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Recent spyware surge

Last week Rick and I made a fast trip to Denver and back in a single day (about 7 hours on the road).

During that time we talked about the various computer problems we have seen lately. He noted that spyware seemed to be on the decrease. It is only Wednesday and I have reason to believe that Rick set a jinx upon computer users everywhere.

On Monday night my sister called with a computer problem. I drove to her house and her computer was loaded with spyware and viruses. Earlier that day, I received a call from another client with a computer that wouldn’t even boot up because it has so many viruses (over 1600 infections).

Picture Slideshows….take a cue from TV

My daughter ‘graduated’ from middle school today. During the ceremony, a group of ambitious students put together a 60-75 slides, using Microsoft PowerPoint, documenting their 8th grade year. PowerPoint and other slideshow making programs give us great flexibility in putting together our pictures like never before.

Does anyone use the old slide projectors anymore?

These students had a minimum slide time of 20 seconds and some slides were on screen for almost 30 seconds. Needless to say, the impact of the program was dramatically reduced because of the extremely long time the audience had to stare at the same picture. The students also put the slideshow to music. Being of the video and Internet age, I would have thought these students would have questioned the length of slides, but I also expected their tech teacher to point it out as they were putting it together. The kids showed some gumption in doing the slideshow, so I have no fault with them at all…I just wish the teachers would have helped guide them.

MSCONFIG: These items are unneccessary

We talk about the Microsoft Configuration Utility (msconfig) so much, that we have a t-shirt available for it in our store. Msconfig is accessed by:

  1. Click Start
  2. Click Run
  3. Type:   msconfig
  4. Click OK

Once in the utility, you want to click the "Startup" tab. Here is a list of some the programs that can be safely unchecked. After doing so, click OK, and restart the computer as instructed and your computer should run just a little better.

  • jusched – Java update utility
  • realsched – RealOne Player update  utility
  • qttask – QuickTime system tray icon
  • realplay – automatically starts RealOne Player
  • Microsoft Office Fast Start – a starter program to help launch Office applications a hair faster
  • Anything Adobe – Adobe Reader is used so seldom, that having it start its utilities every time we start our computer is a waste of precious computing cycles and resources
  • Sonic Update – update utility for Sonic CD burning software
  • Kodak Updater – This update utility from Kodak really eats at performance
  • Music Match or mmplayer – an audio player that has no business starting automatically
  • iTunes Helper – especially if you don’t use an iPod. If you do own an iPod, it isn’t a necessary program to run at startup
  • AOLSP Scheduler – And anything else labeled with AOL…again,  unnecessary to start all this stuff at startup.
  • Microsoft Works Calendar or Update – neither should start at boot up
  • Money Express and/or Agent – related to Microsoft’s Quicken like program "Money"
  • Qagent – Quicken utility
  • Quickbooks Update – Quickbooks updates can be initiated from Help in the Quickbooks program. 
  • Tkbell – related to RealOne player
  • Iomega – related to Iomega external or internal drives and how icons are displayed
  • Reminder – Greeting card programs of various brands. If you don’t use the reminder program, uncheck this box. 

These are the most frequent programs we come across that do NOT need to start automatically. Unchecking the boxes in msconfig has absolutely no effect on running the actual programs. For more information on what the heck is starting up automatically on your computer, check out this easily navigatable list. 

 

DVD Burners

Seeing all the blank DVD’s and CD’s in a store can confuse a computer user. And with most computers shipping with a DVD-ROM over the past four or so years, it is even more confusing. And to make matters even more difficult, many CD/DVD-ROM manufacturers have black fronts with black text! Yikes that’s hard to read.

One of my customer’s today assumed that his laptop had a DVD burner because it could play DVD’s. He is not alone as many people fall into the same category…it is not that clearly written. For many years, we used floppy disks and if a computer had a floppy drive, we knew we could read and write to a floppy. Unfortunately, that is not the case today. CD and DVD players come in two primary flavors (I won’t discuss all the hybrids here); ROM (Read Only Memory) and R/RW (Recordable / Re-writable).

What to do if your CD doesn’t autostart or it autostarts incorrectly

Often computers forget how to start up CDs automatically when you put them into the drive or they start up in the wrong program starts up.

To solve this problem go through the following steps:

1. Close any programs that are running.

2. Double-click on My Computer (on your desktop or in the right pain of your XP start menu).

3. Right-click on your CD-ROM icon.

4. Click on Explore from the menu that comes up.

This will open up a window showing the contents of the disk. From this point you can click on the "Setup" icon if you are trying to install a program. If the disk contains pictures or music, double click on the files that you want to look at or listen to. 

Shareware and Freeware – March 2006

We haven’t covered this topic since 1999!

Shareware is software that you can "try before you buy". The developer usually provides the program for free of charge with either some features disabled or a time limit on how long the product can be used. To unlock all the features or use the program past its expiration date, you must pay for a registration number. This type of marketing works quite well for developers who make good products.

Freeware is software that you can use for no cost at all. Developers providing this software usually create the program to either fill a niche or jus practice creating new programs.

Programs by small developers can be found for almost any purpose you need. Everything from organizing pictures to creating labels and from recording music to changing wallpaper. The only places I recommend hunting for and downloading freeware and shareware are:

Download.com
Tucows.com
Nonags.com
Palm Gear (for Palm Pilot users)

10 Things you can do with Broadband Internet

Thanks to lower prices and increased availability, broadband (high speed) Internet is starting to over take dial-up services in the United States. Dial-up Internet served us well for the first 10 years of the Internet, but to really take advantage of the Internet today, a broadband connection is a must.

Here are 10 things that you can do with a high speed connection today that you can’t do (as easily) with a dial-up service:

  1. Keep up to date with Windows and Internet security updates automatically
  2. Google Earth
  3. Download music (legally) at sites like Napster, iTunes, and Rhapsody
  4. Receive and make phone calls while on the Internet…without an extra line!
  5. Watch online news or information videos or listen to online music or news casts without waiting and without the choppiness and stuttering of a dial-up connection
  6. I know many people don’t think that speed matters…but with broadband, the Internet becomes much more of a resource tool than a novelty.
  7. Upload pictures to printing services to either be picked up or mailed to you.
  8. Watch movie trailers
  9. Save time…you can do four times as much research or work with a broadband connection in half the time.
  10. Make free or extremely inexpensive phone calls and video phone calls.

Admittedly, many of these functions can be carried out with a dial-up connection, but studies and my experience have shown that people don’t do these things. The reason? Time. For example, a broadband user can download a song in under 3 minutes. The same song takes nearly 25 minutes with a dial-up connection. Services like Google Earth can take up to 10 or more minutes to start with dial-up.

Organize Files with Windows XP Move function

Organize Files with Windows XP Move function

Use this tip to quickly and easily move your files (documents, music, pictures) from one folder to another on your computer. Once you master this tip, you will be able to organize your digital files with confidence. You can also use the tip to copy digital photos from a memory card or CD to your hard drive.

  1. Open the folder or drive containing the files (pictures, music, documents, etc) you would like to move.

  2. Select the file or files to move. Remember that you can use the Ctrl + Click method to select (highlight) multiple files or Ctrl + A to Select All files in a given folder

Flash Memory Drives

A flash memory drive (a.k.a. thumb drive or USB drive) consists of a chip of memory (flash) mounted in a plastic case with a USB interface on one end (see the illustration for some examples). With Windows Me, 2000, XP and Macintosh computers, flash memory drives automatically get recognized as another storage drive on your computer. No installation CD’s, no formatting, just fast, safe removable storage.

In addition to their instant recognition and portability, flash drives offer the BEST way to backup day-to-day information like financial data, address books, genealogy, word processing documents, and spreadsheet documents.

Two other great advantages of flash drives are their speed and durability. You can copy 200 megabytes worth of data (literally thousands of word processing documents), in less than a minute! And because there are NO moving parts, the memory is quite stable and long lasting.

To use a flash memory drive, follow these steps:

1. Insert the drive into a USB port on your computer.
2. Wait approximately a minute (first time only) for the computer to recognize and install the device (Windows 98 need to install a driver)
3. Double-Click your My Computer icon to verify that another drive shows up (usually the first letter after your CD-ROM
4. In Windows XP, you can now RIGHT click on any folder or file and then Click Send To —> Removable Drive. This will instantly make a copy of the document or folder on your flash drive.
5. In Windows Me or 2000, you can copy and paste a folder or file to the flash drive or open the flash drive in a new window and drag your files to it
6. If you use a financial program, simply use the program’s built-in backup function and have it back up to your flash drive
7. To delete information from a flash memory drive, open up its icon in My Computer, then click on the file or folder you want to delete, and push DELETE on your keyboard