BasicDog

As my HTC mobile phone has become more of an integral and also somewhat forgotten part of my everyday life I haven't been able to control my urges to accumilate extra hardware that makes using my HTC Touch Dual easier.

This will be a guide of the different accessories available for the Touch Dual with an emphasis on which ones that I rely on daily. I have split the accessories up into several catagories based on what you are trying to do with the phone.

Have you ever wondered how much electricity the electrical appliances around your house use, we have a number on the back of each appliance but do we actually know how much they are using?

After building my new Home Theatre PC I found myself wondering how much electricity it is using compared to my gaming system, and this lead me to buying a Power meter from my local Maplin shop. The power meter is a very simple device, you plug it into a socket in your house and then put the plug of the hardware you are testing into it and watch the little LCD screen amaze you. The LCD screen can display many different units, including Amps, Volts, Watts and Kilowatt Hours, and since I am used to PC components and appliances such as microwaves being referred to using Watts, I used this as my benchmark unit.

This is the story of how I have managed to build a HD Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for only £135 and in the process managed to make a HTPC that uses an average of around 45w of electricity. Perfect for my living room, my electricity bill and in turn; the planet.

I embarked on my venture to build a media PC for two reasons, the first being to free my gaming system from the living room so I can get some much needed gaming action, and the second was an exercise to see how little money I could use to build a High Def capable PC with a HDMI connection. The components that I used are listed in a moment with their costs; these are mostly bought from ebuyer.com or a market stall in Derby.

I have owned the HANNspree Xv-S 32" TV for around 8 months now and I have been taking it for granted to the extent where I have neglected to mention it on here. This is of course a travesty as it was both very cheap and brilliant.

Employing my usual decision making technique for non PC component products, which involves finding a cheap product with 50+ customer reviews online and reading until I am convinced it is not low quality, I happened upon this TV on ebuyer.com. One of the great things about new companies to the market selling cheap goods is that the sites selling them soon build a substantial collection of customer reviews which in turn builds the company reputation.

A little about HANNspree
HANNspree are a branch-off company of HANNstar who produce the HANNs.G PC monitors; a respected brand and this therefore leads you to expect the same quality from HANNspree TVs.

One of the major selling points of modern phones is that they feature cameras, and following my review of the HTC Touch Dual I hope to detail how it performs when taking pictures. Having a camera on your phone can be very handy and would be sorely missed if there wasn't one, though until recently they were seriously lacking in the features we have become accustomed to with digital cameras. Mobile phone manufacturers keep coming up with more and more innovative ways to make phone cameras a more viable alternative to carrying both a phone and camera, let's see what HTC have done with the Touch Dual...

It all began while I was on holiday for a week and the only way I could keep an eye on my site was to pay £1 an minute for a slot machine-esque internet access point. Anyway, this isn't about those awkward internet machines on holiday, but about how I find myself owning a HTC Touch Dual. The short of it is that I decided to get a PDA-phone, and now find myself wondering how I lived without one.

The PDA-phone I chose was the HTC Touch Dual (as I am sure most noticed from the title of the article) on T-mobile, and I must say that for the money (£25 per month) I don't regret the decision at all.

Checking the performance of your PC for gaming is something that thousands of people around the world do on a regular basis and it worth millions. It can be stressful and very adictive (Of that I have first hand experience) but the end product can be a very stable computer, and in my case an empty wallet and enough experience to write an article about it...

Using an Frames Per Second (FPS) display in games is the most common and is generally the bread and butter of any passionate PC gamer, however it is a very crude and somewhat inaccurate way of determining how well your system performs as a gaming machine. I will explain how you can use FPS first, but will put the emphasis on how to benchmark your system for an accurate representation.

This is one of my old articles which has stood the test of time and to my knowlegde still stands true, hopefully someone will find it useful.

This article aims to show the different ways in which you can upgrade your system hardware to increase the performance of your PC.

Due to sytems being used is many different fields (especially windows) I have developed a relevance table to the right of each upgrade, this shows how important each one is to your computers performance for each type of use. The relevance is rated from 0-10, where 10 is crucial and 0 is pointless.