Any suggestions, recommendations or ideas found on this site are applied at your own risk.
Have thoughts, problems or ideas you would like to have us address here? -or-
If you want to be notified when our next newsletter is available, let us know!
Printed copies are available at the store. For previous newsletters click here.
.

Happy Fourth of July!

(From Minnesota? Time to prep that snow blower)

If you have not been to the Annandale for the Fourth of July Celebration, you are missing out on some great small town hospitability.

Annandale's Fourth of July agenda is available here.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Need brochures or the like?

We will soon have the capability of color laser printing on both sides of (up to) 11"x17" paper.

Check your IE settings

If you go in to the Internet settings (Tools > Options) then the Security tab, see if the slider is available. If not it means you are running a custom security setting. Did you change it? If not you should be concerned. We have not determined how or what sites may be changing this setting but we have seen many computers with erratic and odd Internet behavior due to this custom setting.

If your slider is not available, click the set default button. Also move to the Advanced tab and do the same thing! We further suggest you delete all temporary files from the General tab and when prompted, delete the off-line contents as well. Optional but suggested, we recommend you delete all cookies. However, this will mean you will need to re-enter your information at many sites.

One last thought; if you are in the middle of updating or installing anything, finish that project and reboot! Now close all applications you have open including any found in the System Tray. Then open the My Computer icon, the Windows folder then the Temp folder.
If you are in the correct folder (C:\Windows\Temp) you should should see a bunch of files and folders that have arbitrary and sequential names like these. Note: C:\Windows may be differnet on your computer, e.g., c:\WinNT, c:\Win98, etc Hold CTRL and press A one time. This will select all files and folders. Press Del to delete them then empty the recycle bin.

Additional we suggest you get one of the anti-spyware applications listed last month and check your computer for spyware or auto-dialers.

If you ever had or suspect you have a virus

We would like to have you check your registry for an unauthorized entry. Don't get nervous, this is no big deal as long as you follow our instructions. From the Start menu, select Run. In the box type "regedit" (without the quotes) then press enter.

First thing in the registry editor is to make a backup. From the file menu select Export and give this export a name. Name it as the current date using dashes, e.g., 6-1-03. No need to add an extension. Pay attention to what folder that is being saved to. The default will be your My Documents folder which is fine.

While in the registry do not change anything! If you do you may end up with a computer that will not properly start up!

For the first few steps you will be clicking the plus signs to expand the hive (the tree). Click the plus next to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
Then scroll (way) down and click the plus next to exefile
Then Shell
Then open
Now click on the word command
In the right panel, double click the word default
The value should read exactly and only "%1" %*

If you find anything in this field other than "%1" %*
close the registry and call us!

If all is fine and you are sure you didn't accidentally delete or change something, go to your My Documents folder and delete the previously saved reg file.

If you want to learn more about the registry, start here.

This boggles the mind

When talking about file storage (disk space), we talk in terms of bytes. We have posted a web page on storage giving you some examples of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and so on. Recently we ran across the following analogy: If a person 67 years old were to have stored:

100 e-mail messages per day; and
100 Web pages viewed per day; and
5 scanned pages per day; and
1 book every 10 days; and
10 photos per day; and
10 hours of sound per day; and
1 CD per week.

they would consume about one terabyte of disk space.

Windows crash

Sometimes crashes are caused by bad memory in your computer but generally they are a result of poorly written applications or drivers and not the operating system itself. In some cases an application or driver will try to access a memory range that is already in use and when that occurs, the computer crashes. Here is an interesting ZDNet article on Window Crashes.

Word tables

Ever need to create a table like this in Word?

Here's an easy way:

First, in a new document create more paragraphs markers than rows needed by pressing enter. Then at every other paragraph mark create the table section individually as desired. When you are done, delete the separating paragraphs marks between each row. See example below.