Death to the FAX!

Howdy one and all and a great big welcome back to another fun filled edition of The Weekly Geek!

Man do I dislike the FAX machine! People, please just let that technology die!

About 3 or 4 times a year, I do business with someone who “cannot receive e-mail” for one reason or another. Two of these businesses are HP and Dell – now what in the world! When I have an issue I am trying to resolve for a customer and I want to e-mail the HP “support team” the error or anything for that matter and the tell me they cannot receive e-mails, I just about go ballistic (in my head, not out loud). I have had the same experiences with Dell. These are supposed to be the TECHNOLOGY industry leaders and they can’t accept e-mail? Goodness gracious, e-mail has been around since 1985!

In addition, some of my clients cannot accept e-mails because (they say) they must have a signature to validate the documents / contract. I am not sure what to say but “bull”, have you ever ordered anything on line? Your e-mailing an order without a signature, or pressing the “order” or “accept” button constitutes a “e-signature” and acceptance of the contract.

Now to be fair some places e-mail me documents but then they want me to print them, sign them and FAX them back, get over it people, the FAX should have been left behind January 1st 2000. They are slow (try faxing a 70 page loan agreement on your house), peculiar (see what happens when you run out of paper, two Faxes come in at once or you are trying to type in a FAX number and one starts to come in). Continue reading

Removing old or unneeded programs

Hello one and all and a great big welcome back to this weeks edition of “The Weekly Geek”. In this weeks fun filled adventure we are going to free up some space on your hard drive by removing old versions of programs and programs that you no longer (if ever) use.

There are two correct ways to remove old programs.

The first is through the “Programs” list on your computer. To do this go to the “Start” button in the lower left of you display and then click on “Programs” or “All Programs”. Look for the name of the program you want to remove. Continue reading

Scan disk in Windows NT, 2000 and XP

Welcome back once again to this fun filled and exciting edition of The Weekly Geek. This week we will continue in our efforts to maintain your computer by running Scandisk in Windows NT, 2000 and XP. Previously we covered how to do this in Windows 95, 98 and ME (combined referred to as Windows 9x).

If you have Windows 2000 or NT you cannot set up Scandisk to run automatically without buying separate, non Microsoft software.

To run Scandisk manually, double-click on “My Computer”, then right click on the hard drive you want to scan, choose “Properties” and from the new list select “Tools”.

Finally under “Error Checking” click on the “Check Now” button.

When “Check disk…” appears, put a checkmark in box boxes, select the “Start” button. You will be advised that the scan will only work upon the next boot up.

To run immediately, close all programs and restart your computer (Start | Shutdown | Restart) or wait until you shutdown and later restart the computer as usual. Continue reading