Thursday, December 24, 2009

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

This pretty much says it all for me:



I hope you and yours have a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!

(The photo is of the Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in Boothbay Harbor, Maine and was taken by Kevin Burnham of the Boothbay Register staff).

I will be taking a few days off from blogging to enjoy the holidays. Thanks for visitig here.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Top 10 Cell Phones

Wow, what a great article this is. All you would want to know about the top 10 cell phones available today. This comes from pcworld.com, and could be very timely for many of us. My only concern about all of this is twofold: initial cost of the phone and the ongoing monthly fees. I admit to feeling a bit hypocritical saying this after buying an Apple MacBook Pro.

Need a break from your laptop? These productivity phones offer a lot more than the ability to make calls. Here are the 10 best smartphones available today.

Edited by Ginny Mies, PC World 

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Tip of the day: Move the My Documents folder - an oldie but a goodie

A customer asked how to move her MY DOCUMENTS in Windows XP to an external hard drive. It seems her C: drive was getting rather full, and she had aleady bought a large external drive.

I thought I had blogged on this. It is something I have done. I can't, however, find the blog post, so I am blogging it here today for those of you who may wish to do the same thing. This blogger offering I am using is from Google. Google bought blogger.com some time ago. Would't you think therefore that there'd be a good way to search my (or any other) blog? I guess Google doesn't see the payback in improving the search facility, which is practically useless.

In any case, if you would lie to move your XP MY DOCUMENTS, it's very straightforward. It may take a while if you have a lot of documents because they all have to be moved!

Use this link for the show me instructions: Tip of the day: Move the My Documents folder

A "thank you" and a tip of the hat to Ed Bott for having posted this on his blog.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Securing Your PC - Revisited

Protecting your computer from attack by viruses, rogues, malware or spyware is not rocket science. I promised I would re-post this information in response to several inquiries. On March 9 of this year, I posted all of the components I use to combat the bad guys and to keep my machines running smoothly.

Here is the link to that post:  http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/securing-your-pc.html


I have been experimenting lately with Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) as an alternative to AVG Free. I have expressed my disappointment with AVG's marketing techniques in this blog, so I have no problem leaving them behind. If you are using AVG Free and feel the way I do about them, you can try MSE as well. Simply go to microsoft.com and download it there. It is free!

In answer to other questioners, YES, using a HOSTS file is an integral part of a good security package. The one I recommend is considered the best by many people, including me.

All of the software on my March 9 list is free.