Paying for a web hosting service doesn’t necessarily have to burn a hole in your pocket. When looking for the best budget web hosting service, you might be inclined to choose the company with the lowest monthly payment but that isn’t always the best idea.

The top web hosting services for customers on a budget sometimes offer different services or features and by comparing those first instead of merely deciding based on the price tag, you will get the most bang for your buck.

The Basic Offerings of the Top Budget Web Hosting Services
If you look at a simple chart that compares the top budget web hosting sites, you will find that they all offer a domain name, disk space, and transfer. Some offer free domain names along with unlimited disk space and transfer while others charge for domain names and have limited services.

Your first job is to sift through information about the top budget web hosting services and narrow down your choices based on monthly payment and these basic offerings.

All of the top budget web hosting services offer customer/tech support 24/7 for 365 days of the year via chat, email, or telephone. Unfortunately, not all of the companies offer reliable and prompt customer support thus it is necessary to read reviews written by real customers who can tell you whether or not their customer service/tech support team is up to par.

Bonuses Offered by Top Budget Web Hosting Services
Due to rising competition, nowadays even the top budget web hosting services offer coupons and bonuses along with their typical services and features. It might sound too good to be true but depending on what plan you buy, some companies may even offer a few months (usually up to six months) of service for free!

Some other bonuses include the capability to host a larger number of sites or even an unlimited number, depending on the company. This is important to consider when weighing your options because some of the top budget web hosting services only allow you to host a handful of websites while others allow you to host an unlimited quantity for a lower price. Reading the fine print is essential in this case.

Many of the top budget web hosting services offer Yahoo/Google PPC (pay-per-click) credits starting from $25 up to $100 in total. Some of the top budget web hosting services also offer free setup and software.
Initially, it may seem overwhelming to choose a web hosting service because even if you are on a budget, there are plenty of companies out there competing to be your service provider. Thanks to that competition, there are lots of freebies and features that would otherwise come with a heftier price tag.

The key is to shop smart by comparing the prices, services, and bonuses offered by the top web hosting services while being careful to read between the lines and make sure there aren’t any charges or fees they aren’t telling you about in their sales pitch. With that in mind, you will certainly have no trouble narrowing down your choice amongst the top web hosting services and finding the best that is out there.

Some worms, such as the Blaster worm, use known bugs in Microsoft Operating Systems to force the computer to shut down itself. you may also get the shutdown command by inadvertently ending a system program in the Task Manager. You can create a shortcut on the Desktop for a command that will allow you to quickly abort any un-wanted shutdown commands you might get.

Simply right-click on an empty space on the Desktop and select ‘New->Shortcut’. In the Location box type in ’shutdown.exe -a’ and click on the ‘Next’ button. In the Title box enter any name you want for the shortcut then click on the ‘Finish’ button.

Whenever you see the shutdown command appear on your screen, simply double-click on the shortcut to abort the forced shutdown.

For most computer techs, installing Windows seems pretty straight forward. That’s because, if you are like me, then you have probably done it a thousand times. However, for those just getting into IT, this may not be the case. If you have no experience with installing Windows then you can now familiarize yourself with this process by using the free Windows XP Setup Simulator.

The Windows XP Setup Simulator allows you to practice installing Windows as much as you want on any computer. Just simply run the program and you are guided through the setup process just as if you were actually installing Windows on a computer.

The simulator is self-contained so it doesn’t interfere with your current Windows installation in any way. You can also use it to practice your Windows 2003 installations because the process is very similar.

The simulator also comes packaged with a guide that explains every step in the Windows XP setup process.

The Program is free and you can download it here.

Are you looking for a way to make YouTube videos load up faster on your computer? This could be a problem if you have a slow Internet connection, which can cause videos to “freeze”. This is caused by the fact that the video is being downloaded into the buffer.

There are a couple of ways you can ensure that videos from YouTube are loading faster and steaming with fewer interruptions, so read on to find out what.

Method 1: Add stop button to YouTube video player. By default, if you press the Pause button on a video in YouTube, the red bar will continue moving, meaning that the video is being buffered. This is fine for fast connections, but will cause the freeze issue on slow connections.

Using a Firefox script, you can add a Stop button to a video which will prevent it from buffering the video. In this way, you can have multiple videos open and watch one while the rest are stopped.

You need to install Greasemonkey and then install the stop script. You should see a button above the video now:

Note that this script is useful when you have multiple videos open in different browser windows. If you are just watching one video, pausing is better because you can let it buffer a good amount of the video before pressing play.

Method 2: Download and install the SpeedBit Video Accelerator software. The cool thing about this program is that when you watching a video on YouTube, it will open up multiple connections to the video on the servers and download different parts of the video at the same time.

So instead of just starting the download from the beginning and moving towards the end, SpeedBit will download the video like your BitTorrent client downloads torrents, different sections all at once.

It will significantly reduce the video freeze and buffering issues with YouTube and will also accelerate YouTube videos that are embedded in other sites like MySpace, blogs, etc.

Method 3: Another way to load YouTube videos faster is to use the Fast Forward feature. Just click anywhere on the player bar and the video will load from that position.

Pretty simple trick, but I didn’t know this for the longest time! Definitely helps when you have a longer video and only want to see a latter part of it.

Method 4: Download the video to your computer. If none of these are working and you are still having issues, then it might be better to just download the video to your computer!

There are a million ways to download YouTube videos to your computer, but I’ll only mention one and that is Vixy.net because it lets you download and convert to another format such as AVI, MOV, MP4, MP3, or 3GP.

That’s it! There’s really nothing else you can do to load YouTube videos faster other than getting a faster Internet connection! Enjoy!

Oh, how the PC users have longed for this day. With one of Apple’s marketing points being that Mac is practically virus free, many have held the view that this stems largely from Macs (and OS X) being less prominent on the market than Windows-based PCs. As a long time PC user, I cannot deny that I consider some of the applications in Windows a security train wreck (*cough* IE6 *cough*), but I do agree that the myth about Macs being immune to viruses is overrated to some degree.

Now, many reports (1) (2) (3) say that some pornography sites hold a Mac trojan pretending to be a video codec.

Granted, this is not the first Mac trojan nor the first Mac malware. But, this one seems to be particularly nasty.

Named OSX.RSPlug.A, it appears to Mac users as they’re lured into thinking they’re viewing a video, and acts as a necessary video codec. The computers of users who proceed with the installation will be infested by a DNSChanger that hijacks web requests sent to eBay, PayPal and several online banking websites. Not nice. Read the full scoop on this threat over at Intego.

And now Ladies and Gentlement, I give you my Tech Tip of the day number God knows what. Here is how you can install and/or upgrade your WordPress Installation in less than 4.52 minutes.

1. Upgrading:
Upgrading WordPress can be a little bit of an annoying process, since it involves a lot of steps such as backing up the database (just in case), deactivating all the plugins, downloading the newer version, uploading the new files and overwriting the old ones, and then reactiving the plugins, and hoping all goes well. however there is a way in which you can upgrade your WordPress installation in less than 1 minute, with little to no effort.

I am talking of course about the called WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin by Techie Buzz. I’ve tried it on a couple of secondary WordPress sites that i operate (for testing purposes) and it worked like magic. I seriously could not believe how fast and easy it was.

In order to use this plugin, simply upload and activate it. Once activated, you will see a new option under Manage called Automatic Upgrade. The plugin, through a wizard like interface, will walk you through all the steps needed to upgrade WordPress, including checking over your current installation, putting your blog into maintenance mode, and even grabbing the latest version of WordPress from the official download page, and all you have to do is click click. thats all.

If you have a standard WordPress installation, I highly recommend using this plugin to keep your WordPress software up to date.

2. Installing:
This one might need an itty bitty amount of work at your end, but it is equally fast and easy as the AWUP above. all you need to do here is create the database and assign a username/password to it. (if you don’t know how to do that, you can check out the WordPress detailed instructions site, and it’ll explain everything to you step by step.) thats it. now head over to Vladimir Ghetau’s Wordpress Web Installer. fill in the form, and you’re done. can’t get easier than that now can it? this web installer however currently installs WordPress version 2.2.1, but thats no problem, is it?

I have to mention though, that I personally believe in getting down and dirty with things, i.e: I like to do everything manually, not that there’s anything wrong with using the automated processes above, but thats just me, i like to stay on top of things, since I believe that doing everything by hand reduces that chance for errors and what not.

So, thats it. enjoy.

One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet is on its way, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages, including Arabic.

“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits.”

The evaluation is made possible by today’s insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet.

Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

More information on the ICANN website.