Before I get to that, I want you to ask yourself these questions. How many hours do you think you waste on the Internet trying to keep track of all of your logins and passwords for every website you visit regularly? Do you have trouble remembering all the different logins and passwords and frequently click “forgot password” on your favorite websites? Do you constantly have to change your passwords to keep up with security requirements? Don’t you wish it would be automated?

The reason I would not be able to tell you my bank account password, even if you put me under major duress, is because it is 32 characters long and it is scrambled like crazy so it literally looks like something like this:  zJwXwWFdWki7KPQWj9ihLwkEEJaLQXPo. So how in the world do I remember passwords like that? The answer: I don’t. RoboForm does it for me.

It is great piece of software that I use more than anything else. This awesome software remembers all of my online passwords for me. I don’t have to type in usernames or passwords for any website on the Internet. I literally just click on a button and blammo, I’m instantly logged on to whatever website I want to visit.

This piece of software is called RoboForm and it has saved me hundreds of hours of time on the Internet. You’re welcome to try it out, absolutely free, for 30 days. After your free trial I’m almost 100% certain you will buy it because it is indispensable.

Check out a quick video of RoboForm to see it in action:

I hope this software saves you loads of time as it sure did for me.

Download RoboForm

Haven’t had enough of knowing which update notifications are good and what isn’t? Good! There are plenty of other notifications which are quite good and need attention, and there are some others which will be demanding your attention and may do a lot of harm. We will look at both so you will be prepared in case you see any from either category.

The general rule to safe computing is be prepared and be informed. Be prepared for many programs trying to steal your attention with various notices, but also be informed by which ones can be ignored, which ones are critical and which notices could be dealt with a little later on.

A lot of people use the Windows operating system, and it regularly receives its own updates as well. Whether you download manually from microsoft.com, or use the built-in Windows Update feature, you are sure to come across this safe notice:

Windows XP Version

Windows Vista/7 Version

For keeping further nasties such as spyware and trojans out of your machine, you might be using a safe and trustworthy program such as AVG Anti Virus:

For those who regularly use Flash-based applications and games (Facebook, YouTube, puzzle games, etc) you need to make sure that you are running the latest version of Flash. If your version is too old, sometimes you will see a notification like this:

Or, if your copy of Flash is not too out of date, be sure to check out www.adobe.com when you have the chance, as later versions of Flash usually offer increased stability, better and smoother animation features and sometimes use less memory, which means a faster web browsing experience for you.

There are also Java update notifications that are legitimate:

However, there are some notifications out there that look legitimate, but are indeed malicious and you should avoid, ignore or close them immediately.

Notice the various typos that appear throughout this legitimate-looking program. This type of software is unsafe and should not be downloaded, opened, or authorized. These types of programs usually pop up via banner ads throughout the web or they walk right into your computer if it is not fully up-to-date with the latest security patches and updated Internet software.

Just some of the things they do if they are allowed to run on your computer are: invade your privacy, steal your financial information, break into your email accounts and remotely use your computer to harass other people. Some very, very closely match the notices you might see on your own computer, and they will be offering to make your software run faster, perform a remote virus scan or safe guard your computer, when in actual fact they will make your computer slow, infect your system with viruses and allow your computer to be a central point for many more mean and nasty users.

Safe computing!

It is that time of year again, when the decorations go up, the snow starts, companies left and right are fighting for your holiday dollars with new shiny gadgets and vendors slowly increase their pricing to take advantage of the period of extra spending.

However, not everyone tries to raise prices and not everyone just wants to help you empty your wallet. There are some people out there that do offer genuine deals and offer some pretty amazing bargains. Not some cheap quality products either but brand name items, wonderful gadgets with a pricing scheme that makes it easy to fill those Christmas stockings.

Many people might be looking to find that appropriate gift for the gadget fan who has everything, or a computer upgrade for the games player or a new PC system for their home or business. But taking that into consideration, how can you avoid those vendors who just want your money and find those who sincerely want to offer you great products at great pricing and who understand what it is like for the consumer who just wants things to work, to work right and to work the first time?

I ask you to consider the sender of this newsletter. A well known world-wide computer company which I am sure many have heard of is called Dell. Now some of their retail pricing can sometimes seem a little “padded”, that is, it can be a little high and not really for the user who wants great hardware but is also looking for a nice holiday discount too. Fortunately for you, I can get you that discount.

How? You might ask. Because of some fancy negotiation skills and an obsession with wanting to always give the best deal possible as much as possible, I can give you a brand-name system complete with the works, and a new printer for those holiday snaps, scanner, laptop and upgraded network and Internet gear for up to 30% off the listed retail price. Sound impossible? Not to someone determined to get the best deal possible from the leading manufactures with the sole intent of passing those savings on to my clients.

I still do not think that is enough. What if you do want to upgrade your existing system or transfer your documents and photos to a new machine? What if you run a small business and need reliable backup services for your data? Fortunately I can also throw in a yearly backup and file transfer service as well.

Am I crazy for wanting to save you 30% off retail pricing of a new system and then throwing in a reliable and trustworthy backup system free for a year? Possibly. I’m either excited about the bargains I can offer or I need to be thrown into a padded cell for forgetting my meds. Better ask me about the former before the latter happens, or you will be so angry with yourself you’ll go mad too!

Many people might go to their local newsagent to buy the local paper or industry magazine to keep on top of what is going on and see what is being reported. Others might visit news websites to find out what the latest news is and more again might flick on the radio and catch the report on their local station.

Of the above, some might do it as something to do, others use it as white noise and again others might rely on it during their busy day to find out what is happening in their community, their town, their state, their country. Now, where am I going with all this? Well, did you know that your computer also needs to be kept updated and find out the latest?

Your computer may not be interested in the local news and bits of gossip, but it definitely is interested in knowing about the latest viruses being developed, the latest spyware being deployed, how to avoid the latest security vulnerability or have that problem fixed with your word processor that occasionally mucks up your fonts and disrupts your table placement when someone else opens up the document.

The most critical of the above is probably looking for virus updates for your anti-virus programs. Here is one from the popular AVG Anti Virus:

Here is one you might see from the free Adobe Acrobat Reader:

It is important to update utility programs such as Adobe Acrobat Reader as your current version of the program may not have all the benefits and interactive abilities such as form editing and saving.

Many web browsers also have an auto update feature, such as Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla continually update and improve the Firefox web browser to fix bugs and improve operating speed and enhance your web browsing experience. Here is a notification that a new version of Mozilla Firefox is available:

Sun’s Java platform is also popular as it is needed for many software programs, and for enabling Java support in your web browser for sites and web-based applications that require it. Here the Java Web Start application is letting the user know that a newer version with updates, fixes and improvements is waiting to be installed:

In the next post, we will continue this mini-series with Part 2 looking at more common update notifications as well as some nasty and malicious ones you should avoid and ignore.

Arthur C. Clarke once write “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and I believe that applies more today than it ever has. It has been proven by the massive explosion of great new technologies released lately and it can be hard to tell if this is the panacea, or if there are still a few surprises ahead of us.

What seemed like a far fetched idea just a few years ago in the arena of consumer electronics, we are now using in our living rooms without giving it a second thought. Personal Digital Assistants were small devices that once handled our schedules, address books and took notes. Then they progressed to featuring touch screens, advanced operating systems and allowed wireless internet access for email and web browsing. They continued further to allowing portable music playing and
movie watching. Now we only have to look at recent developments in tablet PC technology, such as the Eee PC T91, the concept of which was pushed again to the Apple iPad.

Storage devices which, once upon a time, were the size of a washing machine holding mere megabytes (to give you an idea, they may have been able to hold one, yes one, small PowerPoint presentation, word processor document or only a handful of high resolution digital images). Now storage devices the size of the knuckle on your pinky finger can hold an entire library of books, hundreds of music files, thousands of digital images, several home movies with space left over to save a copy of important emails if you wanted to. Wouldn’t that have seemed like magic a mere 10-15 years ago?

However, that trip down memory lane has another purpose besides helping us to appreciate how far we have come on our digital journey. It is to tell you that all those years of progress have brought us some amazing devices, and that if you aren’t taking advantage of a few of these, you may well be losing money, time or both.

Take advantage of the new hard drives that will keep working even if they are accidentally bumped, use very little power and are impossible to “crash”. Use a tablet PC for computing on the run and working remotely or to occupy you for those long journeys. New network technologies allow full computing and internet access without wires, and some even allow completely free calls to anyone in the world. Contact family and friends with cheap video conferencing abilities and enjoy the full
benefits of modern personal computing.

Ready to see a magic show? Take a look at what technology can do for you and stop slaving away with obsolete, costly and slow devices. The future is here, right now and the show has just started. Enjoy.

I am a huge fan of laser printers for many reasons. They are fast, efficient, easy to network, and the toner cartridges last a very long time before having to replace them. Probably the best reason is their lower cost-per-page compared to inkjet printers. If it was a perfect world, quite honestly, I would abolish inkjet technology altogether. Don’t you find it to be quite silly that you’re paying $50 for a very tiny amount of ink? Gather up a bunch of ballpoint pens and you’ll see that you are getting majorly ripped off in the printer ink business!

So, here’s my brief take on what to look for in a printer:

• Technology: Laser, hands down. Forget the inkjets!
• Connectivity: USB is a given, but networking is a must if you want to share your printer with multiple computers. Wireless is even better.
• Speed: 20ppm or faster is generally the lowest rating to look for. Laser printers usually print in the 30-50ppm range easily.
• Color vs. Black/White: You’ll get the cheapest price tag if you go with a mono/black & white laser printer for sure, but color lasers have come down in price considerably in the last few months.A good, simple mono laser can be had for about $100.
• Brand: Canon makes the best laser printers for business use. Period. For home use, Dell offers great prices on all of their laser printers. HP is #1 in the market, but certainly not in my eyes. Their software and drivers are horrible.

Probably the biggest “downside” to lasers is the fact that they don’t print photos on glossy paper. For this, I just bring my photos to a professional printing shop that can do this for me at pennies per photo. Even then, I rarely print photos since it’s so much cooler showing them off on a 50″ plasma TV than a tiny 4×6 photo paper.

A lot of users buy inkjets because of the all-in-ones that are out there. I think all-in-ones should be abolished too! You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. I had an all-in-one Canon inkjet for about three years before the auto document feeder died. Then shortly after that, the print heads really got messed up. So basically it ended up being a glorified fax machine and flat bed scanner that can’t even print!

So my idea of a perfect office is this:

• Printing. I have a Dell Color Laser 3110CN Printer. It prints color, black and white, envelopes, and just about anything I need printed. I printed a 500 page book in less than 30 minutes and the toner hardly depleted.
• Faxing. I don’t have a fax machine. Instead, I use an Internet faxing service called SmartFax (www.smartfax.com). If I need to fax something, I just choose the Fax “printer” on my computer and it sends out a fax over the Internet. This saves the wasted step of printing things out and then faxing it with a fax machine. The best part about SmartFax is inbound faxes are free and unlimited. Sometimes I get junk faxes so it’s better to just delete the e-mail instead of wasting ink and paper.
• Scanning. I have a dedicated flat bed scanner for photo projects and I have a dedicated sheet-fed scanner called ScanSnap which makes it a cinch to scan in receipts, documents, tax returns, and anything else. It converts them into PDFs on my computer for easy searching and viewing.

By the way, my office 100% paperless, save for the shreds of paper in my shredder. I don’t even have post-it notes (there’s a program I use that puts notes on my computer’s screen)! Contact me to find out how to make your office paperless and how to get rid of wasteful technology. Be Green!

With proper care, the expensive lithium-ion batteries in your notebook PCs and other portable gear can run well for many, many years.

Common battery-care mistakes will reduce your batteries’ run times and lead to needless environmental waste and costly early replacement.

Heat is the biggest offender to lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries. It is best to keep the laptop as a whole as cool as possible by avoiding direct sunlight, leaving the laptop on while storing it in a bag, or leaving the battery in while it is plugged in and already at full charge. When your laptop is running on AC power, it’s recommended to remove the battery pack and store it in a cool place, like the refrigerator (in tightly wrapped plastic bag). Low temperatures stall the inevitable and irreversible chemical changes that occur in Li-ion batteries.

In fact, if your laptop is mostly run off household AC power, you can greatly extend the life of its Li-ion battery by following the 40/40 rule: Run the battery down to about 40% of maximum charge then store it at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (in your fridge).
If you can, avoid running Li-ion batteries all the way down. It used to be recommended to run the battery all the way down, but that has changed with the Li-ion batteries.  It is best for the battery to be used between 40-100% of the charge.
Even when you are careful about the battery, your battery will still eventually go bad from normal wear and tear.

Most people purchase spare batteries, but it is best to wait until you really need one for heavy mobile usage or you will have the same problem with it wearing out before it is needed.  If you do have a spare battery, store it in the fridge with about a 40% charge when it’s not in use.

It is important to check the manufactured date on the battery pack when buying a replacement.  It could have been on the shelf for a couple years, which defeats the purpose of buying it.
If carefully taken care of, you can get 300-500 charges from a battery and a happy battery life.
These two excellent articles provide more information on Li-Ion battery life:

• How to prolong lithium-based batteries from BatteryUniversity.com

• The care and feeding of Li-ion batteries from TechRepublic.com

Have a dead laptop battery or two? Give it to me and I will recycle it properly for you! I can also provide replacement batteries for your laptop.

Most computers today might have what has traditionally been a mechanical hard drive; a noisy metal rectangle shaped box about 3.5 inches wide that generates a lot of heat and has little metal platters inside that spin about several thousand times a minute and holds your data and computer programs. But there is a new challenger on the block that is taking the computing world by storm, and for very good reason: it is so much better.

Mechanical hard drives are very, very common. Trouble is, they are very susceptible to damage and wear. Yes you may have one that lasts years, but many a hard drive has been found that has “crashed”, that is, the little “arm” inside the drive that sweeps over the metal plates to read your data has either scrapped or seriously damaged the metal platters, taking all of your data with it. In most instances, your data is irrecoverable. They are also incredibly sensitive to movement and a simple accidental drop or bump (even if the computer is off) could potentially kill the drive pretty quickly. A painful lesson for those who do not have a recent (or any) backup of their data.

The new drives, called SSD drives (the SSD stands for Solid State Device), use a special computer chip for storing your data, and these gems bring with them many, many benefits. Some of these are; [1] Using less than a tenth of the power that traditional hard drives use (save on your power bill!), [2] Have absolutely no moving parts that can wear out, which eliminates any chance of mechanical problems, [3] They produce very, very little heat, whereas a mechanical drive can get so warm they are too hot to touch! [4] They can be bumped, dropped, prodded and left in extreme temperature conditions and still be fully functional. In fact, you can do all of the above to an SSD drive while it is turned on and it still won’t be affected, [5] they are really fast. SSD drives can read your data over 1000 times faster than mechanical drives. Yes, that fast.

The only disadvantage with SSD drives is the same for every introduction of a new technology; they can be expensive and offer lower storage capacity than current desktop systems might have. However, all that was months ago, and today, they are more affordable, offer more capacity and they are more popular than ever.

A drive that is ultra reliable (even when the drive eventually goes bad, data rescue is much easier), ultra fast, produces very little to no heat, uses practically no electricity to run and is completely silent. That sounds like the perfect device for your computer. Fast, Reliable and Affordable. Mechanical drives used to make us choose two out of those three options with a compromise on a third option. Today SSD drives offer all three. They work just fine with the new Windows 7 too.