I helped a retired aged computer user today who was cajoled into using Facebook by his family. His Facebook friends hammered him daily about posting some pictures to his online profile. But like many computer users, he juggled time between three different photo management programs. One of them, luckily, was Google’s Picasa and I configured Picasa to locate all his… Read More »Add photos to Facebook quickly and easily – Video Tip
This month’s show centered on social networking. We had a special in-studio guest, Annie Payne (click here to reach her web site). Annie runs an extremely busy blog and writes for our local paper, The Daily Sentinel. Thanks for helping us talk about and answer questions about Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites Annie! In addition to the social… Read More »Computer Help Show Podcast – 02-18-09
If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, and you should be, you may be overlooking one of its greatest features…the built-in spell checker. It works on any web page, in any text box you need to enter text. Look for any words that have a red, squiggly line underneath them for misspelled words. To correct the word, RIGHT click one time on the underlined word, then click the proper spelling from the list of suggestions. If you need a spell check in smaller text box like an email subject, you might need to RIGHT click in the text box, then click Check Spelling from the menus to force a spell check for that text box
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.
I just finished installing the Windows 7 Beta version released by Microsoft on Friday. I installed it on my Toshiba Intel dual-core processor with 4 GB of RAM. It was running Windows Vista which took more than 4 minutes to fully boot (I consider the boot up process to be finished when the hard drive stops spinning and I don’t have to compete with a still booting computer to do what I want to do), and running any applications was like walking through molasses. I can say that my expectations were pretty low, but I am pleasantly surprised…so far.
2009 is upon us and computer prices are incredibly low, but if you can wait a year to buy a new computer, I would highly recommend it. Why? Microsoft plans on releasing the next version of Windows either late in 2009 or early in 2010. All indications point to the earlier release since Microsoft is anxious to bury Vista.
Today marked my second Linux/Ubuntu casualty in almost 2 dozen attempts. As I’ve learned more about Ubuntu the past couple of years, I carefully selected clients who would have little problems dealing with a non-Microsoft operating system.
You may have read my take on Ubuntu usage for the average computer user before, but here it is again to setup the rest of the story: I believe that any computer users who uses only email, word processing, Internet, digital photography, and maybe a solitaire or mahjong like game can function perfectly and happily in Ubuntu. Those who need proprietary Windows programs or like to buy and try out different types of software will not do well with Ubuntu.
Some of the nastiest spyware infections can be dealt with easier than previously thought if you try the following steps immediately after becoming infected:
I have had good success with this routine if the infection is caught quick enough (usually within a day or so).
On my way out the door today, I came across this article outlining one of the largest security breaches yet with Internet Explorer. I have been recommending for years that you switch to Mozilla Firefox. Today, I’m taking a harder line and recommending that you should never use Internet Explorer except in the extremely rare instance where a site truly requires Internet Explorer (IE) to run properly. For your safety and the safety of all of us connected to the Internet, please download and use either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
Pandora.com qualifies for yet another Web 2.0 application. Pandora started as a project to find the similarities in music and why we like certain music and why we don’t. The Pandora folks eventually made all their study of music into an amazingly customizable and accurate music service. To sign up is free although I recommend paying for the service if you use it a lot. Once you sign up, you start by building your own radio stations based on your favorite songs or artists. After you build your first station, Pandora starts to play songs related to the song or artist you started with when you built the radio station (which entails that you simply type the name of a musical artist or a song name and click Create).
As the songs play, if you tell Pandora whether you like the selection or not (via a click on a thumbs up or thumbs down icon), it will continue to more accurately pick music for you. You must see the short video below to see how it works, and better yet, give it a try to see why it is such an exciting and useful Web 2.0 application!