I got a call the other day from a customer who had just purchased Windows OneCare to protect a couple of his computers. When he installed it on his laptop, it installed ok but when the computer just rebooted, it just kept rebooting. When I arrived and wanted to get out of the reboot loop, […]
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When I was a kid, my grandfather lived in Idaho. I saw him about once a year when he came down in his RV or when Idaho made it into our summer family trip. What if I could have seen him more often, like each time we talked on the phone? Today, cheap webcams and […]
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Not long ago, I spent a couple hours on the phone with SunRocket. I had their InnoMedia Gizmo and the VOIP light just wouldn’t come on. I had a newer SpeedStream DSL modem there and a Netgear RangeMax router also connected. In my attempts prior to calling, I followed their suggestion to connect the Gizmo(that’s […]
I recently had occassion to need a document viewer for the Blackberry so I went on a little search. I found a couple of options but decided on DocHawk for its simplicity and decent price. The way it works is you go into your mail app and choose a document attachment to send to the […]
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Software is a funny thing. It can be copied endlessly, which is great if you’re a consumer but if you’re selling software, it can be a nightmare. For example, what if you were a carpenter and built one redwood picnic table featuring beautiful inlays depicting scenes from Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure. You delivered it to […]
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Over the past 6 months I’ve run into a couple of brand new Dell machines that after running for a couple of hours, had this same problem. They both showed only the desktop with no icons and no Start menu/task bar. In each case, booting into safe mode worked but didn’t shed much light on […]
This month, I’ve pulled the topic from many of the questions I received over the past few weeks. Questions like: How do I protect myself online? Should I worry about identity theft? What’s a cookie? Do you want a cookie? These questions(all but that last one) are motivated by the fear of the unknown so […]
Who likes to pay to learn about secret options in tools you already purchased? That’s just what I did recently with HP and its recovery CDs. I present the information here so that nobody else has to pay for the secret options. I recently had a problem using HP Recovery CDs to bring a computer […]
I enjoy educating people about computers and the internet and I thought I’d use this issue to teach you how to use the keyboard to be faster, more effective, and more comfortable in your computing. If you’ve seen the back of my business card, you know what I’m talking about. Which can you do faster? […]
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Today, I connected to the newly-opened Google Wifi network. A few weeks before, after eating at the In-N Out at Rengstorff in Mountain View I spotted what I thought was a node on their mesh network. At that time, the access point was not broadcasting its ssid and I couldn’t get on even with a […]