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Computer Services in New York City and surrounding areas

General Computer Tips:

Should you use a PC or a Macintosh?

Macintoshes are easy to use, very stable, logical yet intuitive to use. They have wonderful programs and come in great designs.

Windows has the very reliable windows XP Home or professional, both are stable and easy to use.

Windows as of Vista made some remarkable improvements and now that Windows7 is currently out (but only as BETA for testing) all I can say is its all the best of XP and Vista rolled into one.

Don't get me wrong I love Macs, have been a user since the early Apple II and a pc user since the Commodore, Sinclair and 8086 days, yet I love the way Microsoft has paid attention to its OS and especially its browser now standing at version8. It's all looking very good for Microsoft.

As far as Linux stealing the show from Microsoft, on a consumer level I don't see that happening, maybe business will adopt Linux to save some money in the foreseeable future but I don't see that happening for Macs/Windows and the home user.

I love Macintosh. I love Windows. I use both.

I love the power of XML

The operating systems:
For PCs it is Windows 95*,98*, Me*, 2000, XP and Vista and coming soon Windows7!
For Macintosh it is OS9*, OSX, (Intel macs runs windows OS as well, how sweet is that!) and its flavors up to Leopard and Apples' soon to come Snow Leopard. Wow!, do we live in exciting times!
The Knoppix, Ubunto and Linux systems (Unix and its derivatives) run on PCs and Macs.

*obsolete

 

Selective Printing Selective printing allows you to print just a portion of a web page, email, or other printed matter, instead of wasting ink and paper on a lot of text you don't need. This doesn't work with every computer system, but it does with most.

Here's how to do it:
1) Highlight only the text you want to print.
2) From the file menu select Print, or right-click the highlighted text and select Print from the pop-up menu.
3) When the printer dialog opens, look for a Print Range or Page Range or similar wording, and then look for a Selection option.
4) Check Selection.
5) Click Print.

Switch Mouse Buttons If you are left handed, you can change the mouse button functions on almost every computer (even though it's the clicking the right mouse button, it acts like the left mouse button). 1) Open the Control Panel 2) Double-click the Mouse icon. 3) If necessary, select the Buttons tab. 4) Select the setting you want. The settings available depend on your mouse, a two button mouse will probably only have an option to switch the buttons, but a three button mouse may have other options.

Capturing a Screen Image The image may be copyrighted so be careful how you use them. For personal use, such as to make a calendar for your home is most likely fine, but I wouldn't put them online or use them in any commercial way. Using the PrintScrn key at the top of your keyboard you can save screen images. This “Print Screen" key sends the image to the Clipboard. From there you can paste it into a document.To copy just the active window use ALT+PrintScrn

Now Where'd I Put That? Sometimes we just plain forget where we saved a file or folder. Try the “search" option from the Start Menu. You can search by name of file; it's content, its extension or the approximate date you created it.

Find the size of the file Press ALT+ENTER with the folder highlighted. For example, to find out how much space your My Documents directory is occupying:
1) Open Windows Explorer.
2) Select My Documents in the left pane.
3) Press ALT+ENTER (or right-click and choose Properties from the pop-up menu).
Windows will report the total folder size. Also works on individual files such as images. If you keep a copy of your web site on your computer (and you should), this is a great way to see how much disk space it really takes up.

Websites with small text size In the menu choose "view" scroll to "text size" and choose increase or larger. If using Mac OSX press and hold the apple key and then "+" to increase or "-" to make text smaller.

Update your anti-virus, Back-up your files See our page on viruses and the page on storage/back-up for more inforamtion

Surfing Shortcuts To quickly cycle back and forth through a series of web pages you've visited, hold down the "ALT" key and tap your left and right arrow keys. Left arrow takes you back while the Right arrow takes you forward.

Computer Security Tips Regularly download security patches from your software vendors' to keep it up-to-date. Never open e-mail attachments from strangers, regardless of how tempting it may be. Do not keep computers online when not in use. Make regular back-ups of critical data, either to CDs or external hard drives.

Ending a Task Sometimes a program stops responding, and it won't even let you close the application. To end a task in Windows: Press the Ctrl+Alt+Del together. (this won't reboot the computer unless you do it twice) It will open a running applications dialog box. From the list, select the application you want to end and click the End Task button. The key is to be patient. Sometimes it takes a few moments, but trying to do it again before it's done processing your request can cause the entire computer to hang.

Display File Extensions with XP A file that attached to an email may appear to be a text file if the file name extension is hidden. For example in reality it may be named: filename.txt.exe but it will appear as filename.txt so it appears to be a plain text file - but .exe file may be a virus.

To display full file names on a computer running Windows XP:
1) Click the Start button
2) Click Control Panel
3) Double-click Folder Options icon
4) Click the View tab
5) Scroll down and remove the check mark from the "Hide extensions for known file types" option.

Want to know what software application a certain file goes with on your computer? Input the file name into Google's search box and a number of reference sites will help you know exactly what purposes a file serves. I actually used this to feature to identify a piece of "spyware" lurking on my computer.

Disable Startup Programs If you're experiencing a sluggish computer, one of the first places to look into is your system tray. See all the icons in there? Those are all programs that start when you boot up your computer. That means they are running and using memory whether you are using the programs or not. You may be better off not having all these programs start when you start your computer. You can still use the programs, it just means they'll take a few seconds longer to start when you open them. DO NOT disable any program you don't know for sure is safe to disable. If you disable the wrong thing, your computer may not start the next time you boot up

Speed Up Your Computer Only keep open the programs you need at the time, some folks keep many files and programs open all the time. Check your system for spyware. Many freeware programs install spyware, and these can really slow your computer to a crawl. Add extra memory. This is less expensive than you think.