Author: Roan Yboa

Clip courtesy of the Nine Network Australia

Harry Potter fever is about to break out big time with the release of the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. What better time to talk about the new Harry Potter Game, plus there’s a new all-in-one computer, and a website that’ll try and improve your golf.

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince For Wii.

This new game from EA allows games to relive the action of the movie….from the Hogwarts Express to the dramatic revelation of the Half-Blood Prince. The Wii Remote and Nunchuck become your broomstick playing Quidditch, while the remote by itself can be used as a wand to battle the forces of darkness

Gamers can take on night-time missions while the castle sleeps and they can call on Nearly Headless Nick for clues and tips to help you complete your challenges. It retails for $79.

BenQ N Screen Nettop 21.5-inch

This is an all in one computer that has the hard drive built into the back of it. Although this is not new technology, it is pretty cost-effective at only $999.It takes up less desk space, too.

It has 160GB of storage and 1GB of memory. It is aimed specifically at the child/senior citizen market, and has bigger fonts for kids and senior citizens (can be adjusted manually if you wish to make it smaller).

It is available from Officeworks

Customise your own golf club

There is a website that helps you customise your own golf club. The customisation tool was developed by 25-year-old Australian Brad Lindenber. User go online and fill in a form about what type of club you want to use, your gender, your height, how fast you swing. It processes the information and tells you what is the ideal club for you to use and is said to have more than 50 million combinations.

Clubs cost between $49-$239 for clubs, from $99 for a putter. www.lindgolf.com

Found it very interesting this week that Google is now looking at getting into the operating system market, albeit for netbooks only at this stage.

A couple of issues piqued my interest. It’s great that Google are going to provide competition for the Windows platform, which in its many guises has caused problems over the years. The latest version, Windows 7, has been hyped as the best to come, but we’ve heard that before.

The Google OS will be open-source and probably free. Open source could be a problem in that too many people might have too much input, but the free aspect is certainly worth looking into. Unfortunately, free also means that to make money Google might have to use advertisements, or collect information on users and onsell it for marketing purposes.

With between 70-90 percent of the operating system market (depending on whose figures you use), Microsoft will not take this lying down. They will shout out about their system having more to offer and patches and updates etc, but when something is free, people cannot help but come on board.

Said to be available from next year, it be interesting to see how the company that has a virtual browser monopoly in Western countries can make a buck from the OS.

It has been noted that it will only be a lightweight OS – in other words you can use it to surf the net, word processing and sending and getting email etc, so won’t have the functionality of Windows….yet.

I look forward to see how it all pans out.

Wow, a tonne of questions today and lot of information covered..

First of all we talked a little about blu-ray, which although the technology has been around for some time, it is really beginning to take off in the consumer space. I recommend you get a blu-ray player is you have an HD television, because that is where you’ll get the most out of it. Steve queried whether the graphics for gaming would be any better. They won’t be.

I also talked about a couple of Nintendo DSi games that are ideal for the holidays. Both AFL Mascot Manor and NRL Mascot Mania are a lot of fun, whereby you can play a mascot from one club against the mascot from another. There are mini-games, players cards to collect, and a game of either AFL or NRL to be played if you make it through the various levels.

Marika asked via email if there was any way of transferring files from her iPod to iTunes. The only program I know of is called iPod Ripper, but have not used it myself, so will be interested to see how it goes.

Glen was using Windows XP to try and burn pictures from his camera to a DVD, but was having problems. Not too sure why it wasn’t working, as it is usually a case of drag and drop into the correct field. I need more information Glen, so if you read this, drop me a line.

Paul from Campbelltown is annoyed at the crappy reception he is getting from his digital set top box. Unfortunately, because digital technology is pretty new, there is nothing you can do about it. Interference is the problem, and this can be from airplanes flying overhead, or thunder storms. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about it at present.

Deborah rang and was concerned about the speed of her Internet. She has four people using her broadband BigPond account for $60 a month. I’m suspecting that the household is churning through its usage too soon, and once this happens BigPond will default to dial up speeds. Some might query why not just let the household use normal broadband speed and pay the difference. That would be because the bill at the end of the month might be a nasty surprise!

Michael rang to say his son’s Xbox had the red ring of death. What does this mean? It means his Xbox is kaput. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Microsoft has assured me that it has extended warranties, so if Michael has any problems, he should get back to me and I’ll try and sort it out with the Powers-That-Be at Microsoft.