If your name is Mel, Jim, Barbara, Happy, Sandie, Buddy, Larry, or David and a few others…your email answer is here! Their questions ranged from hard drive data retrieval to Macintosh password management to AVG and many other questions as well…tune in by clicking play!!
Editors note: Of course, I’m going to exempt smartphones (my current favorite is the iPhone 3G) because these are necessary to 21st century living.
Next to the smartphone, my vote for best technology currently available is the Digital Video Recorder (DVR). A DVR replaces the venerable VHS recorder for recording television programming. DVR’s use hard drives to record the programming digitally and require about a tenth of the knowledge necessary to program a VCR. The hard drives can record from 40 HD hours to almost 200 hours of programming. With DVR’s, there is never a tape to change or rewind, and the quality of the recording is flawless no matter how many times you watch it.
Another plus with DVR’s is their advanced fast forward feature. All DVR’s have a skip button on the remote that skips 30-60 seconds in one push. Does that time period sound familiar? Yes, it’s the length of a commercial. When watching a sitcom, most commercial breaks last about 3 to 4 minutes…a few quick presses of the DVR’s skip button and you are watching the next segment. A 30 minute program can be finished in about 19 minutes…I’ll take 11 minutes wherever I can get them. And a one hour crime drama can be over in about 40 minutes!
Sorry Oprah and Dr. Phil fans, daytime talk shows cannot be recorded with a DVR.*
Right now my family is recording nearly 18 hours of Olympic programming every day, but we can watch all that in about 4 hours or so by using the variable speed of the DVR’s fast forward feature. Very helpful to skip through boring soccer matches or 50 KM race walking at 300X speed. But because the recordings are digital, you can actually keep track of the action and
I just returned from visiting my brother and his new baby and traveled, again, with only my phone and my Asus Eee PC. As usual, the little laptop did not disappoint. I was able to keep up with email, work with my spreadsheets and word processing documents and do other web research as well. All from a little marvel that cost less than $400 and weighs less than 2 pounds.
If your computer still performs all the functions you want it to do, there is no need to replace it. However, no matter if you’ve been using the same computer for a month or seven years, all computers need and crave RAM (Random Access Memory).
RAM provides the ‘umph’ for our computers and an abundance of it helps Windows’ performance tremendously.
Hard drive space (physical storage of your data) and RAM (temporary memory for running programs) utilize two distinctly different types of technologies. So, don’t equate free hard drive space with RAM. Instead, use these guidelines for figuring out your RAM needs.
Because of the dramatic drop in price over the past two years of RAM, here are my current recommendations for your computer system (the numbers are in megabytes):
Technology is no different than politics in that there are a variety of topics that people have opinions on. While you may not know much about these topics now, what you know about them can have a great impact on knowing who to listen to when it comes to learning more about digital photography and related topics.
PC vs. Mac:
The Mac people will tell you that Macs are better for graphics, easier to use more stable.
In the computer world, there are hot rodders – people who will tweak their computers to get every last bit of horse power out of their systems.
Just as with automobiles, techniques used by hot rodders were once necessary in the early days when horse power was hard to come by.
Today, most computers come with all the horsepower most people need. Important tasks like defragmenting the hard drive, running scan disk and deleting cookies no longer do anything spectacular to the performance of the average computer.
Cookies are harmless – even the shady ones. Defragging does little on a 250 gig hard drive and scandisk is take care of by utility features in Windows that run every time you boot up or shut down.
Organizing your digital photos is so important. Too often I see people who have major computer problems and think that everything is backed up only to find that their digital photos were so spread out on their computer that the only had a portion of them backed up.
Many people simply copy their digital photos onto their computer wherever a given piece of software puts them and they have no idea where that is. These notes will help you setup a system for managing your digital photos so they will be easy to find and backup even without programs like Picasa.
Here are a few links that will help you:
When I help people setup a new computer, camera or printer, the standard question asked by the new gadget owner is; “What shall I do with the old one?” I think that the value of tech curbside recycling is highly undervalued.
Curbside recycling involves hauling your old hardware out to the curb and just leaving it there. In most moderately busy neighborhoods (HOA’s rules aside), a piece of technology on the street will be snapped by a collector or hobbyist in less than 48 hours and often much quicker. The item gets reused or put to work in someway, you didn’t have to fret about where to take it and haul it long distances, and the device more than likely won’t end up in a land fill…a win-win-win situation.
It’s been almost one year since I first posted this tip. We have many new visitors this year, and not enough of you are heading my advice yet on this subject, so I’m posting it again. Please believe me when I tell you that this tip alone can save you countless dollars, time, and tears!
Through my travels, I have noticed that many computer users save emails with pictures because they are unsure of how to save those pictures. Saving lots of pictures in your email program can drastically slow down the performance of the email program over time. Email programs typically can handle thousands of messages, but if something happens to the email database, and you haven't backed up those databases, the pictures will be gone for good. Your best insurance for saving pictures is to save them to a folder on your computer (like My Pictures or a subfolder of My Pictures) then back them up on a regular basis.
To save pictures from your email to a folder on your hard drive, do the following:
1. Click the paper clip icon in the preview pane*
2. Click Save Attachments
3. In the "Save To" box at the bottom of the dialog box that pops up, click Browse and choose where YOU want to save the pictures and click OK
4. Click Save
* If you read your Outlook Express email in its own window, then RIGHT Click on the
If you search for the word “Norton” using the search engine in the upper right corner of our website, you will discover that our advice to dump Norton branded software is echoed by dozens of other visitors to the site.
This week I saw a computer that took 27 minutes to completely boot up. It was an older system with 256MB of RAM and a 1.6ghz processor. Even at that, 27 minutes was a long time.
I noticed that they had the latest version of Norton 360 installed. I told them that the system would at least double in speed if they uninstalled Norton. “I know you don’t like it, but we already paid for it.”
Agreed but took the system home intending to reformat it and add RAM over the weekend.