There used to be a day when a man would be forced by his significant other to pull over and ask for directions. Those days are long gone if you have access to the Internet and a few minutes to spare before your trip. Ideally, you would have a GPS, but fear not if you don’t…here’s the regular way to avoid getting lost without the need for a GPS. You may have a map in your glove box but let’s be honest, it’s most likely old, out dated and difficult to read while on the road. That’s where mapping websites like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and a slew of others come in, to help you find your way. Just punch in the address you are leaving from and then the address you are going to and let the mapping website do the rest. Print out your results and bring them with you on your trip, easy as pie. Because I work in a service center, many of the delivery guys will use this feature when they are going to a new location that they are not familiar with. If you are one of those “I just don’t have the time to waste going to a mapping website” type of people, you would be better served to give yourself the time to avoid wasting extra driving around on the road…not to mention the price of gas these days!

Our family has owned a small portable satellite radio device for a few years now and until recently, we only activated it during the summer months. We now use the radio for multi-tasking and are thinking it may be time to sign-up for a full year plan as we are now using our satellite radio far more often these days. Here’s why, during the day I do service calls for different companies around the city so the radio goes with me during that time. In the evening, we move the same radio receiver over to our garage as we tend to spend many hours in the evenings doing a little of this and a little of that around the yard. Finally, we own an RV and when we go camping, the radio comes along and the best thing is because it’s a satellite signal, no matter how far in the back woods we go, the reception is just as good as it is in the city. The best advice I can give is to purchase extra antennas for every location you will be using your radio so as to not have to waste time moving the antenna every-time you move the radio.

Most will already be familiar with GPS (Ground Positioning Satellite) which basically means a hand held computer that uses several satellites to calculate where in the world you are currently located. It’s great for finding your way around or even back home after a long trip but did you know that others are having a great time using their GPS devices to do some gaming? No, not those kind of games with the bleeps and blips and graphics that look oh so realistic, but instead a treasure hunt game! It’s called Geocaching, and it’s all the rage with many GPS owners and their friends and families. It’s easy as pie to either hide your own treasure and then go post the co-ordinates @ Geocaching.com or if you rather go treasure hunting, use the same site to find lots of hidden ‘caches’ near your home.

My day job is to fix a variety of computers and printers for a warranty depot on all the major brands. We often run across PCs that are just beyond words and we just need to take pictures to show our co-workers how ‘bad’ it really was. This PC came from the Alberta oilfields and was obviously kept somewhere in a shop with no protection whatsoever. At first, some of the ladies where scared to look inside the case because they thought there was a dead mouse inside it! No dead mouse here, the dust bunny inside this computer is just that big. We used an entire can of compressed air in order to clean out the insides of this machine, it was disgusting! If you have a PC in a shop, do yourself a favour and build a small cabinet with lots of holes for air intake. Cover those holes with some-kind of screening of filters in order to keep the dust out of the electronic components.

This morning in my inbox was the Best Buy digital flyer announcing that Dell was now available for purchase @ Best Buy stores. Many of my co-workers seemed surprised that Dell was now available in retail locations, but with the shutdown of many of it’s Dell branded stores including the one here @ West Edmonton Mall, it came as no surprise to me but instead a long awaited bonus. I look forward to my next laptop purchase as I will now have one extra brand to choose from…it can only help bring prices down even more.

Before we shut down the Mr. Tech service dept., we always recommended that our clients run AVG anti-virus from Grisoft as in our experience the product is superior to both Norton and McAfee. But, don’t take our word for it, you can download a free copy of the software and try it for yourself. Mind you, if you like the free version you should consider upgrading to the full version as you get a 2 year license for less than it would cost to purchase either McAfee or Norton software. Once you’ve installed the free software, you may think something is still wrong so the suggestion would be to get a second opinion. Visit Trend Micro’s website and run their free online virus scan called HouseCall, which will provide you with yet another level of protection.

Maybe you are in need to of booting your system to DOS or you want to troubleshoot some issues you are experiencing and you need a boot disk. Forget about finding your old windows CD and trying to dig out the boot disk making instructions and then going through the hassle of extracting files to be copied to a blank CD or even a USB flash drive. BootDisk.com has every kind of boot disk you can imagine…DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP and even some Linux boot disks as well.  You can even find bootable Cd’s, Windows live/bootable, network boots and even how to guides for Windows Vista. If you are looking for bootable discs that contain troubleshooting tools as well, then a visit to Ultimate Boot CD website is what you need. The tools included are many such as CPU tests, memory tests, peripherals, information, benchmark tools, bios tools, Hard Disk install tools as well as diagnostics, wiping tools, cloning tools, formatting, partitions, boot managers, file tools, boot manager, NTFS tools, anti-virus & malware tools, network, dos boot, and Linux boot disks.

For a long time now, Dell has been quietly re-selling it’s refurbished, used and off-lease products on the Internet. Every so often they even send me a coupon code for things like free shipping or even 25% off my purchase. Don’t go looking on the public Dell site as you won’t find anything there…you have to visit Dell Financial Services Canada or Dell Financial Services USA website to view all the great deals.

Megabytes, Gigabytes, Memory, RAM, Hard Drives, Storage Space, what is it exactly that they are talking about? It’s confusing!

Well, it’s all very simple once you can tell them both apart. Without complicating things too much, a computer has memory much like a human has a brain, and has a hard disk drive much like you would use a notepad to write down things that you can’t memorize due to the volume of information to be retained. Also, unlike the human brain, memory in a computer is erased every time you turn it off and on again…or in computer terms, it’s volatile.
So, to save your information, or files if you will, you need a hard drive to write the information down for later use (like taking notes).

Computer memory goes by several different names, but the one we are discussing today is called RAM (Random Access Memory). RAM memory is calculated in megabytes and gigabytes much like millimetres and centimetres are calculated. 1000 kilobytes equals 1 megabyte, and 1000 megabytes equals 1 gigabyte.

Now, there is some confusion for people between hard disk space and memory space. Why is this, simple, because hard disk space is also calculated in megabytes and gigabytes! So, how can you tell them apart easily in the store? Well, fortunately for us right now on the market you buy RAM in megabytes and hard disks in gigabytes. Therefore, the term we learn this month is MEGABYTE (MB) AND GIGABYTE (GB).

RAM (Memory) is sold in megabytes and typically you will find it in the following sizes: 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and so on…(128MB is typical for a computer being sold right now in stores) HARD DISK DRIVES are sold in Gigabytes and typically you will find them in the following sizes: 10GB, 20GB, 60GB…even 160GB! (A hard drive of at least 20GB is enough for the average user).

In case you are not very familiar with what the term ‘backup’ actually means, I’m going to give you a very easy explanation of the concept: When you put a sheet of paper on a photocopier and hit copy you have just created a ‘backup’ of your original piece of paper. Now, let’s say you have a picture of your pet as a file on your computer that you don’t want to lose. Make a backup of this file by copying it elsewhere. If the file is small enough you can copy it and others to a floppy disk and put that disk away in storage. Or if your files are bigger and you have two hard disk drives, you can make a copy of the files you wish to backup to the other hard drive.

If you have hundreds of files or even dozens of very large ones, you can ‘burn’ them to  » » » »