Eugene's observations

Although there is a high degree of security built in to iPhone and iPad applications (by virtue of only being available via the Apple Store), note that Android based phones and tablets are inherently insecure - 44% of such devices that are infected call premium rate numbers without your (initial) knowledge according to the Juniper Global Threat Center. The lesson is to always use protection.

Many people know that phishing is the luring of good folks into entering private information into dodgy websites by sending links through e-mail; or possibly just sending people to infected websites that can silently install a drive-by virus. How good do you think you are at identifying such sites ? There are a couple of places that can test your prowess in a fun way:
http://phish-no-phish.com
http://paypal.com/fightphishing

In my opinion the first question on the PayPal site is incorrectly marked, but otherwise these may be eye openers.

For a degree of automated protection from phishers, set your DNS (ideally in your router/DHCP server rather than each PC individually) to the OpenDNS one of 208.67.222.222 or Google at 8.8.8.8

Up and coming technologies just about to hit the big time in 2012 are predicted by me to include:

1. Windows 8, Microsoft's latest operating system. Targeted firmly at tablet PCs and featuring their new 'Metro' user interface - a bunch of tiles that will launch an application but can display real-time information too.
2. Facebook challenging Google for the No. 1 website position. Why search Google when your friends can give trusted opinions ? But more than that, why identify yourself to numerous websites when one Facebook ID is all you need.
3. Solid State Disk drives (SSDs) - they are here now but the demand will bring the price down to the level where most new PCs will have them - laptops by the Summer and towers by year end.
4. Thunderbolt hits PCs - we all use USB and version 3 has just made that 5 times faster. But that's nothing compared to the speed that Thunderbolt will deliver - about 10 times faster than USB 2 in real world tests.
5. Near Field Communication - NFID is like the RFID tags but upgraded to allow them to be cheaply attached to any device so that your smart phone can scan and be scanned. Expect to use your phone for small purchases, hotel room door keys even speaking with someone remotely ! This will be incorporated in Google Nexus phones and, I predict, the iPhone 5.

Many people know that SSDs are much faster than the traditional electro mechanical disk drives, use less power, produce less heat and last much longer. The only drawback is that they cost a little more - not so much now though; so they are a sensible upgrade for both laptops and towers if most cases. To get the best performance out of SSDs Windows should be installed from scratch. If cloning or migrating from an old disk there are a few things that can be modified to improve performance or longevity.

• Disable features that involve moving data to equally fast memory: Open REGEDIT and navigate to
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
  Look for the keys EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch. Both should be set to 0.
• Make use of the TRIM command to have the disk handle delete operations in the background. First check whether this is already set by getting to the CMD prompt and typing fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify if you are informed that it is set to 0 move on to the next thing otherwise enter the following command to enable TRIM fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0
• Make sure that SSDs are not defragmented. This is more than a superfluous operation, it actively shortens the expected lifetime of the disk as leveling disrupts file patterns.

When you open your browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Chrome) and type the address of your favourite website, that address has to be converted from an alphabetic string that is easy for humans to remember into a numeric code that uniquely identifies the computer that holds the website you are looking for. In geekspeak, domain name system (DNS) resolution. This code is maintained by 13 computer clusters dotted around the world and then passed on to other servers such as your own Internet service provider (ISP) - the place most people automatically go to get this information.

Maintaining DNS servers costs money, and some ISPs use faster computers than others. If you are unlucky enough to sign up to a poor ISP you may be wasting a second each time you lookup an address. Not much admittedly, but if you multiply that by the number of websites you visit added to your e-mail provider, then multiply that by the average number of foreign references on a page, such as advertisements, the time does become more significant.

The good news is that there are DNS providers that are free to use and often faster than your ISP, and changing is easy. Just enter the new address in your computer or router. I have just run a DNS tester program that I downloaded from CodeProject and measured the speed of access to 60 random websites. I did this using my own ISP's DNS server and compared it to those offered by some publicly available options such as OpenDNS and Google. The difference between best and worst websites varied considerably - some taking 11 seconds to resolve. But by comparing the averages for each of the DNS servers I tested I have been able to optimize my own browsing by setting my primary DNS server to 8.8.8.8 and the secondary to 4.2.2.1