Tips on Buying and Using Personal Computers.

But a huge tip that will make your life way better on notebook / laptops, are to spend a whole $10 to $20 and get a bleeping mouse that just plugs into a USB port. Why anyone chooses to fumble with those stupid little mouse buttons makes no sense at all! Then get a real keyboard for $20 and plug it in too.

A notebook computer does not have an inbuilt DVD and CD system. The typical screen size is between 12 to 14 inches. The notebook also has a low profile, that is, it is thin. It also features and integrated modem & network connection. The notebook’s keyboard is also minimalist but it retains its functionality. The power consumption of the notebook is low because it features a Celeron design processor. The laptop on the other hand has additional features as compared to the notebook. For a start, the laptop features a wide screen that is 14 to 17 inches in measurement. You will find a graphic s subsystem either form ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce. The laptop also features a built in DVD-ROM drive or a DVD-RW. The keyboard is also large and full featured. The battery life of a laptop is also lower than the notebook’s, at around 3 hours. A great feature of the laptop is that it is upgradeable. A laptop also features an integrated modem and network, and Bluetooth technology. A laptop also features Wi-Fi capabilities. You will find a high quality integrated audio as well as speaker system. From the above descriptions, you will realize that a notebook is exactly opposite to the laptop. A notebook offers reasonable power and it is highly portable. The laptop on the other hand, is designed for the main purpose of being capable to replace the entire desktop computer whenever necessary, while retaining the capabilities that you will find in a desktop PC. Technology is rapidly moving forward but as of now, these differences between a notebook and a laptop remain.

The first rule of desktop PC buying is to never buy a Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway or other big name brand desktop computer. They're fine for notebook / laptops, but they're full of problems that can be easily avoided with desktops.

Unfortunately, this is the age of the Internet. Most large companies do everything they can to drive traffic to their website, track what you're doing, collect and sell your personal information and what you do with your computer / printers / digital cameras, and put you on spam (junk mail) lists.

These, and other, useless programs that do things you don't want them to are known as "crapware" or "parasite programs."

To see how much crapware your computer is running, press these three keys all at the same time only once: Control, Alt, and Delete.

Click the Processes tab. The amount of processes running should not be more than a couple dozen (or 30 on a notebook). Anything more, then you have parasite programs the computer manufacturer is forcing your computer to run (that provide no value). If you have kids that game online / use social sites, then there's probably dozens of crapware (and Spyware) programs running.

Below is an image of our computer, that has been meticulously optimized so that NO parasite ever run:

As you can see, there are only 21 processes running. On computers where none of this optimization work has been done, it's normal to see fifty processes running. This means that half of the time, your computer is thinking about "totally useless crap," and that's why it's sooooooo slooooow. On laptops, it's normal to see 75 processes. That's why they're even sloooooooooooooooooooower.

These programs don't do anything you want them to do, so all they do is make your computer run slower, crash, collect information about you / steal your privacy (spyware), and drive you to their useless websites.

What to do about this: Go to Start, Run, and type in "msconfig." A program will run. All of these parasitic programs start up because MSCONFIG tells them to. You can manually turn them off in both the Services and Startup tabs. You cannot just go and turn these things off without knowing what you're doing, or most everything thing will stop working (don't uncheck everything in Services, but you can probably set everything in Startup to not start up, and things will be much better. Try it and see, you can always reboot and set everything back to starting up).

Then the thing to do is to Google each process, and then decide whether or not you want to try turning them off. We're so anal about this that we even turn off the Morningstar Principia parasite in the Startup tab that's put there whenever it's installed monthly. When you do this, be prepared to spend some time at it. You'll also need to keep track of what you're doing, so use the Print Screen key and then paste this into a Word docx, so you can see what you did. When you mess up, don't worry, just turn that process back on and reboot. When you've eradicated as many parasites as possible, your computer will run way way way faster and better.

Then when you're Googling the process, write down all of the program names and folder locations. Then use Control Panel / Add or Remove Programs to deinstall them.

There's nothing magic or hidden about this (like there is with index.dat and desktop.ini), so it's just a matter of doing the work needed to get rid of everything useless, while not harming anything that will make things not work right. You just have to invest the time experimenting. It's well worth it. When you have things the way you want them, do more screen prints into a Word docx and save it so you can always go back if needed. Some parasites will just grow back on their own, so then you'll need to get to the bottom of that too.

Because the OEM vendor has modified Windows, you can't eradicate most of them.

Companies like the ones listed above customize their motherboards and Windows to do all kinds of worthless things - like drive Internet traffic to their, and their "partners" websites.

This is annoying, but even worse, it makes the computer slow, makes it incompatible with other software you may want to install, and makes it crash.

Anyone familiar with AOL, Earthlink, Norton / Symantec, Adobe, the phone company's DSL CD, and similar software knows about these programs taking over your computer. Nothing good ever comes of this.

About anti-virus and anti-spyware software: Norton / Symantec is almost useless against spyware. Instead, get Computer Associates (which also has major problems). Not only will it eradicate spyware, it won't take over your computer like Norton, but you'll have to live with a bunch of stupid errors from their program not knowing how to load and run right.

So here's what to do if you want a real computer to work really good: Go to a good local PC shop that puts PCs together from scratch. Tell them you want a genuine unmodified Intel motherboard, with a genuine Intel CPU, and get a brand new original Microsoft Windows installation CD (that does not say "OEM" anywhere on it). Tell them, if possible, to not use any hardware from Asia or India - everything needs to be made in the U.S..

Then when there's a problem, you can call them, or just drive the PC to the shop, and/or you can call Microsoft.

Actually, all of this changed around '07. Now when you buy a clean computer with clean Windows, you have a choice. You can buy it so you'll get a non-OEM serial number, and you can call Microsoft for support for 90 days for free. After 90 days, you'll be charged $95 an hour for help. This version of Windows costs more. Or you can get the same Windows with OEM in the serial number, and when you call for help, you'll be charge $95 an hour from day one. This is cheaper. The concept is the same even though Microsoft is now charging for support - the clean, non-modified, version of Windows is the biggest factor when it comes to having a PC that won't annoy you. So getting a clean Windows install is critical - and is what you will NOT get if you buy a large name brand PC off the shelf at Wal-Mart-like stores.

This way:

• Your computer will rarely crash or do stupid things to you all day (compared to the name brands with an altered OEM version of Windows).

• You'll be able to upgrade / update Windows without having to take it back to the store (if you can). Because these firms modify Windows, you can't just buy and install the latest version of Windows because it doesn't have all of their modifications. It may run, but it will crash constantly.

You can't install clean Windows on an OEM computer (HP, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc.) because they modified their mother boards to only run on their modified version of Windows. You can only run their version of Windows. This is the root of millions of problems that you're then stuck with forever.

• You'll be able update Windows and other programs via Microsoft's free update site.

If you do that with OEM operating systems, it will just make things worse (like make everything like wireless drivers stop working), because pure MS code won't run on motherboards that have been modified (by Dell / Gateway / Compaq / HP / Etc.). You'll have to go to the vendors website to get updates, and they're usually full of a never-ending parade of bugs and fixes and "patches."

• You'll get a free copy of WinZip - the file compressor and decompressor. When you buy something like a Dell, you don't get it for free, and will have to pay extra from MS to get it. The same with Windows Media Player, which comes as a freebie with a pure version of MS Windows. Things you've taken for granted for over a decade just won't be there because MS gobbled them up and will then make you pay for them if you buy an OEM version of Windows.

• Your computer will be much faster (because it's not running tons of useless crapware parasite programs in the background).

• When it breaks, there will be no more having to pack it up, spending a fortune sending it in the mail, and waiting weeks to get it back. The service will be better (because you can just drive it over to a real human in your community). Then you can wait for it to be repaired and may have it back the same day.

• You won't get the constant parade of "patches" that you need to install to keep your computer running.

• The PC will still cost less, even after the local sales tax.

• Useless background programs won't take over your computer and drive you to their useless websites. It also won't go to websites automatically anymore, be constantly updating things you don't want, and all of that nonsense. You'll notice the increase in bandwidth.

• There won't be unwanted icons and favorites all over the place.

• You'll be putting money into your community instead of reinforcing the name brand's bad behavior.

Miscellaneous PC Tips and Info

http://www.nitropdf.com - Nitro PDF lets you easily edit PDF files.

Bullzip has the best free PDF file maker.

Before you buy any hardware or software, make sure it's not made in Asia or India. There's too many problems with all that, because their #1 goal is usually cost-cutting. You want a real American computer where the #1 goal is quality. The price differences are minor these days, so there's a substantial difference between a real computer and a bleep computer for under $100.

If you've noticed, you can rarely eradicate cookies and the tons of useless and dangerous websites load on your PC anymore. When you Delete Cookies and all of that from your browser, it doesn't get rid of hardly any of them. Then when you try to use Windows Explorer, these files in Documents and Settings don't even display anymore so you can delete them. There is only one way around this, and that's to use your CD burner program to hunt these files down and delete them manually. CD burner programs can still access these files on most computers. This way you can eradicate everything except the infamous index.dat files. You'll have to hunt for them in dozens of folders under Documents and Settings, but it's worth it to do it monthly at least. Be sure to delete all of the desktop.ini files too. Basically everything in all Content IE folders needs to be eradicated monthly or your PC will eventually clog up.

AMD processors are a lot more buggy than Intel processors. Of all of the computers we've had, the one with the most stability problems has been the one with the AMD processor. Granted this was years ago, but Intel processors running pure Windows is probably still the most bug-free way to go.

Back to increasing PC performance: This is a little-known Windows trick, that will speed up your computer. Press control-alt-delete to get the Task Manager to open. When you right click on a process (under the Processes tab), you'll see that you can set CPU priorities (and which CPU that process uses). So when you're working with a program that's "slow" then raise its priority. Also, lower the priority of other (useless) programs too (like ctfmon). You can also make it so cftmon will only use CPU #1 using the Affinity tab.

You should consider turning off the "Send Error Report" function. It is very annoying, may break Internet Explorer, and is prone to spyware viruses that let bad people into your PC when it's sending the error report. This happened to our Compaq Presario and it sat and downloaded 200Mb of stuff before we realized it wasn't sending an error report and killed it. So it's best to just turn it off. Go to Control Panel, System Properties, and at the bottom there's a button for Error Reporting.

If you're annoyed because Standby / Sleep mode doesn't work right, because it comes out of Standby for no reason, or because the mouse moved, then the problem is your (Logitech) mouse. Get a Microsoft comfort mouse (4000) and all of your mouse and standby annoyances will go away (including the problem where the mouse jumps all over the screen for no reason). It worked perfectly from the get go with no setup or driver install. In general, ALWAYS use MS mice and keyboards whenever you can. They're no more expensive than "cool" mice and keyboards, and tons of problem (like standby not working) just go away forever.

We've also found that the spill-resistant Microsoft keyboards work the best (but avoid Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 as they're prone to static buildup which makes the space key not work). The Mail, media player, and Web keys are cool, and they just feel the best (which allow you to work way faster and more error-free). We almost had to trash a whole notebook just because a few drops of beer spilled on the keyboard once (it was saved just by plugging in a real MS keyboard).

On all of our keyboards, you'll find several keys have been removed. They are rarely used, and only serve as targets for making mistakes. For example, we popped out all of the following keys: Caps lock, Number lock, the Start menu key, Break, Scroll, F1, and the two keys next to the Print Screen key. If you gently pop them out, then they easily pop right back in. Popping out these useless keys will greatly improve your typing speed and efficiency. If you need to use them temporarily, you can just insert a pencil or pen tip. You'll be amazed at how your life will improve without these keys! They're nothing but useless targets that want to go, "Press me by mistake with your warp ten butterfingers so you can screw up and waste tons of time fixing your mistakes, especially the Cap Lock key, yeah hit me by mistake 100 times per day so you'll have to send an hour retyping everything." NO! ALL useless keys can easily just pop out of the keyboard, and problems all solved once and for all!

First rule of keyboards: Keep all liquids away from them! Even the spill-resistant keyboards will need replaced is one drop of beer lands on it.

We use the Microsoft 4000 Ergonomic keyboard. It took a little getting used to, but now it's a major pain using normal keyboards. So if you type a lot and/or are a power user, then you'll never go back after you get used to them.

There is also no law saying that you have to use the little mouse in the middle of the notebook / laptop computers. Just hook a real $20 MS mouse into a USB port and you'll instantly double your speed and your life will be way better.

If you hate pop-ups (e.g., Netflix) that were supposed to go away when you turned on your pop-up blocker, it's because of a newfangled thing called "add-ons." So you'll need to go Tools, Manage Add-ons, and then disable Shockwave Flash Object. In general, disable all of them (accelerators and everything on all menus) until you get an error from a website you want saying you need one (be sure to disable everything from Adobe). Also, then it won't take an eternity for your browser to open. Hulu and videos will need Shockwave Flash Object and Pandora will need XML DOM Doc to run though.

Always use a good power surge strip for your PC and monitor. Even better is using even the cheapest battery backup unit. Then plug power strip surge protectors into the battery backup so you'll have two in series. We've had dozens of friends lose their PCs and years of work over the last three decades all because they were too lame to use real power strips, UPS, and/or do backups. All it takes is for the power company to hiccup, or have lightning strike anywhere near your power lines, and you're toast all because you were too lame to buy a $15 power surge protector strip (and do monthly backups). We've never once had this problem and have been hit by lightning and have had the power company's screw ups destroy many other gadgets.

You can get the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student suite that has the latest Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for ~$50. You can find this at most all office supply stores (most computer stores, Best Buy, sometimes Target, etc.). If you're still using Excel or Word '03 then you're operating in the Stone Age with primitive and broken programs, and really really need to upgrade ASAP. Them "moving stuff around" via ribbons is annoying, but well worth the learning curve.

In general, Samsung has the best monitors.

If after getting a wide screen monitor, your images are too stretched horizontally, what you'll need to do is use the monitor's internal setup deal and let it automatically set it up under the Size settings. Everyone says this is fixed by changing the resolution via Control Panel / Display, but that doesn't do anything. It's an aspect ratio thing, and Windows is clueless about that.

Tips for working with and saving files can be found here.

You should make CD (or at least USB flash drive) backups of all of your work at least on a monthly basis, and store the CD in a safe location, but not where your computer is. USB drives are okay, but not safe totally because they are vulnerable to EMP and are in general, too flakey. Once a CD is made and stored safely, there's nothing a magnetic / electrical spike (or sunspot / solar flare / gamma ray burst) can do to harm it. It's critical to back up your data, but not programs. At any time, your hard drive could crash, there could be a fire, flood, burglary, power surge, or any number of things that would make the data on your hard drive irretrievable. Get one of those 16Gb USB drives, and use that as a weekly backup (again don't keep the drive in the same physical location as your computer). Then do a real CD backup at least monthly, and rotate the CDs between your bank safe deposit box and other secure locations (so if you go home one day and there's nothing but a meteor crater, you won't lose decades of work).

How to set up your Internet e-mail so you can use MS Outlook Express (which make life waaaaay better): In your browser, go to Tools, Internet Options, Programs, and select Outlook Express under E-mail. Next you'll need to read and use your e-mail provider's help files to configure your Outlook Express settings. For example Yahoo: First, Yahoo Mail will only work with Outlook Express if you have Yahoo Plus. Next, in the large search input field at the top when you're inside Yahoo Mail, type in something like this, and the detailed instructions on how to get your Internet mail to work with Outlook Express will come up somewhere in the results. Before doing that, find the version of Outlook Express you have by clicking Help, About. Then if you still have XP, determine if it's 32 or 64 bit. Then input: "use Outlook Express 6 with Yahoo Mail XP 32 bit." It will take some tinkering, but it usually works then your life will be a lot better because you can then just use Outlook Express instead of the arduous Yahoo Mail interface.

Don't forget to backup your MS Outlook Express e-mail folders too. Do a search for *.dbx files to find them. You should also backup your Favorites files and Desktop folder by looking in the folder Documents and Settings, Owner. Backup the star-shaped folder named Favorites and the whole folder Desktop.

You should also create a new system restore point monthly. To do that (in XP), go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore, and then ensure you click "Create a Restore Point," and not the other choice. Then when your computer dies, you may be able to restore in a minute.

Try to keep your desktop box a few inches off of the floor to keep the dust down. Then use a vacuum to dust only the exterior air intake. Never try to use a vacuum for anything inside the box, as the static electricity will fry your motherboard and/or hard drive.

If you don't like Adobe taking over your computer, and sucking up your bandwidth by updating constantly updating (or who knows what it's really doing when it goes to their websites a hundred times per day), then here's how to help stop all of that: Use Windows Explorer and find Adobe in the Program Files (probably under Adobe / Reader). Find the file AcroRd32.exe, and rename it to a text file (we rename it to "you suck.txt"). Click Yes to the Rename error box that follows. Then go to My Documents and find the Updater5 folder. Delete it (it will be recreated the next time you use Adobe). Also, all of the Adobe folders in your Documents & Setting were deleted. When you want to use the Adobe Reader, then rename the file back to AcroRd32.exe. This manual process will help stop tons of annoying things, and will give you more Internet bandwidth. Adobe is by far the worst offender when it comes to "We own your computer if you install any of our software, so we're totally allowed to do anything we want all day every day whether you like it or not." So doing this simple thing will eradicate most of this stupidity, and you may see a noticeable improvement in performance just from that alone.

With some annoying work, you can also stop your anti-virus program from taking over your PC and sucking bandwidth. You really don't need to let it run amok and go online to update daily. So you can turn all of this off using switches in the program. We just disable everything in every program that says "Automatic Update."

About the annoying Microsoft Explorer thing where you click on a file name, and then it highlights because it's stupid and think you want to rename the file. Just don't click on the file name. Only click directly on the file icon. This stops this renaming function from starting up.

Using desktop shortcut keys helps too. This makes it so you can open programs way faster using your keyboard, instead of hunting for the icons to double click on with the mouse. For example, go to your desktop. Find the Internet Explorer icon. Right click, and choose Properties. Now type the letter "I" in the Shortcut key: field. Close. Now when you press Control, Alt, and I all at the same time Internet Explorer opens. It's faster and easier once you get used to it. Great summaries of Microsoft shortcut keys are here.

How to keep the terms "uploading and downloading" straight: The Internet lives in a cloud up in cyberspace. So when you move a file from where you are on Earth up to the cloud, it's uploading. When you transfer a file down to Earth from the cloud, then it's downloading. In the Word docx download, you can see that Ameriprise, JP Morgan, Citi, and Capital One, all financial services firms that work in the clouds, were hacked into. This could have been, and will be you, if you cloud compute, it's only a matter of time.

What to do when this dialog box pops up: "MS Outlook wants to compact your e-mail folders, this make take an eternity." Click NO! If you click yes, it will take over your computer and you be stuck not being able to do anything else for an hour (exaggeration). If you click yes, and then decide to cancel after you realize it will lock up your computer for an hour (or you kill it with the Task Manager), then it will eat your e-mail folders (the dbx files, and this is why you should find them and back them all up at least monthly). Wait until you won't use the PC for an hour, then go into Outlook and manually compact all of your folders.

If you've had it with spam, here's what to do. You have to delete your e-mail address so all new e-mails sent to it will get a failed mail e-mail back. If you just try to turn up your spam blocker, then too many real e-mails will be blocked. Flagging e-mails as spam doesn't work, because they just use a different domain name daily. After you've deleted the old address and made a new one, you'll have to manually tell people about the new one. Do it one at a time over a month. Then if you start getting tons of spam all of sudden you can narrow down who's doing it. Sometimes people have a virus on their computer that lives in their Outlook address book, self-replicates and automatically puts your e-mail address on a master spam list. Tell them to get their computer fixed.

After a few months, then reactivate the deleted e-mail address. Then wait a week and check it. If there' no new spam, then it's safe to use it again. If there's any new spam, then delete it again. Most of the time, you'll still be on spam lists even if the address has been deleted for years.

We used to do this with addresses on the main domain, like answers@toolsformoney.com. It turns out that spammers send to dozens of generic names at domain names automatically (like info, sales, or help). So once they have your domain name on their list, there's nothing you can do - their robots will spider your website daily and collect all addresses to put on their list. Then they'll sell it to other lists.

So here's how to fix that: Get a GMail account. Go to your e-mail server control program, and set your regular e-mail to auto-forward to the new GMail account. Then tell Outlook / GMail to leave e-mail on the server after Outlook downloads it. Then tell Outlook to only get e-mail from GMail. Most spam will automatically be blocked. Then when you get spam, you can go to your GMail account and delete it as spam there (since you can't report spam from Outlook nor lame e-mail programs from your webmaster). You'll just have to remember to clean out your GMail every so often so it won't clog up, and also to check the spam folder for non-spam.

Never buy a USB drive from Lexar - they don't work and then there's no refunds.

To keep your notebook battery alive the longest - try to never disconnect the power cord. As an experiment, the amount of time the battery lasted was plotted against how many times and how long the PC ran on battery. There was a correlation between how long it ran on battery and how long the battery life was. The more and longer and longer it ran on battery, the less time the battery lasted before it ran out.

Once you've purchased something, then you can read the rant about using Apple Computers.

How to help make all of the stupid Windows open maximized:

1) Right click on the desktop icon, and go to Properties. under, Run, choose Maximized.

2) That probably didn't do anything, so open the program again. Then resize it to where you want it. Now hold the shift and control key down at the same time when you close.

3) If that didn't work either, then try doing the same thing, but this time open the programs from the Start menu.

If that worked, but you still can't get it to work right from the desktop, then delete the desktop icon and make a new one from the Start menu (just drag it to the desktop).

4) If that didn't work, then the only other remedy is to edit the registry. Thanks again Microsoft, you suck (but you're still way better than Apple Macs)!

How to make an e-mail distribution list in Outlook Express

1) Select Address Book from the Tools menu.

2) Click the rolodex index card thingy to open a new entry.

3) Click Personal Distribution List, then OK.

4) Type the name of the distribution list. E.g., if you want to make a list for everyone in the office, and you want to call it "List," type List.

5) Click Add / Remove Members.

6) Double click the names from the list, or type them in (if they're not on the list).

7) Exit these dialog boxes.

8) Type the name of the distribution list in the To... field when you create a new message.