Filtering Incoming EMails

Posted on May 20, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever waited for an email from someone and it got lost in all of the other email in your inbox, or worse yet, while cleaning out your inbox, you accidentally deleted an email that you had wanted to save?

Of course, you can create folders in your email program and drag the emails you want to save to the folders to keep them, but what if you could setup your email program  so that when mail comes in from certain individuals, or mail comes in with a certain subject, it automatically gets filtered to an email folder and stays out of your inbox. I have a filter for some mail from marketers that I automatically send to my deleted items folder so I never have to look at it. Others, from family members, that automatically go to a “Family” folder. Some friends have their own folders where their email gets delivered to. Some folders receive newsletters that I’ve signed up for.

Every popular email program allows filtering of some sort. You can setup filters for almost anything you receive. Not only does it keep your inbox clean, it sorts and separates your email so it’s easier to find.

I’ve included a link to a pdf file that lists the email programs Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, Outlook Express and Outlook, and described how to set up the filters. You can find it here. If you are using an email program that is not listed, please let me know and I’ll find out for you how to do it.

Filed under: Instructional, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Evernote – Every Time to Organize Everything

Posted on May 8, 2009 by wjimenez275

Well, almost everything.

Several years ago I started using Evernote on an occasional basis to save bits of information I ran across on the web. As time went on, I found that I was using it continually. For those times when you’re surfing the web and you find websites that you’d like to go back to  but don’t want to bookmark them, or those articles that have a quote you want to copy but don’t want to open notepad or a word processor to copy it to, or, in my case, fixes for different computer ailments that I need to keep handy, Evernote is the program to use. It’s compatible with Windows and the Mac.

With Evernote, capture what you like, find it when you want.

(Taken from the Evernote site)

Things to capture:

  • Tasks and to-dos
  • Notes and research
  • Web pages
  • Whiteboards
  • Business cards
  • Scribbles
  • Snapshots
  • Wine labels
  • Even Twitter messages

And then find them all any time across all the computers and devices you use. And it’s free.

How to get stuff into Evernote

Memorable stuff is always happening, so we’ve created lots of ways for you to get that stuff into Evernote:

Create: Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote

Snap: Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We’ll even recognize the text in the image.

Clip: Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy

Drag-and-Drop: Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows

Email: Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address

Scan: Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote

Record: Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want

Tweet: Send Twitter messages into Evernote by following @myEN

You can even install Evernote on a flash drive and take it with you. I highly recommend this program and once you start using it, you’ll find it invaluable as well.

http://www.evernote.com/

Filed under: Instructional, PC Tips and Tools | 3 Comments »

How Can I Shorten Long Website Addresses?

Posted on April 28, 2009 by wjimenez275

On occasion, you will need to copy a website address into an email, or even worse, into Twitter. I say worse because Twitter only allows 140 characters and some website addresses that you want to share can take up most of that. As for pasting a website address into an email, depending on where you put it, it could wrap onto a second line and then when the recipient clicks on the shared link, it doesn’t pick up the entire link and they don’t get to benefit from the fantastic page you wanted to share.

When those situations arise, there are a couple of sites that will take the long address (URL) and shorten them. The one I use is called TinyURL. Just paste the website address in the top box,  click on the make tinyurl button, and then copy the resulting short url into Twitter or your email.  SnipURL is another site that does the same thing. Bit.ly is another that is really popular with Twitter and Facebook users. Definitely look at it as well.

Once you start using these programs to shorten your website addresses, you’ll find other reasons to use them besides sharing email links and Twitter.

Filed under: Instructional, Internet Items, PC Tips and Tools | 2 Comments »

Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip

Posted on April 16, 2009 by wjimenez275

Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip

By Michael Lasky

An old urban myth claims that the microprocessors used in PCs and other consumer electronics are designed to fail within days or weeks of their warranty expiration.

For tens of thousands of people who bought Dell and HP notebooks whose motherboards fried — often a few weeks after their warranty expired — there’s nothing mythical about it.

The cause of the machines’ fried motherboards is an overheating Nvidia graphics chip. The failure rate is so huge that Nvidia had to take a $196 million charge against earnings in the second quarter of its 2008 fiscal year in anticipation of the reimbursements that would result from the faulty GPU.

What’s particularly scandalous, though, is how HP and Dell first handled the deluge of complaints from customers with notebooks that failed after their warranties expired. The companies either charged the customers (victims?) for repairs or refused service because the systems were past the warranty period.

Even worse, HP and Dell continued to sell notebooks with the same Nvidia chip long after the companies were aware of the problem. (Ultimately, Nvidia released a new version of the GPU that didn’t cause overheating.)

Unwary consumers who purchased the affected notebooks — no doubt based in part on the heady reputations of the vendors — were left in the lurch when their PCs failed, which usually occurred after 18 months or so. The purchasers had no recourse except to yell and scream at clueless tech-support reps.

When the heat from consumer complaints became as hot as the faulty Nvidia chip, HP and Dell relented and published a list of defective model numbers on their Web sites. Dell extended the standard one-year warranty to two years for the systems they identified as having the problem. HP offered a 24-month warranty extension for the specific issue.

However, instead of issuing a recall — as you would expect in such a clear case of a defective part — the vendors instead merely offered a BIOS upgrade. The “patch” for the affected notebooks made their fans run continuously in an attempt to lower the GPU-induced heat, which was cooking the motherboards onto which the chips were soldered.

This “fix” merely extended the time before the motherboards finally burned out while simultaneously devouring the machines’ battery life — sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a coronary. Of course, notebook purchasers became further inflamed by the power drain on their systems due to the constantly running fan.

via Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip.

To see if your Dell laptop could have this issue and is eligible for the extended warranty, click here

To see if your HP laptop could have this issue and is eligible for the extended warranty, click here

Filed under: Instructional, PC Maintenance, PC Tips and Tools | 2 Comments »

Safe Surfing with WOT

Posted on April 5, 2009 by wjimenez275

WOT (Web of Trust) is a plugin I use to make sure that the websites I visit are safe. If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, this is one plugin that you have to install.

Cloudeight Internet recently did a comparison of four different programs that rate the safety of websites, including Norton Safe Web, SiteAdvisor, Link Scanner and Web of Trust. You can see the results here. WOT would have protected you from every one of those sites. Those are sites which they felt are scams or which offer free downloads which they consider to be adware, spyware or malware. (Thank you Free PC Security)

WOT just release it’s latest version 3.5.  From WOT’s website, “Our new version adds protection levels to suit your every need – at every time in your life. Single adults can enjoy “Light” protection while surfing anywhere on the web. You get only a simple alert if you surf to a page with a poor reputation. Parents with young children can choose the “Parental Control” mode which blocks access to dangerous sites like pornography or hate sites.

WOT provides four convenient one-click protection options that can be changed instantly depending on the situation:

  • Light protection suits experienced Web users
  • Basic protection guides the user by giving warnings
  • Maximum Safety stops dangerous Web sites from loading
  • Parental Control blocks access to Web sites with a poor child safety rating and no rating at all”

Firefox users have a new shortcut to the WOT scorecard. Right click on any link and the menu includes the option to see the WOT scorecard. This is especially useful when you are surfing in a site with links but no WOT ratings.

After installing WOT, when you perform a search, the list of links will have a green, yellow, red or clear circle after them. Green means safe, yellow is warning, red is stay out and clear means it hasn’t been rated so you’re on your own. If you hover your cursor over the circle, it’ll further breakdown the ratings. At this time when seemingly innocent websites can wreak havoc on your computer, it’s critically important to have a way of knowing what’s safe and what’s not. With Web Of Trust, you have the knowledge.

You can download the Internet Explorer Plugin here and the Firefox plugin here

Filed under: Instructional, Internet Items, PC Security, PC Tips and Tools | 3 Comments »

Reduce the Size Your Digital Pictures in Windows XP

Posted on March 7, 2009 by wjimenez275

We’ve all done it, taken lots of digital pictures, copied them to our computers and emailed them to our friends and family, only to have it take forever to mail or to get comments from them letting us know that the pictures either were too big to view, or that they were so big that they locked up the computer.  Microsoft PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released. One of the programs is an Image resizer. Go to the link above, scroll down until you find Image Resizer on the right column. Click on that link to download it. Once you download and install the program, it adds an option to the right-click menu to resize images. To use it, go to the folder in Windows Explorer that contains your pictures. Right-click on a picture and choose “Resize Pictures”. An option window opens and allows you to choose the size of the picture and a few other options. Most people are using the 1024×768 resolution on their monitors so you’d be safe using this setting most of the time. 800×600 works well too. You can see in this example (http://www.askbillfirst.com/images/PictureResizer.jpg) that picture IMG_4062 resized from 2.2 mb in size to a fraction on that (132 kb). You can select multiple images and resize them at the same time. I haven’t notice any loss in picture quality and sending pictures in a much smaller size is appreciated by all. The other benefit of this is that I end up with a much smaller file on my computer which saves me hard disk space for other things. Vista doesn’t have the same PowerToys but a nice, free image resizer can be downloaded from http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/. You can watch their YouTube video on the same page to see how it works. It’s similar.

Filed under: Instructional, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Report: Obama helicopter security breached – White House- msnbc.com

Posted on March 1, 2009 by wjimenez275

What’s important to take away from this story is that the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing opened this person’s computer up to the world and basically said, “come take a look at my files, even the private ones”.

A company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama’s helicopter, NBC affiliate WPXI in Pittsburgh reported Saturday.

Employees of Tiversa, a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology, reportedly found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.

Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, told WPXI-TV: “We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president’s helicopter.”

The company was able to trace the file back to its original source.

“What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.

Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same computer, WPXI-TV reported.

Someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, not realizing the potential problems, Boback said.

“When downloading one of these file-sharing programs, you are effectively allowing others around the world to access your hard drive,” Boback said.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, said the company discovered exactly which computer the information came from. “I’m sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.”

Boback said the government was notified immediately.

Iran is not the only country that appears to be accessing this type of information through file-sharing programs, Boback told the station.

“We’ve noticed it out of Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China. They are actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence,” Boback said.

Clark told WPXI that he doesn’t know how sensitive this information is, but he said other military information has been found on the Internet in the past and should be monitored more closely.

Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., said he would ask Congress to investigate how to prevent this from happening again.

via Report: Obama helicopter security breached – White House- msnbc.com.

Filed under: PC Security, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Stop thief! Software lets stolen laptops speak up by AP: Yahoo! Tech

Posted on February 25, 2009 by wjimenez275

Stolen laptop? Now you can tell those thieves exactly what you think of them.

Front Door Software Corp.’s Retriever program displays your contact information as your computer boots up. There’s even space for a plea to a Good Samaritan — “$50 for my safe return,” maybe.

In most cases, that’s enough to help an honest person return the machine, said Carrie Hafeman, chief executive of the five-person company based in Evergreen, Colo.

But in the darkest scenarios, Retriever takes off the kid gloves.

You can log on to a Web site and check a box indicating the computer is missing. Now during start-up, a big yellow and red banner appears on the screen, boldly declaring the laptop lost or stolen. This message is set to reappear every 30 seconds, no matter how many times the thief closes the window.

You can remotely switch on a second password prompt if you fear the thief has also stolen your regular Windows, Macintosh or Linux login.

Behind the scenes, Retriever uses built-in Wi-Fi to sniff out nearby networks, then suss out what Internet service providers power them. With that information in hand, Hafeman said, you can file a police report and get help locating the criminal.

While waiting for law enforcement to come through, you can even let off steam by sending new messages to the nagging “Stolen Computer!” screen.

“You are being tracked. I am right at your door” was one, Hafeman said, adding that she could not bring herself to say others that came to mind. Customers have also tried to induce fear or guilt by switching their contact info to “Secret Service” and “Catholic church.”

The latest version of Retriever, which costs $29.95 for three years of use, is even more aggressive.

Now, when the “stolen” screen pops up, the laptop cries for help. Use a canned message (“Help, this laptop is reported lost or stolen. If you are not my owner, please report me now.”) or record your own.

“You can say, ‘Get your hands off me, you S.O.B.'” Hafeman said.

via Yahoo! News – Stop thief! Software lets stolen laptops speak up by AP: Yahoo! Tech.

Filed under: Instructional, PC Security, PC Tips and Tools | 1 Comment »

Internet Explorer compatibility in Firefox or Chrome

Posted on February 20, 2009 by wjimenez275

If you use Firefox or Chrome as your primary browser, you may have run into an internet page that works best under Internet Explorer, or actually requires Internet Explorer. I ran into this the other day when I was helping someone with a problem they were having in Yahoo Mail, in which the right-click copy/paste function wouldn’t work in Firefox but worked fine in IE. In researching it, I found that this problem has existed for quite a while. A day or so later, I was logging onto a site and it wouldn’t load, only to find out that Firefox wasn’t a supported browser.

The answer to these problems is a Firefox plug-in that you can find here (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-36/). It allows you to right-click a tab and render it as an IE tab. You can designate certain sites to open under the IE tab whenever you need to open them. Most importantly, it allows me to stay in Firefox for all of my other browsing. Really comes in handy.

In Chrome, this extension works wonderfully – http://www.ietab.net/home (ignore the link to Firefox on this page). With this tool, you right-click on the page to have it rendered in Internet Explorer. Under IE Tab Options, you can set which version of IE you want to emulate, from versions 7 to 9.

Filed under: Instructional, Internet Items, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Have you ever needed to share someone’s computer?

Posted on February 3, 2009 by wjimenez275

Have you ever been speaking with  someone and they describe what’s going on their computer but you’re just not understanding what they’re saying, or they’re running a program and have a question about something but can’t really express in words what they need?

There’s a great program that I use that allows me, with the permission of the other user, to gain access to their computer to see what’s going on. I gain control of the mouse and keyboard, or let them keep control so they can show me what’s going on. Did I mention that it’s free?

Crossloop is a free remote assistance program that allows you to run programs, open documents, download drivers, alter settings and even delete files on the remote computer.

The program works by connecting via the CrossLoop server. The server has 128bit Blowfish encryption, making it  safe from hackers and other ne’er-do-wells.

It’s easy to setup and run and it has saved a lot of time in troubleshooting issues. You can download the program from here (http://www.crossloop.com/ipage.htm?id=download).

They also have a service with support people online from all over the world to assist you when you have a problem. The helpers set their own rates and if the Helper was unable to solve your problem or your problem continued after the session and within 48 hours of your final payment, CrossLoop will refund the payment you made. The rates for Helpers vary by many factors depending on the type of issue and experience of the Helper you choose.

A nice program worth looking into if you’re constantly called on to help others, or if you need help yourself and don’t know who to turn to. – Crossloop

Filed under: Instructional, PC Maintenance, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

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