I recently upgraded my wife Heather’s notebook computer.  It’s a two-year-old Dell Inspiron E1505 running Vista Home Premium.  When I bought it, it was about the time that the first Core 2 Duos were being released, so I got her the best I could for less than $1K.  For two years, the machine ran pretty well with tolerable lag (and terrible battery life), but then it started to get unreasonable.  As a result, I took it upon myself to upgrade the machine in the most cost effective ways possible.  Click to read more…

Being the computer nerd that I am and having written a book, created this website, and taught courses about better computer use like I have, you can imagine that I fill the role of personal tech support to many friends and family members.  I usually welcome the opportunity to help the people that I care about, though sometimes I definitely face challenges when helping them out.  This post describes the work I did on a notebook that belonged to my wife’s friend and colleague Bobbie.  Her problems consisted of serious infections, poor system performance, instability, and an excess of unneeded programs.  Click to read more…

One thing that every computer user should always have in mind when doing anything on their machine is security.  Yes, even you Mac maniacs and Linux lovers.  Windows is still the most heavily targeted operating system by malware, but as OSX and Linux gain popularity and marketshare new threats are being created to exploit any weaknesses in these platforms.  Simply put, no one is safe from attacks (unless you never install any programs or connect your machine to a network 🙂  Click to read more…

A little while ago I participated in an IT Solutions Journal open call article about my experience with the Rockbox open source project.  I am a big fan of open source projects because they are built on voluntary effort by communities of people who want to see some product reach its full potential (which is not provided by the original manufacturer).  My first, and current, mp3 player is an iRiver H120.  This thing is 4-5 years old and still working great.  I got this over an iPod because of its hardware capabilities and because of the custom software that was available from the Rockbox project.  The article describes more about Rockbox software and open source projects (like those in the Useful Programs section) in general.  It’s posted here at the ITSJ website, but I also included it below. Click to read more…