqus comment system that I’ve installed, as it provides an alternative way to comment. – No your comment isn’t automatically published; but I will publish the comments made in this way as I see fit.

There is another product on offer too; which I haven’t yet got around to advertising with banners as I appear to have currently run out of room for any more banners; therefore I’ve dedicated an entire small page to it, with a clickable link or two to the product’s main page. You can find it by either clicking this link or clicking on the link under the header banner titled “The WordPress Classroom” (Those links aren’t there for my benefit only you know.) – As in the place where you go to learn all about using WordPress as a platform for your blog and generating an online income from it, etc, etc…

You may have noticed that some of the links in that block under the header-banner that were there before aren’t there now: This doesn’t mean that the respective pages have vanished though; just that I’ve once again run out of space to display everything: A matter that I’ll be addressing during 2010, or perhaps before.

Here’s a display of all the page links that are currently displayed, followed by a list of links to all all active pages that are not currently displayed: -

• Send Me Your Feedback
• Help Me Out
• Blog Contents
• About Shazza
• Objective of This Blog
• Graphical Symbols Used in Electronics
• Testimonials
• kkomp.com Privacy Policy
• The WordPress Classroom

• Get a Free pdf Report
• Additional Comment
• Pagan Links
• Tech Humour
• SEO Elite: The Proven Optimiser – Review
• Get Yourself a Better Browser Today
• Encrypt-Stick: Keep Your Data Safe – Even if Your Laptop’s Stolen

… And for the convenience of my visitors I’ve just this second put those extra page-links in a widget in the sidebar too.

… And for my next trick I bring you the standard listing of all the posts published since the last newsletter; just in case you missed any: -

I Want to Move a Program From my Old OS to Windows 7…

December 17, 2009

When you’ve lost the installation program and/or the product-key; you could be basically screwed… But it’s better to spend to save in the long run.

Onwards and Upwards

December 14, 2009

Come on people: Scrooge is dead – At least I thought so…

Encrypt-Stick: Keep Your Data Safe

December 12, 2009

Over 600,000 laptop thefts annually, resulting in a $5.4 billion loss of proprietary information: Put an end to this crazy financial loss with Encrypt-Stick.

Coming Soon: Christmas Discount Shopping Arcade

December 10, 2009

It’s a kind of discount – starting next week. Roll up, roll up: you have less than a month to grab a few bargains!

The arcade is still there; and will be until 5th January 2010; so I suggest you take a visit.

MaxBlogPress Christmas DEAL is LIVE…

December 9, 2009

An amazing deal; that is never to be repeated: Get MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plus 3 other top products for less than Ninja Affiliate usually retails for!

‘Sorry; but it’s now too late to catch this one: The offer is now closed.

Just a Quick Note…

December 8, 2009

As title: Just a quick note… As in: ‘Note; of the quick variety’.

Microsoft Security Essentials Rated Top Free Anti-Malware Solution

December 7, 2009

Microsoft’s free Security Essentials anti-malware package is getting great publicity; and now it even stands up well to vigorous testing too.

Apology for Technical Fault

December 5, 2009

Apology for the unexpected technical issue that this blog has encountered.

… And that’s just about it for 2009: If you’re doing Christmas this year, have a good one: Merry Christmas. – And for all fellow Pagans; blessed Yule. … & Happy Hanukah for Jews, and blessed be for any other religious festivities, here unmentioned, that you may or may not be engaging in.

The Public Newsletter returns in the New Year, so also have a Happy New Year, and I wish you all tech success and happiness & prosperity for 2010.

Namaste’.

I suppose I’d better write something; or people will start to think the blog’s been discontinued/abandoned if I don’t keep posting. (Yep, you guessed it; I’m a little pissed off: Perhaps I’ve been overdoing it this weekend?)

There was a time when weekends were for relaxing. Relaxing, at least as far as this last weekend is concerned, is a term which I seem to be becoming more distant from as time goes by.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining in the least: I love blogging (/problogging) and all that’s related to it. It would just be nice if my efforts produced better results once in a while. – I suppose everything takes time and dedication; although technique is equally important… More on that at another time.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve added a “Send Me Your Feedback” page; which contains a form on which you can compose an email to me stating useful suggestions, positive and constructive criticisms, and the like.

I’ve spent the weekend and today so far setting up lighting for future video-production, doing administrative tasks, blog enhancements, and things like that, hence I didn’t get around to writing a post until now.

It feels weird, working with 3 hours sleep, courtesy of my dedication and determination driving me on into the early hours of this morning without even a glance at the clock until much later than I’d thought it was.

I wanted to draw your attention to the items advertised, various banner ads, and the Xmas Discount Shopping Arcade; which was 10 days in planning and 10 days in building, testing, optimising, and finally, opening. – There are amazing discounts on my own tech-help products inside; plus a product from a much more experienced blogger than me which could very well end up providing you with the impetus and the method to put a lot more money in your purse/pockets at the end of the day.

I had been hoping that crowds would rush to see what’s going down inside; but it appears, from the lacklustre trickle of visitors to the arcade so far, that my readers are afraid of going near anything with a price on it: People flock in their droves to my free-content, usually without a word of acknowledgement either in the form of a comment; but as soon as anyone gets the idea that something might cost more than zero they seem to avoid it like the plague.

Guess what? It’s the loss of those individuals solely: It’s not my problem. I only offer genuine deals of good value and quality here. If people choose to snub my efforts then they lose by not getting the great deal(s).

On that note you have less than 1 day to take advantage of the MaxBlogPress 75%-discount Xmas deal which was advertised in that rather large banner in the sidebar, but you might still just catch it by clicking the link herein… (Nope; sorry, you missed it.)

This blog is strewn with great offers; all of which have something to do with the internet, hardware, software, or electronics. They’re not only displayed at this time of year either. – But those who over-procrastinate lose out as always.

Who needs all the hassle of trudging around town and supermarkets when you can buy products online much more easily? – Usually cheaper too. – Plus it doesn’t cost you for fuel for the car, or even for more calories if you choose to go on Shanks’ pony. There are some offers advertised on this blog that you’d never find at any supermarket anyway.

So that was my little internal-pressure-relief session for today. ‘Your turn: ‘Get clicking and purchasing. – You know it makes sense.

You may have heard me mention in this blog at times that I have big plans for 2010. That means that I can’t spend all of my time creating regular free-content for the vultures anyway, as I have extra work to do to make things happen. I’m not saying that this blog will change overnight, neither am I making any promises with regard to exactly what’s going to happen: Slowly, maybe sporadically, during 2010, the focus will switch away from a totally-free-base to a combination of free and paid-for content; with less emphasis on the free pillar-content: The foundations are laid, and I’m now building upwards.

- Watch this space.

Humbug!

This was searched for on my blog: The temptation is just too great, and so, my 64-bit-fixation not yet retired to the back of my mind, I’ll answer it directly: -

Some people think it’s a sign of idiocy to answer a question with a question. Personally I don’t. – Although I myself don’t profess to be a Christian; according to the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ himself often answered a question with a question. Look at the number of followers he has, even after 2000+ years! ( – If only Twitter were around in His day.)

So in answer I’d ask the inquirer posing the question: -

‘Why aren’t new 16-bit, 8-bit, and 4-bit computers available any more?’

Do you remember the days of DOS, when 8MBs of RAM were considered a big-deal? 16-bit-processing was the standard, and DOS, which is still in a way a large part of the framework that Windows is constructed upon, was originally a 16-bit operating system. – Nobody much programs in DOS these days. I used to write the odd batch-file in Windows 98 to freak people out at college, much to my tutor’s displeasure; particularly in view of the fact that I was on an electronics course rather than a computer course – but I think that was the last time I used it.

(‘Remember Fortran and Cobol? – That’s another subject entirely. Going back even further; machine-code: It’s still at the heart of all computing, and is the original computing language… Kind of. ‘Remember that board with one of the first 1MHz processors on it, that you could only program in machine-code? (‘Around 1977/8-time if I remember correctly. – It cost about £600GBP!) – I knew someone who had one; but I still never learned to program in machine-code, to my discredit.)

Did you know you can build your own 4-bit analogue-to-digital/D – A converter from just 4 quad 2-input TTL NAND-gate chips? – Those were the days; eh?

Why does this person want a 32-bit new computer anyway? Do I hear “I have old peripheral hardware that won’t operate in a 64-bit environment.”?

- Run 32-bit XP Pro in a virtual machine inside 64-bit Windows 7. – That’s one way round it. – See this article. ( It was quite astounding to find out that I wrote that article as long ago as 25th June: It seems like only a couple of weeks ago!) – Better still; get new hardware, whatever.

It sounds like our enquirer needs something like an Atari, maybe? : That was actually a very good computer for its time.

Joking and sarcastic quips aside, though; progress rules: Technology moves ever onwards.

On that note I am, actually, looking forwards to the first 128-bit commercially-available operating system’s release. A few supercomputers are already using a 128-bit operating-system; so I very much doubt that it’ll stay in the ultra-geek-world only for that much longer.

Please do use that little-used comments-box and state your opinion.

- Oh and if you’re wondering why it’s so small, and why it asks you to log in: The reason is that I’m using the Disqus comment system – which gives comments a little more social ‘oomph’. – Join Disqus why not: It’s free, and there are many other bloggers using it as well as me.

Don’t be shy; and it’s quite safe.

German online retailer www.hpm-computer.de last week leaked details of Intel’s coming range of Core i3 processors. Although Intel forced the retailer to remove the offending info; it was too late: TechConnect Magazine managed to copy the information, and is still displaying it, including clock speeds and prices.

The Core i3 range are supposed to be a budget range of processors: With that in mind, a price-tag of between 104 and 253 Euro seems a bit steep; bearing in mind the current unfavourable exchange-rate.

So what do you get for your money? All 5 of the i3 offerings have an on-chip-built-in graphics processor, constructed using Intel’s new 32nm fabrication technology. The 32nm transistors will require less power in order to operate due to their decreasing size; which gives the Core i3 the edge in power-efficiency. The on-chip graphics-processor will mean that it won’t be necessary to have a graphics-processor on the motherboard itself; as is the case with the Core i5 family also.

The fastest of the bunch of 5 different models of the Core i3 will be Core i3 540; clocking in at 3.06 GHz.

(Why am I thinking P4? Maybe I’m paranoid, or maybe it’s that I distinctly remember that just after I purchased a first-generation P4 clocked at 2.8GHz, Intel released a 3.06GHz P4 with hyperthreading, back in 2002.)

The Core i3 dual-core range will also include hyperthreading; allowing the operating system to see them as quad-core processors.

Expect the price of DDR3 RAM to fall even further: These babies have a dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory controller, as well as 4 whole megabytes of L3 cache. 

– It’s about time DDR3 got cheaper: I’m now seeing 4GB of DDR3 1600 MHz for less than £100GBP, while 4GBs DDR2 800MHz is up to around £70GBP, from less than £60GBP when I bought 4GBs of it for my triple-cored Windows 7 box just before they released the RC, and another 4GBs shortly afterwards, for a tiny bit less still. ( – Supply and demand. )

I once said that I didn’t think they’d get fabrication technology much smaller than 35nm: That was only about a year ago and it seems that I’m already about to be proved wrong, if I haven’t already been so proved. How much smaller can they go? According to my quick off-the-cuff calculations they’re already at the thickness of three or so atoms. What next; quarks carrying energy inside atoms? – That would bring a whole new way of looking at electricity and electronics if it is feasible!

This kind of situation can happen a lot; particularly when running Windows XP I’ve noted. It can even get to a point where the entire machine seems to freeze-up, and nothing appears to respond: Not the display, nor any functions. – Yet the processor-monitoring display appears to show that the processor-load never goes above a couple or three percent while this is going on.

There may be a number of reasons why this is happening, and several things that are going on here: -

Screen-requests

Windows XP queues screen requests and executes them one at a time: Therefore if the queue becomes too long you may find that the display may become sluggish at times until the queue of requests have all been processed. During this time the processor’s waiting for the queue to clear and is idling and/or getting on with any other minor processing tasks.

Disk-access

The major reason why the system appears to jam-up is due to disk-access, possibly combined with the above screen-request queuing. You may notice that at the time your computer becomes temporarily unresponsive the hard-disk activity appears to be constant. – That means that queued data is being written to, and other data is being read from, the hard-disk. While this is happening the processor is just twiddling it’s thumbs while waiting.

Disk-access is a well-known bottleneck in computers. While the processor can interact with RAM whilst only having to wait a couple or three cycles for a response, it’s a totally different ball-game when it comes to accessing data on the hard-disk: The processor requests the information and waits. The request quickly gets to the SATA controller, and either joins the queue or is passed straight to the hard-disk. This takes a minute fraction of a second thusfar, as it’s all electronic and happening extremely fast.

When the hard-drive receives the instructions, however, the slow part begins: First the hard-drive’s electronics process the request and instruct the read/write arms to retrieve X data from Y location on Z platter. The read/write arms then have to physically move to do so, and when they find the data they may have to read it a number of times to ensure that the data they send back to the electronics is a 100% perfect copy of what’s stored on the magnetic disk.

In the meantime the processor has been waiting several thousand cycles or more already, and the reply’s not even been despatched yet. After another hundred or so cycles the processor receives the long-awaited reply. – Meanwhile other operations dependant upon the outcome of that request are backing up in the processor queue. – Many of these could be pieces of data that when processed will result in another screen request, upon which the graphics-processor on the graphics card is waiting in order to complete a screen-draw while it holds other pending requests in a queue.

At times this situation can escalate to a point where the request-queue for the hard-disk, as well as every other queue, becomes so long that the entire machine has to wait a while for the multiple-queues to clear and their respective caches to empty, and thus the entire machine becomes temporarily unresponsive for a while. – All because hard-disk access times are so slow compared to other request execution times.

Is there a way to avoid these excessive queues building up?

Not completely, no: But the more RAM that’s installed and the less the number of processes running at the same time, the less frequently this situation will occur. Why?

Each process requires a separate process-thread in the processor. That in itself isn’t a problem with today’s processors, especially multi-cored processors with hyperthreading. – But the processor still has to issue various requests of other components related to each individual process; many of which will be for access to data on the hard-disk, resulting in a queue of a length dependant upon the number of requests for hard-disk data issued. – Therefore the less threads running at once, the smaller the queue.

RAM and 64-bit

Also the more RAM installed the more can be used by the processor to store data in. The more data stored in RAM rather than on disk the quicker the processor can access that data when it needs to refer to it… And at this point I return to one of my favourite subjects: The advantage of a 64-bit operating system over a 32-bit equivalent.

A 32-bit operating system can only see an absolute maximum of 4 gigabytes of RAM. When the system caches and shared-graphics-memory if any have all been taken into account that usually leaves about 3.5MBs – Which isn’t always enough, depending upon how many processes are being run. Eventually the available RAM is all used up and the processor relies upon the paging file on the hard-drive for storage. – The consequence of this is that over time the queues build up and – see above.

A 64-bit operating-system, however, can theoretically see over 3 exabytes of RAM: About a small football-field’s area of 1GB RAM sticks. In reality a 64-bit Windows operating system can see well over 10GBs RAM; and the most RAM that can commonly be installed on today’s motherboards is usually 16GBs anyway. Is that enough RAM to prevent massive queues building up. Normally, yes. (I have a 64-bit Windows 7 box running 8GBs of DDR2 800MHz RAM and it’s never “frozen” even once in 8 months, no matter how many process are being run on it.(Yes I’ve had the beta 64-bit, the RC 64-bit, and now the RTM 64-bit of Windows 7 on it.))

…In short then; the more RAM the better, in which case a 64-bit operating system is going to be superior to a 32-bit operating system in that regard.

Solid-State disks

Also, solid-state disks help one heck of a lot too; as the disk-access-time for SSDs is much quicker than for their spinning-platter equivalents – because there are no moving-parts in SSDs, and therefore the seek-time is vastly reduced.

There is one drawback or more, though, with SSDs at the time of writing: Firstly they cost a small fortune in comparison to spinning-platter disks. The price is coming down, it’s already more than halved, but there is a long way to go yet. Secondly they aren’t available at the same storage capacities as spinning-platter drives: the largest commercially-widely-available SSD drive at time of writing is 320GB, although there are 500GB and larger SSD prototypes in use in secret in the military and in big industry to a lesser extent. (I can’t confirm that as a fact for obvious reasons; but you can believe it or not as you like.)

Do I have to change my operating system to a 64-bit (Windows 7) OS, buy an SSD, and install more RAM to avoid my comp “freezing”?

No; but those three things would be a complete solution.

If you’re running 32-bit XP I would advise an upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7, provided that your machine is 64-bit capable. If you’re running 32-bit XP and intend to continue doing so, then if you have with less than a single gigabyte of RAM installed I’d advise you to add a gigabyte to whatever you currently have installed. If you want to buy and can afford to buy an SSD than go for it if you like; but upgrading to a 64-bit operating system with 4 gigabytes of RAM or more should solve most if not all of your worries. (Personally I’m going to wait until SSD storage becomes much bigger in capacity and also until the price is less than twice the price of standard HDDs before I invest in that technology.)

Do I have to stick to Windows?

Not at all: I do because I’m me, but you can use any operating system you want to use. I don’t advise trying to run Mac OSX on a PC though; unless your name’s Psystar. I’ve tried most operating systems; and I’ve found that Windows works best for me. You’re not me though, and maybe Linux or something might be preferable to you for your needs. – Try a dual-boot of Ubuntu and Windows. Ubuntu’ s free after all – so you have nothing to lose apart from a bit of time.

… So if your computer (running Windows) becomes unresponsive temporarily at some point, you’ll now know why it’s doing so. – Does anyone have anything to add to that? If so please use the comment box below. – It seems a shame to waste it.

Windows 7 has made using your computer much easier – But it’s still not that easy for someone who’s visually impaired to get Windows 7’s on-screen magnifier working. – In fact, they’ll have to be able to see and discern the small round Windows logo (Start) button, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen by default, click it using a standard mouse pointer, type the word “magnifier” into the search-bar, see the small writing saying “Turn Magnifier on or off, click it, and be taken to the Ease of Access Center.

At the Ease of Access Center the computer eventually starts to talk to you, and highlights four links as an electronic voice reads them out.

“To get to the help-centre for the visually-impaired; you need to find a tiny doorway which is on a corner. Press the door with a sewing needle and it will open. Type your destination into the keypad and you’ll  be taken to somewhere where you’ll be given further directions verbally…”  Would be the guidebook’s directions to any lone partially-sighted person if this were a real-life situation – if there were a guidebook. Oh it’s online, for which the person who wants to know how to use the magnifier needs to be able to use the magnifier in order to find out how. – Brilliant!

I’m sure that you’d agree that this isn’t much help to someone elderly with failing vision. – Which will probably be why very few people actually use the magnifier feature of Windows 7.

- However; if you have a partially-sighted and/or elderly friend or relative who needs fast access to the magnifier feature in Windows 7, then it would be a good idea to create a desktop icon for them to use to take them straight there.

Advertisment:

Here’s how to create the icon on the desktop. The procedure isn’t exactly rocket science: -

Right-click an empty area of the Windows 7 desktop and hover your cursor over “New”. In the list that appears, select “Shortcut” by clicking on it.

In the text-input line below where it says “Type the location of the item:” Enter “Magnify”. (Without the inverted commas.)

Press return on your keyboard.

In the following text-input bar, below the words “Type a name for this shortcut”, ignore the highlighted “Magnify.exe” and type “Magnifier”. (Without the inverted commas.) : -

Press return on your keyboard

You’ll now see that you have a brand new icon on your desktop with a picture, the contents of which include a screen with a magnifying glass in front of it, marked “Magnifier.

All the visually-impaired person has to do now is to click that icon and the magnifier will instantly appear, as if by magic.

The hard-to-find and elusive magnifier feature is now instantly available to the partially-sighted person with just a click.

A bit of Windows 7 hassle averted on Beyond: Hardware + Software + Practical Electronics. – Thinking ahead for the disabled.

… And now; some adverts: -

 The Friday Moan

It’s great to see that you lot are so rich. I thought there was meant to be a recession on; but obviously that was just negative-media-hype. I’m still looking for the destitute impoverished homeless masses sleeping in the park, but all I’ve seen is a couple of winos. – Should I add that I smelled them first:  Aroma d’vagrant et l’alcohol. I also fail to see the long queues for mostly–empty shelves at the local supermarket. – So much for recession. This one is meant to be as bad as the one in the 1930’s; yet all the evidence seems to point to it being fairly superficial. Both the British and American economies have started to show signs of growth incidentally.

The reason I started off in this way is because, a few weeks back, I launched a small competition that had a small cash-prize associated with it. In the first week 2 people submitted 4 entries between them, and I published one from each person. The first one went straight to Number 10 in the kkomp Top 10 and then sank. The second went straight to Number 9 and floated around between Number 8 and 16 for a week before also sinking.

The object of the exercise was to write a post that would get to Number 1 and stay there over the Xmas Holiday Season. – Impossible? – No; I’ve already written a post that stayed at No 1 for over 6 months. I imagined that my 150+ original visitors per day might like to write something, get published, grab a free piece of internet real-estate, partake in a bit of link-love, and maybe win a small cash prize too.

I was wrong, so you lot miss out: However, since the Season of Goodwill to all Gluttonous Temporary-Alcoholics looms in the not-too-distant future, I’m going to offer a prize to anyone who can get their post to the Number 1 spot in the kkomp Top 10 on Christmas Day and stay there all day, or longer than any other post can on that day.

I don’t quite know why I’m offering to do this, as it appears obvious that you lot are all wealthy and happily well-off thank you very much. However, since I’ve scrapped the original competition due to lack of support, there’s the part of the prize-fund that I haven’t spent on eBay, namely £10UKP still up for grabs. -  If you want it then get submitting your guest posts now to drafts at kustomkomputa dot co dot uk. Whoever is at Number 1 with their post in the kkomp.com Top 10 on Xmas day and stays there the longest wins the tenner. – And yes, if it’s me with any of my posts at Number 1 on that day, I will donate the £10UKP to the Overworked Female Blogger’s Benevolent Fund, of which I am the proprietor and sole benefactor. – So if you want it, rather than allow me to have it, then get writing.

Furthermore…

Furthermore, on a totally different topic, Windows 7 is fantastic: If you don’t have a copy yet then get one: Home Premium is good enough for most people, including myself. If you don’t have a computer capable of running it then get one or build one and run it. I encourage everyone to use the 64-bit version, which requires around 2GBs of RAM minimum. Pretty much all computers built in the last 3 years are capable of running the 64-bit version; except for netbooks, which might find it rather heavy-going, don’t have 2 GB RAM as a rule, and would be better off with the 32-bit version.

RC Running Out of Time

On that note I will remind all of you skinflints and freeloaders who are determined to stick with the Release Candidate of Windows 7 because it costs zilch, nothing; that your free Windows operating system will shut down every 2 hours starting on March 1st 2010. – There really is no point staying in the Freeloader’s Legs all winter in a pokey little room with a packet of extra-strong mints for warmth and an ancient laptop with Windows 7 RC on it ‘til shutdown do you part. – Splash out: The RTM version is more stable than the RC anyway.

Seasoned

Suddenly it’s Autumn / Fall; well it is in the UK anyway: No sooner do the clocks go back than the balmy Indian summer turns into a facsimile of a monsoon, temperatures drop, deciduous trees shed their leaves… Actually it’s not all that bad so far: Despite the early darkness I’ve seen a bumblebee hard at work on my still-blooming lavender on October 25th, and the following day I saw a black ladybird with red spots on a bush…No the red spots were on the ladybird, not the bush, silly.

Enjoy this mild weather in the UK; because I predict that it’ll stay mild with a few exceptions right into early December, and then it’ll unexpectedly turn bitterly cold – I mean arctic cold – for a couple or a few weeks. I predict that there is a 50/50 chance of a traditional Victorian Christmas Day being entirely possible this year due to the natural weather.

What makes me predict this? – The way that nature’s behaving, that’s what. I’m a Witch: I could well be right: Then again, the last time I made a massive and well-publicised weather prediction, that time a prediction of a blazing June and a tropical July, we had one of the worst and wettest summers on record. (1997 if I remember rightly.)

Blog Matters

I’ve recently done some work on improving the design of this blog. – As you will appreciate, although I’m not a designer by trade, I am learning more about aspects of blog design and the science behind it.

You’ll notice that a few months ago I’ve changed the colour-scheme to blue and black with a smattering of red, from pink and red with a smattering of everything else.

This blog actually started off fairly aimlessly and directionless back in June 2008 with a not-very-good pink theme. – I never changed the theme since; I just hacked and customised the heck out of it. What you see today is still using the original basic theme framework called “Serenity Pink”. The logo started life as a pink line that was part of the original theme, would you believe.

On the subject of the logo; you’ll notice that at long last it’s relatively decent: It’s actually a brand, rather than a brand confusion. There is a reason why it’s been so crappy for so long until now: That reason is because I was trying to minimise the work involved by enhancement and recycling of the older crappy logos – aka laziness at its most sneaky. They say that lazy people always end up doing the most work; and in this case that was true. At the end of the day I had to scrap the multiply-re-enhanced design; if one can actually call it a design, and start again from scratch: Something which I should have done in the case of the logo some time ago, like a year ago.

Please understand that when I started this blog I was totally inexperienced with regard to blogging. – Yes really 100% inexperienced and completely without a clue: I’d heard of a blog before, although I wasn’t sure what a blog was; even though I’d read quite a few blogs and didn’t even realise that they were blogs. – That was my total knowledge of blogging at the time. I knew how to use html, was clueless about php, knew a bit about javascript, and was a corporate addict who avoided open-source software as I perceived it as dodgy stuff.

An online acquaintance, namely David Risley, who is now a top problogger, and was rising to that status at the time, suggested that I started a blog and recommended that I do so using WordPress. After further talking with him and mulling the issue over in my mind I decided to give it a go.

Installing WordPress was something that actually made me freak. – Honestly; I unzipped the files, downloaded them to the server, looked again, and screamed!

- I’m a trained and qualified electronics technician. I was never trained in blogging. I’d self-trained in software-maintenance plus basic-peripheral devices-setup-and-maintenance, and made a living from it for a short-time. I learned about hardware initially from sitting in on lectures at college for the computer course, and realised how actually simplistic it was to me on the basis of my electronics background. (I’d actually been studying and practicing practical electronics (Mainly analogue electronics.) as a hobby since age 7. – I only actually qualified in it later in life when I took the initiative to enhance my hobby at an academic level.)

- So I’ve learned and gained experience of computing at both a software and a hardware level, having an electronics background. I’m still learning and gaining experience of blogging right now. I’ve done Yaro Starak’s BecomeaBlogger course, which competently teaches the basics of blogging, and I’m currently undergoing David Risley’s BlogMasters course, which teaches how to blog professionally and properly, as well as how to generate an income from one’s blog as a problogger.

Time is a great hurdle to me currently, as I don’t have oodles of time to spend blogging: However, having said that, when I decide to fully throw my oar into the problogger pond I’ll be devoting most if not all of my time to this blog on a full-time professional basis, and hopefully generating a living from it too.

Does that mean I’m a problogger? Give me a chance; I haven’t even finished the course yet. Could I currently live on the earnings I’m making from this blog? Only if I were a nun with a vow of poverty and all my living expenses paid for by the church and/or state.

Do I intend to become a problogger? Eventually, yes: Hopefully in the not-too-distant future. Do I intend to make a living from this blog? Eventually yes; though maybe not just from this blog. Can I start making a living from and/or monetising this blog now? Well, in a way I am starting to monetise it in line with the BlogMasters training; although there’s a long way to go yet.

I’m not knowledgeable enough or in a position to tell you a lot about problogging at this time: However, when I’ve finished the BlogMasters course I’ll be trained in a lot of the aspects of problogging and will have more to say on the matter, as well as more to practice and implement too.

If you’re interested in problogging as a means of generating a living, then I’ll be advertising the BlogMasters course at some point in early 2010, when I’ve finished it and the doors open again to allow in more students. What I can tell you now is that it’s a six-month course spread out over 19 modules; each with multiple training videos downloadable online, along with transcripts and to-do lists. During the course you’ll get direct access to David Risley himself, to ask questions, make suggestions for enhancing the course material, say what you’d like to learn about, and generally gain the benefit of his expertise in the realm of problogging.

David Risley been blogging, initially as a hobby. since before blogging was called blogging, and he’s gained a wealth of experience over the years by buying lots and lots of training materials from a variety of other bloggers and interacting with them. Also he’s what you might describe as a born-problogger, so he’s used a lot of common-sense and integrated his natural abilities into his rise to success.

On another thread; I currently have a survey running on this blog, and I’d appreciate it if all my readers would complete it for me. It’s a fairly short survey which is conducted via Survey Monkey on behalf of kkomp.com. I forget when it closes; either today or in a week I think. Nobody who takes the survey will be personally identified in any way. The answers that you give to the survey will assist me to enhance this blog further and in a way that you readers would like to see happening. To take part in the survey please click here.

Back to technology

I do like to have a decent working pair of computers at all times: Why a pair? Well, if one should fail then I can always use the other while I’m repairing the failed one. Also I can try out new software on one of them and use the other for more mundane office work.

It is with this in mind that I once again encourage everyone to upgrade to Windows 7: With possibly a few exceptions for the time being. Read the article Windows 7 is Out There: Should You Upgrade? for more on this matter.

Other posts on the subject of Windows 7 recently include: -

How to Create a Task Manager Desktop Icon in Windows 7

Windows 7 has made using your computer much easier –except for one aspect: Calling up the task manager.

In this article we learn how to very simply create a Task Manager icon on your Windows 7 Desktop to simplify the process of calling up the Task Manager.

Can I Run Windows 7 64-bit on the XP Machine I Ran 32-bit on?

In which we look at running Windows 7 64-bit on your existing box.

There is a particular post which I feel will be very valuable to anybody running an online business. In fact it will be beneficial also to anyone who runs a physical corporate business also: -

Expert Help to Boost Your Business – For Free!

Seriously–this "Group Think Tank" process has the capability to increase your profits by up to 1,000%–or more–before the year is over.

A number of top-business experts have got together to share their valuable experience with you at no cost. – Yes that’s right; it’s free of charge expertise from top businesspeople. Can you really afford to miss it? The next session is this coming Thursday. I know I’ll be listening in.

On the subject of business; you might find this post useful also: -

Monetise Your RSS Feed

You could be leaving money on the table if you’re not making the most of monetising your RSS feed.

Yaro Starak’s had the doors open to another of his courses this last week. Oh you didn’t take advantage of it? Well you’ll have to wait until the doors open again in 2010 then. – I did publicise it rather much. – I even had an advert on Google for it: -

Doors Closing Soon … Oops; too late.

Lisa Jackson’s been video-making again: See her Halloween production here: -

Halloween Rules

- Totally off-topic for this blog; but what the heck? A little laughter never hurt anyone.

… And finally; here’s a rundown of the rest of the articles published since the last Public Newsletter: -

Benefits of Doing Your Own Upgrades

All you need is some basic electronics knowledge, general software knowledge,… a steady hand and relatively good hand-eye-coordination, and you’re away.

Keep Your Drivers Up-To-Date

To help get optimum performance from your computer, you should keep your drivers up to date.

How to Back-up Social Media – Bonus Article

Social media has no built-in backup; but there are applications out there which can do the job as far as Facebook and Twitter are concerned.

Computer of The Future: 2020

In this post I project my predictions, based upon my impressions of quickly-advancing technology, of how a computer could be in the year 2020.

An Introduction to Wireless Computer Speakers

Andy Zain tells us a bit about wireless computer speakers in this article: I don’t think this idea will ever go mainstream; but I’m sure that it has its uses.

Fake Antivirus Software is Infecting on a Massive Scale

Partly due to the corporate greed of the kosher affiliate networks, there are now criminal affiliate networks peddling malware. Criminals are making a fortune!

- That’s it for this Public Newsletter then: Enjoy your weekend, and if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere then remember, it’s getting cold outside lately; so why not stay in more, sit in front of the computer, and among other things, read kkomp.com.

Windows 7 has made using your computer much easier – but the on-screen volume controls are still a little elusive:

Clicking the white speaker symbol in the taskbar pops up a single volume control, underneath which is a link to the audio mixer. But, saith I, that’s a little cumbersome; especially when you can have a decent-sized icon on your desktop which causes the mixer to pop-up on screen instantly with one click or double-click; depending upon how you have your settings set.

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We’re going to create a desktop icon which will call up the sound mixer. The procedure isn’t exactly rocket science:

Right-click an empty area of the Windows 7 desktop and hover your cursor over “New”. In the list that appears, select “Shortcut” by clicking on it.

In the text-input line below where it says “Type the location of the item:” enter “SndVol”. (Without the inverted commas.)

Press return on your keyboard.

In the following text-input bar, below the words “Type a name for this shortcut”, ignore the highlighted “SndVol.exe” and type “Sound Mixer”. (Without the inverted commas.) : -

Press return on your keyboard

You’ll now see that you have a brand new icon on your desktop with a picture, the contents of which include a screen with a picture of a loudspeaker on it. – OK I named it Sound Volume in the illustration, but no big deal:

Click that icon and the sound mixer will instantly appear, as if by magic.

… Which all goes to show that not only do I take you beyond the comfort-zone with this blog; I also actually improve your comfort-zone too. – All without having to find that elusive “any” key.

A bit of Windows 7 hassle averted on Beyond: Hardware + Software + Practical Electronics.

… And now; some adverts: -

When upgrading the hardware on a computer, a lot of pre-planning is required before doing the actual physical upgrading task itself.

First, you have to know why you’re upgrading in order to know what particular components to upgrade. – For example; if your graphics are insubstantial; that is to say the screen appears to stick when you scroll and scroll in a chunky manner for instance, or you’re unable to get a proper frame-rate on a particular game – yet you know that your processor and RAM are well above the recommended system specs suggested for playing the game, then you’ll be looking to upgrade the graphics card., or to fit a graphics card that will take over from the motherboard’s onboard graphics capabilities.

There are several main components inside a computer which you can upgrade: -

Motherboard

Graphics card

Hard-drive(s)

Power supply unit (PSU)

Random Access Memory (RAM)

Processor (CPU)

One or two of the above may have to be upgraded when other main components are upgraded in order to maintain component compatibility. – For example; if you were upgrading the motherboard, unless the new motherboard takes the same processor and/or same processor socket designation as the previous one, then a new, compatible processor is called for. The same goes with the RAM: Unless the previous RAM sticks will fit into the slots and have the same slot designation as the RAM slots on the new motherboard, then new RAM is also called for. Sometimes a new power supply unit may also be called for too.

When upgrading a motherboard; which is about the biggest upgrade task you can do on a computer, you’ll probably want to change the processor and RAM for something faster that performs better anyway: There doesn’t seem much point in upgrading a motherboard just to have it bogged down by the CPU and RAM.

A well-documented way to increase a computer’s performance is to increase the amount of RAM. This can be accomplished by adding sticks, and/or by replacing existing sticks with new sticks with more capacity on them.

Replacing the processor with a faster and better-specced model of the same socket designation may also be a performance aid in some cases. (See this article, for instance.) Ideally, though, a processor upgrade should normally always be a part of a motherboard upgrade in my opinion.

Hard-drives are another thing you might upgrade: Either adding one or more, or replacing one or more. – You might just want more room to store data; and therefore might, for instance, change a 500GB HD for a 1TB HD, or even just add a 1TB HD as an extra storage drive. Perhaps your old hard-drive is making unsavoury noises, or is experiencing a recent glut of bad sectors, and you feel that it’s time to replace it.

Power supply units wear out and require replacing at times too. Alternatively you might require more wattage for the new graphics card that you’ve just installed, and therefore the upgrade is merely a matter of course.

I once described a computer as an adult Lego set; with wires, electricity, and data added to make it a little more difficult. Once you master how it fits together and at least the basics of how it works, you’ll find that it’s fairly easy to do your own upgrades, and save yourself time and a lot of money in the process. – It really isn’t as difficult as you may imagine: All you need is some basic electronics knowledge, general software knowledge, a static-free work area, take proper precautions, a small toolkit, a steady hand and relatively good hand-eye-coordination, and you’re away: You can upgrade your own computer(s), upgrade other people’s too for a fee, build new computers for yourself and others – The world’s your oyster.

There’s not a lot of money in building & upgrading computers currently, unless you do it en masse; but it’s a useful talent to have all the same, even if only for your own purposes: Whenever your PC stops working you can just usually fix it on the spot with a minimum of effort and cost, compared to calling a geek in to umm and arr, take it away for a few days, and charge you a small fortune when they return it in a working condition. Also, whenever you feel that you could do with a performance-increase in whatever respect, you can just plan whatever upgrade you need, buy the parts, and do it whenever it’s convenient to do so, all at a cost decided to the penny by you – in that you yourself are in total control over your spending, you decide what components you’ll use, what quality of components to utilise, everything.

Have you ever built, repaired, or upgraded a computer? Share your experiences.

Windows 7 has made using your computer much easier –except for one aspect: Calling up the task manager.

You can either click the start button, and type “task manager” into the search bar; in which case the Windows 7 Task manager appears instantly when you hit return, (13 key-presses, 1 click.) or you can press ctrl+alt+del and the screen changes, you select “Start Task Manager”, and the Task Manager appears on the original screen. (3 key-presses (Simultaneous) and 1 click.)

In XP there were a couple of round-about routes to doing it, and there was ctrl+alt+del without the extra click. – So whichever way you look at it; there is at least 1 extra operation involved in calling up the Task Manager in Windows 7.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just call it up with a single click? – The good news is that you can do just that; after a tiny bit of software engineering: -

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We’re going to create a desktop icon which will call up Task Manager. – You’ll be able to call up the Task Manager with a single or double-click of the mouse; depending upon how you have your computer set up.

The procedure isn’t exactly rocket science: Right-click an empty area of the Windows 7 desktop and hover your cursor over “New”. In the list that appears, select “Shortcut” by clicking on it.

In the text-input line below where it says “Type the location of the item:” enter “taskmgr”. (Without the inverted commas.)

Press return on your keyboard.

In the following text-input bar, below the words “Type a name for this shortcut”, ignore the highlighted “taskmgr.exe” and type “Task Manager”. (Without the inverted commas.) : -

Press return on your keyboard

You’ll now see that you have a brand new icon on your desktop with a picture, the contents of which include a screen with a green wavy trace on it: -

Click that icon and the Task Manager will instantly appear, as if by magic.

… Which all goes to show that not only do I take you beyond the comfort-zone with this blog; I also actually improve your comfort-zone too. – All without having to find that elusive “any” key.

A bit of Windows 7 hassle averted on Beyond: Hardware + Software + Practical Electronics.

… And now; some adverts: -

Welcome to Part Two of this series.

In Part One we looked at the situation that I was facing, having moved to a dedicated server from a shared-platform server. Being a noob as far as Linux is concerned, I followed leads from other people who were more experienced in using Linux, (Although one of them did in fact confess that, although he used Linux more than anything else at work, his main area of proficiency was, in fact, Windows.) which ended in a dead end.

Not to be outdone I eventually discovered a blog post from February 2008 which appeared to contain part of an interesting line of php that turned out to be the answer to my problem.

In Part Two, which you’re reading now, we’re going to look at that line of php, as well as add it to our respective blogs to prevent unnecessary 404 errors.

First, though, from my experience, although somewhat limited, I suggest that only bloggers who are hosted on a dedicated server use this code: I don’t see why it would be necessary to run on a shared-platform server. If you are on a shared-platform; that is sharing a server at your hosting company’s depot with others unknown, then your web-host’s engineers will normally be tending to the server and keeping it problem-free. (Which, in my case, is why it costs more to host 4 individual websites on separate domains on shared-platform servers than it does to host those 4 domains on a  single dedicated server: Because the engineers will only fix hardware faults and occasionally give limited advice on dedicated servers.) If you get unexpected 404s on a shared-platform server, phone customer support and they’ll ask the engineers to put it right. – Only use this code if you have no other alternative.

Note 1: – Which brings me on to thinking: There must be some setting somewhere in the server which will prevent the 404 issue from occurring. The engineers can sort it on shared-platform servers; so why can’t I on a dedicated server?

The answer to that is; a) I’m a technician. – Engineers are much better trained and have a wealth of experience. b) I’m a trained electronics technician, rather than a trained computer technician. c) Er, read on: You’ll see that I have sorted it out; but not in the server settings (Linux) themselves; rather, on a third-party application, namely WordPress, that is on the server, using php.

OK; so first, as promised, I’ll reveal where I found this code and give credit: The site is called “The Moonlight Blog”.  I’ve linked the name to the relevant page.

As you’ll see, the writer gives this information: -

Note the php. When rebuilt by myself it looks like: -

<?php header("Status: 200 OK");
?>

Yes I did say a single line of php; well it sort of is; it just works if it’s typed like that; so that’s how I’m presenting it.

“That was the fruit of a week’s work?” you ask; bemused.

In itself that was the fruit of a few minutes work; it just took me a week to find it, as well as many other things besides.

Note 2: In Part One I stated that the author’s php notation was incomplete; that’s true and then again not true: You see if you’re working with php all the time you know what goes where, and you come to expect a pattern. – so much so in fact that you only need write the information that’s not obvious to the trained eye.

header(“Status: 200 OK”); is the bit that the developer needs. The developer knows that it’s php because the semi-colon shows that it’s the end of the statement. The machine won’t know that it’s php because the machine hasn’t been told that it’s php. The bit that I added tells the machine that it’s php; otherwise, to the experienced developer, it’s simply not required.

OK so we have our line of php code; written so that the machine can understand it.

Where do I put it?

Well; since it’s an instruction for the header of a page to return a html 200 code when executed; it appears logical to put it in the header.php file in the theme folder; located at ~\wp-content\themes\<name of your theme>\header.php. if you have more than one header folder; for example: page_header.php and post_header.php, put it in all of the header files.

Where exactly do I put it in the header.php file(s)?

Right at the very top; above all the other text. Why? Because it works.

How do I add it to my header.php file?

There are 2 ways to do this: The first is possibly the easiest, and is from inside the WordPress GUI itself: -

(This method will only add it to the currently active theme installed on your WordPress installation.)

Click on the arrow on the Appearance tab and click on Editor. On the page that follows, look on the right-hand-side of the screen and click on Header (header.php).

In the text editor in the centre of the screen, type or copy & paste the php from this article above all the other text. You might have to click at the start of the first line and press return to create a clear line at the very top before you insert it.

Below the text editor window you’ll see a blue button with white writing on it “Update File”. Click it and wait for the function to execute. – That’s it.

The other way of doing it is to open up your FTP client and navigate to the wp-content folder on your server. On an Ubuntu server the path could look something like

/home/default/yourdomain/user/htdocs/wp-content

(Various servers/hosting companies may vary.)

Inside that folder you’ll find a folder called “plugins”. Open that and you’ll see a folder with the name of your current theme. Open that folder and download the header.php file to your local computer.

Use a text editor program to open the file and insert the php from this article at the very top of all the other text. Close and save. Use your ftp client to overwrite the existing header.php file on your server with the edited file. Do the same with any other themes you may have loaded as you wish.

-It’s as easy as that: The word “easy” depending upon your previous experience.

Just to recap: We’ve added some additional php to our header.php file in our header.php file in our WordPress blog to instruct the page headers to return a html 200 – OK when executed. This should stop them returning a html 404- not found error. The server then has no choice but to execute the other php on the page in question  and serve the product of that execution to the requesting machine.

- And that’s about all there is to say. This php did the trick for me. Why not let me and all my readers know whether or not it did the trick for you too? Leave a comment. Leave a comment also if you have anything further to add. I’m not a php expert, whereas you might be though; so do feel free to add something.

That’s all.

- And now; some adverts: -

After much deliberation and decision-making in the last few days; my final plans for this blog have been somewhat set in stone, subject to minor alteration as and when necessary and dependant upon circumstances as time goes by:

The plan is to continue posting to this blog until January 2010. Some of those posts will be duplicated on shazzalive.com; with video if practical to do so. Furthermore, some of the posts that have proven to be popular and valuable that are already posted on this blog will be rewritten/edited and posted on shazzalive.com along with audio and/or video.

As already mentioned; most content will cease to be produced for this blog from January 2010., and I’ll be producing content for shazzalive.com only. – But that doesn’t mean all content will cease production for this blog. – For one thing there are my members-only newsletter subscribers who may well be in for a bonus if they remain subscribed. All existing members-only newsletter subscribers will have the email address that is on record put into the signup process for shazzalive.co.uk (Shazzalive.com simply redirects to shazzalive.co.uk. Shazzalive.com is easier to remember, easier to type, and is used as the URL generally.) as and when. Hopefully people will join the shazzalive mailing list also. If anyone on my list receives a confirmation email for shazzalive.co.uk but doesn’t want to join, then simply ignore that email. I do hope that everyone on my list will join up to the shazzalive mailing list, though, as there’ll be so much more on shazzalive.com: There’ll be videos, audio files, transcripts, probably reviews too. There will be some amazing offers, interviews, technical and business advice…

Of course, all this won’t suddenly appear on the new blog in January 2010 itself: It’s going to take time to build up contributors, readers, advertisers, writers… I don’t promise you the entire world instantly, as if I did I simply wouldn’t be able to deliver. What I am intending is to produce something bigger and better than kkomp.com; whist at the same time allowing kkomp.com to languish online as a reference library.

This week on kkomp.com has seen 3 new articles appear: -

Video

The first of these is simply called “Video”: Video is not something that I’m well practiced in, so I’m going to be creating a number of trial runs leading up to the opening of shazzalive.com. This was my first attempt. It could do with a few tweaks here and there; but it’s passable. The video advertises a product from David Risley; himself a well experienced video-jockey who produces some outstanding-quality videos; but not just videos: David has been blogging since before blogging was invented, and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge which has allowed him to build up and run an online-business generating a six-figure income, with which he supports a family and lives quite comfortably in his home in Tampa Bay, Florida.

Let David Risley teach you the basics of a six-figure problogger business in only 3 days. The course includes 14 videos, and has a 92 page transcript, checklist, and audio podcasts of all modules included. Download my FREE 5-page .pdf report on 3-Day Money

In 3-Day-Money, David shares his wealth of knowledge with you: From the fundamentals of starting up a blog, including choosing a decent market niche, right through to the techniques and marketing tactics he uses to continue to generate an income-stream and keep his entrepreneurship on the rails of success. 3-day-Money also acts as a great forerunner-course for David’s current project; Blog Masters Club, which will be opening its doors again in or around January 2010

How To Launch System Restore From a Command Prompt in Windows XP

- Tells you how to launch System Restore whilst in Windows XP’s Safe Mode.

List All Installed Drivers in Windows XP Professional is an article for those running Windows XP Professional that shows how to get XP Pro to list all installed drivers from the command-prompt.(This post is also duplicated on shazzalive.com.)

Keep watching this space for more articles that show you how to do more with your computer, give you practical advice on practical electronics, and add to your technical knowledge.

That’s all for this newsletter, Enjoy your weekend, whatever you’ve got planned.

My how time flies: The summer seems almost over already! Only a few weeks to go and it’ll be Autumn (Fall in the USA.).

Windows 7 is officially launching on 22nd October don’t forget. If you’re in the UK then you can order your copy at a large discount currently. As it says; quantities are limited, so order your copy today if you haven’t already done so. Time is running out.

I ordered mine from Staples and they had the nerve to charge me an extra £1.xx as it was my first online order from them. – ‘Cheeky f—ers! – ‘You see why I’m so cynical about British business: (Yes I know it’s the British arm of a multinational.) They’re generally out to profit any way they can at the customer’s expense, regardless. If they’d have said that they were going to levy a fee because it was my first online order from them I’d have gone elsewhere: I should have stuck with my gut instinct and ordered from ebuyer, who I buy from rather regularly anyway. As it was they either didn’t tell me about this, or they hid it somewhere in some tiny print on an obscure page.

Despite my cynicism with regard to British businesses, I have found one British business that appears to be rather ethical as far as I can tell. Their name is Daily and they’re a web-hosting company. Read all about them here.

While I was examining a number of companies earlier; some multinational, I took a look at dabs.com: Now usually I have my typical suppliers and I don’t go outside of my favoured supplier clique as a rule. Dabs.com, however, made me look twice, and some of their deals were so good that I even included them on my regular supplier list. Take a look for yourself. – Treat yourself to that new piece of hardware or peripheral that you’ve been meaning to get for so long why not?

You’ll now notice that the logo in the header has been redesigned; which can only be good: The old one was too big and too brightly-coloured; which distracted from the blog’s content.

What other goodies have I produced this last week? Ah yes: Yesterday I showed you how to get all your media files played by Windows Media Player 11. I’ve come up against this several times in the past where one of my customers has phoned up in desperation having just added Nero to find that most of their media files are now opening in Nero Media Player and half of them won’t play. The fix is very simple, and is in the article: -

Claim Back Files Hijacked by Other Media Players

Next some more electronics: I’m not going into details here. Read the article and see for yourself: –

The Dual Balanced Power Supply

That was fairly short and sweet. – Having said that; 4 articles a week, plus a newsletter, is my normal output. It just happened that 2 of the articles were advertising articles this time.

On that theme; I believe that I stated this in a membership-list mailing already. – But I’ll go for it again in a public article, namely this one: I’m thinking of adding podcasts to some of the longer articles, so that they can be listened to as well as read. I need to know if it’s worth my doing so: I don’t want to create podcasts that nobody listens to. Would people please give me feedback on this as to whether they’d like me to include a downloadable audio file or not. Leave a comment in the comments section below. If I get a decent amount of generally positive feedback I’ll certainly consider doing so.

I have a lot of things to get done right now; so I can’t really keep writing any longer. (I have to find and edit pictures from my library for this article too, before adding and positioning them.) Do have a great weekend, and stay tuned during the coming week for more articles from kkomp.com.

Blessings.

Shazza. x

As you may know, or may have gathered by now; I’m a computer builder and an AMD fan. Yes I’m aware that Intel are the market leaders in chip design and that they produce some extremely top-class processors that are pretty much unbeatable at the time they’re released. – There are 2 negatives with new top-end processor technologies, though: -

The first is that the new designs/technologies haven’t been tried, tested, and trusted. Intel geeks will ask;

“So what? If you’re truly a geek you’ll be the first to try out anything new.”

I disagree – You see if I try out any new device I want to make sure that it works well and in the way that I want it to work.

I don’t play computer games; so having the latest and fastest multi-processor chip and the biggest and hottest graphics processor would do absolutely nothing for me. – On top of that there’s the fact that anything that’s a brand new concept is going to cost a fortune, and may initially be full of bugs.

That brings me on to the second point – That being price: What is the point of trying out some new device when I have to pay thousands for it? I’d rather wait a month – If I particularly like the device, for whatever reason. – and only pay hundreds for it; by which time it might also have a new version out in which any gremlins that found their way into the first line have been ironed out. Result = better product for less. Alternatively I could wait a while longer until the product is being produced en-masse and pay even less for it.

Three months ago I built my triple-core Phenom powered box and installed Windows 7 (Beta, then RC.) on it. I could have built almost exactly the same box a year earlier for a greater financial outlay using a buggy Phenom. As it was, had I waited another month until May 2009, the processor would have cost £10 less and the motherboard would have cost me £20 less. – All in all the entire thing lost over £5 value while I was waiting for delivery of the parts and then building it! Personally I’m not into throwing £5 notes away as a rule.

You may or may not agree with my angle on it all. Your personal opinion is, of course, completely up to you, and I have no intention nor right to try to change that opinion. – The purpose of this post, however, is to alert you to some amazing deals that are currently out on some of the tried and tested technologies at this moment, in addition to a few of the newer products on today’s market in the realm of computers and computer construction: -

If, like me, you’re a computer builder and/or someone who likes to upgrade their existing box(es) from time to time, then you’ll always try to keep abreast of the current products, their latest developments, product news, and where you can get some great deals on existing and new technologies. – Both tried and tested, as well as recently released.

I’ve been browsing around lately through some of the online retailers; both my usual suppliers as well as others, and overall I think that some of the best deals available right now can be found at dabs.com.

dabs.com currently have some amazing deals on Phenom processors, in addition to which their flat-screen TV sets are going through a recession-busting price-knockdown too.

I mean things such as an LG Electronics 37LH7000 Full HD 100mhz Freeview set for under £700 inc VAT for example, some great deals on processors, Crucial RAM, even whole pre-built computers! Seeing is believing; so hurry along and see for yourself. Now is an amazing time to grab a bargain at dabs.com; but hurry while current offers last!

Click on this link and your browser will take you straight there. Happy shopping.

This article is unconnected to the 1980s group Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

A lot of people go out and throw their money away on alcohol, which ends up as part of the contents of the local sewer system rather quickly, on a Friday night, particularly in the UK; but I prefer to stay in and expand my mind: No, not with some new-fangled narcotic substance. – Rather; with study and experimentation in the style of geeky-relaxation:

This particular Friday night in July it was a bit damp outside anyway with somewhat lower than average night-time temperatures for the time of year, so unless I had something amazing planned at some external venue, which I didn’t, I was definitely going to stay indoors. There was some good TV on that evening too, so I’d spend a couple hours watching that and then relax in front of and away from the computer.

I was starting to get a little vacant-minded eventually, and I started to doodle. Now when most people doodle they draw physical things or swirls or patterns or shapes or something similar. When I start to doodle then I usually start drawing an electronic circuit diagram. – Honestly I kid you not. – It’s usually something fairly simple like a Hartley oscillator or a single transistor emitter-follower output stage; but very occasionally I become fully alert while I’m doing it, realise what I’m drawing, and suddenly an idea pops into my head from which I develop something else or it takes me onto another level mentally.

This Friday night was one such event: I’d been contemplating the Darlington transistor in a kind of semi-conscious state, and went on to remark to myself inside my head on the surprising number of hits I’d had on my article regarding a Darlington-pair amplifier circuit. Still in a dreamlike state I put that thought on hold and went on to imagine ways to mix a timebase signal with a direct current to produce an alternating current using a matched pair of bipolar power transistors. – That’s when I realised that I was doodling again; and I’d started to draw a matched pair of bipolar Darlington transistors configured as a high-gain audio amplifier.

I recoiled a little with a start: That was something I’d never thought of before, despite the concept staring me in the face. I thought it might be worth taking further while the idea was fresh in my mind. I started consciously working further on what had been my doodle: I added extra decoupling to the ground points, controlled variable simultaneous negative feedback across both Darlington pairs, 2 sets of potential dividers for biasing the Darlington bases separately…

After faffing about for a while and drawing a circuit diagram with so many corrections it was barely legible, I transcribed the circuit to a fresh diagram in order that it would be legible to anyone else… Then I decided to blog it.

So – fresh out of my mind, totally unrevised and untested, I present to you my idea for a single-channel monaural audio amplifier with gain controlled by means of negative feedback utilising a ganged potentiometer.

I think it’ll work, but I have no idea how well. It’s one of these ideas I draw up that I never actually build, and it remains a theoretical triumph of unstarted construction in my head to times unlimited. Here it is anyway: -

There seems to be an error in the diagram: It appears that I’ve drawn D2 the wrong way round.

If you’re qualified in electronics please feel free to criticise, critique, comment, other words starting with C; even build it and/or improve on the design if you like: ‘Your choice. (I deliberately left the circuit diagram small enough so that you could hopefully get it all in a single browser window in FireFox at a resolution of 1024 x 768 px.)

I didn’t choose any component values other than those of the 10 nanofarad capacitors across the base and emitter of Q1 and Q3: Including them like this does actually increase audio frequency response at bass frequencies. I heard about it somewhere ages ago and have actually tried it to prove that it works: It does; to a limited extent.

Having blogged that I’m now going to get a coffee and do something else. I’ll decide exactly what as I drink the coffee.

Tatty-bye for now.

Hi Everyone.

This week I’ve changed things about a bit with regard to the appearance of this blog. Basically I’ve decluttered the theme by removing the distracting artwork at the sides of the screen and replacing it with a slightly-pink-tinted plain background. I also changed the overall background colour from that slightly-over-intensive pinky colour to white. To remove the resultant overall blandness of the site I added a recurring light violet-pastel-coloured oval, which is visible but hardly noticeable, to the centre column.

I redesigned the header; putting the RSS link at the very top of the page, raising the menu-bar up above the logo-banner, and moving the advertising-space from the header into the page-body, further down. This will hopefully improve the “too-much-going on” feel of the blog.

In addition I further decluttered the Welcome page by removing some of the junk that had built up over the last few months, including the derogatory negative comments of Syphilis Syndrone (posting as “Sarah Palin”), which add absolutely nothing whatsoever of value to anything and were just wasting space.

Do you find the new design elements described above easier on the eye and less distracting? I’d be interested to hear your comments on this.

Moving on; and on Monday I came up with some more gumph on Microsoft’s war with the EU over windows: -

EU’s Latest Antitrust-Stab at Microsoft: Furthermore –

Tuesday had me giving you a guide to the minimum spec.s to look for or build into a new computer, with the future in mind: -

What Are the Minimum Specs Required for a Desktop Computer?

For the newbie, and those who need to know as a one off; a step-by-step pictorial guide on how to do the following: -

How to Find and/or Change Your Computer’s Name in XP

I did an article, back in April, about the basics of the extremely common (If you did but know it.) process of changing AC current into DC. Conversely, this week I did an article on the less-common but nevertheless widely-used and equally-useful process of changing DC current to AC: -

How to Change Direct Current into Alternating Current

Lastly, there are still so many self-wired UK 13 Amp plugs in homes across the country, even to this day; many of which are so badly wired by total first-timers that they’re rather dangerous. I transposed my original papers on the subject from my City & Guilds college course in electronics as an article on how to do it properly and safely: -

How to Wire a UK 13 Amp Mains Plug

I hope that you enjoy those articles.

Lastly, as a note for WordPress self-hosted blog users, I’ll remind you that WordPress 2.8.1 is now out and ready for you to use. It resolves a number of issues found in 2.8. For more information on this, click here.

That’s about it for now. I hope you have a generally relaxing and profitable weekend. Look after yourselves.

Shazza.

How do those compare to, say, liquid-state drives?

Let’s start as we mean to go on: There is no such thing as liquid-state  drives; except maybe in terminator movies. By “solid-state” I mean built from solid semiconductor material with no moving parts, rather than the normal types of hard-drive in use today that read magnetic data via a read/write head attached to a seek arm from a series of spinning platters.

Solid-state drives were first introduced to the public as recently as 2007 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A solid state drive, or SSD, is the upcoming phase of computer hard drive technology and utilises the same kind of hardware-structure as USB flash drives use, made entirely of semiconductors; NAND Flash technology. The solid state drive uses almost 50% less energy than its regular equivalent, makes no noise, and is generally more stable. They could very well eventually replace the normal spinning-platter hard-drives when they are a lot less pricey and can store more data.

Whilst there are advantages to using a solid state drive with no moving parts; price, as already stated, is a factor currently preventing the SSD from taking over the hard drive market for laptop and desktop computers. Also involved in preventing this is a matter of storage capacity:

Some vendors offer 32 GB Solid State Drives for part of a small fortune. Solid state drives currently max out at 256GB; these drives are extremely highly expensive and beyond the budgetary reach of most geeks.

Having no moving parts means that SSDs are not affected by data corruption or operation failures caused by debris or movement. They are also largely unaffected by dust or by being dropped. Dropping a typical hard-drive can cause the heads to crash into the magnetic film on the platters; thus damaging certain sectors and rendering them unusable: if they have data already written to those sectors then that data becomes rendered unrecoverable.

Another advantage is that they can access data stored within them much faster, almost immediately, even if that data is fragmented. Added to this, the SSD has a longer lifespan than traditional HDDs, due once again to its having no moving parts: The expected lifespan is currently up to around 80% greater for SSDs. I’ve heard that some makers of solid state drives are claiming life expectancy of over 100 years; though I’m unsure how valid this claim is. Not many people, at today’s average lifespan, are going to live to find out.

No doubt, in time as the price comes down and the storage capacity begins to approach that of traditional hard-drives, the solid state hard drive will eventually replace traditional hard drives that consumers have been using for years. Currently, though, due to their lower price, manufacturers are sticking with the traditional spinning-platter hard-drives in the main for at least the time being.

Does your computer have a solid state hard drive? Do you find it faster? Please comment.

It’s Wednesday 24th June 2009 and it’s kkomp.com’s first birthday today. It feels like I started this blog aeons ago, (Really, it does. It feels like I’ve been blogging for a number of years; yet it seems like only yesterday I had my 40th birthday.) and also only a few days ago too. In the year since this blog started I’ve made about 430 posts in 24 categories. – That’s not to mention the pages. My initial intention of enough content creation to place this blog on the blogosphere map has to all intents and purposes come to fruition, and some.

A year ago the world was facing the fact that we were in a global recession courtesy of the greedy international banking system. From what I hear lately, the UK appears to be pulling out of it: The economic growth report for March 2009 appears to indicate that GDP and growth returned to a positive figure in the case of UK. Although one leaf doesn’t make a summer; it appears that there are definite signs of a recovery on the way for Blighty.

- But; as some prominent bloggers have asked; where exactly is, or where exactly was, this massive economic downturn? More than not it appears to have been largely created within the minds of negatively-biased individuals by a media-led frenzy. The press will do anything to sell newspapers. A few businesses disappeared, true: That can and does even happen in times of economic prosperity though. Were there people claiming that the end of the world is nigh, that the commercial system as we knew it was going into meltdown? Of course there were: ‘Probably the same doom-mongers who did the same thing in the last recession, and the one before that too. – But the car-parks are still just as full at the shopping-malls as they always were, the traffic still flowed as per usual on the highways and byways, the world continued turning.

I accept that the world financial institutions made crazy speculative investments which lost them billions: perhaps they’ll now learn that putting spotty teenagers with a constant hangover and greedy out-of-control excuses for businesspeople in charge of the world monetary system is a definite recipe for its doom.

As we hopefully begin to emerge from this major economic turbulence we find that the world is still changing in our favour: By “our” I mean those of us who are building our world online. Social networking and global communication has, and will most likely continue to, cause the storm-clouds to depart and to build bridges of co-operation and opportunity for businesses globally. The remainder of the commercial entities will be forced to follow suit. Unfortunately for those of the old-school; opportunity and inter-corporate/interpersonal connectivity will continue to elude them, and they will fade away to be replaced by those who are operating under the new electronically-connected socio-commercial framework that has arisen from technological and societal advancement and the evolution of civilisation that has ensued as a result of that progress.

As I pointed out earlier, during the last year this blog has accrued around 430 posts, mainly of late technologically-orientated material dealing with basic practical and theoretical electronics and/or computer hardware and software, punctuated here and there by a news item or two which stood out to me, along with the odd mystical/Pagan-themed post.

Like a human child; this blog started without form, just a cell of an idea, fertilised and conceived a year ago on a whim, following a suggestion from someone who was already a blogger. Having no womb to mature within, it slowly took form in the wild, evolving with the mainly indirect assistance of a number of professionals who advised and directed with regard to its construction, renovation, changes, layout, and to a limited extent its content.

My naivety during the first couple of months of managing this blog was a little more prolific than I’d imagined it would be. I remember my first move as my brainchild came into existence was to announce on the social media channels, which I’d only recently become familiar with and had managed to pick up 1 or 2 followers, that I now have a blog: here’s the URL; please come visit. Well 1 or 2 people did visit, for about as long as it took to hit their back button on their browser.

I’d heard of people making fortunes on the internet; but somehow connected it with the dot com boom of the turn of the century, and regarded it as a thing of the past. Spring 2008 turned to Summer, my web 1.0 website at kustomkomputa.co.uk didn’t appear to be attracting much if any business, and I was starting to become extremely despondent. – Then a pro-blogger by the name of David Risley suggested I start a blog using WordPress. – Well what I was doing at the time wasn’t working; so in for a penny… Why the heck not?

I had been using Word 10 as an html editor to build kustomkomputa.com: It was difficult, cumbersome, and the resultant pages were full of so much unnecessary html that they took quite some time to load even with a broadband connection. Despite this I’d become used to Microsoft Word, and I even understood most of the crap html in it.

WordPress was a totally different kettle of fish though. I downloaded it, looked at the files and their contents, and screamed inside. .php – I’d never learned any php. .css – I had even less idea about css. Html: No problem; even Microsoft Word. – Especially Microsoft Word. Php and css, though, looked like Chinese to me.

By the time I’d installed WordPress on the server my head was so drenched in sweat I thought I’d just washed my hair! – But I’d done it. – And it didn’t work. Check: Had I done everything right? Yes. I’d triple checked everything before I started, and triple checked it again after every stage while I was doing it. having triple checked everything afterwards I eventually discovered that fasthosts.co.uk Windows servers were no good for running WordPress on. I’d specifically asked them beforehand: -

“Are your Windows servers able to run WordPress?”

Answer: “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever run WordPress from our servers before.”

- When pressed: “Well I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work on a Windows server. If you install it and it doesn’t work properly then we can always put you on a Linux server instead. The transfer won’t cost anything, our Linux servers cost exactly the same price to use as our Windows servers, and it’ll only take a few minutes to swap over.”

It didn’t work on their Windows server. – As promised they transferred me to a Linux server, and I installed WordPress again. This time it worked straight off and without problem.

Advice:

1) If using fasthosts.co.uk as your host for a self-hosted WordPress blog; always choose their Linux servers as your server.

     1a) Always use a Linux server wherever possible: Linux is a much better server platform than Windows.

2) Don’t use fasthosts.co.uk, unless you want to be wound up in red tape.

I hope you like reading; There’s more: -

To start with I didn’t really bother too much about presentation as far as the pages were concerned, which was my first mistake: After a false start earlier in June 2008, where it ended up that I took the entire blog down and restarted from scratch due to some kind of major problem. – I can’t remember what exactly, I downloaded and used a pre-built theme, threw up a Welcome page – almost literally by the previous look of it, and concentrated on turning out content.

I decided to break the mould of how most blogs were operating early on, by having a Welcome page initially, which visitors not linking from a link to an article would arrive at, rather than having the entire content of my posts appearing in chronological order on that initial page. Unfortunately the element that was missing was a contents listing, other than a table of the ten latest posts in the sidebar. This was a matter that wasn’t remedied until 2009, which was another major mistake I made. I agree that it would have been more sensible to attend to the matter earlier, but as things turned out it didn’t happen that way. We live and learn.

Although I’d written a number of papers over the past few years; I didn’t then classify myself as a writer, and maybe it showed. A few of my articles at the time were articles featuring content throughout that I’d created myself, but they were mainly seemingly less than quality content. In the main I concentrated upon relaying news items that I found to be of interest more than anything else.

Quite obviously, since there were an almost infinite number of alternative and better-known sources of the news that I was relaying; people stuck with what they knew, and other than a few visits sent by Google I didn’t get much traffic at all. Also, although I’d downloaded and installed the tools for search-engine-optimisation, I hadn’t configured them properly, (- As I actually wasn’t aware that they required further configuration in the early days, and I also didn’t know how to do it anyway, had I even been aware.) which didn’t help either.

During July 2008 I’d started to introduce advertising via advertisments that I’d created myself with links back to Clickbank. This however generated very little, if any, revenue.

By September 2008 I’d started to relay the news items whilst also including my personal take on them. Although this helped, it still didn’t have that much upwards-effect on my traffic figures. Despite having trained in electronics, as well as having a number of years of experience with computers, I felt at the time still very naive and vulnerable when it came to blogging, pretty much throughout 2008. Despite this though, I noticed that this blog was nevertheless ranked 5-million and-something-th at the time.

In October 2008, I think it was, I began to properly configure my SEO plugins, such as All-in-One-SEO-Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, etc. This did begin to have a positive effect, and the number of unique visitors began to increase somewhat. I also began utilising further free tips from David Risley, which also helped.

By December 2008 the blog was attracting a more realistic audience figure, and I set my attention upon the blog’s homepage, as well as the header and footer.php files, with the intention of tidying it up and making it look more attractive. Php still worried me, as although it was quite easy to understand, I was constantly having issues with the syntax of anything I wrote. Also most of what I wrote clashed with the style.css file of my theme. Although my effort eventually improved the page considerably, the resultant page was too crowded, not designed well, and the colour scheme failed to convey the theme of the blog. Many female readers liked it; but since the blog was attracting a mainly male, older, audience, I felt that it wasn’t a sensible option to allow things to continue that way.

I worked on and designed an entirely new home (Welcome) page, in addition the the header and footer, and implemented in during January and February 2009. I also edited and redesigned the theme to be more in tune with the central subject material of the blog.

Previous to this, although the subject matter had been mainly of a technical bent, I hadn’t really had a theme for the blog as such, nor had I used the blog’s design to clearly indicate the subject matter to my readers; which probably left some readers in somewhat of a quandary as to exactly what it was that I was trying to convey herein.

Also the footer, (footer.php) at one point during 2008 had a serious php error in it which caused a number of problems. These issues were rectified when I almost totally rewrote the header using a lot of html in addition to attending to the php already present – which was enhanced, and also in addition I repaired and enhanced the footer.

In doing so I introduced a header banner, which I enhanced over a number of weeks. I’ve since moved the RSS link into the header, and provided the mailing-list-subscription link high in the sidebar, above the fold, by writing its script into the sidebar.php file. I also introduced a contents page,clearly linked to from the header as well as the Welcome page.

A lot of the inspiration for the redesign came from Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick’s “Becomeablogger” course, which I bought into earlier this year, admittedly a little late. Whilst I haven’t yet implemented all of the suggestions within the course material by any means yet, it has nevertheless helped me out no end. The Becomeablogger course will be having its second run soon, and the enrolment window will be between 29th June and 3rd July 2009. As soon as the window opens I’ll be advertising it in the header of this blog, so if you’d like to join up you’ll have the opportunity to do so via this blog.

One of the biggest issues for me over this past year has been avoiding clutter, both in the sidebar and on the Welcome page. The sidebar is an area which I’ve particularly concentrated upon in this respect, along with its appearance, as the sidebar appears along with almost every page and post. My intention has been to not let it detract the reader’s attention overly from the main article. I hope I succeeded in that.

That’s summed up some of the main points of the blog’s evolution over the time since its creation. No doubt it will continue to evolve further with time; hopefully in a positive manner.

The Future

So what will I be doing on this blog in the future? For the immediate future nothing much is scheduled to change. I’ll be writing more free content fairly regularly, plus making the odd tweak to the theme perhaps. I’ll be adding further advertising of top-quality products from other bloggers and online businesspeople, plus also I will probably be writing more reviews of a number of them.

At some point I’m hoping to be adding podcasts to the mix – Maybe followed by video too. I don’t have a schedule for doing so planned out at this point, so I can’t be any more definite than that at this present moment.

A year has passed, and the blog is still up and running. I have the feeling that the following year will contain many profitable and beneficial additions; both for you the visitor as well as for me the blogger, plus any help in the form of people that I take on in the future.

That’s about it for this post then: A year older and wiser.

Enjoy the rest of the Summer if you live in the upper Northern hemisphere. If you live in the lower Southern hemisphere you can take heart in the fact that midwinter has passed. Wherever you are, enjoy the rest of the year, and don’t forget to return regularly to kkomp.com to see what’s new. If you happen to be in space or on another planet then enjoy the break, and if you aren’t part of the Human Race from Earth and you actually live on another planet then I invite you to make contact with the us Humans. – We’re a peculiar civilisation, but most of us still have some semblance of normality left I believe.

If you’re not on the mailing list then it would be a good idea to subscribe to it and get notified by email. You might also like to subscribe to the RSS feed for notification too.

Finally I invite comments/constructive criticisms/remarks… You know the drill.

An electrical  resistor is an electronic component that offers resistance to electrical current. Electrical resistance is measured in ohms, symbolised by the Greek letter omega, and named after physicist Georg Simon Ohm who discovered electrical resistance hundreds of years ago. There is metric terminology involved with the term’s usage, such as 1000 ohms = 1 kilohm, 1000,000 ohms = 1 megohm, and also 1/1000th of an ohm = 1 milliohm, et al.

The measurement of a single ohm was devised such that it is the amount of resistance that drops a single volt at a single amp. (See the first part of Basic Ohms’ Law/Electronic Circuit Design – Crash Course to make things a bit clearer.)

In recent times the resistor has been miniaturised down to a tiny component that is even hard to pick up with tweezers. (The amount of electrical current that the resistor can handle as a result has also been vastly reduced; although in applications and gadgetry where such tiny resistors are used, the wattages flowing through them are indeed very tiny, sometimes amounting to only a fraction of a milliwatt. (1/1000th of a watt.)

You may have seen resistors on your motherboard even and not known they were there because they’re so tiny. There are usually quite a lot of resistors on a motherboard.

The “standard” sized resistors, built to handle 1/16th, 1/8th, 1/4, 1/2, and 1 watt, which are more clearly recognisable to the untrained eye of someone that is familiar with the sight of resistors, are all still available. You might see 1 or 3 of these on your motherboard also. There are definitely a number of them inside your power-supply unit, as well as probably a few higher rated resistors capable of handling up to 10 watts perhaps.

*Note: If you go and examine your motherboard after reading this; make sure you do so while the computer’s shut down and the power is off. Also I advise you to look but don’t touch; even if you do wear an electrically-earthed anti-static wristband. (See Protect Your Parts  and  Static is Your Enemy.)

So what exactly is a resistor? How is it made? What’s it made of?

In a word; carbon. – Carbon is the principle ingredient. Carbon, in its raw state, is a rather poor electrical conductor. The more it’s compressed the better it conducts electricity. Industry has managed to compress carbon to a point where it has virtually zero electrical resistance. – Then they powder it.

The carbon that has almost no electrical resistance is powdered into an extremely fine powder of highly pure carbon, with virtually no impurities of any kind in it. Impurities, in the form of a fine clay powder, are then added to it (Clay is non-conductive.) in pre-determined amounts in order to give it electrical resistance. The final electrical resistance in ohms of a given quantity of the carbon/clay mix will depend upon two factors. 

Those being: -

1) The ratio of carbon to clay in the “powder” mix. (The amount of impurities present.)

2) The amount of compression applied to the “powder” mix.

With the right combination of these two factors, precision resistors of any resistance from a fraction of an ohm right up to around 10 megohms can be made.

In recent times, different chemicals have been used which increase the tolerance, (i.e. the variation of the component’s actual resistance with the heat generated by itself and surrounding components, as well as drift by changing chemical composition with time, et al.) considerably right down to a factor of a tiny fraction of a percentage point. Nevertheless the basic idea that I have outlined to you is still in essence the method used to this day. The process happens on a level where much smaller components are manufactured on an extremely miniature level; thus using up far less resources but being of a highly precision and exact nature using the latest machinery to mass-produce millions of tiny resistors only 4mm long in some cases.

Then we come to the subject of microelectronics; including building resistors into chips: At the microelectronic level a different method of producing electrical resistance is used, which involves incorporating highly-doped MOSFETs connected as an always-open-circuit device at the point in the circuit where the resistance is required. The extra doping of the semiconductor material provides the required electrical resistance, rather than the “doping” of carbon powder.

Going back to the resistor as a discrete component: Once the desired resistance has been achieved, the resistive chemicals are sealed inside a container of some kind, (Usually roughly cylindrical.) or on a tiny non-conductive slab of material, with an electrical connection fitted at each end of the device. The resistance value is then marked on the component’s outer casing, or a thin non-conductive protective layer sprayed on to it and the relevant markings applied to that, usually by means of a resistor colour-code, standard to the electronics industry. After final testing the resistors are shipped to industry and retailers in their millions.

The Resistor Colour Code

Some high-wattage resistors are made by winding coils of resistive wire on a non-conductive heat-resistant tube. This avoids damage to the resistor’s internal structure due to the heat produced by the resistance to the high wattages flowing through the component.

You’ll learn something new every day here; that’s why it’s always a good idea to read this blog often. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and mailing list, and be notified by RSS and email when new content is produced?

Something you’ll be aware of if you follow Star Trek is that the Borg say that resistance is futile. Clearly on the evidence of the above it’s quite the opposite!

I look forward to your comments.

Ignoring the obvious jokes about AC/DC; including bipolar DC currents, bistable multivibrators, and all other possible smutty electronics terminology innuendos; in this article we’ll be taking a look at how the high-voltage Alternating Current (AC) electricity that comes from the power plug and is transported to your computer becomes the low-voltage Direct Current (DC) electricity that runs your computer.

I use your computer in the above paragraph as it’s the most obvious choice; considering the fact that you’re probably reading this article on your computer; and if not have probably printed it off from a printer attached to a computer. In fact it’s not just computers that have to change the AC mains voltage into a usable working DC voltage. Most if not all mains-powered electronic devices have to do this: Even to a certain extent CRT monitors and televisions, although these also utilise the high-voltage AC current of mains electricity in addition to stepping the voltage both up and down, as well as converting AC into DC in some of their internal circuitry. For the purpose of this article I’ll be using the example of a computer (PC) power supply unless otherwise indicated.

In comes the power lead carrying between 217 and 254 volts of AC electricity in the UK (Depending upon the time of day and the geographical location in the UK.), or around 110 volts AC in the USA. The power supply’s job is to convert that voltage into three separate DC voltages; 12 volts, 5 volts, and 3.3 volts. Due to the high wattage requirements of some of the circuitry in the computer; these supplies; particularly the 12 and 3.3 volt supplies, have to also be able to supply very large currents, measured in Amperes. (Amps.)

The relationship of electrical current (Amps) to electrical power (Watts) is defined in Joule’s Law as P = IV. (Power in watts is equal to the sum of amperes in amps multiplied by voltage in volts.) Therefore if you were to have a power supply supplying 12 volts at 12 amps; the available wattage would be 12 volts X 12 amps = 144 watts.

(This equation can also be reversed to show the inverse of this: -

I = P/V (Amperage = power in watts divided by voltage in volts.) and V = P/I Voltage = power in watts divided by current in amps.))

For the purpose of this article, we’ll ignore the large currents to the greatest possible extent; and rather we’ll concentrate on the basics of changing high-voltages into low-voltages, and AC into DC.

There are 4 main component blocks in a (single-output) power supply; those being: -

1) Transformer

A transformer is a single electrical component consisting of two or more coils of wire formed around a core of varying density depending upon the type of transformer. It works by the electromagnetic field induced in the primary coil  or input coil by an AC electric current affecting the secondary or output coil and causing a proportional electric current to flow within that coil. The ratio of the two or more AC currents in question is dependant upon the construction of the transformer itself.

Recently; in electronic equipment that requires very low electrical current; the transformer has been replaced by a high-wattage resistor/ AC potential divider circuit. This has the effect of dropping the voltage by using electrical resistances rather than the electromagnetic induction principles of a transformer. Since resistors are [usually] smaller and lighter than transformers, as well as being cheaper; this type of voltage-dropping circuit is commonly used wherever possible these days.

Its advantages are reduced cost and reduced weight. Its disadvantages are that it can only output a small current: commonly considerably less than 1 amp, also that the load on the AC mains input of the circuit is always constant and unchanging; whether or not the circuit’s output is being used to power anything.

2) Rectifier

A [bridge} rectifier typically consists of four diodes connected in a certain configuration end-to-end. (see diagram.)

The action of the bridge is to use the component diodes ([Rectifier] Diodes will only allow electricity to flow one way through them dependant upon their connected polarity.) to sort the component parts of the AC wave-cycle into positive and negative; therefore changing the oscillating AC waveform into a crude type of DC current.

3) Smoothing

The crude “DC current” output of the rectifier stage of the circuit isn’t anything like pure DC electricity: It’s very unstable and resembles its former state to some extent.

A large-value capacitor placed across its path helps to iron out the remaining inconsistencies and reduce the inherent instability somewhat.

4) Regulator

No matter how much smoothing is applied to the output of the rectifier by capacitor(s), it can never be transformed into a totally stable DC current by this method alone. A voltage-regulator IC (Integrated Circuit) is placed in-circuit at this stage to finally stabilise any residual waveform-ripple and set the exact output voltage before the current can finally be outputted to run an electronic circuit.

- So very basically; that’s how it’s done. There’s more; a huge amount more, to be learned. – But these are the very basic basics of it.

I assume that either you’ve checked your power supply’s output in one of or both of the two ways I’ve suggested earlier. Those being:

a) While the PSU’s outputs are unconnected, and also while the PSU is running under the artificial load I suggested.

OR you preferred to leave the PSU fitted and tested it: -

b) While the PSU is connected to the computer’s components in a normal way.

The question “What do I do if my power supply voltage drops Under Load?” is a bit of a multi-pronged question. I’ll try in this article to cover a number of those points in the hope that you can come to a conclusion based upon the information and guidance herein.

I’ll start by saying that, in the case of any supply of power, the voltage will always drop to some extent under sufficient load. To clarify that point somewhat, I’ll draw your attention back to Ohm’s Law and the relationship between wattage (Power), current (Amperage), voltage, and resistance (The load):

If the wattage or power (P) = the current (I) squared multiplied by the load resistance (R) in a DC circuit; then it follows that R divided by I squared = P.

If we give I the fixed value of 10 amps in this example, then we can see that as R decreases, so does P. : Translated into English, this shows that as the load increases and therefore the parallel load resistance decreases, so the amount of unused power available from the supply also decreases. Why does this occur? Because as the load increases so the resistance decreases, therefore more of the available electrical power in watts is used by the load and transformed into other kinds of energy.

We know from Ohm’s Law that V = IR (Voltage = current multiplied by resistance.). Therefore, if we use the fixed figure of 10 amps as the value for I again, we note that as the value of R (The resistance) increases then so does the value of V (The voltage.). Inversely as the (load) resistance drops as extra load is added to a DC circuit, so the voltage drops proportionally.

The higher the amount of current (I) available in the circuit; the less the decrease in R (Increasing the load.) affects the decrease of V. (Drop in voltage.)

We can prove that by increasing the value of I to 20 amps: Do the math again and you’ll see that this is true.

Conclusion: The greater the electrical load on a given supply; the greater the voltage drop on said supply.

This is always true to a given extent; no matter how much current is available.

Bearing this in mind, then; how much voltage drop is too much?

In a perfect world; any voltage drop is too much. – But as we’ve seen above; there can never be zero voltage drop unless there is zero load. As we know; if there is zero load then there is zero computer, so the point is mute. The objective of the exercise then is to minimise the voltage drop to the greatest extent possible.

In the examples above we saw that the more current we had at our disposal, the smaller the voltage drop under any given load: In Joule’s Law; I x V = P (Current multiplied by voltage = power (wattage).). We know that the voltage outputs of a computer power supply are fixed ay 12v, 5v, and 3.3v. therefore the available current (Amperage) is dependant upon the available power (Wattage): The more wattage the supply can output the more current is available; therefore the less the voltage drop will be under any given load.

Conclusion: To minimise any voltage drop under any given load conditions; make more wattage (power) accessible.

In other words; if the voltage on your supply rails drops substantially under the load that your computer’s components put on those supply rails, then your power supply isn’t outputting the required wattage.

( It is possible that a malfunctioning piece of hardware is drawing far too much current from the supply; but this is unlikely: A malfunctioning piece of hardware that draws such high currents would get very hot very quickly and would probably begin to cook, causing noticeable odur and smoke. It’s far more likely that the power supply itself is at fault if nothing else is frying itself. )

In the face of that; you have two choices. Either: -

1) Keep your existing power supply unit and decrease the load on it. (- By not running so many components: In other words removing something from the circuit, such as a hard-drive, graphics card, whatever.)

OR

2) Fit a new power supply capable of delivering the required wattage.

At this point you may say:

“I’ve checked everything and worked out that the load on whatever rails is X amps; that’s Y watts at Z volts. My power supply’s output rating on whatever rails is greater than that: Therefore something’s wrong.”

Correct. Something is indeed wrong. There is an inconsistency somewhere. The problem now is to discover exactly what that inconsistency is.

It could be three main things: -

1) The equations are wrong.

2) Your calculations have arrived at an incorrect figures.

3) The PSU ratings are wrong.

Firstly there is no chance that the equations are wrong. The equations used form the basis for modern electronics theory and have done so for more than 100 years.They are an integral part of basic electronic calculus and have been proven to be correct time and time again.

Secondly, check that your calculations are correct and that you have indeed arrived at the correct figures.

If there is no fallacy in your calculations then there is now only one possibility left – That being that the PSU ratings are wrong. How can this be?

Some manufacturers; especially the manufacturers of cheapo power supplies, overrate their product. This isn’t actually lies though. It’s an overstatement:

A PSU rated at 500 watts is indeed capable of supplying 500 watts; but not necessarily 500 watts of continuous power. In tests done by a leading UK computer magazine in the last 2 years, a number of 500 watt PSUs failed when fully loaded. One, the second cheapest under test, even detonated! There is an old saying that you get what you pay for. Sure; a $15 PSU built in China and rated at 500 watts will supply a computer that needs 300 watts to run efficiently without (m)any problems. It’s when you add a powerful graphics card that drains an extra 100 watts, plus a RAID array = another 30 watts, extra optical disk =  +10 watts, and upgrade to a more powerful processor = +35 watts that things start going askew: BSODs occur, the graphics card doesn’t perform properly, the power supply starts making strange noises…

- That’s only 475 watts total, and the PSU is rated at 500 watts, so theoretically it should work; but it doesn’t. – Because the PSU can provide 500 watts peak, – but not 500 watts continuous. – In fact probably only 400 watts or less continuous. At peaks where the power requirement is at its greatest there may be a voltage drop of over a volt causing memory failures and processor outages.

Maybe it’s not that serious in your case? Maybe you’re on the edge of the precipice; but are still noticing a voltage drop on measurement under load, even though the PSU is still holding up, the CPU’s not having outages, and the RAM is just managing on the reduced voltage?

That’s a good thing inasmuch as your computer is still working. – But it’s so close to the wire that it’ll only take a feather to tilt the balance. – So don’t expect your computer to carry on without problems much longer in those circumstances. All you need is for the PSU to get too hot, the CPU to use a few watts more, the graphics card to draw that extra piece of polygonal shading, and…

Get a better quality and / or higher-rated power supply unit: The sooner the better. Once it’s fitted, measure the voltage drop. There will still be a voltage-drop; but it’ll be smaller and your computer will be happier as a result.

Do you have any experience(s) in this kind of thing? Are you getting a comparatively large voltage drop? Is your computer underperforming due to this? Have you recently fitted a better PSU and noticed a difference? I’d be interested to hear your story in brief. Please comment.

This post is edited from an article I originally wrote in 2007, and is included herein as in a way also a re-edit of the post “Static is Your Enemy“, based upon the same source material.

Every now and again I see and / or hear, horrific things: Things like pictures of perfectly good motherboards being placed face-up on nylon carpets to photograph in the hope of selling them. Things like RAM-sticks being wrapped in bubble-wrap and popped into a plastic shopping bag. The sight of trainee-technicians combing their hair while handling processors, or a workshop junior without a care in the world trying to bend processor pins back into place with all-metal tweezers, while at the same time brushing the dust they picked up from inside the spares cupboard off their polyester garments. – Harmless activities to the layman perhaps; but fatal or potentially hazardous to the electronics. The reason – Static electricity:

In the case of all CMOS computer circuitry; anti-static precautions are a necessity at all times when handling, packing, and storing any item of computer equipment or componentry. This is even more important, in some ways, than avoiding exposure to damp and high temperatures, as damp can always be dried out before fitting and use. 9 times out of 10 there’s no lasting damage from a bit of damp: Well nothing that drying out won’t put right anyway; provided that nobody attempts to use electronic components while they’re damp.

The Technical Bit.

Computer components such as RAM sticks, processors, motherboards, graphics cards…you name it, either consist to a large extent of a combination of discrete transistors and integrated circuits or "chips", containing in some cases millions of transistors, or are themselves “chips”, as in the case of a CPU or processor. These transistors are in most cases, other than some power-controller transistors, of the MOSFET variety. : In a very basic terms and on a nanoscopic level, these consist of a microscopic layer of doped semiconductor material laid and adhered to a micro-thin silicon wafer: A tiny gate-electrode is insulated from the semiconductor material by an incredibly-thin and fragile insulating material alongside the semiconductor.

Under normal operation; the gate, being totally electrically insulated from everything else except the lead connecting to it, regulates the flow of electrons through the semiconductor material between the drain and the source connections at either end of the semiconductor material; which is how the transistor works. Due to the fragile nature of the insulating layer between the gate and the semiconductor, however, it doesn’t take much energy, in the form of electrical current, to break down the insulation between the gate and the semiconductor creating a low-current potential divider with the gate as the centre connection, i.e connected to the semiconductor through the break in the insulation, thus ruining the action and function of that individual transistor. Static electricity can build up on virtually every surface, even the human body in some cases, to a potential of thousands, sometimes millions of volts, and at currents greater than the insulated gate of a MOSFET is capable of withstanding. When these charges are applied to any type of MOSFET circuitry, usually without the culprit realising that they are even present, the obvious occurs; the transistor(s) break down due to the insulating layer depleting or being arced through due to the current of the static-charge, and in an instant the device is rendered inoperative, dead, ruined, broken, kaput, finito, had it, shagged, destroyed, fried…

Some people might at this point be of the opinion that with millions of transistors it wouldn’t hurt if one or two don’t work: After all people don’t die if a few cells in their body die, or they injure themselves slightly.

There are a different set of conditions affecting either though. The human body and the electronic circuit are totally different in many respects: The human body can replace dead cells in days, and can bypass the function of dead cells until new ones are grown by its automatic-repair process, at least to a certain extent. With an electronic circuit if a transistor dies then the function in the pathway of a particular electron flow is rendered inoperative and the device malfunctions, in some cases triggering a chain-reaction in which many other transistors along or connected to that path also die; and when a transistor’s dead there’s no magical resurrection, no afterlife or reincarnation.

Destruction of the component can happen naturally with the age of the component; causing it to break down with usage; but it’s relatively rare in modern electronics. A static charge, however, can "fry" a device; literally causing a micro-detonation of the active components within the device, rendering it totally useless for anything other than melting down and making furniture out of.

How to Avoid Damage

Bearing the above in mind, what needs to be done to prevent this involuntary micro-vandalism from happening?

Stringent anti-static precautions should be adhered to at all times, rigorously, when handling CMOS and MOSFET circuitry. – Which encompasses nearly all circuitry within a computer, except for some parts of the Power Supply Unit.

Anti static precautions are aimed at preventing static electrical charge from reaching a device, or, in many cases, from building up in the first place. – But it’s not quite as simple as it sounds: People seem to think that since polythene is a good electrical insulator, then it’ll protect components from being exposed to static electricity.

WRONG. Polythene is one of static electricity’s favourite places to lurk. A charge builds up easily on any polythene surface by means of friction with another material. Nylon also is an excellent static-capacitor, as is your carpet, your leather sofa, and most of your clothes.

“What if I pack electronics naked?” You ask.

Your naked body is a conductor of static electricity, from the carpet, your sofa, your dress, straight into the nearest transistor, and you needn’t necessarily feel a shock either. – To avoid damaging circuitry you need to keep all possibility of static discharge well away from it.

Ground Thyself

An anti-static wristband should be worn at all times when handling semiconductors or semiconductor-based circuitry; CMOS, MOSFET, whatever. Go into any electronics lab, even at college, and you’ll see everyone wearing one on their wrist. This is providing any static charge that comes into contact with their body with a path to electrical earth; the quickest path to destination, which is the path all electricity will take in all cases.

All handling of electronic circuitry and components should be within a static-proof environment. If a static electrical charge contacts the component just once then it’s fried. – End of story. Always always always pack electronics in an anti-static bag. NEVER pack them in polystyrene or polythene. Always wear an anti-static wristband when touching a circuit-board or "card"; preferably on the wrist attached to the hand with which you are holding it. NEVER allow the component to come into contact with the carpet or any manmade fibre: Even if it did happen to be made by a woman. (Avoid carpets in the packing/handling environment if at all possible.) a polythene, polycarbonate, polystyrene, poly methyl methacrylate, poly-whatever surface, and don’t allow it into a strong electromagnetic or electrostatic field. (Microwave, electrical transformer, close to a television screen, etc.) Avoid touching any exposed metal part or component on the board/card if at all possible.

Electronics are fragile. – That’s one of the reasons they’re shielded and kept away from contact with anything else wherever possible. There’s a general rule these days that newer the part the more static-sensitive it is; notwithstanding any extra built-in durability and protection.

Take care and always use proper anti-static precautions; otherwise it could cost you a fortune in parts.

First; what is SATA and what is IDE?

From Wikipedia:

“Conceptually, SATA is a ‘wire replacement’ for the older AT Attachment standard (ATA). Serial ATA host-adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable.

SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (8 pins vs. 40 pins), faster and more efficient data transfer, and the ability to remove or add devices while operating (hot swapping).

As of 2009, SATA has all but replaced the legacy ATA (retroactively renamed Parallel ATA or PATA) in all shipping consumer PCs.”  

“The current ATA/ATAPI standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development. ATA/ATAPI is an evolution of the AT Attachment Interface, which was itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital’s original Integrated Drive Electronics interface. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations exist, including abbreviations such as IDE which are still in common informal use. With the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA).

Parallel ATA standards allow cable lengths up to only 18 inches (46 centimetres). Because of this length limit the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. For many years ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application. By the beginning of 2007 it had largely been replaced by Serial ATA (SATA) in new systems”

“OK; so you can copy & paste:” Says the reader. 

“- I’m wanting to replace my hard-drive. Do I go for SATA or do I go for IDE?”

The question might be more like: “Which will my existing motherboard allow me to install?”

If your existing motherboard is 5 years old or more then it’s unlikely that there is any provision made for SATA drives. If you want to stick to the same motherboard and have a SATA drive installed then there is a way around it; but it depends upon what operating system you’re running as to exactly what that may be. The basic idea is to install a PCI RAID card and run the SATA drive(s) from that. However there may be problems with older operating systems with regard to this:

I’m thinking Windows here: If you’re running Linux or something similar then I will leave it to you to suss it out, as there are so many distros that it’s impossible for me to cover them all herein.

If you’re running Windows XP or earlier and you have an older motherboard without provision for SATA drives then you’re probably stuffed as far as SATA is concerned, and you’ll have to replace your old IDE hard-drive with another IDE drive.

The reason is that Windows XP runs SATA drives in an IDE emulation mode, and older versions of Windows have no support for SATA drives whatsoever as far as I’m aware. (If anyone knows otherwise then please comment below.) Therefore, in these cases, Windows will look for a storage drive to boot from on the motherboard. Since there is no provision for the SATA drive you installed to a RAID card on the motherboard the BIOS will not find any hard-drive and will report this. The SATA drive you installed via the PCI RAID card won’t be seen, because the RAID card needs drivers before it can work – and where are the drivers? On the SATA HDD, which the system can’t see because the RAID card has no drivers.

IF you installed an IDE hard-drive, from which the BIOS could boot the operating system and install the RAID card’s driver, then the system would be able to see the SATA drive in Windows XP and use it as a second drive.

Actually I’ve just realised here that any operating system would do much the same; as regardless of the way that it operates SATA drives, it simply won’t see a SATA drive connected via a RAID card without any drivers. – So whatever the case you’re screwed unless your board has a built-in SATA capability. If it doesn’t then as you can see above, you can use a SATA drive via a RAID card as a secondary drive; but not as a primary.

Having said all that I’m willing to be proved wrong; as that lot was something I worked out by complex logic.

Anyway, regardless of this; it’s fairly unlikely in this day and age that you’ll want to run a SATA drive on a board that doesn’t support SATA, if any such motherboards are still in use that is. If this should be the case in your situation, however, then I’d advise you either to install a new IDE drive, (They’re still available to buy new from most computer component retailers at time of writing, (1st March 2009) and even if they disappear from that source I would imagine that there’ll be a number of secondhand IDE drives available on eBay or Craigslist for a few years yet.) or get a new motherboard or a new computer.

(I’m not saying that it’s not possible to run XP on an all-SATA computer: I’ve actually built an all-SATA computer, running 2 HDDS in RAID 1, and installed XP on it without a problem. The customer is still using it to this day without any issues.)

Wow we spent a lot of time on that didn’t we? Most motherboards in use these days will have provision for SATA drives: Normally at least 2 SATA ports on the motherboard itself that is. There’ll possibly be at least 1 IDE port too. So back to the question: SATA or IDE?

If your motherboard has provision for both then the choice is yours, after all it’s your machine. You might have an IDE DVD-RW drive which uses the IDE port, and an IDE hard-drive which shares the IDE ribbon with it, or you might just have the IDE DVD-RW connected to the IDE port and a SATA hard-drive connected to one of the SATA ports.

Whatever your setup, and whichever technology you replace or add to your hard-drive(s) with; remember that IDE is yesterday’s technology and is obsolescent: It’s being phased out. SATA is today and tomorrow’s technology, and it’s being phased in. In the light of that it makes sense to choose SATA if you can, and only use IDE where you have no other choice.

Would you agree with this or any other issues raised herein, or do you disagree? Please comment below.

This post is aimed at the hobbyist electronics constructor; but others might find it useful also.

Some graphics cards have a TV output that you can connect to the UHF aerial socket of a TV set using a co-axial lead with a co-axial TV aerial plug on each end. There’s a problem with this method, in that the picture is terrible.

The graphics card takes the binary H-sync + V-sync  signal, and passes them through a UHF modulator: Result = the synchronisation pulses aren’t properly attenuated into the composite sync pulses that the TV requires, and the resultant picture becomes distorted as a result; therefore it looks a mess.

There is, however, a relatively simple circuit which uses no more than a quad-exclusive-OR gate TTL chip and a couple of transistors, plus 2 capacitors and 9 resistors; which does the job better and will interface a VGA output of a graphics card to the SCART input of a television set.

If you have the necessary constructional abilities including soft-soldering (on veroboard), then this might be a fun project to build in your spare time.

The circuit basically combines and attenuates the H-sync and V-sync outputs from the graphics-card into the composite sync pulses required by a TV set. The RGB signals are left unchanged. Unlike the TV output of a graphics card; these signals haven’t been frequency-shifted to UHF in order that they can be seen at the UHF aerial input of the TV set. This in itself removes a huge chunk of the distortion that can result from such a frequency change – Only for the TV set to change the UHF to IF and split up the signal into its constituent parts…

You’ll find all the details; circuit diagram, component layout, the lot, by clicking this link. Enjoy.

I started writing this with the intention of writing an e-book; but I simply don’t have the time or the patience to write the reams and reams of text to justify a full coverage of the subject: Therefore I’ve condensed some of what I wrote down into a rather large post. Some of the text isn’t quite as I’d like it to be; but overall it conveys the right message.

This article is written with a view to teaching a few of the basics of electronic circuit design using a number of equations from or based upon Ohms’ Law. It is aimed at the beginner-level student. Whilst knowledge of component function is assumed throughout, links to articles from other sources as well as kkomp.com have been included throughout in order that the reader can study and read up on the function of individual electronic components for the purpose of being able to better follow the basic tuition herein.

Electronics is such a huge subject that it is impossible to cover every aspect in the required detail in a single article. Maybe a 1.5 terabyte hard drive would be large enough to store the knowledge of the average engineer, if it were zipped and otherwise compressed.

We begin by looking at the basics of Ohms’ Law and go on to design of a very basic DC inverting amplifier stage using three resistors and a transistor. I have attempted to keep the material as light as is possible, given such an intense learning curve packed into such a small space.

The main onus is left up to the reader, as near the end of the article I leave the reader with a conundrum to solve. The problem can be solved using only resistors, transistors, and a diode or maybe two. In solving the problem the reader will construct and solve many equations using Ohms’ Law; therefore putting into practice all that they have learned herein whilst at the same time developing their skills further.

It’s short and concise. There’s a lot of study and knowledge packed into it, and I hope I’ve done the subject justice.

Foreword

Electronics is a vast and complicated field. There’s so much to learn, and that learning curve never stops. No matter how much you know; there’s always more to be known as new discoveries are constantly being made.

For instance; forty years ago, nobody would have thought that the recently-invented transistor would be at the centre of technological advancement. It would have been thought of a a crazy notion that over sixty million transistors could be compacted into a device with the volume of a standard matchbox that is the central processing unit of a powerful personal computer.

In this article I’m not intending to describe in great detail the various functions of individual electronic components. Where this may be necessary I’ve linked to articles containing further information on this, should the reader require it.

This article is mainly about calculation used in simple circuit design, brought about by the use of basic calculus, in part using Ohms’ Law. The publication is intended to be the first in an ongoing series of books covering the basic principles of electronics and electronic circuit design. A basic knowledge of component identification and function is assumed in the reader. If this happens to not be the case then the information provided at the destination of the links incorporated within the text should be a sufficient source of knowledge.

The article that you’re now reading does not endeavour to go into digital electronics at this stage, and concentrates rather on basic analogue DC circuit principles, which should be learned as a forerunner to the discovery of digital circuitry.

Electronics is a very intense subject; and one could devote one’s entire lifetime to the furtherance of knowledge in this field. However with the rate of new discoveries now being made it is extremely unlikely that one could ever learn everything there is to know about the subject in even a very long lifetime.

This article is intended for the beginner class on levels 2 and 3. However, by utilising the links provided I feel even an absolute beginner on level 1 would be able to keep up, with much study, and maybe even progress a degree in doing so.

One thing that has been the very basis of all electronic advancement, from the days of valves up until the present day, is a set of equations known as Ohm’s Law. In this article we’ll be taking a look at Ohm’s Law and showing how it is applicable to every aspect of electricity and electronics.

Georg Simon Ohm was born in Germany on 16th March 1789, and lived until 6 July 1854. He became a physicist, and during his career determined that there is a direct proportionality between the voltage applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current flowing in the circuit. Further experimentation meant that eventually Ohm was able to define the relationships of voltage, current, and electrical resistance.

_._

In this rather large article I’m going to be using circuit diagrams. For those not familiar with circuit diagrams I would suggest that you take a look at this link and/or here to familiarise yourself with some of the symbols used. You will notice that I don’t always stick to the usual format in a number of cases when I’m drawing my own circuit diagrams freehand or other than on the computer itself: For instance; when I’m drawing a resistor I use a diagonal zigzag line rather than a rectangular box. Also when drawing a transistor symbol I usually omit the circle around the device.

This is for a number of purposes; the main ones being speed and neatness: If you’ve ever tried to draw a perfect circle without using a pair of compasses or a jar lid, you’ll know just how difficult it is. The symbol inside the circle is the same and unique whichever way round one draws it. The reason for the circle is to indicate that the device is a discreet device, meaning a single device in a package; as opposed to part of a multi-transistor chip or an integrated circuit. For this article we’ll just use the symbol without the circle where I’ve drawn the circuit diagrams myself: It’s a transistor and that’s it.

Standard Transistor Symbol     Transistor Symbol Used Herein

(The link shows only the symbols of a bipolar NPN and a PNP transistor, and also a phototransistor. There are many other types of transistor; such as the FET or Field Effect Transistor in its various different guises. (Which, incidentally, was not named after the author; Sharron Field. (Sadly.))

I commonly use a zigzag line as the symbol for a resistor; this was once the standard symbol for a resistor. It was abandoned for the sake of clarity because it looks too similar to the symbol for an inductor , the symbol of which has curves where the old resistor symbol has angles.

= This is how I draw a resistor

Whereas this is the modern standard symbol:

I personally use the old zigzag line symbol because it’s vastly easier to draw and takes less than 1/4 of the time. If I try to draw a rectangular box I end up wishing I hadn’t.

You’ll notice that the circuit diagrams that I’ve included were drawn with a pen or pencil on paper and scanned in: That’s the way things are currently. I don’t at the moment have either the software to draw exclusively on the computer nor the time and patience to learn how to use it. The situation may be different in the future; but right now that’s the way things stand.

The Basic Triangle

So let’s look at the most basic bit of Ohm’s Law first; that being the relationship of Voltage to current to resistance in a DC (Direct Current) environment: -

The relationship can be expressed in an easy-to-remember format thus:

V

I        R

Where V is Voltage in Volts,

I is electric current in Amperes,

and R is DC electrical resistance in Ohms

From this simple illustration we can draw the following equations: -

V / I = R

V / R = I

I x R = V

If we were to substitute the figure 1 for all of the variables we would notice that the equations are all true and equal in their most basic form: If a single Ampere flowed through a resistance of a single ohm at a voltage of a single volt it would be the point of correlation between the three measurements.

If, as happens in nearly all cases in a practical working environment, we were to increase or decrease the value to a number less than or greater than one for any or all of these variables, then that correlation vanishes; yet the equations still hold together.

Let’s look at an example on the next page: -

A current of 2 Amperes, or amps for short, is flowing through a resistance of 2 Ohms.

In this case Ohm’s law tells us that the voltage present at the point where the current exits the 2 Ohm resistor is 4 Volts; as 2 amps x 2 Ohms = 4 Volts.

Another example: –

An unspecified current is flowing through a resistance of 10 Ohms. The voltage at the point where the current exits the resistor is 5 Volts.

Ohms’ Law reveals that the unspecified current must be 5 Volts / 10 Ohms = 1/2 amp.

A third example: -

A current of 0.1 amps, or 100 milliamps, is outputting a resistor at a Voltage of 0.3 Volts, or 300 millivolts.

Ohms’ Law informs us that the resistor’s value in Ohms is 0.3 Volts / 0.1 amps = 3 Ohms.

Yes it really is that simple; at least at this stage in the proceedings.

Power

The next denomination we introduce into the mix is electrical power, represented by the letter P; and which is measured in Watts.

Here we introduce another law, that being Joule’s Law, which is named after the British physicist James Joule.

Joules’ Law has 2 main equations for giving the relation of power, or wattage, to the integers that we’ve already introduced in Ohms’ Law: The following equations describe this relationship: -

P = I x V

2 ,

P = V  / IP = V squared / square root of I

and

2

P = I  R        (P = I squared x R)

(Please excuse the error in writing the equations as mathematical formulae: The text has cocked up beyond repair. Please read the words rather than the badly-printed equations.))

Let’s look at some examples of this: -

1) A lamp draws 1 amp of current at a voltage of 6 Volts. Joules’ Law combined with Ohms’ Law tells us that the lamp is burning 1 amp x 6 Volts = 6 Watts.

2) A DC circuit draws 2A of current, and has an overall resistance of 12 Ohms. Joules’ Law tells us that (2 x 2) amps of current x 12 Ohms = 48 Watts.

In Circuit

So that’s the very simple bit out of the way and dealt with. let’s now take a look at connecting resistances in parallel and also in series, as well as working out the total resistance: -

There are different equations for calculating parallel and series resistances. Let’s first take a look at series resistances:

In the example above we have a circuit diagram of 2 resistances, R1 and R2, in series. To calculate the total resistance of the series pair we simply add up the sum of the values of the two resistors thus: –

Rt = R1 + R2

That was easy.

When calculating the resistance of 2 resistors in parallel, however, things are slightly more complicated. The equation for calculating the total resistance of 2 resistors in parallel is:

Rt = (R1 x R2) / (R1 + R2)

Let’s look at an example of this: -

In the diagram above we have a 2,200 Ohm (2.2 kilohms) resistor connected in parallel with a 1,100 Ohm (1.1 kilohms) resistor. The total resistance is given by

Rt = (1,100 x 2,200) / (1,100 + 2,200)

Rt = 2,420,000 / 3300

Rt = 733.33 Ohms (0.73333 kilohms)

Here’s a reminder of the resistor colour code and how to read the resistance value of the component. (This code also applies to some capacitors too.) : -

Introducing Semiconductors

In this article I’m not going to be covering any other “passive” components, such as capacitors and inductors. – I’ll save that for you to learn elsewhere. Right now I’d like to move on to what are termed “active components”, or semiconductors.

All the many types of transistor are classed as semiconductors, as are a range of components called diodes. There are also semiconductor components called thyristors which are used for DC power control, also triacs which are used in AC power control circuitry. High-current versions of these are probably utilised in the power supply of your computer, along with capacitors – large and small, resistors, diodes, power transistors, and inductors. Here we are starting to go beyond the scope of this article, however.

Herein I’d rather stick, for now, with just resistors, diodes, and a single basic type of transistor known as a bipolar transistor.

Very briefly; the diode in its raw form is a semiconductor device that only allows electricity to flow only one way through it. Click the hyperlink at the word “diode” above and discover more about it.

Standard Transistor Symbol     Transistor Symbol Used Herein

Yes you have seen these symbols before. They appear in the Foreword.  I thought it prudent to place them here also to serve as a reminder of the point on circuit diagrammatic terminology touched upon therein, as well as to provide the circuit diagram symbol for a bipolar transistor. – No it’s not an electronic device with a mental condition. The name derives from its construction. See the link above for more information.

The bipolar transistor comes in 2 ‘flavours’; those being NPN and PNP:

ollector                                                       mitter

NPN                                                                PNP

The meaning of these terms is described in detail in the Wikipedia article linked to above. This article isn’t written with an intention of dealing with the construction and function of electronic components. Foreknowledge in this area is assumed. Links to locations which detail this are provided for those who need to know, however.

For the examples in this publication we’ll be using the NPN transistor.

Throughput

You will appreciate that every device has its limitations; therefore although there are expensive hi-current devices available that can handle several amps of power, most low-power, and small signal bipolar transistors can only deal with a fraction of an amp passing through them without burning out. With this fact in mind we have to ensure that the current supplied to the individual transistor will not overload it. This is accomplished by a resistor connected between the collector and the + supply rail (VS). This resistor is commonly referred to as the “collector load resistor”. the amount of current allowed by this resistor is calculated by means of Ohms’ Law:

I=V/R

The main amount of current flowing through the device passes from collector to emitter. A smaller current is also required to be applied to the base connection, usually about 0.1 times or 10% (maximum) of the larger current.

More Terminology

In electronics terminology we refer to the current flowing between collector and emitter as Ice0, and the current flowing between the diode junction of the emitter and base as Ieb0.

Similarly with respect to voltage, the terms Vce0 and Veb0 are used respectively.

The terms Vb, Vc, and Ve, refer to the voltage present at the transistor’s base, collector , and emitter respectively. Similarly the terms Ib, Ic, and Ie, refer to the current present likewise.

V+ usually refers to the supply voltage, otherwise referred to as VS or Vss.

Biasing the Base

A bipolar transistor requires a voltage of 0.7 volts present at its base before it will allow any current to pass between collector and emitter. This is known as the “transconductance threshold” It is for this reason, particularly where the device is used under small signal conditions such as audio amplification that the base needs to be biased with a tiny current in proportion to the input signal, to a voltage of just under 0.7 volts.

To achieve this, a pair of resistors connected in series across the supply rails is normally used as a potential divider. The resistances of each resistor are selected such that the voltage at the centre-tap to which the base is connected is just below 0.7 volts. In addition to this the resistances of the resistors are kept as high as is reasonably possible to ensure as little current as possible, and consequently as little wattage as possible, is wasted; as a potential divider will continue to burn the same amount of wattage whether or not an output is drawn from its centre point, due to it effectively being a resistance connected across the supply rails.

In the example above we use a 10 kilohm resistor as R1 and a 1.1 kilohm resistor as R2. The supply voltage, VS, is 7 volts.

To calculate the voltage at the centre tap between the two resistors, to which the transistor’s base is connected, therefore the base voltage (Vb), we use the following equation:

Vb = VS X (R2 / R1 + R2)

Therefore in this example: -

Vb = 7 X (1100 / (10000 + 1100))

Vb = 7 X (1100 / 11100)

Vb = 7 X (11 / 111)

Vb = 7 X 0.099099

Vb = 0.6693693V

- Which puts the transistor right at the edge of the threshold of transconductance. A voltage of over 31 millivolts will flip the device over into transconductance and a proportionally equivalent current will flow between collector and emitter.

Beta

No this doesn’t refer to a test-version of a new computer program: The beta of a transistor is the quantity giving the amplification factor of that transistor. There are two ways of looking at this; in-circuit and out-of-circuit.

Out-of-circuit, as a standalone unused component, a given type of transistor has a maximum beta rating that it can be run at in-circuit. This can vary from around 20 or less for some power-transistors, to up to 1500 or more for some hi-gain amplifier transistors.

Setting the beta of a transistor in-circuit is another part of circuit design.

The in-circuit beta of a given transistor can be calculated by the proportion of Ib when Vb is above the transconductance threshold to the amount of current represented as Ice0. (Unless the transistor is connected in-circuit as a voltage amplifier rather than a current amplifier; in which case the beta is calculated by replacing the term Ib with Vb and Ice0 with Vce0. That is beyond the scope of this book, so we’ll stick to the current amplifier model for now.)

For example; let’s assume that we have a transistor connected in circuit with a base voltage of 0.75 volts (Vb = 0V75), therefore biasing it into transconductance. The base current is set at 1 milliamp (1mA). The supply voltage (VS) is 10 volts, and the collector load resistor is 100 ohms:

Ic (collector current) = V / R

Ic = 10 / 100

Ic = 0.1A (100mA)

The in-circuit beta of that transistor can then be given as:

b = Ic / Ib

b = 100 / 1

b = 100

Provided that this doesn’t exceed the transistor’s out-of-circuit beta rating it’s perfectly safe to run the transistor at this beta and expect its amplification factor to be 100 X.

(In most cases, though, such a large amplification factor in a single-transistor amplifier stage would give rise to signal distortion; especially in high-frequency

AC amplifiers. For DC amplifiers such as we’re dealing with here, though, this beta rating is OK and won’t cause any distortion as there’s effectively nothing to distort in this example.)

Let’s sum up and take a look at an example of what we’re trying to achieve here:

In the circuit above we’re using the potential divider we mentioned earlier:

R1 = 10K and R2 = 1K1

That’s great with a supply voltage of 7V as it biases the base just below the transconductance threshold as we saw earlier.

- But we haven’t yet worked out Ib in this case. How do we do that? well the total current flowing in the potential divider will be:

VS / (R1 + R2)

7 / 11100 in other words; which equates to 0.00063A, or 63 microamps. That’s pretty low but it’s OK. If we want to run the transistor at a beta of 100 then we’ll need to make the collector load resistor allow 63 X 100 microamps to flow as Ice0.

So we want to arrive at a scenario where Ice0 = 6.3 mA.

We know just how to do that using Ohms’ Law: -

If Ice0 = 6.3 mA and V=7 volts, then V / I = R:

7 / 0.0063 = 1111.1111 ohms

- Is the value of resistor that we’re looking for. We look in the spares box and find that the nearest value of resistor that we have is 1100 ohms (1K1). only 11.1111 ohms out; which will make very little difference except that the beta will be a fraction over 100. That’s good enough. – So we choose 1K1 as the value for the collector load resistor.

Another Stage?

That’s it then: We’ve designed a DC inverting amplifier with a beta of 100 (+/-1%) using a single transistor and 3 resistors.

For clarity here’s a components list: –

Transistor:

Q1: BC108C (I chose this one as its quite ideal for the purpose.)

Resistors:

R1: 1K1 1/8Watt

R2: 10K 1/8 watt

R3: 1K1 1/8 watt

If we were to apply a current of 1mV to the base, then the collector current (Ic) would drop by 100 mV. That’s a very basic medium-high gain inverting amplification stage we’ve just designed. Give yourself a pat on the back – That’s quite an achievement if you started reading this article without much, if any, idea of circuit design.

What’s meant by an inverting amplification stage? Well basically the input is the opposite of the output: When the input voltage is zero the output voltage is equal to the supply rail voltage, and whatever voltage is applied to the input, the output drops by a factor proportional to the amplifier’s beta.

For instance; if a DC voltage of 41mV was applied to the base of the transistor in this circuit, then the output would drop by 1.0 volts; from 7v to 6v. That means that if 101mV (0.101V) was applied to the input at the transistor’s base, the output at the transistor’s collector would drop from 7v to zero. – that’s a pretty sensitive circuit we’ve designed there. – But we want to design a non-inverting amplifier; one where if we apply 101mV to the input then the output rises from zero volts to 7 volts.

Why does it behave like this?

When there is no input, the transistor if switched off and current flows unopposed through R3 to the output. (Remember; a resistor gives resistance to current, not voltage; so although the collector current is regulated by R3, the voltage remains unchanged.)  – Therefore the output is at 7v. As the input voltage rises and the transistor begins to switch on and allow current to flow through it to ground, the voltage at its collector falls proportionally.

We could take resistor R3 out of the collector circuit and connect it between the transistor’s emitter and ground, taking the output from the emitter. That would work fine. – Then as the transistor begins to switch on the voltage at its emitter would rise from zero volts proportionally; but R3 as an emitter-load resistor would never allow the output voltage to rise as far as the 7 volts we require. Remember the transistor’s 0v7 transconductance threshold? That would affect the output so that it would never be able to rise above 6v3. What we need is some more circuitry added to what we’ve designed so far. Let’s get designing:

We can modify our existing circuit by adding an output stage to it: -

We have a condition at the output of our device we just designed where the output is at 7v with no input. The output drops by 0.1v with every millivolt above 31 mV applied to the input. Let’s ignore the 31mV for the time being, for the sake of simplicity. – But that idea of taking the output from the emitter can be used. First we’ll redesign the circuit: -

We’re now taking the output from the emitter. This type of circuit is called an “emitter-follower” for seemingly obvious reasons. We now design a second stage for this circuit to correct the error; or should I say YOU now design it.

“But I’m no circuit designer!”

You know enough now to solve the problem.

‘Your Turn

It’s tricky, but it can be done using only what you’ve already learned herein and by clicking on the links provided. You can use as many resistors and transistors as you wish, but remember, in the interests of cost efficiency you need to keep the number of components used as low as you can. If you manage to solve the problem using 64 transistors and 184 resistors then well done for solving it; but that’s far too many components. Keep the component-count low but keep trying.

I ask two further things: The first is that you don’t modify the original emitter-follower circuit in any way. You can connect to it at any point you choose; however you must take the output from the emitter and you cannot change either the existing circuit configuration or the component values. You also cannot change the supply voltage.

Good luck. You can refer to any electronics teaching media that you wish to use. However – here’s the second thing I ask of you – you cannot ask an electronics engineer or technician to solve the problem for you. This is your project. A qualified engineer will have no problem with it; but a qualified engineer doesn’t need to learn how to do it. Hopefully by the time you’ve solved it you’ll have learned how to do everything I’ve shown you off by heart and with ease.

All the information you need is written above; but you can use whatever other media you wish. If you want to learn then this is a worthy project. if not then I hope you’ve found what you’ve learned edifying.

If you happen to be a bit unsure of component function then click the links provided again and study the material. Several months’ basic electronics tuition has been crammed into this book to this point. It would be unrealistic to expect anyone to grasp it all in one reading; even if they did click every link and study the information there in full.

After – word

So you’ve decided you want to be an electronics engineer? Good choice. I’m not the one to teach you though: I’m only qualified as a technician. I am qualified to teach you the basics, though; and that’s a start if nothing else.

I’m trying to limit what I teach herein to what I’m qualified to teach. What I know is more than I’m trained to know. Whilst I’m not up to engineer’s status in knowledge, I do have perhaps a bit more know-how than the average technician. Had I qualified at a higher level I could teach more and feel comfortable in doing so.

The engineer’s course is 4 years long. I studied the equivalent of 2 years (‘Just over a years’ intensive training.) for my technician’s qualification. (City & Guilds 300, 301.)

I’ve deliberately not tried to make this aritcle “pretty” or to give it extra appeal. What you see is what you get. Electronics is a cold hard emotionless science: There’s a lot of maths involved; on a much higher level than this article has delved. (Bode plots and Nyquist diagrams included.) What you see is the beginnings of elementary calculus and an opportunity to dip your toe into using Ohms’ Law for real. If this breif and basic look at electronics has whetted your appetite for more then you’re probably a natural to at least a certain extent. I suggest you glean as much of the elementary basics as you can from this source; following which you continue your studies both online and offline.

Keep your eye on http://kkomp.com for any electronics titbits that I throw out to my readers. Take a home study course, night school, even go for it and take an electronics engineer’s degree if you like. This article only covers a few of the basics: I’ve barely touched on capacitors and inductors, no more than mentioned diodes and some other components, and I’ve only once or twice mentioned digital electronics. – With its logic gates, pulse-triggered flip-flops, Schmitt triggers…

The material herein has barely scratched the surface of analogue electronics. There’s so much to learn; and you’ve hardly begun.

If you’re intent on learning more, or even becoming qualified in electronics, then I wish you the very best of luck. If you found this heavy going and decided that the subject’s not for you then thank you for reading. At least you now have some idea of a subject that you don’t want to pursue any further. I hope you gained some enlightenment from your reading.

Whatever you choose to do; I hope you get the very best from it.

There are several types: The main two, in layman’s terms, are a light dependant resistor – LDR  – the resistance of which increases with the amount/type of light falling on it; and conversely one the resistance of which decreases with the amount of light falling upon it.

One of the main uses for these devices is in switching on street lighting. Rumour has it that a timer mechanism was originally used for the purpose, before the LDR’s invention. That’s maybe a sound idea if the light happens to be situated at or near the Equator; where the seasonal variations between night and day are minimal. However when you start getting as far away from the Equator, even as “close” as Southern England – Where night can come as early as 3:50PM in the depths of winter; yet as late as 10:40PM in the heights of summer: The timer would require resetting at least weekly. I honestly can’t envisage electricians running round the country resetting street lamp timers every week. Having said that though; there were people who went around the major English cities in the evenings and mornings lighting and extinguishing gas street lamps in the Victorian era.

Thankfully technology has moved on a bit since then.

See the Wikipedia article hyperlinked above from the letters LDR for a full description of the component.

You may notice that, on the circuit below, I use a non-standard symbol for an LDR which is completely different from the standard symbol. The one that I use (A zig-zag line with two arrows pointing towards it.) is a shorthand circuit-diagrammatical representation. It’s the old symbol for a resistor with the two arrows indicating that its value is dependant upon the amount/type of light falling upon it. Similarly with the fixed-resistors in the circuit; a zig-zagged line without the arrows. The symbol used as standard for a resistor is a rectangular box with leads either end. i find this too much hassle and too time-consuming to draw; therefore I resort to my shorthand: I understand it even if not all other people do.

So how does the device work in-circuit? The circuit-diagram below shows a very basic circuit incorporating 2 fixed resistors, a transistor, and a light-emitting diode to display the output. The LDR is an inverse-effect type. That is to say its resistance decreases as more light is shone on its surface.

The LDR , along with R1, acts as a potential-divider, biasing the base of Q1. As the light shining upon the LDR gets brighter, so its resistance drops, and thus the voltage at Q1’s base drops via R3. (See “Ohms Law and the Potential Divider”. Also see “Base Voltage”) When the base voltage drops below 0.7 Volts the transistor switches off and the LED goes out.

The function of the circuit can be reversed by replacing R1 with the LDR and vice-versa: In that case as the light shining upon the LDR increases, so its resistance drops and the voltage at Q1’s base rises via R3. When the base voltage rises above 0.7 Volts the transistor switches on and the LED lights up.

This circuit does work; in fact I memorised it from my early self-tuition in electronics, as well as from college. (Where I gained C&G 300, 301: Analogue and digital electronics certificates. ( I also retook a Maths exam as I had a cold on the day of my original exam twenty-something years ago and didn’t do as well as I’d have liked. – I passed; but my grade wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for, and I knew that I could get a better result.))

You might like to experiment with different values of resistor for R1, although a kilohm is probably the lowest value you should use in this case. You could also try replacing R1 with a 1K resistor and a 10K linear potentiometer connected in series. I’ll leave you to experiment.

There are a few and there will be more posts on the subject of basic practical electronics in this blog. if you’re interested in the subject then do look further into the content. It’s not all listed at time of writing so Google is your friend; use it. (Or Windows Live Search, Ask, Yahoo… whatever: I’m not biased or sponsored by Google. I prefer to use Google myself as I find the GUI simple to use and the listings useful. Your opinions may vary.)

If you build the circuit and experiment with it please do tell me your results. I’ll be interested to know.

Above: a PCI USB card.

I realise that many run-of-the-mill or experienced computer users will know the content of this article already. There are some, however, – maybe newbies or non-computer-savvy users – who won’t  know it; and this article is for those people:

No matter how many USB ports there are on your computer, (Usually anything between 2 and 12, depending upon your motherboard and the builder of your computer, be it a well-known-brand, or a custom-build.) there may come a time when you simply run out of ports. Maybe one or more just stop working suddenly due to a hardware fault, or perhaps you have so many devices attached via USB that there are no USB ports left to connect to.

There’s no need to rush out and buy an additional or a replacement computer though: There are at least two much cheaper ways to deal with the problem.

The first is to buy yourself a USB hub:

 This method can on rare occasions have drawbacks as far as power consumption is concerned: A standard USB 2.0-enabled socket will deliver 5 Volts (+/- 0.5 V) at 0.5 Amps = 2.5 Watts approx. If the equipment connected to said USB port via the USB hub(s) tries to draw more than 2.5 watts of power then things start happening: The USB port physically can’t and won’t supply any more power; therefore something has to go without. – And consequently something won’t work as it should.

Overcoming this problem; should it arise, involves opening the case and installing a PCI USB card. This is a device which plugs into one of the PCI sockets on the motherboard, and, once installed, is accessible from the back of your computer.

“I’m not going inside the box! – Oh no way: I’m a technophobe and will just end up breaking something in a panic!”

Relax! It’s a very simple operation. Compose yourself. If it’s your first time inside a computer you may like to be supervised by a local geek you know; just to give you a bit more confidence and reassurance, so that if you feel you can’t go on – help is at hand.

I do suggest that you earth yourself before even opening a computer and/or handling any microelectronic device. If the computer remains connected to the AC Mains with the main power-switch turned off, then the case remains connected to your home’s electrical earth. You can connect a piece of wire to the case and connect the other end to a piece of metal jewellery if you like; or you can buy yourself an anti-static wristband which connects in a similar manner.

Forget everything you see as soon as you remove the side-panel of the case: I know it looks confusing and complicated. You’re right: It is. – But we don’t need to worry about that right now. There’s no microelectronic surgery or precision soldering involved in this operation.

Your PCI USB card should still be in the box and sealed inside the anti-static bag at this point.

Now identify a PCI socket on the motherboard; there should be at least 2. (Don’t get PCI and PCIe confused: they are different technologies and not in any way interchangeable. You’re looking for a PCI socket.) Either ask your friendly geek or find your motherboard’s manual and identify it using that.

Looking horizontally towards the back of the computer from your chosen PCI socket you’ll probably see a blanking-plate, (Usually metal) corresponding to where the USB sockets on the card you’re about to install will be positioned. Reach inside the case. – Try not to touch any of the other electronics purposefully. If you do so accidentally it should be all right so long as you remain earthed (See above.). – Push the blanking-plate outwards, applying pressure until it partly collapses towards the outside back of the computer case. Go round the back of the computer case and remove it completely by breaking any of the weak points remaining that are keeping it attached.

While remaining earthed via the wire or the wristband, remove the PCI USB card, sealed inside the anti-static bag, from its box, Carefully remove the anti-static bag, avoiding touching any of the card’s electronics wherever possible. Hold the card by the metal end where its USB ports are.

Move the card gently into the computer’s case so that the contacts on its side match exactly with the PCI socket on the motherboard. You’ll see a metal lug which is a tiny extension of the card’s metal plate. Keep this as close to the case as possible and you’ll find that it inserts between the edge of the motherboard and the back-end of the computer;s case, so that the card’s USB ports are flush with the outside of the back of the case. Ensure that the card’s row of contacts are flush with the PCI socket on the motherboard and gently press down until they all evenly slide into the PCI socket.

‘Nearly finished: You’ll now see a screw-hole on the tag at right-angles to the metal-plate on the back-end of the card. Match this up with the corresponding screw-hole on the case and insert and tighten a screw to secure the card in place.

Before you close the case; switch on and boot up the computer. The computer should see the new hardware t6hat you’ve just installed, and should automatically install drivers for it.

If it fails to do so then either the card is not inserted properly into the PCI socket or it is faulty. Shut down and switch off the computer at the back. Check that the card is firmly pushed down into the PCI socket and that all the connectors are making contact with the socket correctly. If you are sure that everything is as it should be; power on and boot up again. If the computer still fails to see the card and install drivers, do this check again, and if still nothing remove the card and replace with a different card of the same type.

Once your computer has seen, identified and installed drivers for the card, you can use it normally. Remove the earth connection between the case and yourself, check that you haven’t left anything loose inside the computer, such as tools, a screw, jewellery, etc, and replace and secure the case panel.

You have just fitted a USB extension card; and you’ll see a number of new USB ports at the back if your computer:use these normally as you would use any other USB port.

That wasn’t too hard was it? If you’re not happy with the above instructions then take a look at another site: This tutorial shows you how to install a PCI TV card – the same one that I use in my computer would you believe. Although you’ll be installing a different type of card, as in a PCI USB card; you’ll nevertheless be installing it to a PCI slot just as with this card, so the principle is the same.

Either you’ve plugged in a USB hub, or you’ve installed a PCI USB card. You now have more USB ports to play with either way.

Happy computing.

Analogue amplification stages incorporating just a single active device, such as a transistor or op-amp, – as in a DC amplifier -  usually allow amplification of either the negative-going or the positive-going part of an AC waveform alone; basically cutting out half of the cycle and therefore causing immense distortion. There are two ways of overcoming this: Those being amplifying both halves of the waveform separately and recombining them at the output; perhaps at a decoupling transformer, (Too much copper wire, inductance, and consequential weight for my liking.) or by using two interconnected active devices to amplify both halves of the waveform at once, before passing the full AC waveform on to the next stage.

The latter method can be achieved with a push-pull amplifier.

Pictured below is a circuit diagram of a very basic push-pull amplification stage. (Please excuse the freehand drawing.)

The input signal; an alternating waveform, is fed via capacitors 1 & 2 to the bases of Q1 and Q2. The functions of C1 & 2 individually and collectively are two-fold: The first is that they individually shield the base connections of their respective transistors from any stray DC voltages from a previous stage, also they separate any DC potentials present at the base junctions of Q1 & 2; therefore preventing unintentional and accidental biasing of one another.

Resistors 3 & 4 act as a potential divider biasing the base of Q1 to 0V7. Resistors 1 & 2 have the a similar effect effect on the base of Q2: However since Q2 is a PNP transistor, the values of resistor used in the case of the R3,4 pair are reversed; therefore giving the base of Q2 a negative bias with respect to that of Q1.

Preset potentiometers PR1 & 2 set the potential of the transistor-pair with respect to the supply rails; and consequently the swing-maximum of the output-waveform. Resistors R5 & 6 are a precaution to avoid the peak output level colliding with the supply voltage and therefore causing distortion.

Capacitor C3 provides AC decoupling for the transistor pair.

Note that the emitters of the transistors are connected together and the output taken from that connection. This allows the inclusion of the traditional collector load resistance in both cases.

A waveform appearing at the input flows through both C1 and C2 to the base of the individual transistors. If the waveform is on the positive-going half of the cycle it lowers the conduction of Q2 and raises the conduction of Q1. If the waveform is on the negative-going half of the cycle the reverse occurs: Hence the output polarity mirrors the input polarity to whatever degree of amplification is involved.

A Little Background Information:

Prior to the advent of digital electronics, this type of circuit configuration was widely used in analogue receiving and amplification devices throughout the 1950s, 60s, and to some extent even the 70s. Back in the 1950s before the transistor became widely used in electronic circuitry, they would use a pair of triode or pentode  thermionic valves in the place of the transistor pair. As technology developed the manufacturers developed smaller valves with two triode or pentode sections for the purpose, screened from one another by a metal electrode.

(Example: ECC82 (European Nomenclature), or equivalent 12AU7 (American nomenclature.) AF double-triode with a 6.3 Volt heater supply. The European equivalent with a higher heater voltage was the UCC82 which required a 32 Volt heater supply.)

Valves were also manufactured with a pre-amplification or oscillator stage included, usually a triode; along with a main amplification device, usually a pentode. (Example ECL85 (6.3V heater supply), UCL85(32 V heater supply), and PCL85 (17.5 Volt heater supply, commonly used in the audio output stages of televisions. – Right up until around 1973.))

During the late 1960s/early 70s, valves began to be excluded from the designs of electronic devices, in preference for the transistor; which was lighter, lasted a lot longer, required less voltage to function, and didn’t require an internal heater powered from an external source to make it work.

(There was a period at the very end of the 1960s which lasted a little way into the 70s where equipment manufacturers would produce valve/transistor hybrids, especially in the case of televisions. These exhibited a few benefits over valve-only technology; such as they took less time to warm up before they started working, and the amount of mains-hum distortion was reduced to a large extent.)

There: A free history-lesson along with the main subject. There’s value-for-money; even though there was no charge in the first place.

Personally Speaking:

Just in case you’re wondering, I do just about remember those old days mentioned; especially the latter valve/transistor technology. I was just getting into electronics in those days. – And yes I was rather young to be messing about inside televisions et al. I practiced hobby electronics until fairly recently, when I got qualifications in the subject after a crash-refresher course at college. I became interested in computers in the late 1970s, around the time the Commodore Pet was released to market. Upon leaving school I followed the arts for a while, at the same time as running a small hobby-enterprise in analogue electronics, until I got back into both computers and digital electronics in the late 1990s.

(Oh yes. – Just in case you were wondering; I do remember the large B9D-base line-output pentode valve used in some televisions right into the 1980s; although I can’t remember the alphanumeric designation offhand. It started with a “P”, but that’s pretty obvious. – Most television valves did, other than maybe the HF triode-pentodes in the UHF/VHF tuners of some 1960s models. – Apart from some of the B8A valves of the early 1960s with the metallic base. – Now that is going back a bit too far.)

Ah I just remembered: PL504.  

. . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I was just proof-reading after writing this lot and I remembered; I need to hyperlink. There is so much I should hyperlink. If this article takes longer than expected to produce then that’s part of the reason why.

Oh wow; this’ll be fun!

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When I heard the news the first thing that I thought was “Excellent; at last the iPhone will get cheaper.” – If Wal-Mart drop the price of an iPhone then other American stores will start doing likewise; and eventually the price-drop will find its way to the UK and I’ll be able to get my hands on an iPhone at a discount.

There was just one crucial factor that I didn’t consider, though; that being JOBSWEH.

Steve Jobs (Jobsweh) has his finger on the pulse in every way possible; from what an individual user can and can’t run on their iPhone, to exactly how much retailers sell it for, and consequently what percentage of that ends up in his pocket.

‘Cut-price iPhone? Pah; no chance. Not if Jobsweh can help it.

“Employees in the cell-phone departments at five California stores, contacted by phone today, said Wal-Mart will offer iPhones by the end of December. Employees are currently being trained on how to sell the device, all five said.”

I dread to think how they’re being trained to sell an iPhone:

“…Yes this is an Apple product. As such it’s immune to any and all malware: Only Microsoft products are susceptible to that. Microsoft’s products suck, but all Apple products are personally controlled by Steve Jobs, aka Jobsweh; God of all things Apple…”

In September, Jobsweh got Best Buy, a US electronics retailer, to start selling iPhones. Apple stores were deluged and overwhelmed back when the current iPhone was released in July 2008. Jobsweh was seeking to expand the market to prevent such a mass rush on his stores whenever there would be a next time. AT&T had also been selling iPhones; but their cred was and still is tumbling down the gurgler, as they tried to lock all purchasers into a long-term contract with them, and then increased their prices while their service standards worsened. Although they still have the exclusive US service-provider rights for the iPhone’s signal, people possibly weren’t willing to give them a profit on the unit itself in addition to that which they made with their service. – That’s my theory anyway – So the market needed to be expanded.

Maybe, though, there is a possibility of a cheap iPhone after all? :

“Analysts say Apple may offer a discontinued 4-gigabyte version through Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart and sell it for $99. Apple currently sells two models at $199 and $299.”

“A $99, Apple-branded cell phone is inevitable,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst for Kaufman Brothers in San Francisco. “One of the key things Apple needs to do to drive broader iPhone adoption is to build a more complete product line” with low- end, mid-range and high-end products, Wu said in a Dec. 5 note.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling wouldn’t respond to the report and said the company “does not comment on rumor or speculation.” Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said the company hasn’t made an official announcement on an iPhone offering and has no comment. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel declined to comment.”

Well despite my distaste for Apple in some regards, they are on the up so I can’t knock them. Although their share price has dropped considerably this year, along with pretty much all others, they’re bouncing back and bucking the trend.

Good luck to you Wal-Mart. – But keep your eye on Jobsweh; I wouldn’t put my trust in him totally if I were you.

All quotations are from Bloomberg.com http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a4YIU21gLaSY

In electronics a resistor is a component that offers resistance to current. The main DC function of a resistor in an electronic circuit is as a current limiter; such as in the collector circuit of a single-NPN transistor stage, ensuring that the transistor doesn’t pass more current than its rated value causing it to overheat and burn out. It can also be used in conjunction with a capacitor to give a form of AC resistance known as reactance, the value of which is dependant upon the values of the chosen components combined with the AC frequency passing through the resistor/capacitor pair – However this article is concerned with calculating the DC resistance of resistors only.

Single resistors are available in a number of predetermined values. The unit of DC resistance is the Ohm; symbolised by the Greek letter omega. The value of the resistance of an individual resistor in Ohms can be read by means of the coloured stripes on the body of the component:-

Black = 0

Brown = 1

Red = 2

Orange = 3

Yellow = 4

Green = 5

Blue = 6

Violet = 7

Grey = 8

White = 9

Starting from the first and usually the largest stripe marked on the body of the component; the colour of this stripe indicates the digit furthest left. The next stripe indicates the next digit, the third stripe indicates multiplier to the power of 10 (Or put more simply; the number of zeros after the first two figures.): Thus a resistor marked red, brown, red would indicate that its resistance is 21 x 10 to the power of 2 – or 21 x 100 = 2100 Ohms; 2.1 kilohms. (2K1)

The last stripe(s); usually silver or gold, but maybe another colour, indicate the component’s tolerance or degree of accuracy at staying true to its marked value.

When 2 resistors are connected in a series circuit their total DC resistance can be ascertained by the equation

RT = R1 + R2

Therefore if we connect two 2100 Ohm resistors in series they have a total resistance of 2100 + 2100 = 4200 Ohms, or 4K2.

That’s pretty simple eh? But what if we want to calculate the resistance of two resistors in parallel? The equation becomes slightly more complicated. The total resistance of two resistances in parallel is calculated by the equation:-

RT = R1 x R2 / R1 + R2

Therefore a 2100 Ohm resistor in parallel with a 4200 Ohm resistor gives a total resistance of (2100 x 4200 = 8,820,000) divided by (2100 + 4200 = 6300) = 1400 Ohms; 1.4 kilohms. (1K4)

Years ago back in 2002 I needed a new computer. At that time I wasn’t building computers; I was a software geekette, and I was still learning about hardware. My old 233MHz Cyrix processor on a PC Chips PC100 motherboard  was becoming  too slow even for Windows 98. I wanted to move up to Windows XP; but wasn’t happy about trying it on my existing system.

Like I said; I wasn’t a hardware geekette, but I knew what to look out for; so I did the usual British thing and headed for the PC World store.

I parked outside in their car park and entered the store through the plush sliding automatic doors; went to the back of the store, and started looking at what they had to offer. It wasn’t that bad; but I only had a choice of around 15 different computers; each with its own special deal.

I felt eyes on me and noticed a salesman hovering not far away pretending to dust a shelf. I wandered over to the pre-SP2 stacks of Windows XP Professional CDs: £99! – Extortion! I was going to have to cut a deal here.

To cut a long story short I left the store that day with a computer made by Medion, running a 2.8GHz 1st generation P4, (A cutting-edge processor at the time.) 512MB RAM, (Standard at the time was 250 to 512MB) and 32MB onboard graphics. (Again standard for the time 32-64MB) I also had a ton of crap freebie software thrown in, and the tower came with a wheel-mouse, reasonable stereo speakers, ( – Which I still posses.) OK keyboard, Canon inkjet printer – Which I got them to upgrade from the cheap-looking Hewlett-Packard printer that originally came with the deal, and a free Windows XP Professional CD.

How I got that free was a bit of a crafty deal: You see PC World stores in the UK make a huge percentage of their money selling warranties on their goods and earning from the commissions from that; and therefore the salesman wasn’t going to let me get away without buying one. (All their customers complain about the warranty that they’re virtually forced to buy with their new computer, and which usually costs around as much again; but still they keep going back to them like wasps to a jamjar.) I cut a deal in which I agreed to buy the 5-year-warranty that they were pushing on me on condition that they gave me a better printer than the one in the bundle, and that they threw in a free XP Professional CD. I was trying to get their top-price scanner free with the deal too; but I had to drop that in compromise.

I was happy at the time, except that the box was the wrong colour and I’d had to give up the chance of a model with 64MB onboard graphics to get the model with the printer in the bundle. 2 years later, and with the price of RAM still high, I wanted to upgrade to 1GB RAM and found that there were 2 x 250MB sticks already in the box; which meant I’d have to replace rather than fit 2 more as there were only 2 slots. I also wanted to upgrade to 128MB graphics and did that instead with a Radeon PCI graphics card. I also wanted to upgrade the CPU to the latest 3.06MB P4 with hyperthreading; but that was out of the question.

2006, and I’d just finished my electronics course and gained 2 certificates. I’d also killed two birds with one stone by messing about with computer hardware/software in the computer course classroom which was adjacent to the electronics lab; much to the tutor’s annoyance, as he had to keep coming over and getting me to attend his impromptu lectures. – You could therefore say that I was trained in computer hardware also; although without a certificate.

By this time my computer was in its old age and was starting to show it; although I’d kept it going reasonably well. I was in a mind to attempt my first full-build – I had the know-how; I just needed the parts. The immediate objective; though, was flashing the BIOS on my existing box: I’d done it before on that box, and I’d done it a number of times at college; all successfully. This BIOS flash didn’t go to plan however: A power-spike during the process – I was economising by not having a UPS in-circuit – fried the BIOS chip: All I got from it was a blank screen and a continuous beep…And it was a week before Christmas too! I phoned the warranty company and got a number unobtainable tone. PC World informed me that the warranty company had gone out of business and that the company that had taken over were now closed until the New Year. – I couldn’t wait until then for a computer. I know; I’ll build my own: I’d bought a book from PC Mech that covered everything. In case I’d missed something or did something wrong I’d have that concise manual to put me right. I need components. I’ll make a list: Just in case I’ve missed something there – It is my first full-build after all – I’ll check with the book I bought mail-order off the internet from PC Mech … Let’s have a look…Blimey they cover everything in here: Windows 95 to Windows XP, Linux, the lot… OK I have listed everything – Good. Now to order. Oh my god everywhere’s shut early for Xmas! PC World will be open but will charge me a fortune…

Panic mode: I grabbed the telephone directory and ordered a machine to be custom-built for me before Xmas from a firm I’d never heard of. I did that and the custom-built computer arrived in 2 days; it worked, and I used it until April – When the PSU exploded!

Fortunately I’d already made my first build by then; checking everything from the book I’d ordered from PC Mech just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I post-mortem’ d the blown PC and found that the company I’d employed had used all cheap components, the wrong components, (e.g. A 32-bit single-cored Sempron CPU rather than the 64-bit dual-cored Athlon I’d asked for…) and built it badly – so I started legal action against the fairly-local English bodger-company; but that’s a totally different story.

Actually to be honest I needn’t have bothered with the computer room at college had I ordered that book earlier: It was just like a computer course in its own right: In fact I’d go so far as to say that it was more concise than the college course, and everything was well written and easy to understand – Honestly even a beginner without any computer experience whatsoever could use it to teach them how to build their own.

That really pissed me off; because I’d seen it advertised, I think it was the year before I went to college; maybe even before that; but I’d thought ‘Oh; it’s just another American net-profits person flogging more cyber-junk’: I thought I’d find that’s part 1 which I’d bought at a discount, and I’d have to buy all subsequent parts and join a get-rich-quick scheme to continue to receive the other instalments: Oh how wrong I was! I so wish that I hadn’t been so pessimistic and that I’d bought it then and there. It would have saved me time, money, and hassle.

Well I did it all arse-about-face and I paid the price – Literally in some respects; all because I was too cynical and didn’t think that the book was worth buying – I mean it doesn’t exactly cost a fortune either; but Miss Tight here was just procrastinating to save a few £s; and yet it cost me a few £s more maybe: False economy.

I don’t want to say which book it is after all that: I mean if I do and you buy it then you could end up knowing as much as I do and that’ll put me at a disadvantage. Having said that; I kept my money to myself and ended up losing; so if I were to keep my knowledge to myself then would I end up losing also? Probably knowing my luck.

I’ve been churning it over in my mind for some time whether to let the cat out of the bag; but look what procrastination did before; see above.

Which company and/or its staff/owner have I mentioned more in this blog than any other? Apple. – Well almost; but in a slightly derogatory way. No; PC Mech. Why? Because I have experience of PC Mech and I know that I always get a good deal out of them: That’s why I have a membership with PC Mech, like quite a few others also do.

I’m in England; PC Mech are in America. If I were in any way dissatisfied with their service I’m hardly likely to be able to drive over to their office and have a go at them am I? – Oh believe me more than one English company has had a piece of my mind in the past. No; it’s a matter of trust. What more needs to be said?

So no further procrastination. If you make a fortune out of what I share with you then I want half; all right? Like I’ll get it eh? Well you’re going to find out one way or another; so I suppose ‘better from me than someone else. Scroll down.

Either you want to find out which book it is or you don’t. If you do then scroll down. Of course; if you don’t want to custom-build a PC for yourself – ever – then there’s no point: Thanks for reading.

– I’ve had to do some work typing this lot you know; so it’s not going to hurt you to do a tiny bit yourself. Keep scrolling…

Keep going; you’re authorized: Remember; it’s a matter of trust…

If you’ve bothered to scroll all the way down here then you’re either interested to know more or you’re as crazy as me. Whichever is the case you’re about to get what I said you’d get.

In fact I’m not only going to tell you the name of the book; I’m also going to give you a link to a bit more information and the point of purchase. I’ve procrastinated to this point, and now I’m no longer doing so: The knowledge can be yours.

- All you have to do is click on the ad, no more than that.

What; you’ve come all this way and you’re wondering whether you should? Oh give me a break!

OK; If you’re determined to make the same mistake as me and continue procrastinating until you miss your chance then this link will get you out of here.

– Otherwise there’s a square-ish bluey thing below to click on:-

Happy building!

Today we’ll look at a very basic analogue audio-amplifier circuit and examine how the principle of negative feedback can reduce distortion:

Capacitor, C1, decouples the input to potential divider, R1&2, keeping the base of Q1 at 0.7 Volts – Therefore any AC ripple will be picked up instantly by Q1 and amplified. C2 is the first example of negative feedback: With a value of a nanofarad, it feeds higher frequencies from the collector of Q1 back to its base, thus giving a better response to bass and mid-range audio-frequencies than treble notes. Q1′s Iceo is set by the combined resistance of R3 and R4, and decoupling is provided by electrolytic capacitor C4 to ground. (C4/R4′s reactance should be taken into account when deciding the component values.)

The first stage is decoupled from the following stage by C3, and resistors R6 and R5 act as a potential-divider to set Q2′s base at 0.7 Volts. The output is taken from Q2′s collector via C6.

Let’s assume that the beta for each individual transistor is 100, and that we’ve chosen components that will allow each transistor to operate with a working beta of 50: Therefore a tiny signal of 10mV p-p applied to the input will give a massive output of 1 Volt p-p. – That’s quite some amplification; and not only will the clean signal be amplified 100 times but so will any distortion on the input waveform. Second to that, if we’re amplifying an audio signal with variable amplitude on the input; there are going to be occurrences where this circuit; particularly Q2, is driven to saturation – A 2.1 Volt p-p signal from a preamplifier at the input, for example, producing an output of 20 Volts p-p with a flattened crest where Q2 saturates – Thus producing distortion.

To compensate for the above unwanted distortion we introduce negative feedback:

With the introduction of PR1 and C7 we have allowed a regulated path back to the input from the output, DC decoupled by C7: Therefore the higher the resistance of PR1 the less the entire two-stage circuit is bypassed; therefore the more current flows through Q1 and 2 and is amplified.

This is a similar function to that of R2 in the basic DC inverting operational amplifier circuit below:

Again we note that should the voltage on the inverting input at the virtual-earth junction of R1/2 reach a certain level with respect to the supply voltage it will cause IC1 to saturate. R2 gives negative feedback between input and output, therefore limiting this effect. 

In very basic terms then, the function of negative feedback is to reduce overall gain, thereby limiting distortion.

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