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Hardware Tips

Stop a document from printing – Video Tip

We all run into a problem sooner or later where something we printed didn’t print correctly or we want to stop it from printing. In today’s tip, I explain how to stop the printer from printing and then clean the print job from your computer.

  1. Turn off your printer using its power switch
  2. Immediately watch for a message by your clock that has anything to do with your printer
  3. Click the little bubble message (if you see it)
  4. If you don’t see the options in steps 2 & 3, then:
    1. Click Start –> Control Panel
    2. Double-click Printers
    3. Double-click your printer
  5. When the printer queue dialog box appears, click one time on the document you want to delete
  6. Click Document from the menus, then Cancel (If you have multiple documents, click Printer –> Cancel all documents from the menus)
  7. Once the documents disappear (should be just a few moments), you can close all open windows and turn your printer on again.

I have a few more little tips and you can see this technique in action by watching the video below (2 1/2 minutes):

Cell phone quick tip – How to quickly silence ringer

We all inadvertently leave the cell phone ringer in the on position in situations where it would be courteous to be off. For those times when you don’t want the world staring at you and listening to your “Baby’s got back” ring tone, take a deep breath, then just push the volume button on the side of your phone. Almost every single cell phone on the market will immediately silence the ringer by pushing the volume button…either the up or down volume button, it doesn’t matter.

The next time this happens to you, remember the volume button and you can silence that ringer before the second syllable in baby!

Laptop Battery Life

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.

laptop battery indicator

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.

Another dead hard drive

External hard drives are spacious, cheap and relatively easy to use, but…

I resisted talking about backup this early in the year, but a phone conversation I had today illustrated my philosophy about backup perfectly. The gentleman I spoke with suffered an external hard drive failure, and he used it as the sole storage of his digital photos. Once again, my heart sank with his story of woe. He didn’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars it would require from a data recovery company (he also, unfortunately, opened the drive and tried to manually spin the hard drive platters), but was hoping for some sort of magical tech pixie dust that I might be storing in my pocket.

The point of the story is to scare you into backing up your data. Backing up your data means that your important data exists in at least two different locations. By different locations, I’m referring to two different digital media. Hard drive, and external hard drive. Hard drive and CD or DVD. Hard drive and USB flash drive. Hard drive and online backup. External hard drive and CD or DVD. You get the picture.

Exceptional backup systems would include having important data copied

Does that computer have enough hard drive space?

hard drive propertiesWhile counseling a customer on buying a new computer recently, the customer asked if a 500 gigabyte drive was ok compared to another a computer that had a 640 GB hard drive. Other than hard drive capacity, the machines were pretty equal. Unless the person plans to store their 2000 album music collection, edit feature length movies, or are designing the next skyscraper for Dubai, I have them go through this simple exercise:

  1. Double-click My Computer
  2. RIGHT Click the Hard drive icon (usually designated as the C drive)
  3. Click Properties

When the pie chart appears, I ask them to tell me what the total capacity of the drive is (in the woman’s case I was helping today, it was 20 GB), then I ask them to tell me how much of the drive is being used (the blue part of the chart and in this woman’s case it was 8 GB). Then I ask them how long they have used the computer and in her case it was 6 or 7 years.

The demonstration solidifies the answer for them and will for you too if you need to decide what kind of hard drive capacity is needed when buying a new computer.

Microsoft Arc Mouse

Microsoft Arc MouseMy old cordless mouse quit on me this week. It was a simple Logitech 2 button scroll mouse (optical). I’m not a big fan, actually I’m not a fan at all of mice with all the extra buttons and features. I want a simple 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel. As I was shopping, I noticed that the only simple mice were either cheap crap, corded (I wanted cordless), or came bundled with a keyboard. Since I didn’t need a keyboard, I thought I was out of luck. There are simple 2 button laptop mice, but for everyday use that’s a little too small for me. After almost giving up, I spotted and tried out the Microsoft Arc Mouse. It’s a futuristic looking rodent, cordless, has a micro USB adapter, and has only one extra button (a back button on the left side that is easy to avoid). I tried it side-by-side with one of the simple mice bundled with the keyboards and it felt good.

The arc seems to provide three functional purposes:

  1. Less surface are contacting the desk or mouse pad making it extremely easy to move around
  2. Much lighter than a conventional mouse, again making it move around effortlessly
  3. The slightly taller profile makes the hand fit more comfortably with it than a traditional mouse.

I’m on day 3 with the Microsoft Arc Mouse and am extremely pleased with the purchase. At around $50-60, the Microsoft Arc Mouse costs about 20-40% more than other good mice, but for the comfort, unique and functional design, and lack of too many extra buttons, I think the cost is justified.

Set up a home network – Part I

Home NetworkHome computer networks used to be just for geeks, there was no practical reason to setup a network at home because most people only had one system and the Internet was only accessible through a dial-up connection that couldn?t be shared.

Today that has all changed. Computer networks are not only practical but they are also easy to setup and in many cases they are absolutely necessary. Over the next few weeks, we will breakdown the process of building a computer network into simple steps that will guide you through the entire process of setting up either a wired or wireless home computer network.

Before we get into the logistics of a network setup, we should cover some quick terminology. Here are a few terms you absolutely need to understand to build a computer network.

Simple wireless password security

Thankfully, more and more home computer users are securing their wireless networks. Most newer wireless routers offer to automate the whole process which works pretty well. However, if you are wanting a little more control, I recommend the following advice for setting up a wireless router:

Vista can run faster if you…

I just finished my normal Sunday morning routine of breakfast with the Sunday paper. I always peruse the Sunday high tech ads to keep tabs on prices. Computer prices continue to drop (and I still think manufacturers are getting a kick back from Microsoft) to help spur sluggish sales.

However, the past few weeks, I picked up on another trend; increased RAM.

In this week’s big 4 ads (Office Depot, Office Max, Circuit City, and Best Buy), there were 43 desktop and laptop ads. Out of these 43 systems, only one of them had

What I learned in the first 4 days of my iPhone 3G

I picked up my new iPhone late on Thursday night, worked with it on Friday, then left with it for a quick trip to see my brother and my first and only nephew. Prior to this phone, I have used some sort of smartphone since 2000…all Palm software based. Prior to that I used Palm handheld computers since about 1997.

I decided to move to the iPhone because I felt that the Palm innovation had stagnated…about 5 years ago. Plus, with all the innovation and development happening around the iPhone, I knew it was a great opportunity to take my smartphone usage even further than the Palm based systems had. A real quick word about any smartphone; they aren’t met for every cell phone user. Smartphones are designed for people who want to check email, lookup information on the web, get maps, send text messages, add specialty programs like conversion programs, time trackers and much more to their phone.

Enough blabber, here are some of my thoughts about the iPhone after only four days of use:

  1. The screen is absolutely stunning…clear, bright, and responsive.

  2. I really miss being able to select text