The first step to getting into this field is to understand how it works. Here are some questions that I have found many people simply don’t understand:

• How does the internet work?
• When I put up a website, where does it go?
• When I enter a website address into my browser, what is happening?

I have talked to people about this and the confusion is definitely rampant. Most people have never really thought about where a website comes from. Its just the mysterious “they” who do it, I guess. Also, contrary to what Senator Ted Stevens said, the internet is not really a “series of tubes”.

So, let’s take a look at how this all works.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

Every Wednesday night @ 8pm EST when we do the PCMech Live broadcast, one question always comes up, that being:

Does the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 really fix anything?

The answer is yes, it does. I have to go by reported information because I don’t use Vista, I use Windows XP Professional Edition (with Service Pack 3.)

The caveat to using Windows Vista has remained the same: Use newer hardware/software/peripherals or the OS won’t work correctly. That has not changed. In addition, you should use newer quality hardware/software/peripherals. If you have something known as “junkware”, it will perform like, well.. junk.

You will notice at this point that, seemingly like magic, not as many people are complaining about Vista as they were in pre-SP1 days. Except it’s not magic. Many fixes were applied and many of them worked. I won’t say all of them worked, but most did.

If you have a computer running Windows Vista and haven’t upgraded to SP1 (why I don’t know,) you should. It has been confirmed to help out quite a bit concerning the overall operation of the OS.

If you’re still using Windows XP, don’t take this article as an indicator to run out and get Vista. If you like Windows and want to stay with it, wait for Windows 7.

[Source: Chron.com]