Movie Fan?

If you are a fan of movies, past or present, you should spend some time at The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) web site. Here you can find amazing amounts of data about almost any picture ever made. Give it a try.

IMDB Web Site

Kim Komando

I've hesitated to post this for two reasons: one, Kim has begun offering paid membership to parts of her web site and only paid-up members can access these areas. Too bad. Two, Kim has taken to recycling old posts without updating them, and these sometimes contain dated material.

However, with some caution the casual user may find tidbits at her site that are helpful and useful. I recommend that you do NOT sign up for her free newsletters. I have tried them all, and they are chock full of ads. Kim is enjoying great success, and is able to attract firms wanting to insert ads in her free subscription e-mail reports. You suffer if you sign up.

Instead, visit her web site frequently, check out the Tip of the Day and other items of interest to you posted under News. Also, her message boards do contain some good information.

Kim's radio show is broadcast every Saturday morning in most areas of the country, and her syndicated column appears in many Sunday newspapers.

Kim Komando's Web Site

Kim Komando's Message Boards

 

Checking the health of your hard drive

It's important, especially on older computers, to keep an eye on the health of your hard drive. It goes without saying that you should have a plan to back up all of your personal data on a regular basis. That done, you should run the Check Disk utility, provided by Microsoft in both XP & Vista, on a scheduled basis to ensure that the health of your hard drive is good. If yours shows what appear to be serious errors and not just the "cleaning up of minor inconsistencies" you should keep a close eye on the drive to see if similar errors occur again. Your hard drive may be failing.

You can see how to run Check Disk by clicking below:

Running CHKDSK in Windows XP

Running CHKDSK in Windows Vista

Snopes

We have all received e-mails warning us of impending doom from a computer virus that will destroy all of the information on our hard drives. Other e-mails may promise riches or something else too good to be true, but only if we do what we are asked to do. And we have all been asked to forward that e-mail to everyone in our address books. Unfortunately, many of us do just that without doing any checking.

Here is a web site that will help you decide if the note you received is for real or not, and if you'll take the time to search it for the supposed virus, worm, or trojan or scam or whatever, you may find that it is indeed a hoax that has been around for a while or even many years. Once you know it is a hoax, you can reply to the sender informing them, instead of forwarding the e-mail on to all in your address book.

Snopes.com

Woody’s Lounge

I recently was doing some research on a problem with Microsoft Outlook and stumbled upon a site called Woody's Lounge. I found what I needed there, and I believe that it might be useful to others as well. Mostly it was touted as a resource for Microsoft Office applications, like Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Access, etc., but it also has some more generic fora, like Windows XP for example. There is also an Outlook Express forum. You can view and search the many fora to see if maybe your problem has already been discussed. It is also worthwhile registering so that you can post your problem. Check it out at:

Woody's Lounge