Computer Tips

Create a free website

2011-09-12T16:36:00.003-04:00

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Plus, it's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BBC and TechCrunch, to name a few.

There are hundreds of professional looking themes to choose from. A reliable hosting team keeps the site stable by monitoring it 24/7, even while you sleep.

Create a free website or blog in minutes with free hosting and no ads. One of Time's 50 best websites of the year. Learn more.

Watch Out for Bogus IRS E-Mail!

2011-04-02T23:55:00.002-04:00

If you receive an e-mail that looks as though it's from the IRS, watch out! Don't even open it because it's a phishing scam. The IRS never requests personal info via e-mail.

Help fight these criminals by reporting phony IRS e-mails to phishing@irs.gov. For more information, please visit the IRS website.

Spring Clean Your Computer

2011-03-19T10:30:00.003-04:00

It's time for spring cleaning but don't forget that also includes your computer(s)! Really though, this tool should be used at least on a weekly basis and daily if you're a heavy Internet user.

For efficient computer cleanup, I recommend cnet's highly-rated, award-winning Glary Utilities, which has to-date been downloaded by over 20 million users. Okay, folks. Twenty million users can't be wrong. This is a set of really hot utilities and, best of all, it's FREE - that's 100% freeware. Read Cnet Editor and user reviews here.

This all-in-one utility will fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC, and if you want to upgrade to the Pro version, you will also receive optimization tools for your computer that will not only optimize its performance but will also solve problems, protect your privacy and help you to customize your system to suit your needs.

Start your cleanup now by downloading Glary Utilities here.

Save yourself embarrassment!

2010-08-18T13:11:00.002-04:00

The other day, I received a forward from a well-meaning friend, who received the forward from another well-meaning friend, who received the forward from.... Unfortunately, no one took the time to check out the source along the way.

To begin with, the forward included movie attachments that totaled 11 megabytes. Please do your friends a favor and do not forward any attachments or pictures over 100k. In many cases today, people receive their e-mail on smart phones and are billed for the amount of data channeled through their phones. I urge you to please be considerate.

The size of the attachments was a major problem with this forward. However, the source of the attachments was a far bigger violation of netiquette (Internet etiquette).

The opening screen on each movie gave credits to the website hosting the movies, printing the website address across the screen. Also, printed across the bottom of each screen on the movie attachments was the host website address.

Think of the embarrassment of the senders when they discovered (too late) that the host website address was the website of hard core pornographers. I hope everyone can learn a valuable lesson from the mistake of someone else.

For more help, please visit my blog post that shares the wisdom of a computer expert on how to forward e-mail appropriately.

I Made the Leap!

2009-08-04T14:19:00.004-04:00

Wow! Has it really been that long? I guess it really has. You see, it's been about six years since I made the leap from the PC world to the Mac world...and I'm not about to turn back! I am so glad I switched.

I now have a superb, underlying business-strength operating system that isn't freezing up and crashing all the time, with a user-friendly operating system on the top level. Best of all, I am not spending hours at the end of each day, cleaning up spyware and viruses that used to plague me on the PC. I feel like I can breathe again and I am able to get so much more work done without all the hassle and frustration I had been experiencing on the PC.

At first, I was really leery about switching, after having been on PCs since 1983. What convinced me was the answers I read on the Apple website, addressing other people's concerns. Take a look for yourself:

Coming from a PC world? Get the FAQs about Mac compatibility.

I recommend buying your first Mac directly from an Apple Retail Store so you can easily get all the help and support you need. You should be able to find a store near you. Check out this handy list:

Find an Apple Retail Store

Once you've gotten some experience under your belt, you may want to purchase online.

Buy a Mac online

Go ahead! Step out and take that leap. Believe me, you will be so glad you did.

How to Forward E-mail Appropriately

2007-11-22T23:39:00.000-05:00

A friend who is a computer expert received the following directly from a system administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails. Please read the short letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper procedures.

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it? Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses and names.

As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every e-mail address that has come across his computer.

Or someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right. All of that inconvenience over a nickel! How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps:

(1) When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them. Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second.

You MUST click the "Forward" button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

(2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC:(blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address.

If you don't see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it. It's that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say "Undisclosed Recipients in the "TO:" field of the people who receive it.

(3) Remove any "FW :" in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent.

(5) Have you ever gotten an e-mail that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The e-mail can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and e-mail addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and e-mail address on a petition.

(Actually, if you think about it, who's supposed to send the petition in to whatever cause it supports? And don't believe the ones that say that the e-mail is being traced. It just isn't so!)

The main ones I hate are the ones that say something like, "Send this e-mail to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your screen." Or sometimes they'll just tease you by saying something really cute will happen.

IT ISN'T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (Trust me. I'm still seeing some of the same ones that I waited on 10 years ago!) I don't let the bad luck ones scare me either. They get trashed.

Before you forward an Amber Alert, or a Virus Alert, or some of the other ones floating around nowadays, check them out before you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS!

Just about everything you receive in an e-mail that is in question can be checked out a Snopes. Just go to www.snopes.com. It's really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on.

So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.

Firefox - the web browser of choice

2006-07-19T12:54:00.000-04:00

If you haven't made the switch yet, I highly recommend you switch from using the Internet Explorer web browser to Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Here, you can watch a cute little video. (Requires the free Flash Player.)

After you've downloaded Firefox and installed it, be sure to follow these instructions for safer web browsing:

Launch Firefox by clicking on it's desktop icon.

From the drop-down menu at the top of the browser, select TOOLS and choose OPTIONS.

In the OPTIONS dialog box that pops up, click the PRIVACY icon and then choose the SETTINGS button in the lower right corner.

When the "Clear Private Data" dialog box pops up, select all the items under "Private Data" and then under "Settings," be sure to select "Clear private data when closing Firefox."

Last of all, click "OK."

Now, every time you start or close Firefox, you will see a "Clear Private Data" dialog box. Be sure to click the button that says "Clear Private Data Now" to clean up before and after browsing the web. This one little step will help keep most spyware off your computer. However, I still recommend using Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy to do a more thorough cleanup job.

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Computer Maintenance Tips

2005-12-10T14:59:00.002-05:00

Virus & Spyware Cleanup Tools
Having problems lately with virus and spyware infections? Here's what works well for me.

I suggest running Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Microsoft AntiSpyware programs with current program and spyware definition updates.

Ad-Aware Personal

Spybot Search & Destroy

Microsoft Windows Defender

I highly recommend AntiVir. I learned on a hi-tech discussion board that this software is exactly the same as Vexira, its extremely expensive, commercial counterpart. It has FAR outperformed Norton AntiVirus, in my opinion.

AntiVir

Run these online, commercial-strength cleanup tools. This is what computer shops use to clean up viruses:

Housecall

Panda ActiveScan

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Post-Installation Tips
Here are some post-installation tips I learned from a computer guru. You may want to choose some of your own settings instead.

Customizing your Desktop

Right-click on an empty space on your Desktop and select "Properties.
Click "Desktop" tab and select "Customize Desktop."
Select Desktop icons you want to appear on your Desktop.
Finally, deselect "Run desktop cleanup Wizard every 60 days" and click "OK" or else the Wizard will automatically wipe out your Desktop icons periodically.

Customizing Power Management

Right-click My Computer icon on Desktop and select "Properties."
Choose "Hardware" tab and click "Device Manager."
Click plus sign (+) beside "Universal Serial Bus Controllers."
Right-click "USB Root Hub" and select "Properties."
Choose "Power Management" tab.
Deselect "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" and click "OK" twice.

Resetting More Power Management Controls

Go to "START" and select "Control Panel."
Click "Performance and Maintenance.
Click "Power Options."
Change all to "Never." (Here I set my monitor to turn off after 20 minutes' idle time.)
Click "Advanced" tab and deselect "Prompt for password when computer resumes from standby."
Select "Hibernate" tab and deselect "Enable hibernation."
Click "Apply" and "OK."

Clean Up Startup Programs

Go to "START" and select "Run."
Type: msconfig and click "OK."
Select "Startup" tab.
Remove Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Office if you have a limited amount of memory. (For more help recognizing software programs which hog your startup memory, check the Startup Applications List.)
Click "Apply" and "Close."

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Updated August 7, 2008