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address book

Backup – Again

I will keep bringing this topic up again and again until every visitor to HelpMeRick.com makes a regular habit of backing up their valuable data. Already this week I have received three calls from computer users who lost valuable data due to a computer crash. In addition to the calls, I received another four or five emails from computer users in the same situation.

I know backup is monotonous, but it is also vital to protecting your digital information. For more than ten years I have written and soap boxed about backup and provided many tips on how to best approach this misunderstood and often forgotten computer skill. Establishing a backup routine is not difficult and once it is up and running is painless to maintain.

The mysterious expanding Outlook Express book!

I received an email this week from someone who had a mysterious address book problem.

Their Outlook Express address book had tons of email address for people they didn’t know. Pretty scary. If you are an Outlook Express user, you may want to take a look at your own address book, it is likely happening to you too.

There are two possible explanations for this.

1. Address book Gnomes. These weird little bearded men with pointy hats creep into your home late at night and add strangers to your address book using magical powers.

2. You have the “Automatically put people I replay to in my Address Book” box checked in Outlook Express.

What’s nice is that the solution for either problem is fairly simple.

All Q&A Session – July 2007

I don’t do it too often, but this month I decided to hold an all Q&A (2 hours) user group meeting. It truly is amazing how many questions 30 or 40 ravenous computer users can generate. Sometimes one question leads to another, and an entire “topic” can take up a half hour. You have to be at one of the meetings to truly experience the type of knowledge and information that gets shared and explored. Some of today’s topics included:

Check Your Email When Away from Home

When we vacation, checking our snail mail is either left up to a house sitter or a neighbor. However, email is something we don't usually delegate to these fine folks who keep track of our snail mail and newspapers. Did you know that you can check your email from almost anywhere in the world?

It's true and this week's tip shows you how to do it. All email is sent not to you, but first to your provider. They don't read it, but it sits on their computers until you retrieve it, thus allowing you to check it remotely. While you are away from your home computer on vacation, the mail sits and accumulates on the provider's computer. You can check in on your email by logging into your provider's web site from any computer that has Internet access and read and write email.

When to use CDs , DVDs or flash drives

With so many options for backing up today, people often get confused on which method is right for them.

Typically there are three methods for backing up:

1. CD or DVD

2. Flash drive

3. External hard drive

The method you choose should depend on the type of backup you are doing.

CDs hold 700MB (about 300 pictures) while DVDs hold 4,700MB. But the amount of data that they hold is not as important as what you use the disks for. CDs and DVDs are best for archiving data that will likely never change such as pictures, old word processing documents, important tax or financial records, etc. Once you write information to a CD or DVD consider that disk finished and do not try to add more to it.

Rick’s 3 Rules of Email

  1. Never Forward Email
  2. Never Forward Email
  3. IF you must forward email, ALWAYS use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) and ALWAYS clean up the header information from previous email.

Some computer users who encounter my rules of email sometimes pass off my thoughts as being too strict. Unfortunately, I know it isn't true. Today, for the upteenth time, I worked with a customer who has had her email address for less than a year and already is inundated with more than 75 spam per day. Luckily her Internet provider has a decent spam filter, but she still has to put up with a lot of unwanted spam. The only thing she uses the email address for is correspondence with some family, friends, and two religious oriented weekly email newsletters.

When to use a CD for backup

Our regular listeners hear us talk about this subject often, but it bears repeating as much as we can talk about it for your data's safety and your sanity. Backing up to CD's is a multi-step process and all the steps need to be followed for it to go right.

CD's work great for archiving data that won't change. This includes pictures, music, your finished novel, etc. CD's should only be burned ONE time. CD-R's have the capability of being written to many times, but this also increases the likelihood of problems with the CD. Burn them once and store them in a safe place.

A word for our Dial-up readers (and our high speed Internet emailers)

Lately, I have helped many dial-up computer users get their email unclogged. It became clogged because their friends and family who have high speed Internet sent them messages that were way too big for email. Usually these messages contained either large digital photos or video jokes or messages that bring dial-up users email to screeching halt. 

DIAL-UP USERS:

  • You absolutely need to know how to check your email using your web browser (this tip explains how ).
  • When email stops coming in or you see messages repeating themselves, it is time to check your email as above and then delete any messages that are larger than 500 kilobytes (kb). This will allow your email to flow again into your email program
  • Inform the offending parties that send these overly large messages that your system can't handle the volume and to please remove you from their forward lists.

HIGH SPEED USERS:

Palm handhelds still rock

Palm has shifted focus the last few years to smartphones (like the Treo I'm writing on right now), but they still manufacture and sell PDA's (portable digital assistants). I helped a customer setup a new Palm Tungsten E2 today. I set it up so that she could sync (transfer data from computer to PDA and vice versa) between both her Windows desktop and her Mac laptop…very slick. Now she has the option of accesing her calendar, address book, notes and much more from any of the three devices.

Palm handhelds; they organized and changed my life. It will take a true miracle device for me to fall out of love with Palm.

Quick Access to Outlook Express Addresses

Outlook Express users can quickly access their address books by enabling the Contact view. Here's how:

 

  1. In Outlook Express, click View from the menus

     

  2. Click Layout
  3. Check the "Contacts" box
  4. Click OK

Now with this mode enabled, you can simply double-click on an address book entry to pull up a new email addressed to that person.

Remember that you can also quickly get to your address book in the new email composition window by clicking on the TO button (see picture).