Chances are you don’t know about these great technology products because they are only available overseas. We’re here to ruin your day by making you covet them as much as we do.

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Technology isn’t the same everywhere. Some countries take longer to get the newest, best, coolest, shiniest toys—even the United States of America. That’s why, every once and a while, we try to round up a list of fantastic products that you can’t get here. Sometimes the differences with what is available are slight, sometimes they’re major, but it’s always an excellent excuse to see how the other half lives with gear that we can’t have yet, and may never get.

You can check online at sites like Dynamism for a chance to import some of these products, but be prepared for disappointment (or at least sticker-shock).

I can’t imagine troubleshooting a Windows PC without Process Explorer. Users frequently compare Process Explorer to Windows’ built-in Task Manager, but I tend to think of Process Explorer as what Task Manager should’ve been. There’s so much more to Process Explorer that it’s hard to put the two in the same sentence.

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Process Explorer tells you which files are currently open by what program. That feature alone has saved me half a head of hair because, once identified by Process Explorer, the process that’s locked up your file can be killed.

Process Explorer also gives you full information on all of the svchost processes running on your PC. That accounts for the other half a head.

Mouse over a process, even a generic svchost, and you can see the command line that launched the process, the path to the executable file, and all of the Windows services being used. Right-click and you can go online to get more information about the executable. It’ll show each executable’s handles (believe me, that’s important), let you search for an executable based on the handle, and show you the percentage of CPU being consumed, not only by a process, but even by thread within the process.

If you drag the cross-hairs icon over a window, Process Explorer shows you every conceivable detail about the program that’s controlling the window. Process Explorer also shows marvelously complex graphs of CPU usage, memory commitment, and I/O activity. It’s spectacular, even if you’ve never ventured beyond the “what’s my handle” stage.

What’s new in this version? The official TechNet blog says you should expect a “slew” of enhancements and new functionality. I couldn’t find such a bounty, but the new stuff I did locate looks quite useful.

The best new feature is called Tree CPU usage. In the past, Process Explorer would show you the percentage of CPU usage for each process or subprocess. If you bring in the Tree CPU Usage column, Process Explorer will additionally show you the total CPU usage for all subprocesses.

Easiest way to see it: Crank up Google Chrome, which uses lots of subprocesses. In Process Explorer’s Process view, right-click on any of the column headings and choose Select Columns. Click on the Process Performance tab, and check the box marked Tree CPU Usage. Click OK. You see a new column called Tree CPU Usage. Drag it over next to the CPU column and watch. You can see how much CPU all of Chrome takes, not just the individual subprocesses.

There are cosmetic improvements, too. The System Information window now has tabs, giving some breathing room to a previously cramped layout, with a few more memory statistics. By and large, though, if you’re familiar with Process Explorer 12.04, you’ll be right at home with Process Explorer 14. (Yes, in true triskaidekaphobia fashion, PE skipped version 13.)

Is there someone out there wh have completed the MCSE for Windows Server 2003 studying on their own?
i am in the process of purchasing the :
MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exams 70-290, 70-291, 70-293, 70-294): Microsoft® Windows Server(TM) 2003 Core
Requirements, Second Edition is 50 hours of study a week anough time to get certified in 3 months?

are this good books to study, are they easy to understand?

i just graduated with an AS degree in computer technology, but i have no certifications and this sscare the hell out of me.

i have a few months to decide what i am going to do, mean while i would like to get certified.

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i dont have any mony for boot camps and stuff, so i am thinking on doing the training on my own.
i have a few questions.
1. more or less, how long does it take to get certified
2. i have 3 months of free time, would that do
3. onse the first test is completed, how long do i have to complete the others
4. i have 3 computers at home i would like to network, is this anough for a lab?
5. any tips, or sugestions

Yes, it is possible to get certified for MS by doing self study. I did it myself and so have others. I’m an MCSA. I could go for my MCSE but I’ll talk more about that later.

You said you have 3 months and you want to be an MCSE in that time? I highly doubt you can pull it off. I got my MCSA in 8-9 months. Of course different people learn at a different pace. I usually took 1 month to read 2 books for the same test. The second month I took practice tests and skimmed over the books I had read. Third month I took the test. This worked for me for the first 2 tests. The last 2 test I failed the first time and had to re-read the material to get a better grasp of it. You HAVE to factor failing into your time. It’s very rare for people to pass all MS certs without failing at least 1 test.

I forget what the 2nd books were that I used to study but the first ones were from Thomson Course Technology. You should read 2 different books for each test. That way what one book skimmed on or wasn’t very clear should make sense in the second book.

Forget about getting your MCSE. Go for your MCSA. As a matter of fact, the first 3 tests are the same for each cert. If you’re smart, you’ll take the 4th test that is required for MCSA and also counts for MCSE. Take the Exchange Server test and you’ll be good. Careful because not all the optional tests count for the MCSE and vice versa.

I don’t recall there being a time limit as to when you need to complete the others by. As a matter of fact, MS certs don’t expire like other certs do. They last until MS stops supporting the product. Windows 2000 MCSA/MCSE just expired this year! However, I think with server 2008 they are going to start expiring every 3 years like other certs do.

3 pcs are just perfect for your training environment. I only had 1 when I was studying for it. You can run 2 servers & 1 client or vice versa.

My other tip is to take other tests as well besides MS. I would say bypass Network+ and study for the CCENT. It’s the new entry level cert for Cisco. That way you have both MS certs and networking certs. Cisco is a better cert than Network+.

Last but not least, don’t stress so much about getting the MCSE. Like I said, I got the MCSA in January 2008. It’s now June and I haven’t taken any other tests to go for my MCSE. There’s 2 reasons for this. One, like yourself I also graduated in June 2008 with an AS degree. Having no real job experience and yet having an MCSA I have no administrator job. I was unemployed for 6 months because I refused to get a desktop support job. I wanted to be an admin but that is not going to happen if you have no experience. So be prepared to take tech support jobs because admin jobs require experience. Desktop support is what I have been doing for the last 6 months. My MCSA is not being really used and it didn’t open doors for me.

That said perhaps where you live people are begging for MCSA certified people. Around where I live, no one is. Of the very few jobs that are looking for an admin, they want someone who’s been doing it for at least 8 years. So by the end of this year I will be moving to another state and see if I can find something better. Good luck.

With hundreds of handsets to choose from, it can be tough to find the right one. Here’s what you need to know to dial up the perfect phone.

In the age of apps, smartphones get all the buzz these days, but half of the cell phones sold in the U.S. are still feature phones: camera phones, music phones, waterproof phones, texting phones, or just plain voice phones.

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We’re recommending smartphones to more and more people now, but there are still reasons to get a simpler device. It’s not just about being a Luddite. Maybe you want to save on monthly fees by avoiding a smartphone’s $10-$30 data package, you don’t want to give your teenager the power to buy apps, or you just don’t want to be tethered to the Internet all the time.

Unlike smartphones, feature phones are a matter of “what you see is what you get.” They don’t receive magical software upgrades or run thousands of additional apps, as does the iPhone 4, for example. Most do more than make calls, though you can find phones that only make calls, if a basic phone is what you want. But most feature phones include some combination of a camera, a basic Web browser, e-mail, and text messaging apps, and music and video players. Those features will usually be inferior to even budget smartphones, but they’re perfectly usable.

Feature phones are typically less expensive than smartphones. They’re available in a much wider range of shapes and sizes, and on a broader range of plans including prepaid options. Monthly service fees for feature phones are generally less expensive too.

Ready to find your new phone? Here’s what you should consider before you start shopping:

First, Choose Your Carrier
Because all the national carriers sell a wide variety of phones, choosing your service provider should be your first move. Start with our Readers’ Choice Awards to see which carriers came out on top. Here’s a quick rundown of what each one offers:

AT&T boasts nationwide coverage and a terrific selection of phones, particularly for texting. It has dramatically improved its service quality in the Northeast over the past year. But service plans for more powerful feature phones are so expensive, you might as well get a smartphone. It’s also the worst-rated carrier by our readers.

Cricket and MetroPCS are “unlimited” carriers that offer much lower rates than their competitors and don’t require contracts. But they aren’t available everywhere, and have a somewhat limited selection of phones.

Sprint is relatively inexpensive, and offers some neat media services and a solid high-speed network. It also has the most open approach to third-party apps, letting its subscribers add a wide range of Java applications to its feature phones. Sprint has two prepaid brands, Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile, that sell phones without contracts.

T-Mobile offers cutting-edge phones at relatively low monthly rates and enjoys a reputation for good customer service. It’s the only carrier that offers a monthly discount in exchange for paying full price for your phone up front. But its network can be weaker than the other major carriers’ in rural areas.

U.S. Cellular is only available in about half the country, yet it consistently gets great scores on our Readers’ Choice Awards because of its strong commitment to customer service. This year the carrier started the “Belief Project,” a new customer-service plan offering perks like free battery swaps and replacements for damaged phones.

Verizon Wireless is famed for its excellent network quality and good customer service. Its prices can be higher than the competition, but when it comes to voice quality, many Verizon phones excel. That makes Verizon a perpetual leader in our Readers’ Choice Awards.

You may also see unlocked phones on the market that work with GSM networks such as AT&T and T-Mobile but aren’t sold by the carriers. These handsets are often imports. Because they’re generally more expensive than carrier-approved-and-subsidized phones, few are sold in the U.S. But you can find a few bargains, such as the affordable Sony Ericsson Naite, in case your AT&T or T-Mobile phone breaks and you need a replacement.

Next, What Are Your Feature Priorities?

Because feature phones do almost everything, you should decide what capabilities you need or want most. Start narrowing down your choices by first ranking the five major categories of features in order of importance: voice quality and capabilities, messaging, camera, media playback, and Web/GPS/games/miscellaneous. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to concentrate on a more narrow selection of feature phones.

If you’re big on text messaging, you want a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. If you’ve got a small child, a camera is probably important. If you want to ditch your iPod, keep an eye out for good media features.

Since it’s a given that you want your calls to sound good, you may feel you should focus mainly on voice rather than other features. You don’t need to worry too much about that. The vast majority of phones sold today have solid voice capabilities. Paying attention to your other feature needs, and then double-checking to make sure the phone you choose delivers on voice quality, makes it easier to sift through a long list of handsets.

What to Look for: Voice

Reading reviews and trying out a phone before you buy it are the best ways of gauging voice quality. Most phones fit into a broad middle range of reception and sound quality. But you can still find phones that are uncommonly loud or have a lot of “side tone,” that is, the feedback of your own voice in your ear (which can help you avoid yelling into the phone).

If you’re primarily interested in voice and you’re looking at AT&T or T-Mobile, focus on 3G phones. Those carriers’ 3G networks offer superior voice quality to that of the 2G networks. The major downside is that AT&T and T-Mobile 3G phones have about half the battery life of 2G phones.

Important voice features to look for include no-training voice dialing, Bluetooth headset support, and a standard (3.5mm) wired headset jack. Yes, there are still super-simple phones out there that basically only make calls. The Samsung Haven on Verizon Wireless and the Motorola i335 on Sprint are voice-only phones.

What to Look for: Messaging

Quick-messaging devices, otherwise known as texting phones, are are tremendously popular right now. If you intend to text often, get a plan with unlimited text messaging—it’ll likely save you money in the long run. The best phones for heavy messaging have full QWERTY keyboards, like the Verizon Wireless Samsung Intensity II and T-Mobile’s Samsung Gravity 3. You may also want to check that the phone supports threaded texting, a feature that groups together all text messages from the same sender.

Don’t expect e-mail or IM on feature phones to give you a full smartphone experience. Feature-phone e-mail programs typically download your e-mail in text-only mode, without attachments, and feature-phone IM programs often won’t let you access your AIM buddies. Sprint’s e-mail program, on handsets like the LG Rumor Touch, is the best of the bunch, supporting multiple accounts and some attachments. If you have a Sprint or and AT&T phone, you may be able to run a free Gmail client with conversation view and search support.

What to Look For: Camera and Media

Let’s be completely honest here. The best camera phones and music phones nowadays are all smartphones. For a few years, feature phones with the good cameras and music players flourished. But especially now that the Android OS is popular, phone manufacturers have decided that anyone who wants to take decent pictures or replace their iPod probably wants a smartphone.

Feature phone cameras can still satisfy casual users who just want snaps to post on Facebook or Twitter. Look for a phone with at least a 2-megapixel camera. Keep an eye on reviews to see which phones take washed-out, compressed-looking photos and which take bright, clear shots. It’s harder to find a good video phone. If you want to post your videos online or burn them to DVD, look for a handset that captures 640-by-480-pixel videos, at 30 frames per second or better. One of the few good remaining options is Verizon’s LG enV Touch VX11000.

For music, you want a phone with a 3.5-mm headphone jack, so you can listen to your songs with standard headphones. If you get a phone with a 2.5-mm jack, or even worse a proprietary one, you’ll need a clumsy adapter to use quality headphones. As an alternative, look for a phone that supports stereo Bluetooth wireless headphones.

The best non-smartphone music experience is on Verizon Wireless with V CAST Music with Rhapsody; these phones sync with the powerful Rhapsody music program on Windows PCs. The freeware doubleTwist does a great job of syncing both PCs and Macs with some LG and Sony Ericsson phones. Another option is iTunes Agent, an open-source app that lets you sync some phones with iTunes.

What to Look for: Web/GPS/Games/Etc.

Some phones have decent browsers that display most Web pages; others have basic WAP browsers. If you want to surf often on your phone, look for a model with the Opera Mini Web browser. All Sprint and some T-Mobile phones let you download Opera Mini, and some AT&T phones come with it pre-installed. Most current phones come with some variety of for-pay GPS capability—but be sure to get a handset with a loud speakerphone so you can hear the directions.

For the accident-prone, some phones, like AT&T’s Samsung Rugby II or the G’zOne Ravine for Verizon Wireless, are even ruggedized or waterproof.

How to Get the Best Price

Once you’ve made your handset decision, it’s time to head to your carrier’s store, right? Maybe not. The best deals you can find on feature phones are almost always online. Five places to look:

1) Your carrier’s own Web site will likely have prices that are considerably lower than what you can find in a brick-and-mortar store. And you can often find online-only instant rebates.

2) You can find amazing deals on Amazon.com if you’re switching carriers. You may have to send in a mail-in rebate form, however.

3) and 4) Wirefly.com and LetsTalk.com are reliable, competing cell-phone stores with their own exclusive offers.

5) Finally, true cheapskates should look for used phones on eBay. Especially if you’re hoping to spend under $50 without signing a new contract, you can often find great deals on last year’s models.

Apple iMovie isn’t the simplest video editing application; that honor now goes to Windows Live Movie Maker. But iMovie combines simplicity with more powerful tools, surpassing Microsoft’s Windows 7-and-Vista-only app with features like image stabilization, voiceover recording, and overlays (think picture-in-picture or green-screen effects). The latest version of our Editor’s Choice-winning entry-level movie editor for Mac is mostly an incremental update, but it adds some impressive new tricks: Hollywood-style trailer creation and audio adjustments top the list of what’s new. Some new effects like slow motion and instant replay have become easy to add. And iMovie ’11 even has something I haven’t seen in an entry-level video-editing program—face detection.

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I tested iMovie on a 2.4GHz MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 1.4GHz MacBook Air (11-inch). Installing iMovie is part of the iLife ’11 installation, which is no minor update and isn’t just a matter of dragging a disk image to the applications folder. This makes sense, since it’s multiple applications: On my 2.4GHz MacBook, it took a solid 20 minutes. You can’t install iMovie separately, but if you don’t want the other apps it includes, you can remove them individually later. Even the first time, iMovie started up much faster than Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac on the same MacBook.

When you go to add video files to iLife ’11, it optimizes them at import, which can slow things down, but you can turn off optimization before you start the import. When I imported from using a USB stick with a mixed bag of standard and high def content, about 45 files in all, the program told me that it would take 4 hours. And unfortunately there’s no Cancel button for this process, so I had to Force Quit. The problem turned out to be some preprocessed video file formatting—iMovie only wants to work with actual content from camcorders and cameras. In Windows Live Movie Maker, the same process offered a cancel button, and it even showed thumbnails of the content being imported. It also took less than five minutes. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 for Mac had no trouble importing these files, but that app takes a lot longer to load than iMovie, and crashed a couple times during my testing.

I was also disappointed with the limited selection of video-capable digital still cameras that iMovie directly supported; on Apple’s webpage dedicated to showing which models and formats were supported, only one Canon DSLR with one format was listed, the EOS 5D Mark II and AVCHD. When I plugged in a 7D, nothing. For supported camcorders like the Flip line, the import experience was excellent, showing thumbnails of all the movies on the device and letting me play them for a preview even before the import. I could also drag clips from a Finder folder to iMovie, but only to an Event, not to the source clip area.

Tagging and star-rating clips has been around for while, but having the app analyze your imported video clips for People is a new feat of iMovie ’11; 20 clips totaling 6 minutes took 10 minutes to analyze. Once this was done, I could see a purple line going through the parts of clips containing people, and a tooltip showing whether it was one, two or a group of people. At the bottom of the app’s window, I could click on an silhouette icon to restrict the Event area to just clips containing humans—a helpful tool, which is also found in Premiere Elements, but not in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Interface
With iMovie, Apple invented a new and now much-copied video editing metaphor, and this interface remains in the ’11 version. It intuitively combines storyboard and timeline view. At first, this may throw people used to working in a standard timeline. The app also has a few interface quirks, but after a little experience, using it becomes second nature. Passing the mouse cursor over any clip either in the source or production areas plays that part of the clip or movie. You can swap the Events (source clips) with the Project view from the default Project in the top panel, with a neat animation that shows what’s going where.

When you drag the mouse across a clip’s storyboard entry, which corresponds to its length, the section is encircled with a yellow selection box, and you can add just that selected section to the project. I do wish it were a little easier to select a whole clip in the source—a double click opens the Inspector, which shows duration any applied effects (like stabilization); you can choose to select the whole clip from a right-click context menu choice. Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t get the full screen view new to iPhoto ’11, which would be a definite advantage in the screen-hungry activity of video editing.

Full-Fledged Hollywood-style Trailers
Version ’11’s canned movie themes go way beyond ’09’s six, including trailer formats that set your home movies to grandiose symphonic background music. Also new are a couple sports-centric instant movie options. When I chose a Movie Trailer theme such as Action, Adventure, Noir, or Blockbuster, I was presented with three pro-studio-style tabs for the production—Outline (and a yellow pad with handwriting font), Storyboard, and Shot list. The first let me enter the cast and crew, and the Storyboard and Shot List tabs are where you enter clips for use in the trailer.

The storyboard and shot list tabs are where the magic happens: They both show thumbnails of types of clip required to complete the trailer—action, group shot, close-up, and so on. In the Storyboard, they’re arranged chronologically, and in the Shot List by type. You can’t change the duration of these, since they’re timed to sync with the background music, and the program will adjust your chosen clip or clip section to the correct length if it isn’t already. The result is a high-definition movie trailer sequence perfectly timed with an exciting music score performed by no less than the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s even easier to make than this writeup makes it sound, and you can always go back and change any clips or text.