High-Speed Internet Service Choices

There are a couple of choices in high-speed internet service providers in the Northern Berkshire. There are a few differences in the services that are offered by Time Warner Cable and Verizon:

Verizon DSL offers two services – a basic, 768 kbps service that is perfectly suited to loading websites, retrieving email, and downloading small files such as antivirus software updates. This service will perform these jobs at such a speed that there is no advantage to having the higher speed connection. The one limitation of the 768 kbps service is transferring large files via email or web browser, or watching streaming media, such as audio or video.

Verizon’s other service, their 3000 kbps service, is more comparable to Time Warner Cable’s service, which typically runs at between 2000 and 5000 kbps. These two services are virtually identical, streaming media, transferring files, etc. at lightning fast speeds. Their prices are not. Verizon’s service tends to cost approximately $15 to $30 less than Time Warner Cable service.

We hope this assists our clients in deciding which High-Speed Internet Service Provider is best for you and your needs. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like a Brainspiral technician to install one of these services for you.

Removing Security Warning when Opening Program in Windows XP

For those of you running Windows XP Service Pack 2, you have likely come across this problem at least once. You download a picture, document, or program you need, and before you can do anything, up pops a window, warning you of the (so-called) dangers of opening the file. “Warning,” the window advises, “This file is from an unknown publisher. Opening this file may damage your computer.” As helpful as this proposes to be, it is annoying for those downloading pictures of their vacation or their co-worker’s business document. For those continually annoyed by this, we offer this fix.

To remove these pop-up notifications, go to “Start”, right click on “My Computer”, click “Properties”, go to the “Advanced” tab, and select “Environmental Variables”. In User Variables, click “new”, and add the following: SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS, and give it the value 1. This will disable the pop-up security checks.