Posts about maintaining your computing equipment
That’s an odd question! What do I mean by that? The simple answer is that I want to know if you have a domain that you own. Do you have an address on the Internet that you can use for your blog or website? Do you have an address on the Internet that you can…
Have you ever had the need to set up a conference call? And have you ever been stymied by how to do it on the office phone or your cell phone? Do you know if your home phone can do conference calling? I may have the answer to these questions for you in today’s post. …
If you’ve got a business email account then you have an asset that needs to be protected. What would happen if one day you logged on to your computer and opened up Outlook (or almost any other email client) and it did not open? Or it opened but it couldn’t find your email? If you…
I’ve been on vacation since Friday afternoon. Actually, I spent all of Friday afternoon and part of Friday evening driving the 482 miles from Orinda, California to Newport Coast, California down the El Camino Real, otherwise known as US Hwy 101. During the 7, almost 8, hour drive I had plenty of time to reflect…
I want to talk a bit about backups. But first, let’s take a little quiz: First question: Do you have a backup program/system in place that regularly performs a backup of your critical data? (Answer truthfully and no copying your neighbor’s answer) Second question: How likely are you to remember to do this on a…
So one day you go up to your computer and it is doing something weird or it’s not doing what it should be doing or something is wrong and you just have no clue what to do. You’ve even rebooted, but the problem has not gone away. It’s now time to call tech support…or is…
Now I’ll talk about Error Checking (A.K.A. ScanDisk or ChkDsk) and Disk Defragmentation. These two programs are essential to the continued good health of your computer. Running these two programs is like changing the oil in your car and getting a tune up. They don’t perform the same functions, but if your forget to change…
Next up is Virus Scanning, so to start with let’s talk about what is a virus. If you go the McAfee web site, their glossary defines a virus as “A computer program file capable of attaching to disks or other files and replicating itself repeatedly, typically without user knowledge or permission.” This is probably as…
Moving on to some hardware issues now. We are living in dangerous times now here in California. (And if you believe the news, other parts of the country will have the same problems soon) I am referring to the dangers to computers from power outages. As mentioned yesterday, power surges are disastrous to electronic equipment…
I’d like to offer an alternative to blindly picking up the phone and calling tech support. There are some preventative measures that you can take, but you aren’t going to like them as you’ll have to spend a little money and a little time, but believe me, this is the better way. First and foremost,…
