As gasoline prices reach beyond $4.00 per gallon, let’s take a pause to figure out if it is worth paying 20 cents more for the premium grade. The best place to look for an answer is in the owner’s manual.
If it asks for a regular grade (87 octane), then pumping that premium oil will be of no additional benefit. However, often time vehicle manufacturers suggest the premium fuel only to achieve optimum performance for the car. In that case, if the regular grade is used, the car will experience a negligible performance loss upto 5%.
Mordern cars automatically adjust the engine with the fuel grade provided to avoid damage. There is lot of information available on this topic from sources including scientific research, automakers and gasoline experts. Share your experience and opinion on premium gasoline. What grade do you use?
Until now applications like Google Earth let you roam all over the planet but now the rest of the universe is not that far either. Access all the universe at home using Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope.
The program was delevolped on the idea of late Jim Gray, Microsoft computer scientist, to make the universe accessible to everyone. It was acheived in partnership with NASA and California Institute of Technology for use of astronomical data and high-resolution images generated by top observatories and instruments such as Chandra and Hubble. The Worldwide Telescope uses images generated by observatory telescopes on earth and in space. The images are stitched together to put celestial bodies in the correct perspective and in their actual positions in the sky.
Worldwide Telescope can be download for free at worldwidetelescope.org
Some of us easily adapted to the new Vista environment without many complaints but for those who are nostalgic for sweet ol’ Windows XP operating system, PC Magazine has step-by-step directions to downgrade from fancy Vista to the simpler XP environment.
Vista requires more RAM than XP to operate and the GUI is certainly impressive but those who don’t care much about the appearance and just want to get their job done should switch back to the more stable, faster OS.
PC Magazine: How to Downgrade from Vista to XP
