by Tina Gasperson
If you have a need to keep your notes really secure and private, a little tool called Locknote should work well for you. Locknote is free and easy to use. All you do is download Locknote and run it. There’s no installation required.
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by David Hakala
Converting Audio CD music to other file formats and saving them on your computer is called “ripping” the CD. Windows Media Player allows you to rip files from CD and save them in a variety of formats.
The most commonly used formats are MP3 and WAV. The WAV format is uncompressed so it provides the highest fidelity to the original music. But WAV files can be megabytes large. An MP3 file is up to 10 times smaller than a WAV file but loses some fidelity due to compression. Many users save WAV files for use on their local computers and make MP3 files when they plan to transfer files over the Internet.
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by Tina Gasperson
If you’ve had trouble installing a new game on your Windows PC, it may have had something to do with your DirectX installation. DirectX is a set of instructions that allows games and other media-intensive applications to run on many different kinds of hardware. If there’s a problem with your DirectX, then your application may not know how to work with your computer. DirectX comes pre-installed on your Windows computer, and you can run a built-in DirectX troubleshooting application called DirectX Diagnostic Tool to see if there are any problems.
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by David Hakala
Charts make boring worksheets interesting. They also convey lots of information at a single glance. The new ribbon bar in Excel 2007 makes it easier than ever to fill your workbooks and other documents with nifty charts of all kinds.
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by Tina Gasperson
Chances are your computer is set to check your main CD drive for a bootable CD at boot time, and if there’s not one there, to boot from your main hard drive. Most of the time, that’s exactly what you want and there’s no need to change the order in which your computer looks for booting instructions. But if you wanted to run an alternative operating system from a memory stick, you’d need to tell your computer to look there first for its “marching orders,” so to speak.
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by David Hakala
So you want to try this RSS feed stuff. It sounds pretty cool to get all your news, gossip, and other every-changing information delivered to you in one easily sorted and read place. But to use RSS you need an RSS reader program. There are hundreds out there. Here are a few of the best.
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by Gabe Goldberg
Back in the Internet’s pre-history, AOL was the leading online service, providing connectivity, software applications, content, news, games, and support. But as Internet availability and diverse content grew, the need for an all-inclusive “walled garden” — as AOL was charmingly called — diminished.
Even now, though, AOL provides many people’s entire online experience.
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by Tina Gasperson
Putting off mailing thank you notes to everyone who gave you a gift on your wedding day because you know it will take forever to address all of those envelopes? You can stop procrastinating. It’s easy and quick to print professional-looking envelopes and stick-on labels of all different sizes with Microsoft Word 2000.
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by David Hakala
When you press the Enter key in an Excel worksheet, it normally drops you down to the next cell in the column. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Excel allows you to specify to which cell the selection goes after you press the Enter key, or whether the selection remains unchanged.
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by Gabe Goldberg
What could be simpler than sending email? You type, someone (sometimes many someones!) reads. But aren’t there some people whose email you enjoy reading and some whose notes are annoying or even painful to slog through?
Simple tips will make you a “favored corresponder” and get your email read sooner rather than later.
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by Tina Gasperson
If your computer is running slower, it could just be that you’re running out of space on your hard drive. It’s easy to check and see. Find the icon called “My Computer,” either on your desktop or in your start menu, and click on it. What you’ll see next is a list of the hard drives and other drives on your computer. “C:” is almost always the letter that represents your main hard drive. Right click on Local Disk C: and then click on Properties. You’ll see a window with a graphic representation of your hard drive space. Blue is the used space, and pink is the free space. If a very small percentage of your hard drive is free, go ahead and click on the “Disk Cleanup” button to the lower right of the graphic. The Disk Cleanup utility will take a few seconds to calculate how much space you can free up. Good time to go get a soda.
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