fixyourcomputer.today.com

You know, I usually vote for the underdog.  I stay away from those winning popularity contests - just probably out of spite, I guess.  I didn’t once see an episode of Friends while it was on prime time.  I have never seen an episode of Survivor, Big Brother or even American Idol for that fact.  Why?  - because for me it’s not the thing to do.   “Ca ca” is a word that is commonly thrown out in distaste of the mindless prime time line-up. Throw me the History,  Discovery and Sundance Channel any day.

When I was first exploring the world wide web many moons ago, Lycos was in my opinion the better search engine.  Google started coming around and I thought what a terrible name and avoided it like the plague.  Then I watched as Google grew in popularity, more and more people were talking about it - which made me steer clear of it even more-so.

Finally, one day, I needed something.  I have blocked the painful event from my mind so I can’t even recall what exactly it was.  I used Google.  After that, I opened up more and more and started embracing the gifts that Google had to offer.  I am now a Google junkie.  With the time one spends on the internet these days it is just silly not to be.  If you want to find something and find it quick.  Google is the portal above all portals and let’s not forget the gadgets.  Me like Google gadgets! They are constantly  adding nifty tools and if you know what to use and how to use them weblife is so much easier, I promise you!

Gmail   Gmail (googlemail) is a great mailbox if you hate spam. My yahoo was always full of spam, gmail has such a great filter that I haven’t had spam hit my inbox for years and only once or twice during that time has the wrong thing hit my spam box.  Yes,  it is that good.  Other features?   You never run out of space.  You can forward other email accounts there and reply to that email using the same email address it was sent to and then there’s Gspace  that you can use for extra storage of music, pictures, etc. which you can access from anywhere like your gmail account.  Also you can chat from inside your gmail with either AIM users or google talk.  They had it going on before Yahoo.

Picasa Version 3 is now out and if you ever upload photos to your pc - get Picasa.  It organizes them so they are easy to find - it grabs them up from all over your pc so it’s not like finding a needle in a haystack just looking for pictures from last Christmas.  Once they’re organized you can crop, edit, collage, add text - and even make a movie with music all while in Picasa.

As my main job and side jobs are all on the pc, I am a customization freak.  iGoogle allows me to access a homepage that has a large variety of themes and widget to choose from.

Google Reader  makes checking on your daily topics so easy in a feed.  In fact you can have all of them come up right onto your iGoogle homepage using reader, though you can use it without having iGoogle as well.

Google Product Search  Other than possibly a pack of gum.  There is practically nothing that I don’t search on product search first to find the lowest price on something.  Need a set of tires - know exactly what kind you’re looking for?  Type that model into product search and sort by price or relevance. Try it with anything. What a time saver!

Google Earth   While not for use on a computer with little memory, earth does quite have it’s advantages in planning trips, doing homework, etc - here is the tutorial

Mobile?  Use Google on your phone as well.  Need to know what the weather is?  Type “weather” and send it to 466453   within seconds you will have current conditions and the forecast for the next couple of days on y0ur phone.  Use it for movies, a tow-truck whatever! You may need to add your zip code to some of the searches but try it and see.  I continually use Google Mobile!

Also use Google for your 411 information calls.  It’s free and here’s the short tutorial on 1-800-goog-411.

Now these are just my personal favorites, but see for yourself what google has to offer.  Don’t forget to check out the labs while you’re in there and see what’s in the testing phase now!

Have fun!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

In this blog, I will be adding and commenting on the available tech support forums out there.  Good help, as they say is hard to come by - especially when free!

If your computer is doing something that is obviously not right and you need a pic fix but computer repair isn’t in your budget this week.  Some of these sites are amazing and quick with knowledgeable posters that can walk you right through a quick fix.

On this or any of my blogs - if you have a site in mind that you think is worthy of consideration.  Send me a link and what you think is helpful or just cool about it.   Also if you have tried one of the things that I mention and it didn’t work for you, feel free to let me know your reasoning so that I can review the product again.  I will appreciate your time in doing so as I am trying to offer quick link guides in different areas of resource.

Good Luck!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

Not my general format, but hey, it’s Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving Day Everyone

4 years ago, my son (now 19) was hospitalized with a collapsed lung.  He was Life-Flighted and immediately put on Life Support.  For 5 days I sat by his bed and wept as I watched his vitals on the bedside machine drop to extremely low levels.

He was finally taken off of Life Support on Thanksgiving Day. I am happy to say he is making me so very proud today in the U.S. Army doing Military Intelligence. Never has a day meant so much to me as I am truly thankful and reflect each year (and more often than that) how close I was to losing my child that I love so much.  For me, Thanksgiving has become a day of celebration.. -and he is able to come home for Thanksgiving this year!

Here just a few interesting sites related to Turkey Day!

                                  The History of Thanksgiving by History.com   

       The first Thanksgiving “Voyage on the Mayflower” by Scholastic.com         

        Lots of Turkey left-overs?  Thanksgiving-Epicurious.com

Taking the liberty of the format change to help out the sale shoppers as well:

bfads

black-friday

 blackfriday

blackfriday.gottadeal

blackfridayads

theblackfriday

blackfridayonline

dealtaker.com/blackfriday

Happy Thanksgiving All!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

Make $50,000 a day from your home and all you have to do is type the letter “a” 3 times into your computer!!!  Don’t have a pc?  That’s okay! Use your remote control!

- Nope!, Nada!, Not here!, Not gonna happen!  You big silly! Postings like that are not for real!  All they want is your bank account number or your money in some sort of fashion . That is “their” work at home business - scamming.  If you have to pay for a job, it’s not a job.  I don’t care what they try to tell you.  At most you’ll be “working at home” trying to scam somebody else in the same fashion they scammed you to try to get that money back.

 All I am doing is posting some blogs and/or forums of some very hardworking people that have worked dilligently and put some things that show me if you look hard enough there is work from home out there.  Just use your head and keep your wallet closed.  An actual employer should be paying YOU!

 I have 3 part time jobs working from home and have only been seeking WAHJ’s for a short time. Am I getting rich?  No, but I am working from home, making a decent hourly wage with one & the others are dependent on the work I do.  I let the dogs out on my break and talk to my bird as I type.  Unfortunately snow is here and there’s an ice storm tonight, so walking the dogs isn’t as nice as it was a month ago. 

Here is my compiled list of Work at Home Forums & blogs in no particular order:

last of the forums but certainly not least is Textilicious be forewarned as there are some jobs of an adult nature listed, but there are also some other legitimate postings so definitely worth a look!

Randy’s Home Business Blog at About.com  Randy Duermyer of About.com offers a weekly updated Work from Home  list along with some valuable tips & business advice.

  I came across this blog and wow!  Dealighted has put a lot of effort into making many lists of work at home opportunities!  Please check her out! Dealighteds Blogspot

 Check out this list I came across - I’ve not gone through each one but there’s several to choose from on there - they are unresearched by me:

 Work at Home Moms Top 10 WAHM blog awards!

These 2 also are unresearched by me, but I threw them in there.  Feel free to report back with your findings.  Be careful!  Ways to Make Money  &  Phone-Sex-Jobs.com

  Looking for a writing job?

  I have been authorized to allow some referrals for bloggers through this company today.com.  The pay is not all that to begin with, but it gets you in the door and writing. If you write very well & know how to capture an audience - there are bonuses and referrals to advertisers as needed.  Check it out!  It’s free - so apply here and put Cryptic Muse in the “referred by” box. Get ahold of me if you have any questions!

Happy Hunting!

 Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

CNet Download.com  Download.com offers great reviews for the products you can download on their site.  Not only do the Editors review and rate the products, the Users can rate their experiences too so you know if the freeware you’re about to click on is one great big ball of adware!
Meebo  Chat with your friends and family without downloading on your AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ, Jabber & Flixster accounts!
Geni.com  Fantastic genealogy site.  Get all your family involved when people are added to your family tree.  Share old pictures that are gathering dust - upload them and relatives all over can see them in the online albums.  Great privacy too.  Only specified people can see profiles.

I’m a customizations freak.  Not much else to say other than the next 3 sites accommodate me.

Mozilla Firefox Add-ons
Google Products
Internet Explorer Gallery

If you download torrents is Torrentz  is a great site as it actually gives you results from the biggest torrent sites:  Mininova, Pirate Bay and a few other up and comers. Saves you from searching one by one which is nice!

Totallyfreecrap.com  Just what it says - Totally Free Crap will have a free sample from different merchants sent to your door every couple of days.  It’s just kind of neat to have little packages arrive that you didn’t have to pay a thing for.  Nice change from the bills and advertisements.

2 great sites for a rainy day.  I particularly like the “weekly faves” tab on All My Faves   and there’s always something different to look at as well on Bored.com though there is admittedly some silly stuff for the younger crowd on the latter to weed through it is still worth a look.

What are your favorites?  Leave me a comment and I’ll look them over and you can see them in a later blog listed as your user favorite!

 Enjoy!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

In my opinion of course. -  I think the title sums it up so I will just get started with my list of favorites! I will however note that this list does not include my pc security favorites which are in my  PC Repair Blog

 I’ll start with functionality:

Screen Hunter 5  I’ve recently discovered Screen Hunter 5 as a great screen capture utility.  I’ve not yet had time to play with all the features of it, but it was a quick download and did exactly what I needed it to do.

CDBurnerXP  Burns Data Discs, Audio Discs, Even Iso Images which I love!  Easy to use and has the drag and drop feature, just drag the file you want in there and click “burn”.  I’ve used CDBurnerXP for years and I swear by it.

Peer Guardian 2  It’s an IP blocker.  I have it.  I use it.  Who’s to say if it works or not.  I got it after I read very good things about it in a couple of reputable places - so lets just say it works.

Roboform 6.9.9   Are you a form filler?  Do you sign up for a lot of things?  Roboform 6.9.9 will do this for you.  Just download, put all your information in and then click a button on your tool bar.  It will automatically fill in all the applicable forms on your page.   There is a pro version which you can purchase but your free version never runs out.  You just get to choose a few extra customizable forms with the pro version.  Also you get 2 identities with the free version - which is a big help as well.  When not filling stuff out however you may want to disable it or go under “view” in your toolbar and uncheck it so that it doesn’t continually ask you if you “if it can be of assistance”.

Picasa 3   Pictures - like many of the other things listed here I have sworn by Picasa for years.  What a great free utility for your pictures.  Rather than have your pics scattered all over your pc, Picasa finds them all and shows you an easy and organized short cut too them.  Also from in there you can crop, adjust, collage or export them to the web - do whatever you need to do to them all in one program.  I love Picasa!

 Stamina 2.5   All thumbs when it comes to typing?  Stamina 2.5 will help.  It is a great typing tutor with a kind of funky name.  I thought it was along the lines of “Enzyte”   or something and NO THAT IS NOT WHY I CLICKED ON IT! I thought it was miscategorized and was looking to laugh at someone! I am so glad I did however.  You can test your kpm (keys per minute), wpm (words per minute) and can also break your practice down into symbols, numbes or words.  Great freeware!

Digsby   may still fit in the functionality profile because it is a great big help if you have more than one email account.  Digsby is a chat service - for those of you familiar with Trillian, Gaim and Penguin, Digsby is like that only it is by far my favorite.

It automatically pops up for me for instance and shows me new emails in  our families three gmail accounts, our 3 yahoo accounts and any new activity on Linked In, Myspace, Facebook or Twitter!  All this while I’m chatting with my son on yahoo and my sister on AIM. Try it out!

The rest is definitely customization:

Mozilla Firefox 3  I am such a big fan of customization and not only does Mozilla Firefox offer that, it offers good security as well.  Many are beginning to prefer it over Internet Explorer.  Here is a list of Firefox Add-Ons - you can browse the column on the left to see which may strike your fancy!

Logon Studio  This is just a nice change.  Gives your pc a new welcome screen at logon.  I have mine rotate so their a different pic each time.

Object Dock  I use this on and off for something different on my desktop.   You can see a screen shot when you click on the link to decide for yourself. Object Dock gives your Windows pc more of a Macintosh look.  Wit it though you can virtually get rid of all the icons off your desktop and be able to access them from the bottom of the page. Also customizable so it can blend in with your wallpaper.  Nice touch.

Transform XP to Vista  I’ve just started using it and it does just as it says.  Gives your Windows XP os a Vista look.  Apparently so you can decide if you want to “cross over”.  It comes with “Yahoo Widgets” which I’m not really crazy about.  Go ahead and “transform” it’s worth a shot”

 Enjoy!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

What can people see about you on the internet?

I do what is known as a form of skip tracing.  How would I get into something like that you ask?  The 2 main jobs I have held in my adult life.  The first of the two I was a representative payee   and in charge of peoples money.  They would generally have a drug problem or some sort of condition and some would be in my office continually trying to scam me out of their money.  Not that I would keep their money, my agency charged a fee of $30.00 per client per month to do this and keep them from buying $600.00 worth of crack every month and then sleep in a cardboard box. I would often double check new “landlords” that would come up demanding rent money and was able to see just who owned the house they were claiming to be “renting out” to my client.

 At the second job I would review applicants history’s to some extent.  Not that a theft charge 20 years ago means you’re a bad person now but if you were repetitively caught stealing then hey, you may have some problems we don’t need for our business. I would also look up people that issued bad checks to the company - if we got a check that bounced I would see if this was a habit for you and if you didn’t have 10 bounced check convictions on your record, then hey, you were probably telling the truth, it was an accident and we’d be willing to work with you.

In doing this I got quite good at locating information.  Free information.  The scary thing is, is how much you can actually find out about a person - just you or me, being a civilian on the street all through “public record”.  The public has a right to know but there apparently isn’t a right to disclose a whole hell of a lot.

 So here are some links - use them to see what people can find on you if they’re looking - so that you, yourself have that knowledge and can take measures accordingly.

 First let’s cover the social engine networks: Myspace, Facebook, etc, etc.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell if your boss has one or not.  Are you missing work due to the party last night or what?  Think they don’t keep an eye on you?  These searches (in no particular order) are aimed directly at the new age of “social networking”.  If you have an option for a private profile TAKE IT!

	◊Pipl
	◊Yasni
	◊Wink
	◊Yoname
	also one of the most thorough I’ve found:
	◊123 People Search

Other resources include:

◊  Whitepages.com   ◊  Yahoo People Search   ◊  Melissa Data

Now some of these places offer you the choice to opt out via email or snail mail (rarely phone call).  If you don’t like what you see, I would contact the company and ask for opt out details.  Maybe they’ll let you, maybe they won’t.  At least you have an indication of what is out there about you now.  Hopefully you like publicity.

Good luck to all!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com

Before trying any other software, try what I’ve listed below!After schooling and years on the computer, I have decided to share some of the best computer fixes ever to get your pc up and running top notch!  All of the downloads recommended are free and have not created even more of a spyware problem as some “free downloads” out there maliciously do.  Please keep in mind that while I have tested and am an avid user the products which I recommend, my computer is running the Windows XP operating system and I have a DSL connection. So it may not work on your Mac or with a dial-up connection but feel free to ask if you have something different.

If you are starting at the beginning and just want to get some effective freeware on your system -  Assuming you already have your Windows updates current with “automatic updates”:

1.  Start with a firewall:  Zone Alarm is my favorite and if you’ve used it in the past but didn’t like it then - give it another try.  Many people didn’t like the many notifications they would get but they were easily turned off if you opened it up and looked.  Now the only warning you get is if you are installing a new program - it just makes sure you are installing something, if you’re not then something’s trying to getcha so click no.

Zone Alarm upon installation will ask you if you want to use their free trial of firewall, anti-virus and spyware blocker.  That is fine but if you do that, wait until your 15 day free trial is over and they give you the option to go back to the “free” version before you download the next 2 things.

2.  Anti-Virus:  AVG now has the option of going pro with 8 but you can keep it at basic and still be fine for your anti-virus needs.

3.  Spyware Blocker/Remover: Spybot Search & Destroy

4.  Also my most favorite cleanup/fix utility ever:  Glary Utilities

Never heard of it?  I know, but trust me on this one.  Glary Utilities is great on so many levels.  You can do the One Click Maintenance to do a quick scan (don’t forget to click the options next to the tracks eraser to select exactly what you want erased with the scan).  I generally have all selected and start fresh each time but I’m not a big password/login saver anyhow.

Also you can do a deeper cleaning with Glary by clicking on the “modules” tab.  Here you can click each orange tab and select what you want to do under each tab.

• Clean up and repair: Disk Cleaner/Registry Cleaner/Shortcuts Fixer/Uninstall Manager all very useful and should be pretty self explanatory.
• Optimize & Improve: If your pc is slow to start you can check in here and disable your messengers or other programs from starting when your pc starts and click on them as you need them to get your pc up and running faster. Memory Optimizer is good too if your pc is sluggish.  Registry Defrag is great and one of the only of it’s kind that I’ve found that will locate registry errors and fix them for free!
• Privacy & Security: Tracks Eraser and File shredder “Wipe Free Space” is the only choice enabled for free.
• Files & Folders: Duplicate Files Finder  the only thing I watch with this one is I do not delete the Manuals/Drivers which do come up often in here.  Empty Files Finder is great and unique I just check every empty folder that is found and delete as if they are empty then they are just taking up space!
• System Tools: If you want to know what all is running on your computer you can check it out on your Process - about the only thing under this tab I use often is the Windows Standard Tools.  There I use Checkdisk and also to Disk Defragmenter to “analyze” &  see if it’s time to defragment when I’m done with the rest of Glary.

Of course some of these are Windows tools and are on your pc already, the plus of this for me is while I’m cleaning up my pc, it’s all their together for me, no need to search and a good reminder if you need to do a thorough cleaning.

Now I’ve never had this happen and I’ve always done what I just listed above, but if you delete something you think you shouldn’t have or just can’t seem to live without, you have the option to reverse your previous actions by going to the Menu tab and clicking on “restore” and you’ve got it back, so don’t fret!

Now some of you may be so far beyond this point:

You’ve had expired or no anti-virus and firewall and been going all over the world wide web anyhow.  If your computer is on it’s last breath and there’s no way you will be able to download these items to get is set straight?

Try to download Glary Utilities and do the thorough cleaning I walked you through above.

If you are beyond even that go to Start/My Computer/C: drive and right click on c drive then going down that menu to properties.  Left click on properties and when the box opens, click disk cleanup. It will tally up how much space it will give you, make that sure the recycle bin and everything is checked, click ok and just let that sucker run!

When that is done go up to the tools tab:  under there you will click error checking and in the box select both options and click start.  You will then get a notice that it will not start until you restart Windows.  Click okay as you really don’t want to do that until you’ve done your defrag anyhow.  That being said, go down to defragmentation go to defragment now and then defragment.  That will take a while especially on a bogged down computer so when it’s done save this page so you can find it and restart your pc and let your error scan run.

When you get restarted find my page.  Try the Firewall and then try to install Glary  Utilities  - do these 2 things before you go anywhere else on the net or you are just going to get bogged down again.

next a fantastic free scan is Trend Micro Housecall

Even with a high speed connection though be fore-warned this scan will take hours!  Keep an eye on it for a little while though as you are going to have to click some options at first to get the scan going.

From there go through the list and add the other things.  If you’re not sure what you already have?  Go to control panel and add and remove programs.  You may want to remove that other antivirus or firewall that probably wasn’t doing you much good if you are at this point.  Make sure to get it off of there though so that the systems don’t conflict on your pc.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Cryptic Muse

fixyourcomputer.today.com