I was surprised at how quickly my Canon A310 digital camera was eating expensive Duracell Copper Top Alkaline Batteries.
I wouldn't have been if I would have read the owners manual. The owners manual says you can expect 75 shots using Alkaline batteries and 350 with NiMH (Nickle Metal Hydride) rechargeables. A five fold increase in battery life sounds good, not to mention not having to buy and throw-away the alkalines.
I had a relatively old Intel digital camera that didn't have an LCD display/viewer. Using regular old Alkaline batteries in that camera worked fine. Not true with the Canon.
A good page for information on rechargeable batteries and chargers.
Digital Imaging Accessories Review: The Great Battery Shootout
I decided to buy the Maha Battery Charger - MH-204GT SMART CHARGER package with 8 Maha Powerex NiMH 1800 mAh (milli-amp-hour) AA's. It's not the state of the art charger or battery but I thought it was the best buy.
More information on NiMH batteries here -
Green batteries - Information on Rechargeable Batteries and Battery
I'm curious to see if the NiMH batteries perform well in my daughters MP3 players and whatever else we have around here that uses AA batteries. We seem to go through them at a fast clip. I had an AA battery charger years ago that wasn't very satisfactory. The batteries didn't hold a charge very long and wouldn't recharge at all fairly quickly. From what I read the NiMH batteries don't have that problem in that they recharge to close to original power and can be recharged hundreds of times (how many times depends on if they are totally discharged when you recharge them and other stuff I don't care to read about).
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I got kicked off my laptop tonight because Becca and some of her friends are using the living room.
I get to use the desktop for awhile. It's always interesting to see what kind of trojans, spyware, adware, viruses and worms have found their way onto this computer. There's usually a few; sometimes more than a few. I think most of them come from downloading music files or games since I don't get them on my laptop.
Any bad stuff that's found it's way onto our computers has never been catastrophic...more just annoying. I like to fiddle around with stuff so I don't really get too excited about it.
I recommend running Lavasoft AdAware, Spybot Search and Destroy and Trend Micro Housecall and SysClean software. They are all free and easy. Besides the cleaning tools you may want to install antivirus software. I'm trying out Computer Associates EZ Antivirus tools free for a year on this PC now that the free McAfee trial ran out.
I don't recommend following advice you find on how to delete trojans, worms, etc. that is available on various bulletin boards/user forums on the web. One of the trojans on this computer is Trojan something (I forget..and don't really care). Anyway if you search Google for "Trojan something" you will get convoluted, bizarre, incorrect or on occasion maybe good advice on how to "fix" your PC.
An example I just ran across, was someone handing out free advice on how to delete the trojan's I'm interested in. This advisor talks about reformatting your hard drive. That cure is worse than the disease.
A simpler method is to go to Trend Micro, download the latest pattern file and SysClean software and let it run. Not nearly as interesting as all the arcane "expert?" advice you can find on the web but a heck of lot easier and safer for your PC than dinking around in the registry or reformatting a hard drive.
That reminds me of a "fix" a local computer store did for an old computer of mine. I was getting a "divide by zero" error and couldn't figure out what was causing it. I took the computer to the place I bought it from and after a couple of weeks they told me they had fixed my computer. They fixed it by erasing and reformatting the hard drive, without backing up anything I had on the hard drive.
I got a nice clean hard drive and no error until I reinstalled the s/w that caused the problem in the first place. They actually did me a favor sort of. As I reloaded s/w programs on my computer I was able to figure out what s/w was causing the problem. It was a program I'd bought that allowed you to choose a bunch of different funny sounds/recordings to associate with keystrokes, mouseclicks etc. That was years ago before that sort of thing was easy to do with Windows.
I've never bought a computer from a local dealer since that one. Why?
I thought by buying locally I'd get better support. That didn't turn out to be the case and since that experience I've bought a few different brands of computers by mail, and been very happy with the quality and support. Sorry local computer stores...I'm sure some are better than others.
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