Cool Feature - Gmail canned responses

I tend to send out a lot of "how to" emails and many of them are exactly the same. One of the ways I get around the monotony of typing the same set of directions over and over is by using the "canned response" feature in Gmail. It allows me to create a really detailed and well worded set of directions once, and use it as many times as I need in the future without having to search.

Step One: Turned on Canned Responses

• Click the gear icon at the top of any Gmail page. From there, select Mail settings
  
• Select Labs
• Enable Canned Responses
• Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page

Step Two: Create Canned Response

• Select Mail
• Click  Compose
• Create your canned response
• Select Canned responses > New canned response
• Choose a name for your canned response and click OK

Curiosity Killed the Console

Several hours have just been spent putting a PS3 back together again, and it has prompted me to remind folks of a few things to think about when taking computers/electronics apart. My boyfriend, in his excitement to play Dragon Age II, got tired of waiting for me to clean the lens on his PlayStation 3 and decided to do it himself. He's never done anything like that before, and he's about as tech savvy as my grandma, so needless to say I wasn't surprised to find a baggy of "spare parts" and a very funny looking PS3 when he was done.

Before you go on an electronics disassembling adventure, take heed the following tips:

• Set aside several hours of time. You may think that you'll remember how that piece fits tomorrow, but given enough time and distraction people are prone to forget. Also, leaving something disassembled on a hard work surface is just begging for something to get lost. I personally have a cat that collects screws in the middle of the night. He steals them, plays with them, and drops them in his food or water dish. True story.
• Do your homework. Have manuals, links, and instructions on hand before you start. A quick Google search will most likely uncover a video of somebody doing exactly what you're doing. Watch it, take notes, and save it for later.
• Make sure you have all of the proper tools, cleanser, etc on hand. Stopping in the middle to go to the store is a drag.
  
• Keep a pen and paper on hand and document each step. Remember, it's a lot tougher to reverse engineer something to try and figure out where that missing screw goes than it is to write it down as you take it apart.
• Keep several containers (shot glasses or sandwich bags work well) to hold screws/parts from different parts of the machine in and label them. For example, drop the screws for the outside case in a sandwich bag and label it "outside case." If they are different sizes, note what size goes where.
• Don't be afraid to seek out help. If you're not exactly sure how something should come apart, look it up or call somebody. Muscling a fragile part will lead to much shame and embarrassment.

It took some time, but all is well with Mr. PS3. Dragons Age shall be played, and I believe I've earned a free pass on dishwashing for a couple of weeks for my efforts and his embarrassment. Time well spent, if you ask me!

Hard drive filling up? WinDirStat to the rescue!

It's hard to believe how much hard drive space we use up these days. If you're somebody who has a lot of video and or audio files, you can find your drive filling up fairly quickly. Cleaning up to make more room can be annoying and time consuming when done manually. WinDirStat is a cute, simple and free application that analyzes how much disk space files are taking up. Simply download it here and follow the simple installation instructions.

To run it, select a drive and let it scan. The scan is fun and has little pac man guys darting across the screen as they analyze your data. There really isn't much on this computer so the scan only took a few seconds

Look at that! Free AND shiny! You can drill down and see more details about what's taking up space in your files, by clicking on individual files.

Up and Down Wireless

Wireless can be fickle. One minute it's giving you all of its 802.11N love while you watch a Dexter marathon on Netflix, the next it's down filling you with the agonizing pains of Internet withdrawal. Then, moments later, it's back up with no apparent rhyme or reason. Let me give you a little rhyme for your reason.

Unless you live in the wilderness, it's extremely likely that your neighbors wireless network(s) extend into your wireless domain. Many consumer routers are set to broadcast on the same wireless channel (often channels 1, 6 and 11) which can lead to multiple networks duking it out for airtime in a relatively small space. The way I see it, you're left with two options. Make tiny matching foil hats for yourself, your laptop, and your router...OR you can change the channel. While the former is definitely more fashion forward, it's not very effective. I just wanted to see if I could get you to rush into the kitchen to grab some foil before reading the rest of this. Let's change the channel.

Signs (2002)

Now I'm banking on the fact that you understand how to make basic changes to your router. I'm going to assume that when you got it, you logged in to set up an SSID (your network name), set a security protocol and passkey, and hopefully changed the standard administrative password of the router itself. If you haven't done these things, you need to locate the make and model number of your router and Google it to locate the manual. Breaking into unsecured wireless network is about as easy as going to the fridge for a snack so it's important to do these things to keep people from leeching Internet access from you, or even worse, accessing your personal information.

Now let's take a look at what channels your neighbors are using. Download and install an application called NetStumbler. When you run it, you'll notice it removes you from your wireless network and uses your wireless card to scan local wireless networks. In order to return surfing, you'll need to close the application. NetStumbler couldn't be easier to use, especially for the information we're trying to access. Simply double click it and let it run for a minute and you'll see a neat little list of local networks and what channels they are on.

As you can see from our list here, some channels are quite packed. This is most likely because this was the default channel the router was set to and it was never changed. All you need to do to avoid this traffic jam is to set your network to one that is not being used, or at least, not being used very much. Just log back into your router, find the wireless channel settings, put yourself on a traffic free channel, and enjoy smooth wireless surfing.

Magic Jelly Bean

It sounds like something out of a fairy tale, and this week it was so useful it almost was! I had a user whose drive was failing and needed to be replaced, so I set him up with a new one. I then took his old drive and put it in an enclosure, that allowed it to connect via USB so he could access all of his data. Unfortunately, he had no record of the key for his Microsoft Office installation. Yikes, that could be an expensive thing to have to purchase again!

Thank goodness for Magic Jelly Bean products! They make key finders, that scan the registry of your system for the keys of software you have installed. I've mentioned SIW before, and I adore it, but it doesn't find keys on external drives.The free version is just called Key Finder, and they make an fancier yet still inexpensive version called Recover Keys for more elusive and harder to recover keys. Simply download, install and run for data on your own drive. For keys on an external drive, like the situation above, you simply use the "load hive" feature and point it to the Windows installation on the drive. Voila! All the information you need to reinstall that expensive software on the new drive.

Upgrade Your Desktop RAM

One of the most inexpensive and effective ways to boost your computer's performance is to add more or upgrade your RAM. For a brush up of what RAM does for your computer and how much you need, read my earlier post here.

• Establish if you need an upgrade. To do this reboot your computer without opening any applications. Open the Task Manager (Ctrl+alt+delete for Windows XP and Windows 7. Start > Task Manager in Vista) and click the performance tab. If your available memory is hovering around 50% or less, then this means you're using half or more of your memory just to boot up Windows. Once you start opening applications, you're most likely maxing it out or getting pretty close to it so you could use an upgrade.
• Use the application SIW to figure out what kind of memory you have, how many slots your motherboard has, and how much memory your motherboard can support. See my post about SIW here if you're not sure what it is or where to get it. In the example below, you'll see I have 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, 4 slots available, and my motherboard supports 4 gigs total. I'm going to purchase 4, 1 gig modules of DDR2 ram to replace my existing 512 modules.

• Go find the best deal you can! For shopping tips, check out my post here.
• Gather your new memory, the tools I described in my last post and your unplugged computer and lay them out on a hard table top. Carefully open it up, you may need to unscrew small screws from the back to do so. (Make sure to carefully save them!)
• Locate your existing RAM, and remove each one by gently pushing down on the clips on either side of each module, and carefully pulling it out of it's slot. Make sure to only hold the RAM by it's edges, and avoid touching the circuits on the side or pins on the bottom. When I remove RAM, I like to take it out and lay it in such a way, so that I know which direction it was installed. This makes it easy when lining up the notch in the pins on the bottom of the new RAM modules. You know exactly which way it's supposed to go. Oh these clips are dusty, time to break out the canned air!

• Again, holding it only by it's edges, carefully line up your new RAM module and gently push down until the clips pop into place. This does require some firm pressure, but not too much. If it's a strain, check to make sure you've lined it up correctly. Again, that notch in the bottom needs to be lined up the right way or your RAM just won't go in.

• Take a final look to make sure all of your new RAM modules have been installed correctly. They should all be flush, nothing should be sticking out. 
• Close your computer up, plug it in and boot it. Run SIW again to make sure all of your new RAM is recognized. If it isn't or if you received an error on boot, unplug it, open it up and re-seat the RAM.
• Now sit back, relax and enjoy the performance boost!

What's a defrag?

If your computer seems to be running a bit slow, one of the easiest things you can do is defragment or "defrag" your hard drive. If this is something you've never done before, you might notice quite a nice performance boost when you're done. It's time consuming, but very simple, and it's something you can just set to run and walk away. Before we get into how to go about this, let's go through what fragmentation is in the first place.

When we think of our hard drives, we tend to think of them like vast, open, linear space. But your computer doesn't see it that way. Puny human brains! Windows sees your hard drive in a series of clusters, all the same size. I like to think of this series of clusters as a big bag of identical Legos. Windows will assign however many of these "Legos" to each file, depending on its size. The picture of you on a fishing trip may get one "Lego" while the video of you falling out of the boat may get 3. Now, your computer does not need these "Legos" to be kept together, it can still read them if they are separated to make room for more information. Over time, this happens a lot. You install programs and uninstall others. Add data and then delete it. Your "Legos" get moved around and separated from one another. After a while, it's about as tidy as the t-shirt table at Old Navy around closing time on Black Friday.

Now remember we said that Windows didn't need to keep all of the "Legos" from your file together to read them, but it does eventually make them slower to access. Imagine you are now trying to put the "Legos" together to read your midterm paper, and instead of being all lined up in a row, they are spread out all over your house. Even if you know exactly where they all are, it's still going to take longer for you to run around and put them together than if they were all neatly in one place. This is how a fragmented hard drive can slow your computer down over time. Like trying to recall all 50 states upon returning home from a healthy dose of nitrous oxide at the dentists office.

It's good practice to defragment your hard drive every few months or so, and Windows even has a built in utility to do so. You can access it in the Computer Management area of your Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. I'm not taking you through step by step, because I am not too jazzed with the performance of the built in utility. It reminds me of cleaning my room when I was a kid by  throwing everything in the closet. It looked tidy but wasn't really thoroughly clean. Instead, I'm going to have you use a free application called UltraDefrag. Download it here, and follow the installation wizard. Open it up and click the "Analyze" button to get a break down of how fragmented your drive is. Now, click the "Defragment" button and let it do its job. Easy peasy freesy...just how I like it!

Sneaky installs

Beware the sneaky install! What's a sneaky install? Well it's what I call it when you're trying to install one thing, and another application comes along for the ride. It's not even that the stow away software is necessarily bad, it's just it's not something you signed up for. It takes up space and memory, can slow down your boot time, and can invoke rage when it pops up in the middle of something important, like slaying virtual dragons.

A perfect example of this, is McAfee Scan Security Plus. This little nuisance likes to install itself when you install Adobe Flash Player, which everyone needs to get their funny cats fix on YouTube. It will then constantly pop up asking to scan your system, then try to sell you solutions. If you've been following this blog at all, you've probably already procured yourself a nice free little antivirus solution and have no need for their snake oil. Removing it is not hard, you simply have to access the add and remove programs feature in your control panel, find it in the list and click uninstall.

Why do they do this? Well, it's not an evil plot to drive you to the verge of madness, even though it seems like it. They're all in it for the money. And we can't even really be mad at them, because often times we're benefiting from the free software they created. All you can do is try to avoid installing what you're not interested in.

There's no real secret to avoiding these little tag alongs. You just have to pay attention and read the fine print. To avoid the example above, all you had to do was uncheck the box that said "Install McAfee Security Scan Plus" on the Adobe Flash Player download screen. Other software sneaks in during the actual installation process, which is why it is key to read each step of the installation wizard carefully before clicking the continue button.

Nothing about this information is all that technical, but it's a reminder to be mindful when working on your computer. We all get tired and click happy sometimes and every installation seems to look the same. But if you're not careful, you may just end up with more than you bargained for.

How much computer do you really need?

This could end up being a novel of a topic, though there seems to be one consistency for those who are not so tech savvy. Ready for it? Everyone seems to like spending more than they need to! It's like that deep, inner, American need to supersize french fries. Your meal does not need to be the size of your head to be delicious and satisfying, and your computer does not need to be $3000 to email your cousin. It's not 1984.

Family and friends will often ask me to spec a computer out for them and I'm usually pretty happy to help. (I'm even happier to help if there are margaritas or baked goods involved!) I ask about their usage and what they would like to do on their new machine, head out on an Internet journey, and come back with something that is reasonably priced, will do everything they need, and has plenty of room to expand. Almost 100% of the time, they reply to me with some link for some outrageously beefed up machine, that costs twice as much as the one I found for them. That poor computer will probably need a prescription for antidepressants when its 16 gigs of ram and 8 processors are frittered away on watching YouTube videos of kittens and playing online Scrabble. Picture grandma buying a Ferrari to drive 8 blocks to church on Sunday. Get the picture?

Now before you can decide what you need, let's start by learning what some of these computer stats mean. Here are the three biggies. Knowing what they are and what they do, should make your shopping process a bit easier:

Hard Drive:  Your hard drive is where all of your information is stored. To get an idea of how much space you might need, we can take a look at what you're using. There are a few ways of doing this, for example, Windows XP you can open up My Computer, right click on your C drive and select properties. As you can see from the image, I'm almost using the entire capacity of my 150 gig hard drive. I could use an upgrade. When I make my purchase, I'll go for something that's at least 300 gigs. If you're only using 32 gigs of your 200 gig drive, you probably don't need a terabyte (1000 gigs) of space but if that's what floats your boat, I'm not going to judge you.

RAM (Random Access Memory): This is your computer's memory. How much RAM you have will dictate things like how many applications you can have running at once, and how quickly your computer will respond to you. I'm currently on an older machine with 2 gigs of RAM. I play World of Warcraft, blog, surf, and do everything I need to do just fine. An upgrade would be lovely, but I'm not hurting for one. I'd say for standard use, there's not much need for more than 4 gigs of RAM.

Processor or CPU (Central Processing Unit): Think of it as the brain of your computer. Your brain makes your hand move when you request it, and the CPU interprets the requests you make of your computer and carries them out. These can be a bit trickier to navigate. Personal computers used to have one CPU. Now, most of them have the option for multi-core (dual core, quad core, etc.) CPUs. This basically means they've taken multiple CPU's and fused them together to make one mega CPU. It's pretty cool stuff. You don't need an 8 core CPU, but because the CPU tends to be one of the harder components to upgrade yourself, if you're a novice, I'd suggest going for a dual or quad core processor if you can afford it.

Common sense should play a factor in your decision making process as well. For example, if you're buying a laptop and plan to keep it with you all the time, remember that a super, ultra, monster, mega 20inch screen laptop is going to be heavy and hard to carry around. Do you really need something the size of a coffee table to update your Facebook profile on your way to work? You may want to consider buying yourself a desktop for that rich, video experience and then purchasing a much simpler and smaller laptop or nice smart phone for travel. This sounds expensive, but technology in smaller packages is expensive. You can get all the stats of a $2500 laptop, in probably about a $1000 desktop. This leaves you quite a bit left over for something more light weight to travel with.

There's a lot more information to cover, and we'll get to it all eventually! But this should get you started on your road to moderately priced technology bliss.

Safe mode

There may be times when you'll have to access Safe Mode in order to repair something. Safe Mode is like a minimalistic version of Windows that's used for maintenance only. You can access it by following these steps:

1. Shut down your computer completely.
2. Turn your computer on, and as soon as you hear it come on tap the F8 button. You're trying to get into a boot menu before you see the first Windows start up screen and the timing of your F8 tapping can be tricky. You may not press it in time and Windows will boot up regularly. If this happens, shut your computer down and try again. Tapping F8 too many times on some computers may bring up a keyboard error. If you see this power it off and try again. It takes some finesse, you'll get it eventually.
3. Tapping F8, if done correctly, will bring up a Windows boot menu that asks you what mode of Windows you would like to start. Select Safe Mode, or if you're trying to update something that requires internet or network access, select Safe Mode with Networking. Windows will prompt you to hit continue, and you'll see what looks like computer code loading on the screen. Be patient and let it finish. It takes longer to load Safe Mode than when you're booting regularly.
   
4. Once you've finished your task in Safe Mode, restart your computer and boot Windows normally.
   

Identifying hardware the EASY way!

So you're thinking about upgrading your RAM or some other piece of hardware and not sure what you have? I guess that means it's time to grab a flashlight, open up your computer, and pray you don't break anything...right? Guess again! Thanks to a teeny little program called SIW or System Information for Windows, you can find out everything you need to know about your computer in just a few clicks. Simply download the free version for home use here and run it. It will quickly show you everything from the key for your Microsoft Office installation, to the make and model of your motherboard.

Development of this kind of software isn't easy, and since it saved you some time consider donating a few dollars by clicking on the "If you like SIW you can buy me coffee" link here at the bottom of the page. Geeks need their coffee to keep on being brilliant!