To Defrag or Not To Defrag??

It doesn’t seem like very long ago that I was recommending to folks that they defragment their hard drives once a month. As with all progress, what was once Best Practices is now either no longer necessary, or downright inappropriate. When hard drives were 40GB and smaller, defragmentation was necessary to make sure all your files were together and not […]

Microsoft is Not Calling You!

Truth: Microsoft Technicians are NOT going to call you and offer to help fix your computer.  That means that anyone who calls you claiming to be a Microsoft Technician is NOT telling you the truth. There is no division within Microsoft tasked with calling users to help them fix their computers. Furthermore, there is no process within your operating system […]

More Cores is the Key to Multitasking

Multi-core processing is one of those terms that geeks love to use when they tell people about their computers because having multiple cores means wonderful things. Let’s start on what a processor is: A processor is a component that processes instructions from the different programs and makes outputs. That’s obviously a simplified explanation, but that’s what it is and what […]

Why Does Microsoft Keep Changing Stuff?

  If you know me—at all—you know that I use a lot of different forms of technology, from different providers. This gives me the foundation to be able to tell you authoritatively that it is not just Microsoft that keeps changing stuff. Let’s start by saying that, although a horse and buggy is an adequate way to get around and […]

How “Free Stuff” on the Web Really Works

Everything has a cost of some type. That’s basic economics. It’s not always a monetary cost; sometimes it’s a price paid in effort, and sometimes it’s an “opportunity cost,” which means that as a result of choosing one thing you can’t take full advantage of another opportunity. An example of that would be in how we choose to spend our […]

This Thing Called the World Wide Web

I remember when there was no World Wide Web, when the Internet was not called the Internet. For today’s emerging generation of computer users, however, computer use IS the Internet or the Web. The journey from a room-sized machine churning out processed data to global information access from a handheld device weighing less than a pound probably does not fascinate […]