Tony Brewer

 
Teri was so excited when her boss gave everyone in her office a new Blackberry for Christmas. I can’t say that I blame her for being excited, but I always suspect there is an ulterior motive for gifts like that! Maybe I’m just hyper-cynical, but I think that businesses are trying very hard to find ways to get more of their employee’s time without paying for it! And I think that a gift like this can be written off as a business expense. Oh well, I don’t want to ruin her fun; she’s very excited about having it in the first place! She’s been very busy entering all of her contacts into the contact list.

I’ve advised Teri that she should go online and sign up for the free Blackberry Backup app that I found at the drive.com website. I think it’s a valuable tool to be able to use their free app to back up and restore your contact list. The service isn’t restricted to just Blackberrys; it can be used for the Iphone and the Android phone as well. With the amount of contacts I have on mine, I sure appreciate having an app like that – I’d go crazy if I lost all of my contacts! This app provides real peace of mind about averting that disaster!

My friend Linda asked me to help her create a new webpage.  She’s starting a new business on a shoe-string budget and didn’t want to spend any more money than she absolutely had to.  So I decided to build a free website for her as a quick little starter, so if people ask her if she has a webpage she can answer “yes!”

There is a cute and easy Internet website builder that gives you a free website and lets you customize and build the webpage.  All for free!  I decided to give it a try this morning and I went ahead and built her page.  It was a little confusing at first because I wanted to insert an image and I couldn’t figure out from the step-by step directions that they give exactly how to insert my own image.  So it took about ten minutes to look around and figure it out.  But all in all, creating the web page was fast and easy, and I have to say that I was fairly impressed with the process.

So now I’ll tell her that she can be adding her web page URL to her business card, and to let me know if and when she wants anything added to her page!  Oh, and here is a screen shot of the page I created, in case you are interested to see it!

My sister called me last night, frantic because her Microsoft Outlook wasn’t working for her anymore.  She wanted me to tell her how to fix it right there on the spot.  To be honest, I couldn’t figure out how to help her right off and she was very disappointed.  Have you ever had trouble with Microsoft Outlook on your computer?  What did you do about it?  Did you know that you can get a software program that does PST Repair to help you repair damaged Outlook files?  I found out about a company called REMO that specializes in software that addresses these kinds of problems and also deals with security issues.

Specifically the security issues revolve around making sure that the files that the files that you delete are REALLY  deleted so that someone that gains unauthorized access to your computer can’t get the data off from it that you had sent to the “trash bin.”  Did you know that normally after you delete these files you can recover them unless you ”sanitize” your disk.  By “sanitize” I mean wipe clean so that the files cannot be recovered by anyone.  That’s actually the best way to make sure that your confidential records that you deleted are gone to the point that no one can access them at all.

My brother makes his living from being the computer support guy for several local companies.  He is also the one I call for help when I can’t figure out what is going on with my computer.  (Yes, that has happened from time to time.)  What I think is really awesome about his ability to help is that he often uses remote control software to fix the problems without even leaving his house!  He simply accesses my computer via the Internet from his computer and pokes around and fixes what is wrong!

He has assured me that what he uses is completely safe and secure, and uses 256-bit encryption – the highest in its class so that I don’t need to worry about any hackers getting into my computer and messing with it.  The only thing he has needed me to do to help him out is to make sure that my computer is turned on and that I have authorized his access to my computer.  From time to time when he is working on it he has had to restart the computer, so I’ve had to be there to turn it back on again and reauthorize his access to it.  Other than that all I did was sit and watch the screen while it appeared to fix itself!  It was really amazing to watch!

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to figure out why my computer was running slower. I did all kinds of scans to find viruses, etc and found nothing, so I decided that the problem was probably some programs that had been installed that I didn’t actually need that were running in the background. So I uninstalled a couple of programs that didn’t look familiar and then all of a sudden my CD/DVD drive no longer produced sound! Oops!

Realizing that I must have accidentally uninstalled an important driver, but not know which driver and how to figure it out and fix it I turned to the powers that be at google and did a search for Computer Drivers. It took a while for me to figure out that I needed one of the Audio Device Drivers or one of the Sound Drivers; I just still wasn’t quite sure which one I needed.

Fortunately I found a link to a down-loadable software program that runs a diagnosis of my computer and told me which driver I needed and then helped me to download it. It wasn’t free, but it was well worth it! Problem solved!