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Why good computer guys get grumpy sometimes

Arrogant computer guys really bother me. I try very hard not to be a computer guy who thinks he knows everything.

The problem with this is that I am sometimes competing with computer guys who convince people that they do know everything. When I try to straighten out the situation, I get the line, “but the guy at Best Buy said that Norton is the best.” or “But my son who has worked at HP for 20 years says that Vista is much faster.”

When I try to explain using experience and logic, they don’t want to listen. Logically, wouldn’t it make more sense to listen to someone who isn’t trying to sell something. Even better, someone who deals with problems in real-life homes and businesses every day?

WiFi is truly becoming ubiquitous

I’ve mentioned before that I think that laptops make a lot of sense for computer users who travel. With a great deal of our communication and information gathering tied up in the computer world, not having this tool when traveling is a definite minus. My family and I just returned from a short trip where having our laptop with us saved us a lot of time and aggravation.

While traveling, we used the computer and a wi-fi connection (which was easy to find) to :

  • Email relatives
  • Access maps 
  • Compare shopping centers we were thinking of visiting
  • Keep an eye on the weather
  • Check road reports
  • Find our favorite eateries
  • Find independent coffee shops (we like them better than Starbucks) 
  • Download and look at pictures we took
  • Stay current with news without having to wait for a newspaper or the evening news

I’m curious what other travelers use their laptops for on the road. Leave a comment and tell me your traveling laptop story or tip!

Your hard drive is meant to hold stuff

Every week I’m out making my rounds, I hear this expression; “My computer is really slow it must have too much stuff in it and needs to be cleaned out.”

Your computer can never have have too much “stuff.” Your hard drive is designed to hold tens of thousands of documents, pictures, music and more. The number of files you store on your computer has next to nothing to do with your perceived speed of the computer.

Computer speed directly relates to how much RAM (temporary memory, not storage/hard drive memory) it has, how fast the processor is, and most importantly how clean your computer is. By clean, I’m referring to physically clean and what types of files are stored on the system.

Remember to take out the trash!

If you really like saving all of your email, you might seriously consider getting a Gmail account. With today’s emails sometimes weighing in at 5 megabytes and more, email programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc) can get extremely sluggish. Sluggish performance eventually leads to corrupt data which means you lose all your email.

You can take steps to avoid this, however, by following a few simple

Brain transplant

If I could impart one aspect of my computer knowledge to everyone who uses a computer, it would be the ability to understand file management.

File management, in the computer world, means how information (files) are stored and utilized on a computer system. Understanding file management, means understanding:

Desktop Shortcuts Make Computing Easier – Video Tip

Learning to make Windows work for you instead of you working for it can yield many more happy and productive hours using your computer. One highly under utilized feature of Windows is the shortcut icon. Learning to use and manage shortcuts will give you a huge advantage with your computer.

Photoshop Elements 6 is out – Yawn.

Adobe released a new version of Photoshop Elements this week. I haven’t read everything about it, but looking over the "What’s New" section on the website it appears that there is little to get excited about.

The new features and upgrades fall in four main catagories, organize, edit, create and share. These four catagories can be narrowed to two, useful and arts-and-craftsy.

Internet Explorer prints only HTML

Today I ran into a problem that I hadn’t seen before. A customer’s MSN and Internet Explorer browser (including MSN email and web mail) would only print the HTML coding of a web page or email.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the programming that is used to present web pages to us and the coding behind text color, bold, etc. in email. We had cleaned some spyware from this users computer earlier in the day, and even printed out some pictures, but a few hours later I received a call about this strange symptom. At first, I thought it was just a forwarded email gone awry, but after arriving on the scene and seeing that word processing documents, test pages, pictures, and spreadsheets all printed fine, the culprit was definitely in Internet Explorer 7.

Need for technology proportionate to family proximity

Two of the past four weekends I have left every piece of technology behind (except for my camera) and taken my family into the mountains. My cell phone, my laptop, my XBox, my projector, and even the portable DVD players stayed behind.

The drive to where we were camping was less than three hours and we kept the kids busy the old fashioned way. We stopped at overlooks, rest stops, gas stations and told stories. The kids got car sick between yelling “_________’s touching me!”

Once we were at camping the kids kept busy fishing, swimming, playing games, chasing miniature wild life, and eating junk.

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.