Episodes

What if I told you I would give you an email account, and it’s all yours to use. You can use it for personal or business email or whatever you want. There’s only one catch: you can only have it temporarily. At some undetermined point in the future, your access to that email account would be cut off and you would not be able to use it at all after that. Would you use that email as your primary email address? Would you give that address to all of your friends and family? Would you put it on your ...

It’s a question that I get asked all the time: Should I leave my computer on all the time, or should I turn it off at night? There are valid reasons for both options, so I’ll present you with the pros and cons and you can decide what’s best for your situation. Why you should leave it on: Maintenance and backups Your computer has stuff to do just to take care of itself. Your antivirus needs to update itself and do a scan regularly, and Windows Updates get downloaded and installed at least once ...

Last Monday I posted about how to handle a couple of specific computer emergencies (a spilled drink on your laptop, and a failing hard drive). This week in Part 2, we’ll cover two more emergency situations that require to you take action right away. No need for panic if you plan ahead Computer emergency #3: Thunderstorm You’re working at your computer, and you hear a rumble of thunder off in the distance. Here in Florida, during the summer this happens almost every afternoon. A storm is comin...

Do you know how you react when suddenly you find yourself in an emergency situation? Some people can think calmly and do what needs to be done in spite of the chaos that may be all around them. Other people freeze up or panic and don’t really know what they should be doing – and by the time they figure it out, it could be too late for them to do anything. When I was a kid, this was my Saturday night What I’m talking about today is not a car accident or some other life-threatening situation – i...

Sometimes things happen during the routine course of the week, and suddenly I realize – that’s a good topic for a blog post. That’s what happened this past week. If you’re on Facebook, you know there is a high volume of pure garbage that gets “Liked” and shared. I’m not necessarily talking about content that is inappropriate (although there is a lot of that too). What I’m referring to are all the “news” stories that are just plain fake. And especially the photos. And the sad thing is, people p...

Have you ever gotten a PDF file by email, and you had to sign it and send it back by email? For most people, that process is a real hassle. You have to print the PDF file, then you sign the printed copy, then you have to scan that paper back into a new PDF file and save it to your computer, then email it back to whoever sent it to you. It’s a lot of steps for what should be a pretty simple process. Good news… there is a much easier way! And it does not require any printing or scanning. This is...

If you use Windows 8, you have probably become familiar with the thing called the Charms Bar. Or at least you know what it is and where it resides (the right side of your screen). When you put your cursor in the top right corner of the screen, the Charms Bar slides out from the right side with its “charms”. Really they’re just icons, but Microsoft must have figured since they were changing everything else about Windows they might as well come up with some cutesy names for stuff we already know a...

Every once in a while I get a phone call from a frustrated computer user. Their complaint? The volume icon has disappeared! Which means they can’t use the on-screen icon that normally allows them to raise or lower their speaker volume. Where does it go? And more importantly, how do you get it back? As far as how it disappears, I can’t really tell you for sure. Somehow the box gets unchecked. It’s hard to imagine someone accidentally navigating to the place where that checkbox is and inadvertent...

When you create a Word document, you know exactly what you are typing. So, you are obviously in full control of what appears on the pages of that document. But did you know that Word “hides” some information in the document that doesn’t actually appear as text on any of the pages? And this might not be information you want to make public. You can check this out for yourself. Go into your Documents folder, and open one of your Word files. At first glance, all you see is the text that you put on ...