Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Do you still have that old computer of yours from the early 90’s? Statistics show that there are enough computers in storage in the U.S. to provide every man, woman, and child with three computers!

So how can you get rid of your old worn out computer? What do you do when you decide to upgrade? Here are Frequently Asked Questions about computer recycling.

Have you ever wondered how computers in schools and libraries withstand daily onslaughts from random users, while the average 12-year old can corrupt, infect, and muck up just about everything in a family computer in mere minutes?

Most organizations like schools and Internet cafes use the Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit to preserve a public computer’s security, settings, and files. With the Shared Computer Toolkit on the job, a simple reboot of the computer can erase what would normally be a nightmarish scenario, restoring the computer to its pre-use state in a blink of an eye.

If you are looking for a simple, free way to limit a child time on your computer, restrict certain programs from being run, or just reverse the abuse your home computer will endure at the next family get-together, the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP might just be the silver bullet you are looking for.

If you are trying to squeeze every ounce of speed from your Vista computer while you wait for Windows 7, there are a few tweaks you can use to get things moving a little more quickly.

Microsoft put a lot of thought and effort into reducing time required to boot Windows Vista by reworking its boot sequence. The result is an operating system that gets you to your desktop faster than ever so you can start working within seconds – not minutes – of pressing your power button.

Even though Vista is designed to boot faster than Windows XP, many of the same XP tweaks can be used to shave precious seconds off of Vista’s startup time while adding a little zip to its day-to day performance.

At this very moment the latest spyware threat may be silently slicing through your computer’s anti-virus defenses, infecting your PC with pop-up ads or monitoring programs designed to steal your passwords and other sensitive information.

With thousands of spyware threats on the web, it is important that you know how to detect and remove these pests from your PC. Over the past few years spyware removal has gone from a technical nightmare to a simple, automated process thanks to the multitude of anti-spyware security applications in the marketplace today.

But before you decide to purchase an off-the-shelf product to secure your PC, you might be surprised to know that there are some free, easy-to-use programs available on the Internet that will remove these pests from your computer.

While there are many programs available to remove spyware with ease, there are two applications in particular that stand out in the crowd as safe, secure programs to clean any hidden spyware from your PC.

Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.com) and Spybot Search and Destroy (www.spybot.info) are both excellent, free applications for removing spyware from your PC. While each application accomplishes similar goals, they are slightly different in how they update, scan for threats, and remove them. This article will show you step-by-step how to install each application and use it to remove any spyware that may be sneaking around on your hard drive.

While computer hardware prices have plummeted over the past few years, the cost of many popular software programs has soared to all-time highs. But you may not need to open your wallet to get the benefits offered by many high-end software suites. In fact, a savvy consumer could save as much as $2,000 by selecting comparable open-source programs instead of buying the name-brand titles.

Open-source is a term that refers to software applications that are created by individuals or teams of individuals and distributed freely on the Internet. While open source software is similar to freeware, it differs in that the license allows others to freely add or modify the program to make it better.

I have found that there are hundreds of open-source programs available on the Internet, so for comparison purposes I selected four that appeared to compete directly with fee-based software titles. In this post I will examine open-source counterparts to Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Audition, and Microsoft Publisher to find out if they really measure up.

The difference between computing bliss and a blue-screen tragedy can be as simple as a bad driver, a new piece of hardware, or the latest software update.

Windows users fall victim to any number of blue screen error messages that can transform a once powerful computer into a helpless doorstop. Fortunately, many of the most common hardware errors can be diagnosed and resolved with little more than a quick web search and some troubleshooting skills.

In this post, we will address some of the most common Windows blue screen errors, tell you what causes them and how you can resolve them yourself.

It might surprise you to find that the data that appears to be so neatly organized inside files and folders on your computer is actually more jumbled than a bucket full of Scrabble letters.

While a computer’s hard drive is very precise in remembering where it has stored your data, it does tend to store it in some strange places from time to time.

Unlike a neatly organized filing cabinet, your computer breaks up large files into smaller file fragments tailored to fill the first available free spaces on your hard drive.

This process of saving file fragments in the first available slot on your hard drive forces your computer to work harder to read an entire file from start to finish. Because the computer must work harder to read a particular file or program, it takes more time to complete even a simple task like sending an email. Organizing these scattered file fragments into one continuous file on your hard drive is called defragmenting.

To better understand the concept, imagine picking up today’s newspaper and reading a front page article. After a few paragraphs you are asked to turn to another page to continue reading the story.

It takes you some time to open the paper, turn to the proper page, and find the story to continue reading. Now imagine that you are required to move to a different page after each paragraph of the story. It would take a lot more time to read the fragmented story than it would have if the story was printed on a single page.

The same concept applies to your hard drive. It takes time for the mechanical components of your hard drive to skip all over your drive and locate all of the fragments of a single file. Over time, hard drives can become so fragmented that they begin to boot slower that they used to or seem sluggish when performing common tasks.

Regularly defragmenting your hard drive will take all of the file fragments that are scattered about your drive and organize them into complete files. Since you hard drive can now read the fragments as one continuous file, your computer will perform faster than it did in its fragmented state.

Last week I mentioned that I was going back to revise some of my older blog posts to help them rank better for their key terms. After adding much missing meta data, scrubbing for dead links and nofollowing ones placed for reference purposes, my traffic jumped 12%.  At the same time my bounce rate also […]

The legacy definition of keyword density doesn’t cut it entirely in today’s search engines. Relative distance from other keywords is just as vital to an SEO effort.

A Website’s bounce rate is a measurement of how many visitors leave after only looking at one page. Lower bounce rates mean better conversions & more readers.