The toughest phone around – the JCB Tough Phone

Now most people aren’t that brutal with mobile phones. I mean, people bash them around a bit and scratch them a little, but nothing horribly serious. 

Unless you are the kind of person who is really, really lethal to your mobile phone, this post won’ t interest you. However, if you’re phone is constantly being replaced because you keep cracking the screen or dropping it excessively, this might be of interest to you.

It’s called the JCB Tough Phone. Incase you don’t know who JCB are, they manufacture farm machinery and very large tractors. The JCB tough phone is one of the strongest phones around, claiming that it is splash resistant, shock proof, drop resistant and dust resistant. 

I got hold of one recently and gave it a quick test. It’s very thick and well-made, and it’s well protected from drops and other common damages.

And that’s not it. It comes with 3 year warranty and no matter how you damage it, it if gets damaged, they’ll send you a brand new one for free. That’s it. No arguement. 

In terms of features, it is slightly down. There’s no camera, but there is bluetooth and most other common phone features.

It is quite costly at £170 SIM free but it might just be worth it if you damage your phone a lot.

If you want more info, head over to http://www.play.com/Mobiles/Mobile/4-/3517231//Product.html?searchstring=JCB&searchsource=0 or www.jcbphone.co.uk

Lyricsplugin for Windows Media Player

I discovered this a few weeks ago but have found it extremely useful so I thought I would share it.

Lyricsplugin is a plugin for Windows Media Player that displays lyrics for a song while your playing in the main Now Playing window.

 

Lyricsplugin Image

Lyricsplugin Image

It’s one of those ‘set and forget’ type of programs. You just install it, activate it, and let it show you all the lyrics to your favourite songs.

You can even add lyrics for songs manually it doesn’t recognise in its huge directory as well as configure the plugin to your liking.

It also is available for Winamp if that’s what you use.

I definately recommend you get this, head over to www.lyricsplugin.com and get it for free.

The working Freecom Network Drive review…

Well now I finally have a working Freecom Network Drive (http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/12/the-final-freecom-network-drive-update/), I thought its only fair to post a real review for it.

So, I’m reviewing the Freecom Network Drive 500GB (available from http://www.freecom.com/ecproduct_detail.asp?ID=3402&CatID=8020&sCatID=1146266&ssCatID=1147446)

For a drive costing just under £80 plus a bit of delivery, it’s really quite good value. You get a 500GB drive, 10/100MB ethernet connectivity, USB connectivity, a local FTP server which can be made available all over the internet via port forwarding on your router, adjustable IP configuration, seperate directories, and a couple of other things you don’t really notice.

There are a few pros and cons…

Pros:

  • Very good value for money
  • Huge amounts of storage
  • Useful powersave option
  • FTP (local and internet-wide)
  • Generally does the job fine

Cons:

  • Occasionally crashes
  • Powersave option doesn’t totally turn it off
  • Gets quite hot due to it not having a fan
  • Only capable of about 2mbps when uploading to drive which isn’t rocket speed
  • FAT32 formatting means the dreaded 4GB file size limit; change it to NTFS and you won’t be able to access it over LAN (only USB)

So it does have it’s good and bad bits, but overall it does the job fine. It does get noticeably hot so beware of that but its not caused any problems so far. I believe it shouldn’t be a problem because the alliminium casing is designed to allow heat to flow through the device. On the upside, the lack of fan means electricity usage is very low.

I’d recommend it to most people as long as your not storing files more than 4GB per file.

General thoughts: Very good for most people, ideal as a home storage solution. Maybe not so useful for people who store DVDs on their hard disks, for example.

Update 3.2.09: Since I did this post back in December, Freecom have increased the price of this drive. However, the drive itself is still the same and they have not modified it.

Windows Live Messenger and the annoying spam “viruses” (Warning and fix)

Don’t you find it annoying when a contact (its a computer, not the real person sending you the link) sends you a link that looks perfectly realistic and you download it to find it’s actually a messenger “virus”.

I was a victim of one today and they are absolutely mind boggling. You don’t initially know they are what they are, but when you do they are enough to send you insane.

I had one of the most annoying ones today. You may want to know this as a warning. If you get a link from someone saying the following:

foto http://site.facebooky.net/ and then what looks like an image link with your email address on the end, do NOT open the link or download the attached file.

It’s one that spams all your contacts with the same link but with their email address, and then freezes your mouse so their is nothing you can do about it. When it’s finished driving all your friends mad with spam links, it hands the mouse back for 5 minutes, and then repeats itself again.

In the end I decided all I could do was wait until it wanted to spam everyone again, and then turn off the wifi adapter so it couldnt send any messages. Once it decided it couldn’t send anything and handed the mouse back, I checked the task manager for suspicious files.

One file in particular caught my eye: fxstaller.exe

A quick Google search found that this was the file causing the problem, and that many other people were having the same issue.

The file hides itself away in C:/Windows and although Windows reports it being there, it wont show up since its hidden. The best way i decided to kill it was (in Windows Vista) open up the start menu, search fxstaller.exe (but NOT pressing Enter) and when the file was listed, right click it and delete. And that ended my woes.

If you have the issue, that’s how you fix it.

The final Freecom Network Drive Update…

At last! A large package from CCL delivery arrived on my doorstep arrived on my doorstep today.

And thank god… rejoice… the heavens have opened, its here! The brand new drive is here, and it works!

And it’s not bad at all. It works at about 2mbps file upload and download so its not so bad. Its not Gigabit ethernet but still its relatively good.

I can stop complaining about it now!