How to test your PC reliability

It's always good to know that your computer is stable. This way you'll ensure running critical operations smoothly without any crashing. Here I'll show you a few reliable programs for CPU and memory testing.

How to test the CPU
I've been using IntelBurnTest which includes Intel libraries used exclusively for CPU testing prior to its market release. IntelBurnTest software is compatible with AMD processors and tests faster than Prime95. Just make sure that your testing system is equipped with proper cooling.
Tips:
Prior testing please download and run Realtemp - this way you can watch in real-time the temperature - and make sure it's below 70°C.
Prime counts determine the memory size used in the test.
Residual values must be equal or less e^-09 i.e. e^-10, e^-11, and so on.
Residual Normalized should be between e^-02 and e^-04. (from 0.01 to 0.0001)
Numbers outside these ranges indicate that you experience memory or CPU errors.
Try at least 10 or 20 passes.
When having more than 2 GB RAM running on the 32-bit version of Windows please use the tests on a 64-bit version of Windows in order to allocate the whole memory(above the 2GB addressing space).


Linux users could use: http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/

you may also try:
http://systester.sourceforge.net/downloads.html
and CPU Stability Test

Memory testing
I've been using: memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

SuperPI mod

If during work you happen to see: picture flickering, activation and deactivation of small pixels on the screen or computer halts after heavy usage it's probably your video card or the installed memory slots. If however after testing your memory with memtest86 the problems persist and your video card is embedded then your filtering capacitors are getting old or just don't function properly. They pollute the data stored in your computer memory - remember that its shared memory is being used by the video card. In such a case it's better to replace the capacitors with new ones.

Improving Adsense eCPM / RPM and CPC

There are some things that anyone could do to increase his/her income when using Adsense.
You can learn a bit more about the SEO topic from my online course.

1. Decrease your ad units count
Second and third ad spot clicks are not so-profitable as the first ones. Also when having 15 ad links on a page and the user clicks on only 1 then your eCPM will start to get low, because this way the advert impressions are growing but the clicks are staying the same.

2. Rearrange ad spots
Look at your AdSense performance tab: and if you have higher CPC on your middle positioned ad(ie it is getting more clicks) then place it to appear first in your HTML code, then re-position it with CSS to the place where it's getting those clicks.

3. Add more useful content to the page
You can use Google Analytics or other web statistics software to see the average time of stay on your pages. This way you might find the pages that need to be enriched or rewritten. And if you manage to increase visitors'  stay time then your eCPM will surely grow!
 
Next, let's discuss how to increase your Adsense earnings by improving the eCPM ( RPM ) parameter.

4. Direct hits and RPM
By definition, RPM is ' the amount of revenue you can expect to earn from AdSense for every 1000 impressions shown on your site ' which is something totally different from how much 1000 impressions on your site actually cost!

And as you can see from this video:


in order to have high eCPM you'll have to ensure unique visitors are clicking on your ads.

But first, let's see how to recognize some of the actions that "repeated" users (or our direct traffic hits) perform. They usually:
-  type the URL in the browser / open a new tab or access the URL from bookmarks.
-  come from links found in email/newsletter, Word or PDF files.
-  come from redirects (301 header redirect, javascript or meta refresh tags)

As you might have seen in the video above there's an inverse connection between your eCPM value and the traffic you have. In other words: receiving more mixed(not unique) traffic in effect will only lower your eCPM.

Filtering direct hits
So as you can see our first priority becomes not the obvious one to get more traffic in order to display more ads, but to display relevant ads to our organic public segment only ( i.e. users coming from search engine queries). This way we'll be displaying fewer ads, but the eventual incoming clicks are going be much more valuable.

Here is a simple PHP script that will filter out most of the direct hits and display advertisement only to users coming from google:
Assuming that your AdSense code is placed in the variable $ads;

<?if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "google")) { echo $ads; }
?>

or the more generic one: displaying ads on the referral only traffic by filtering out hits generated from your own domain:

<?
$referer = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
$my_domain = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
if (!strstr($referer['host'], $my_domain['host'])) {echo $ads; }
?>

5. Increasing bounce rate
I know that this may sound very frustrating like everyone out there is suggesting just the opposite, but after watching the video you may start thinking about it.

6. Update your ads with the asynchronous version of the code
This will improve your page loading times as well as display the ads faster to the end-user. Just go to My ads, click on the preferred ad -> get code and from the select box choose the Beta async version.

7. Don't mix ad channels
If you are using 1 ad code in different websites placed at different positions this will interfere and alter the ad basic parameters, and with time will limit your overall cost per click value. This is especially true if you are using targeting options.

That's it, don't forget to write unique content and I hope this post helps you actually increase your AdSense earnings!