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Office

What do Rick and Adam do during the week and what is their phone number?

A common misconception is that Adam and I spend our week sunning ourselves with our families on some exotic beach before returning to our mansions and counting our stacks of $100 bills.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. I own and operate a business called Grand Valley PC Partners in Grand Junction, CO. All my business is onsite home and office calls to help computer users get out of trouble, setup up new systems or Internet service, and teach users how to get the most out of their computer. I have been doing this for more than 10 years (the radio show is 7 years old).

Make sure you have the disks

I do my best to support small local businesses, because I own and operate a small, local business. However, when it comes to purchasing a computer, too many times I have seen the small computer shop put together a machine that is more expensive with less features than a name brand computer. And worse, the computer does NOT come with the original Windows CD and accompanying license.

If you aren’t given and can’t obtain the original Windows installation disk when you purchase a computer, then the copy of Windows on your computer (and probably other software as well…think Microsoft Office) is illegal. The software will work fine, but when it comes time to reinstall after a hard drive crash or if you want to upgrade, you are stuck with having to purchase full versions of these programs. 

Spread out your backup

I had a client call me today to ask my advice on a new computer. Unfortunately someone had broken into her house and stolen not only all of her computers, but all of her backup disks too.

Bad guys are often smart enough to know that a computer is worth more if there are a lot of programs to go with it. So if your computer is stolen, chances are the theif will also take the opportunity to steal any disks he can find as well.

Keeping all of your backup in one place is never a good idea. Not only can theives get to it, but if any other catastrophe takes your home or office, chances are your backup will go with it, if you keep your backup with your computer.

RAID – It’s not just for cockroaches anymore

I worked on a computer this weekend that had two hard drives (150 GB each) in a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks) configuration. It was the first time I had worked with this type of computer. There are different flavors of RAID available and they are described as Level 0, Level 2, etc). In simple terms, RAID automatically makes copies of everything on the first hard drive to the second hard drive…also known as mirroring.

This is done for a couple of reasons. The first is obviously backup. RAID allows for continuous seamless (and transparent) backup from one drive to the other. Performance for some applications like high end graphics or Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) becomes slightly better with hard drives configured in a RAID format. Up until recently, RAID has been reserved primarily for computer servers (think large offices, Internet providers, web hosting, etc). Hard drive costs have dropped dramatically in recent years and storage size is skyrocketing. These two factors are propelling the implementation of RAID in personal computers.

Cell phone confession

There are two facts about my business:

  1. I could not do my job without a cell phone.
  2. I would not make much money to feed my family if I didn’t talk while driving.

Many cities and even states are looking at banning talking on cell phones while driving. Some want an all out ban, others say the driver must use a ‘hands-free’ setup. Unlike many drivers, I still keep a picture firmly planted in my head of the horrific crashes we were shown in Drivers Ed almost a quarter century ago. I also remind myself daily that my odds of getting in a fender-bender are higher than others because of the mileage I spend on the road (all my work is done on-site, so I travel from job-to-job all day long versus commuting to and from a central office).

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. 

 

I love PayPal

I have been raising a little money by selling stuff on eBay so I can buy my wife a Ferrari for Mothers day. As it turns out, the items I sold only went for about $50, so I will have to find her something else.

EBay is amazing, but PayPal is amazing-er (a little Bushism).

Both items closed yesterday and by this morning I had the money in my PayPal account. I took the items to the post office and I used my PayPal debit card to pay for the shipping.

When I got home I took a look at my PayPal balanced and saw that I was earning 4.62% on my PayPal money market account which requires no minimum balance and has no limits on withdrawls.

Is this computer good enough?

I get a lot of calls from people who are planning on purchasing a new computer. I really enjoy these calls because I am typically able to help people keep from making some big mistakes based on the advice of their teenage children.

Today I had a call from a client who had purchased a computer but wanted to make sure she got the right thing. She had asked my advice about a week ago and I told her to set a $700-800 budget and anything she found should work great.

She called me to tell me about her decision. She chose to go with an HP, she didn’t know all of the details, but she said it had 1024 "of something" and 160 "of something" and "two processors or something" and a 19-inch flat panel monitor.

Microsoft Word or Office Problems after last week’s Windows Updates

This is a short note to help those folks who are having problems with opening Word documents after a critical update from Windows last week. It appears it is unique to folks with some specific HP software.

After studying it, I would recommend going to Add/Remove Programs and remove the HP Share-to-Web program (unless you are really using that feature…most people don’t). If you do use that feature or want to learn more about the cause and fix for this problem. Visit Microsoft’s Support site and read their article.