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…

I have been teaching extension courses locally at West LA College for around two years now (I  will soon start teaching at El Camino College as well), and I can easily say that it has been a wonderful experience.  Teaching has allowed me to connect one-on-one with the target audience for my book Computer Zen: A Journey to Better Computing and see how well the information comes across to real people.  So far, the response has been very positive and I have branched out into teaching other classes.  Click to read more…

I was reading one of the SANS OUCH! newsletters today (which I have discussed in this post) and saw a nice little article with some telltale signs of a computer infection.  Initially, I thought to myself “How could anyone not know?”  But after reading the article and thinking about it for a little bit, I realized that most people probably just assume it’s the computer’s fault.  Whether it’s age, the slowness of Vista, running many programs at once, or a shortage of hard drive space, something else gets to be the scapegoat while the infection continues to worsen the machine’s condition.  Included below is the article from the newsletter (which can be found here).  Click to read more…

Your hard drive.  That magical magnetic thing (unless you have an SSD) that stores all of your data, programs, and other important stuff.  It’s amazing how much you can fit on a hard drive, but every drive has its limit.  Once it gets maxed out you’ll probably notice some performance degradation.  The computer takes longer to start up, programs take longer to start, etc. because of all that excess data.  This article will discuss some of the techniques you can use to help clean out the unneeded stuff from your hard drive to get it back to that zippy speed you had before.  Click to read more…