Backing up email data

If you do one manual back-ups of your data files, one of the most difficult and yet most critical tasks is backing up your email system : address books, correspondence, attachments, etc, etc. But where do you find the files? Unfortunately, they can be located in a number of different places, depending on which version of Windows your use.
If you use Firefox and Thunderbird, some really helpful tips are in this article by Gizmo, at TechAlert. (I would really recommend printing this out.)
If you use Outlook, this article will explain the procedures for 2000, 2003 and 2007 versions, as well as for Outlook Express. I do like the nice people who write all this helpful stuff!

When your PC won't boot

It's the stuff to send chills down your spine. Your push the Go button and nothing happens. You check the power cables and other connections and still no go. So you rush to this very helpful article by Phil Spector for some advice. (Of course, you have printed it out beforehand, and saved a hard copy.)

Quote of the day

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at
kick-boxing. ~ Elmo Philips

Converting audio formats

Let's imagine you want to take a track from a music CD and put it onto an mp3 player or email it a friend (leaving aside discussions about copyright for a moment). Dragging a file from the CD to your computer via Windows Explorer or some other file management utility doesn't work, because what you see in Explorer is a pointer to the music track, not the track itself. To extract the track, you need to "rip" the CD. A very good free tool to do this is CDex, which is quite intuitive, except for where you find the files on your computer after CDex has done its job. You will find them in the folder My Documents\My music\MP3\ and maybe further in at No artist\No title.
The resulting files are in the .wav format, which is an uncompressed format, and an average 3min song will probably be in the region of 35mb in size. To transfer them to an mp3 player, you have to convert the track to the mp3 format, which you can do with a free utility such as Free Mp3 Converter. This is a pretty intuitive piece of software, and you can happily run with the default settings, which will give you a file approximately one-tenth the size of the original. You can compress this even further, if you care to play around with the compression settings, which you will find under Output Configuration\Format Parameter. If you choose, for instance, a sampling frequency of 44 100 Hz and a bitrate of 96kHz you will at least halve the file size again, although with a small sacrifice in quality. Further reductions can get you down to email-size files, although the quality may be a bit dire. On tracks that are voice alone, however, this is not so noticeable.

Retrieving software keys...and more

If you have to reinstall your operating system, you will also need to reinstall all the software you rely on - and that means you need all the software keys. Which normally also means you need the original disks. If you don't have the disks, or you have lost the packaging, you could be in trouble. Fortunately, riding to the rescue is a very helpful free utility called Belarc Advisor. When you run Belarc, it scans your complete system and gives you back (via a web page) an amazing amount of information about your computer. Info includes motherboard type, CPU speed, drive space, Microsoft hotfixes, operating system revision, and Web browser vulnerabilities, as well as third-party software installs. Included in that is a list of keys for all your programs. This is obviously best done before your computer develops problems - so go on, download it now and run a check. You'll be so pleased you did. And then when the technician whom you are paying megabucks to fix your computer, or the man in Malaysia on the software helpdesk, asks the sort of questions that normally make you go hot and cold all over, you'll have the answers.

Spell checking using your browser

More and more of our work is moving from the desktop to online. Online word processors are gaining traction; if you use gmail you type all your correspondence online; this blog is written completely online. So what do we do about spell checking, now that we don't have Word to hold our hand? Thankfully, Firefox comes with a built-in spell checker which is automatically turned on by default. The checker underlines any suspect words in red, and when you right click on that word, you get suggestions for correct spelling, and the option of adding that word to the program's dictionary, just as you would in Word. You can also download other language dictionaries (there are currently more than 70 available). Internet Explorer doesn't have the checker built-in, but a good add-on called IESpell is available for download.

Co-ordinating bookmarks

If you use more than one browser, more than one computer, or more than one operating system, the free Xmarks browser add-on is probably the best thing since sliced bread. (By the way, what was the best thing before sliced bread?) Although it does a lot of nifty things, at its most basic level Xmarks (formerly known as Foxmarks) synchronizes your bookmarks among all your browsers, no matter what computer they're on or what operating system the machines use. For example, I use Firefox and Internet Explorer on my main Windows computer. As you might imagine, trying to keep all of the bookmarks (or Favorites in IE land) synchronized is a tough task - but that's what Xmarks does. You can find versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, for Firefox on Linux, and for Firefox and Safari on the Mac. Simply run Xmarks along with your browser, and it synchronizes not just your bookmarks but also your passwords, so you can log in to your favorite sites from any browser you use. Other features include the ability to get detailed information about any site you visit.