Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Things to try before throwing that old _____ away…

Friday, December 18th, 2009

I’m on a roll!  I’ve gotten three things to work that were headed for the scrap heap:

  1. My dad’s Gateway notebook computer.  It’s maybe 5 years old, running Windows XP Home.  It had slowed to an agonizing crawl, and my dad was thinking about tossing it.
  2. My old Dell P991 Ultrascan monitor.  Maybe 6-7 years old.  It was working okay, but it couldn’t show a true “black,” and there were these tiny green diagonal lines spaced apart by two inches or so.  Really annoying, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
  3. My old Zenith color TV.  Maybe 8+ years old.  It was working fine, but then one day, the greens started looking blue, and the picture in general had an orange tint.

Here’s how I fixed them, without spending a dime:

It turns out that the old Gateway computer was the victim of the security suite that comes with Verizon FiOS.  (My dad had recently switched over from Optimum Online.)  I uninstalled the Verizon bloatware, and all of a sudden the notebook was blazing fast.  (I subsequently installed Microsoft’s free Security Essentials software, which apparently has a way smaller footprint than the Verizon package.)

I fixed my Ultrascan monitor by rolling the driver back to the OEM driver that came with the monitor all those years ago.  I then used the “color return” feature, and the monitor is now as good as ever, with true black and without those unbelievably annoying green lines.

I fixed my old Zenith color TV by unplugging it (literally pulling the plug out of the socket), and leaving it unplugged for 2 hours.  (I found this tip somewhere or other on the internet — it acts as a hard reset.)  Amazingly, when I plugged it in again, the greens had come back.

Hope this helps!

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Geek Tip: Make Your To Do List Your Home Page

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Over the years, I’ve spent (no joke) thousands of dollars on books, tapes, CDs, software, and gadgets in a never-ending quest to Get Organized, and to Get More Done.

But once again it turns out that the best things in life are free (depending upon how you define “free,” that is).

Boiling down a whole bunch of books and tapes, the key to getting organized is:

  1. Write stuff down
  2. Look at what you’ve written

Step 1 is easy — I’ve done Step 1 hundreds of times over the years. 

It’s Step 2 that’s the killer.  I’ll look at my to do list for a day or two.  But then a month or two goes by, and I’ll suddenly think to myself:  “Hey, what ever happened to that to do list?”  Or, more embarrassingly, I’ll find an old to do list with the word “urgent” written next to a whole bunch of stuff I never got around to doing.

Here’s my solution:

Thanks to those clever folks at Microsoft, you can open local Word and Excel documents through Internet Explorer.  So it’s a piece of cake to use Word or Excel to create a to do list, and then make that Word or Excel document your home page.  It will look something like this:

Now, every time you surf the web, you will automatically spend a couple of seconds glancing over your to do list.  (With tabbed browsing, you can even have multiple to do lists as home pages.)  If you need to consult or update your to do list, you’ll know where to find it.

I’ve been using this technique for a week, and I’ve looked at my to do list 10-20 times every single day.  The world is my oyster!

Notes:

  1. You can also accomplish the same thing using Google Docs (although for some reason I sometimes have trouble getting my Google Docs tables to work.)  Using Google Docs has the advantage of letting other people see your to do list (and also allows you access if you’re not at your home computer).
  2. Don’t put anything confidential or sensitive into your home page to do list — malware may be able to harvest it and send it Lord-knows-where.

Good luck!

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