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Missing file names under documents or photos in thumbnail view

Lately, more than a few people have had trouble with missing file names in the thumbnail view of some of their folders. It isn’t entirely apparent why this happens, but fortunately the cure is pretty simple. If you are one of the poor souls who happens to be missing their file names, follow these steps:

  1. Open the offending folder to see the thumbnails
  2. Click View from the menus (or the view button on the toolbar), and click Details
  3. Hold the SHIFT key down on your keyboard and Click View from the menus (or the view button on the toolbar), and click Thumbnails


You should now see thumbnails with file names under them.

Online Photo Editors

Basic photo editing no longer takes special software. You can now do some wonderful things with photos from any computer on almost any browser from anywhere in the world. Online photo editors allow you to edit photos simply by going to a special website.

Once fully loaded, these sites let you resize, adjust brightness and contrast, tweak color and even work with layers. While none of these editors are as robust as Photoshop Elements, they are great for doing basic adjustments especially when working on a computer that is not your own.

How about a new business model for airlines?

For a guy who has few investments, I spend a lot of time thinking about business. I watch news stories and when I hear about a failing industry I begin thinking about ways to improve it. This is especially the case with industries that shouldn’t be failing based how society depends on them.

I have offered ideas on how to save the movie theater industry and cell phone industry in previous posts but last night I literally shot up out of dead sleep with a possible solution for the airline business.

I think Google should start an airline – or at least significantly fund one. There are thousands of airlines in the air at any given time, each airliner holds hundreds of people. These people are sitting in one place staring at the back of the seat in front of them for an hour our more.

Backup…yes, again

I’m late in writing my daily Shotgun report because I have four computers sitting in my office in various forms of failure. Fortunately, at some expense to the owners, I was able to extract some valuable data from two of the machines. The other two machines didn’t fair as well and nothing was salvageable.

Today’s lesson? BACKUP!!!!!!!

I just searched HelpMeRick.com and found no less than 15 articles and tips directly related to

It’s time for a new cell service business model

A resent consumer reports article compared cell services and Sprint ranked last among the top four services across the board. I use Sprint and have never had any real troubles. I have also found that the coverage is great whenever I travel. They also have the best price for data and their rates are reasonable.

I am not writing this in defense of Sprint though. I am pretty upset with American cell service in general.

Currently cell phone service business models are built on a foundation of using gimmicks to get a customer to buy then punishing them for long term loyalty by raising prices and excluding them from promotional deals.

We want your feedback!!

We would love to triple, quadruple or quintuple our traffic to HelpMeRick.com. I think we can do it if we can get some honest feedback from you, our regular site visitors.

Please leave comments below this story to tell us what you like and don’t like about HelpMeRick.com And more importantly, we want to know what it would take to get you to visit our site every single day to see the new content we post or use it as a reference for people you might help with their computers.

Thanks for your help!

Zoho at CES

We were pleased to run into my favorite Web 2.0 app representatives in the hall at CES, Zoho! Zoho offers a complete online office experience for no cost. Zoho applications can be accessed any time, any where with any computer and a web browser. How can they offer such a great product for no cost? I asked them that very question… Read More »Zoho at CES

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times

Software upgrades can cost you much more than they help you. Very few computer users need to upgrade any software, except for daily updates for security software.

Today, I helped a couple who became frustrated after updating from AOL 9.0 to 9.1. They relayed to me that they went ahead with the upgrade because of the promise that AOL would be easier and faster with the upgrade. After the upgrade, AOL changed their Internet Explorer and Firefox home pages, made getting to email more time consuming, and even lost some of their bookmarks.

It didn’t take long to get them back to their familiar 9.0, but they were extremely frustrated by the changes made to their system.

Moral of the story: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it nor upgrade it.

The best oatmeal cookie recipe ever

Ahh, the power of the Internet. I make no secret of the fact that I love to cook. I’m not much of a baker, but I’m always in search of the best oatmeal-raisin cookie, my favorite. Last weekend, I did simple Google search for “best whole wheat oatmeal raisin cookie”.

After sifting through about ten different recipes, I tried three of them. All were good, but the one I’m linking here is from a site I never heard of called Recipezaar. It is hands down the best oatmeal-raisin cookie I’ve ever eaten.

I added a little nutmeg to the recipe and some ginger, plus I cut back a little on the brown sugar and added a little more non-sweetened apple sauce. One thing to keep in mind is that the recipe says you will get 48 cookies, but it actually yields just about 20 cookies.

What we teach actually works!!

Today I saw a client I have not seen in a long time. They are a great family with four teenagers at home. One year I had to reformat their computer three times because of their knack for picking up spyware.

While I enjoyed the money, I did not enjoy doing all those reformats. Reformatting a computer is my least favorite project.

Gradually I would break them of their habits and have them using Firefox, AVG and a variety of anti-spyware tools. Each year I have seen them less and less.

I saw them today to help them setup a new laptop and I decided to scan their desktop computer for spyware while I was there.