Month: October 2006

News: New Best Buy digital music servce, powered by RealNetworks

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 06/10/2006
1 Comment on News: New Best Buy digital music servce, powered by RealNetworks

As previously noted, Real will launch a new Rhapsody-To-Go-DRM technology, dubbed Rhapsody DNA, on the Rhapsody music and media service.

News today from Dealerscope.com is that the big box, CE retailer Best Buy is kicking off a new music service powered by Rhapsody, optimized for SanDisk’s 2200R Rhapsody DNA-compatible digital music players.

“Best Buy Co. Inc. announced a music service Thursday powered by RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody service and optimized for SanDisk Corp.’s latest digital music players. Starting October 15th, the Best Buy Digital Music Store, based on the newly released Rhapsody 4.0, and Sansa e200R Rhapsody players will become available. The players will come preloaded with 30 hours of music from EMI, SonyBMG, Universal and Warner artists.

“The move is designed to rattle the 88 percent share of the digital music download market held by Apple’s iTunes service and the better than 50 percent share of the digital music player market held by their iPod.

“Best Buy is offering a free two-month subscription to its new service to anyone who buys the new player (but don’t expect to listen to any of that music after the two months are up unless you subscribe).

The players range in price from $139.99 for a 2GB model to $249.99 for an 8GB model.

Best Buy has previously tried to enter the digital music store game with RioPort.com and Napster.

Best Buy Digital Music Store will launch at www.bestbuy.com/digitalmusicstore

Tags audio

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MSN Tech: Be a Better Computer Caretaker

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 05/10/2006
1 Comment on MSN Tech: Be a Better Computer Caretaker

Today on MSN Tech & Gadgets, a good article on how to be a better computer caretaker” “You spent good money on your PC. You might as well take good care of it, too.”

Get your operating system on CD and create those recovery disks

Do a backup

Run your disk defragmenter

Remember these three words: uninterruptible power supply

Don’t cold reboot

Watch the environment

Take care of your peripherals

Certainly agree with all of these items.

We had to reinstall the OS on one of our machines at home, and finding the original OEM operating system CDs was relatively easy. If you have multiple PCs in your household, write on the CDs which PC they are paired, as many are specific not only to an OEM brand but model.

As for back ups, if you don’t archive with a utility (like OneCare) then do a drag copy of your important folders from “My Documents” on to a recordable CD or DVD, or an external hard disk: the prices of external USB 2.0 drives is cheap enough for everyone to have a back up drive. At a minimum, shoot for backing up once a month.

If you live where the power is subject to weather impacts (we have trees that bring down the lines a couple of times in the winter) then an uninterruptible power supply is a must. Although we have laptops in the house, we also have a whole house surge supressor that installs on the mains into the home. And use fused and filtered power bars for your equipment, a standard feature on many uninterruptible power supplies.

Tags: customer service, customer satisfaction, Microsoft.