I’m not sure why, but I’ve seen a rash of lost toolbars in Outlook Express and Windows Mail. If you lost your main toolbar with reply, print, new message, etc and you need to know how to get it back, watch this video. If you know other people with this infliction, please pass the video on to them.
Social engineering strikes again.
Last spring, a spam posing as a reunion invitation made its rounds around the Internet. The spam/virus gets spread by an unsuspecting and less than alert computer user opens an email supposedly from a class mate inviting them to a reunion. Once the email is opened, a root-kit (hard to detect spyware/virus hybrid) gets deployed on the person’s computer and begins to spread itself from there.
This scenario repeats itself hundreds of thousands times over a couple of days and eventually infects millions of computers around the world.
A variant of the very same ploy started to make its rounds again this year coming to a crescendo over the past couple of weeks with millions more people duped.
Mysterious file extensions, flickering monitors (the LCD kind), donating old computers, printing to a file and more are included in this week’s edition brought to you by questions from: James, Barbara, Bev, Robert, Bill, Al, Barb, Keith, Cheryl, Marilyn, Chuck, Charles, Guilermo, and Jack.
After two weeks and more than 21,000 visits to the web site, the survey only produced 225 responses (thank you to those who filled out the survey). I hoped to amass at least 1000 responses, but it was still an interesting experiment. The Google Web Form attached to Google Documents worked simply and flawlessly.
The survey will remain open and you can access it by clicking here. Google Docs automatically generated the results below, but any Excel or database guru out there that wants to take a look at the raw data and shoot me back some more detailed results correlating operating systems, RAM, etc, feel free! The spreadsheet is attached below the article.
UPDATE: Jason H. took the challenge and came up with some great statistical data from this little project. View or download his analysis below in the attachments. Thanks Jason!
If you are a Mac user and want a program to start automatically, follow these steps:
Microsoft drove me into the world of Linux and its various flavors including Mint, Puppy, PC Linux OS, Dream, Damn Small, gOS and many more. This trek started two years ago (can you correlate that time frame?) and my veracity for learning it hasn’t ebbed one bit. In fact, I find the world of Linux more compelling every time I sit down and learn more about it. I’m writing this article from my Asus EeePC that runs a Linux derivative and its performance impresses me every time I use it.
Spyware infections, on Windows based computers, continues to sky rocket. The average computer user suffers from this plague far more than a more technically savvy user. As more and more people get connected to the Internet, the ratio of technically savvy users drops and thus the increase in spyware infections.
Many people equate younger computer users with techno knowledge, but the opposite seems to hold true. Young computer users know how to use the technology, but don’t understand how it works or how to stay safe with it any better than an older computer user.
With questions from Jim, Cindy, Harley, Mike, Bruce, Marshall, Jason, Larry, Diane, Patsy, Marilyn, Maury, Bill, Michael, and Dave, I give answers covering topics from Kim Komando’s web site, Outlook email oddities, Picasa slide shows, headphone jack problems, decoding Firefox cache files and much more. Have a listen!
Since laptops now out-sale desktops, I decided to bring this tip out of the archives.
We had a call last weekend, and I get the same question from many laptop users: “Why is the battery life on my laptop so poor?”. The biggest reason is that the battery doesn’t get enough exercise. Most rechargeable batteries today don’t have the memory problem like they did eight and ten years ago. However, unless the battery does get used on occasion, it tends to lose its ability to hold a charge.
Even if you don’t take your laptop outside of the home, I recommend that you run your laptop off of the battery at least twice per month. You don’t have to drain the battery all the way down (some battery experts say not to let it completely deplete ever), but use it until it’s pretty close to empty then plug it back in to recharge. Cycling the charging and depleting of the battery will give your laptop many more productive hours of battery time.
When running from the battery, your laptop will show a little blue battery icon by your clock that shows the approximate batter life remaining. The time shown isn’t 100% accurate, but gives you a quick place to eyeball the remaining time you have on your battery.
Every day I make my appointed computer help rounds, someone marvels at my use of browser tabs. Tabbed browsing started almost 9 years ago with the Opera browser and continues today with the excellent implementation in Firefox. Internet Explorer finally got on board a couple of years ago and tabs work ok with it too.
If you are not using tabs in your Internet browsing, then you really aren’t browsing, your floundering around the Internets. Learn to use tabs, you can do it. Use my video tutorial (click here) to learn this helpful and time saving technique that will change the way you look and use the web.