Extend your laptop’s battery life

With proper care, the expensive lithium-ion batteries in your notebook PCs and other portable gear can run well for many, many years.

Common battery-care mistakes will reduce your batteries’ run times and lead to needless environmental waste and costly early replacement.

Heat is the biggest offender to lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries. It is best to keep the laptop as a whole as cool as possible by avoiding direct sunlight, leaving the laptop on while storing it in a bag, or leaving the battery in while it is plugged in and already at full charge. When your laptop is running on AC power, it’s recommended to remove the battery pack and store it in a cool place, like the refrigerator (in tightly wrapped plastic bag). Low temperatures stall the inevitable and irreversible chemical changes that occur in Li-ion batteries.

In fact, if your laptop is mostly run off household AC power, you can greatly extend the life of its Li-ion battery by following the 40/40 rule: Run the battery down to about 40% of maximum charge then store it at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (in your fridge).
If you can, avoid running Li-ion batteries all the way down. It used to be recommended to run the battery all the way down, but that has changed with the Li-ion batteries.  It is best for the battery to be used between 40-100% of the charge.
Even when you are careful about the battery, your battery will still eventually go bad from normal wear and tear.

Most people purchase spare batteries, but it is best to wait until you really need one for heavy mobile usage or you will have the same problem with it wearing out before it is needed.  If you do have a spare battery, store it in the fridge with about a 40% charge when it’s not in use.

It is important to check the manufactured date on the battery pack when buying a replacement.  It could have been on the shelf for a couple years, which defeats the purpose of buying it.
If carefully taken care of, you can get 300-500 charges from a battery and a happy battery life.
These two excellent articles provide more information on Li-Ion battery life:

• How to prolong lithium-based batteries from BatteryUniversity.com

• The care and feeding of Li-ion batteries from TechRepublic.com

Have a dead laptop battery or two? Give it to me and I will recycle it properly for you! I can also provide replacement batteries for your laptop.

The Truth About Windows 7

Windows 7 will be released soon and bringing with it an injection of much needed new life for the IT world this October. Microsoft did themselves several favors with this upcoming new release. It is everything Windows Vista should have been, and much, much more. I can’t wait.

Windows 7 will be delivering everything that speedy Windows XP was, with the few added features from Windows Vista in a much slimmed down format, and will especially boast more security than Windows XP and faster response than Windows Vista.

The feeling of “this is a good thing” only happens once every so often in the computing world, and with Microsoft feeling slightly disappointed by the sales of Windows Vista, they have poured everything they could into making Windows 7 the new dream product that everyone should try out at least once, and it shows, it really does.

Some of the new improvements include much more realistic system requirements. Windows Vista really needed a lot of grunt to get it working at full speed, but Windows 7 will be much more reasonable, though the more system memory you give it, the more Windows 7 will be able to work for you more efficiently.

Just like Windows Vista, it will come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. What does this mean? It simply means if you just want to browse the web, send some emails or listen to music, then you can do that. If you need a little extra processing power for image or video editing, playing games or just like to push the limits of your programs, now you will be able to do that too.

Other nifty features include built-in native handwriting recognition, which goes hand in hand with Windows 7’s increased support for touch devices such as tablet and touch screen PCs. Those using netbooks with Solid State Drives, or if you have an SSD in your desktop machine, Windows 7 includes all the latest support to fully take advantage of and self-optimize itself to work best using the new hard drives.

There will also be a built-in Windows XP Mode which will provide near full compatibility with all your existing software and hardware drivers by actually running a virtual “pretend” version of Windows XP at the same time as running Windows 7.

Other great changes include improved boot/start up times and streamlined features to ensure maximum speed and response during your work and play. A few old favorites are removed, but are available separately as part of Microsoft’s Windows Live suite.

So, will Windows 7 be a new challenger to the devoted Mac and Linux market share, or will it be another Windows Vista. Only time will tell, but things are looking like Windows 7 will be good. Really good. It is showing great potential and is proving itself to be a very worthwhile investment for your computer.

For more information on Windows 7, or purchasing a new computer with Windows 7 pre-loaded, or upgrading to Windows 7, please feel free to contact me.

What exactly is computer memory?

Most computer users are confused between the two types of computer memory. There is the one type of memory that if you increase it’s capacity, you get a dramatic performance boost. Then there is the other type of memory where if you increase that capacity, you get to store a lot more music, photos, videos, and the like. I sometimes get questions like “Will adding all of my photos from my camera onto my computer slow it down?” The answer to that question is no and I will explain why below.

There are two types of computer “memory”. There is RAM (or Random Access Memory) of which the operating system and programs you see on your computer’s screen resides in and there is hard disk drive storage memory. RAM is the “fast” type of memory. This memory works so fast that its speed is measured in nanoseconds. Hard disk drives are the “slow” type of memory. This memory is so slow that its speed is measured in milliseconds. Hard disk drive storage is in the hundreds of gigabytes and it is a permanent storage medium for all your computer’s data (operating system, pictures, music, documents, etc). This type of memory should be thought of as “storage” rather than “memory” because that’s where the terminology can get confusing for some users. The real type of computer “memory” is RAM and it’s the kind that runs all of your programs in real-time until you turn off your computer. That’s why computers take a long time to boot up because it has to pull all the programs off the slow hard disk drive back into fast RAM before you’re able to work on the computer. RAM is volatile memory – all your stuff disappears as soon as the power is turned off.

Now here’s where things get interesting. If you try to load so many programs at once to multitask in, or play a very resource intensive game, database application, or CAD type of program, your computer might actually run out of its fast RAM type of memory. Then guess what happens? It has to use the slower hard drive for additional memory! This is called paging or swapping. It will take those unused running applications that are usually in the background or minimized on your task bar and put those onto the hard disk drive in order to free up RAM for the newly launched application. This is why one of the BEST things you can do to speed up your computer is to add more RAM. For Windows XP, I recommend no less than 2 gigabytes of RAM for today’s common applications. For Windows Vista, I recommend no less than 4 gigabytes of RAM. For the upcoming Windows 7, we will be able to run a very efficient computer with only 2 gigabytes of memory again, just like Windows XP, because Microsoft has really scaled back all the “bloat” that plagues Vista.

So, if you find that launching multiple windows on your screen is very slow, then you just might need a RAM upgrade. Feel free to contact me for a free evaluation of your computer and its RAM upgradeability.

Ways to Reduce Spam/Junk E-mail

In this post, I’m going to talk about one of the most hated things about computers and the Internet — spam. Spam, also called Junk Email, hits our inbox daily whether we like it or not.

Most of you already have some kind of anti-spam mechanism, whether it’s by hosting with me, using a big ISP’s e-mail, or using a free webmail service like Yahoo! or Google. These all have server-side spam filtering. However, anti-spam is not a perfect science, so some junk mail still slips through. Below, I have listed seven different tips on reducing or circumventing spam.

• Don’t use any “auto-preview” features in your mail client. Examples of this are the Reading Pane in Outlook 2003/2007 or the Preview Pane in Outlook Express/Windows Mail. These should be turned off as they auto-load the e-mail. Most spam is easily identifiable by its sender and subject, which is okay to view.
• Don’t post your e-mail address in plain text on the Internet. Examples include having it on your website (use a contact form instead), posting in forums, chat dialogs, or blogs. Having your e-mail in plain text can easily be found by spam robots that crawl the Internet to harvest e-mails for spamming. Spammers are very sophisticated with this, much like how Google is sophisticated with web search.
• Don’t unsubscribe. Some spam e-mails have an “opt-out” link that simply verifies that you’re a real, active e-mail user who opened their junk e-mail message. Legitimate newsletters, however, usually have good privacy policies, are e-mails that you know you signed up for, and are from trusted, known sources.
• Don’t open suspicious/unknown attachments. Spam e-mails may come with an attachment that looks like it’s a picture or a text file of some sort. This is usually malicious in nature and will usually infect your system with a Trojan that gathers even more e-mail from your own address book. A good anti-virus solution usually circumvents this very well. In fact, AVG AntiVirus 8.0 does this very well. It has plugins that scan incoming emails for these malicious attachments and will either silently take care of it for you, or prompt you to do something about it.
• Don’t open spam e-mails with pictures. The pictures are downloaded from a spammer’s server on the Internet. This lets them track you and see that you opened their message. It’s a welcome mat for even more spam.
• Use a throw-away e-mail address. If you regularly find yourself having to sign up on various websites just to gather information on something, download something, or get something, it may be a good idea to have a “throw-away” e-mail address. This is an address that you can use for sign-ups only and it would be separate from your business or personal address that you only give to friends or family. Free e-mail services such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo, or MSN Hotmail are easy to sign up for and use. On the more advanced side, I have my own domain “neuroncomputers.com”. So what I do is I create some random, jargon e-mail address like signups392@neuroncomputers.com and use that for awhile. When I see that it gets hit with tons of spam, I simply delete it and create a new one called signups405 and so on so forth.
• And the #1, perfect anti-spam solution is…Don’t Use Email! Of course that would be impossible since email has really become a staple in business and in our personal lives. The good news is, as technology gets better and better, so does the fight against spam. From my own observations with clients and how their email systems are set up, I’ve seen first hand that approximately 98% of all emails have been effectively blocked and discarded as spam. So if you’re actually getting 5-10 spam e-mails per day, that’s only a small fraction of the 2% of e-mails that are not being blocked. I’d certainly hate to have thousands of spam e-mails in my inbox!

If you have any spam-blocking/prevention ideas, questions, or comments, please feel free to share them with me, and I’ll be sure to add your comments to my blog and in my next newsletter edition.

Bill Gates Retires

Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates is stepping down from daily operations at the software maker, to focus on his philanthropic efforts. Go here to see a cool time line of all the major events in the life of Microsoft, the company he co-founded in 1975, and in the Gates’ life.

The Importance of Backups

Do you regularly backup your data? I cannot stress the importance of regular backups simply because it’s not a matter of if your computer or server’s hard drive will fail, it’s a matter of when. Also of equal importance are regular backup checks. Do you really know if your backups are actually backing up? Check out this great article, courtesy of pcmag.com.

Simplify Your Online Logins

RoboForm is software that literally does the grunt work of remembering your online logins and passwords. It also automatically logs you in to websites. Sure, Internet Explorer and FireFox have password remembering features, but RoboForm takes it a step further with automatic website navigation, logging in, and even form filling – all with full, encrypted security. With form-filling, you don’t have to type your address or shipping information when you place online orders, ever again. I have been using this software for years and highly recommend it. Check it out, there’s a free 30-day trial.