Consumed Consumer . org

I recently had an ISP service interruption at home, leaving me without a working Internet connection for a few hours. I used my iPhone to tether into my 3G connection, did a few speed tests, and wondered how it compared to my regular (cable modem) internet connection. Here are the test results.

Not long after we played around testing our connection here in Canada over broadband (cable) vs iPhone (3G) , Akamai releases its 2009 Q3 report.

I recently got another used laptop off eBay. It came without an OS so I was going to install Linux, but seeing that Windows 10 has just become available for download, I decided to give it a try and install Linux alongside, in dual boot. First, let us look at downloading the ISO, comparing the 3 possibilities: NetSession, Direct and BitTorrent. This article represents my pre-install research – the install experience and tips coming up soon.

Have you noticed your Internet connection getting sluggish even while your Speed-tests show no slowdown? Are your VoIP conversations breaking up and becoming unintelligible especially when torrent downloading? If your answer is yes, you might benefit from the following tips.

After placing the order for my new cable modem it is now time to receive it, unbox it and test it.

For the longest time I've been renting a cable modem from my ISP for about $5-6/month. As DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems (capable of 400Mbps D/l and 108 Mbps U/l) have become widely available I've decided to upgrade my cable modem and also purchase it.

After having a look at the more specific driver issues related to installing the latest version of Ubuntu linux on my Toshiba Tablets , it’s time to have a more general – and, hopefully, useful to more readers – look at what’s new and what needs to be changed in this new install. Obviously, I’m building upon my previous install notes ( 10.10 ).

After wasting time and intense frustration, I have decided that waiting for videos of photos to upload to online services is not something I want to do from my laptop. I shall thus explore alternatives..

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

One of the most annoying "features" in Windows is the "Compressed Folders" feature, where Zip files are displayed as folders. While this may be nice for some, most users accumulate a large number of zip files in a folder, making it unviewable in Windows Explorer. We look at how to get rid of it.

I recently had the opportunity to benchmark two very similar Acer computers, differing mostly in the kind of Intel processor they shared. I found that only Novabench is worth using.

I've heard a lot about the community of iHacks. Apparently, Apple restricts their devices and limits their capabilities. Some people have made it their mission to free their devices and allow them to perform at full potential. Here is how that is accomplished.

After successfully formatting my 2 new Western Digital 2TB discs properly, with the "advanced 4k option" , the time has come to move all the data from my existing 2TB array (1 TB + 1 TB in RAID 0) to one of the new drives. The quickest way to do this is to connect the drive via the NAS unit USB port.

Why would ConsumedConsumer.org care about the US elections? Frankly, because we cannot afford not to.

As I was running out of space on my DNS-323, I decided to upgrade my two 1 TB drives to 2 TB. Due to insufficient research into the matter, I was surprised to read, prior to performing the upgrade, that there are significant performance issues with these drives.

For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of running a TOR relay for my own privacy reasons and to give back to the community as well. Though my router and NAS (and possibly even my WD Live box) have enough chutzpah to run it, I prefer to use a very old computer instead for reasons of separation (security). For a while, I even considered buying a Raspberry Pi or some other similar cheap gizmo, then I remember I have a bunch of old computers I've never used..

I have a laptop that allows me to swap my DVD drive (which I don't use much) for a second hard drive in RAID. I'm looking at buying a drive in the $100-200 range to complement my existing SATA drive.

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.