“A book for people who use Windows 7 at home or at work and know it can do more for them, but who don’t know how. The Windows 7 Power Users Guide contains helpful how-to’s, full colour pictures and quick tips to guide you through everything from using the Start Menu and Taskbar to backing up your documents and identifying and fixing problems.”

Mike has been writing for some time now on our sister sites Windows7News.com and ConnectedInternet.co.uk.  He said about coming to gHacks “I like to approach things from an end-users’s point of view, after all, we’re not all MSCE qualified tech support engineers.  I’m looking forward to bringing some support, news and a little bit of humour my posts at gHacks and I’m very grateful to Martin for the opportunity.”

We look forward to Mike’s contributions which will begin later this week.  Welcome aboard and good luck.

A new week recap will be published on each Monday from now on giving short but precise information about the posts (max of one per day) that have been published at Otakugadgets in the last seven days. On to the posts:

• Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T: HD, Thin and Light with a Low Battery Life – Sony is one of those companies that give a lot of attention to the appearance and the details of their laptops. Apple of course leads the industry in this (read Jobs is) but Sony is a good second in the design aspect. From their Vaio series of high-end laptops comes the well-designed and good looking Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T.
• 5 Recent Voice Controlled Gadgets That Are Totally Cool! – Voice control is not what it used to be at one point. Back in the days when it was first introduced as part of mobile phones and other gadgets, it was still in its nascent stages. At that point, it was nothing more than a gimmick. This I can say from first-hand experience with older Nokia phones. The accuracy was nowhere near usable and well, it was not something you would want to rely upon.
• Altec Lansing Expressionist Series Speakers: Double Barrel or Single Bass, Take Your Pick – A lot of people these days are making a permanent shift to laptops. There are various points as to why everyone is leaving their desktops but the main reason is the compactness and the portability. Laptops are fast becoming as powerful as desktops and hence it is easy to understand why people who wouldn’t make the switch earlier are doing it now. While laptops can match desktops spec to spec now, there’s usually one thing missing when people make the switch and that is audio.
• Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1465dx: Runs longer and heavier – The Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1465dx is another laptop that is focused on being a great 14-inch laptop for students. As you might already know, students demand specific things from their laptops and the recent run of student friendly laptops try to conform to those demands. This particular portable has the advantage of a really long battery life. It has a huge battery that is likely to last you all day and for real.
• Dell Studio S1440-022B: If you want budget and slim minus an optical drive, this is it – The Dell Studio S1440-022B is targeted at school students who are looking for a budget laptop. This new offering from Dell does something quite bold and does away with the optical drive altogether. As a result, the laptop becomes much slimmer and weighs less as well.
• RIM (Research In Motion) BlackBerry Curve 8520: A Cheaper Curve – The new BlackBerry Curve 8520 is the model that comes after the Curve 8900. It is a lot like the 8900 with some of the features missing. Physically the design of the Curve 8520 looks a lot like the Curve 8900 but the former has enough new features that set it apart.
• 8 Eco-Friendly ways of turning your gadgets green – I have recently been noticing a lot of new Eco-gadgets (or green gadgets if you will) in the market. A year or two back, these genuine eco-friendly products were barely practical let alone cool. But all that has changed. They are now looking pretty sleek and you can actually use them if you can get them. They aren’t always available and they are not available everywhere. If you do get them rest assured that that they are pretty cool and very practical.

Let us know if you have any tips or requests. We would love to hear them.

We figured that a gadget and hardware website would fit perfectly in our portfolio, as we love to write about things that we love and are passionate about. Hah, that sounds a little bit stupid. Still, if you want to keep the motivation to write for a website after a month or year you need to be passionate about the niche. Or, you need to be one of those professional writers who can write about everything without problems.

Otaku Gadgets is on the other hand an experiment as we never operated a blog where the contributions were mostly coming from writers that we hired. We made sure to hire professional writers who are also passionate about the things that they write about.

The design of the site and pretty much everything is temporary for now. We have the intention to change to a custom design in the future but this will be fine for now. I would be very happy if you would pay a visit to the site. You can subscribe to the RSS feed if you like and I encourage you to voice your opinion on the site. Is there something that you love, like, do not like, hate? Keep in mind that it is a work in progress.

It is funny how some things turn out. I met Everton back in 2005 when we created our first websites and we have become good friends over time. It is very likely that this is not the our last project.

I was one of the first adopters when Google released their search engine while all of my friends and colleagues were still using Yahoo or local search engines. I believed in Google, that it was the best and told and convinced everyone I knew that they were the best. The error that I made was that I never looked back, I did not check other search engines to see if they would deliver better results or offer better search possibilities.

I believed that Google is the best. Well, I honestly do not know if their search engine is the best, hearing lots of critics who claim otherwise. It is a fact that spammers do concentrate on Google because most users use Google and not another search engine.

So, what I want to do is the following: I will look at other search engines from now on and use them to see how good they are. Unlike Everton however I do not use a lot of other Google Services. I have a Gmail account but that is not my primary account.

The fact is. Google relies on its dominant market position as a search engine. That’s why they make billions of cash because everyone is using them. I don’t want them to disappear, I just want that the market share is divided fairly among several search engines, not just one.

Read More:

Breaking Google’s Stranglehold On The Internet

The software that I would recommend are AVG Antivir, CCleaner, Audacity, Gimp, Skype, Filezilla and Firebug while the rest is in my opinion not necessary. The list compiled by Gili had the purpose to list applications that he did install on his newly bought notebook.

I actually knew all of the applications listed but one which was Zoho which seems to be an online Office suite. Head out to Connected Internet if you are new to computers or would like to take a peak at the list. It’s by no means perfect but good enough to suit most users.

Read More:

Software for your Computer at Connected Internet.

1. Ghacks was an accident. I never had the intention to create a regular blog from it.
2. I love sports. I do play football regulary because it is fun and keeps me in shape.
3. My favorite song is Vincent from Don McLean. I have the stary night picture he is singing about at home.
4. I once had a relationship with a very beautiful Danish girl who I met in Spain. Europe rules, did I mention this ? My love for the Scandinavian countries steems from this relationship.
5. Once every year I’m travelling together with my parents and brother to one European city. We already have been in Berlin, London and Prague and will continue this tradition in the coming years.

So, that have been the five facts that I wanted to share with you. The game has to continue, I’m therefor tagging the following blogs: Mikeal from Sweden who is running the awesome gadgets blog fosfor, gnome from Greece who likes to hide in his lair, thinker who is running a polish blog (hope it is polish :P), Gina from Lifehacker who is a great inspiration for me and finally the Spanish blog genbeta.