Welcome to GuruNews
Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can
interact with the PC Guru team via our Web site, located at http://www.thepcgurus.com. On our
site you can post your computer questions, comments and rants on the forums,
e-mail the PC Guru
team members and chat one on one in our nightly IRC chat
beginning around 8:00 PM EST. You can also subscribe to our RSS feeds so
you can get the latest news and forum updates from the PC Guru Web site directly
on your computer.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin’s website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
To subscribe to this newsletter just drop by www.thepcgurus.com and sign up!
Vol. 6,
No. 10
3-2-06
1 Web research and utility sites
2 Web wrangler
3
Google goes AMD, soybean powered sports car, MS Origami, Norton antics
4 Free color laser
5 Quiet down!
It’s time for our semi-annual roundup of exceedingly useful web sites, a collection of pages for research, online utilities and helpful tips.
Revisiting www.portforward.com that was mentioned last week, saying this amazing site just features screenshots of hundreds of different routers doesn’t do it justice. Browsing around I discovered that they also list the port information for hundreds of programs and games as well as a comprehensive list of ports and their assigned uses. Since reader Ralph Beverly made me aware of this site I’ve used it several times on the job. Definitely a keeper if you’re on broadband, or if you help your friends with broadband issues.
Speaking of broadband, no site can help you determine your current connection speed better than www.toast.net. Just choose the Internet Speed Test button, pick a test and a host and check your speed against the nominal rates of several different services and connection types.
If you find your connection is sub-par head over to www.speedguide.net and use the free TCP/IP Analyzer for suggestions on changes you can make, or just grab the free TCP/IP Optimizer program to make the changes for you. Once you’ve backed up your current settings (which is VERY important) use Optimizer to change your settings to the optimal limits and reboot, then run the Toast test again to see if you’ve improved things. If you haven’t you can restore your original settings through the Optimizer control panel.
If you’ve ever put a fresh load of Windows on a machine you know what a hassle it is to reload drivers for all the hardware, especially if you can’t find the original disks. www.driverguide.com can save you hours in finding the correct drivers for your printer, modem, video card etc.
Membership is required but it’s free, and you’ll have to put up with some advertising offerings, but it’s well worth it to be able to search for drivers using an FCC ID, a number on a chip or even random bits of information etched on a card or other device.
If you’re setting up a home network for the first time or troubleshooting a problem on an existing network www.practicallynetworked.com is a great place to check. Tips on file and printer sharing, connection sharing, security and wireless are just a few of the topics you’ll find covered at this site.
If you’ve ever seen a system that uses more than one monitor you may have wondered “how did they do that?”. www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/ can tell you the how and the why, plus offer reviews of different video cards in a multiple monitor environment and even a gallery of pictures featuring different setups.
I know Art uses three monitors and I use four and I can attest to the fact that the setup is extremely useful. You can keep web pages visible while typing an email, article or homework assignment as an example, or you can keep your email client and web browser visible simultaneously while browsing. Web cams, multiple pages, just drag them around to the various monitors and monitor for changes. Once you’ve experienced this for a day or two you’ll wonder how you could possibly get by with just one.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention www.snopes.com in an article like this. I get scads of email messages and many of them “smell” funny. Anytime you get a virus warning, missing person report or outraged claim of some corporation doing something treasonous it’s always a good idea to check that message against the Snopes database. If experience counts for anything I would estimate you’ll find that 99% or more of those messages are either outright hoaxes or horribly distorted or out of date.
Obviously there are a lot of sites that I haven’t mentioned and, if you the readers like this sort of content and let me know, I’ll do another article like this in the near future. That’s enough for this week though.
On another note I have a couple of follow up items to cover. First is the podcast I mentioned in the last issue. The first attempt went well but illustrated some changes we need to make before we start posting them for download. Overall I was pleased with the effort and I would expect them to become available for download in a few weeks.
I also want to mention the new weekly sweepstakes section. I’ll try to stick to major manufacturers with decent reputations, but I would caution you that many of these links might serve to gather email addresses for advertising purposes. Read the entry forms carefully and don’t sign up if you don’t trust the manufacturer or their privacy policy. I can alleviate your fears to a certain extent by telling you that I sign up for every one that I feature, but I get lots of professional ad emails anyway.
Happy browsing…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Google, one of the largest consumers of servers on the planet, leans away from Intel in favor of AMD Opteron processors. Sorry Intel…
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2006/03/02/google-amd-0302markets15.html
One of the coolest cars ever built goes from 0-60 in four seconds, gets 50 miles per gallon on soybean-based bio-diesel and was built by… Mr. Hauger’s West Philadelphia High School’s auto shop class:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml
Microsoft will soon announce a radical new paper-folding method for creating… no, wait…
Two-year-old glitch in Norton products allows script kiddies to wreak havoc on IRC channels:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/03/keylogger_utterance_spooks_nor.html
Matthew
Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.mattdattilo.com
Contest of the Week
This week’s online sweepstakes pick if from HP and ends March 29th. The grand prize is an HP Color LaserJet 3700dn, a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and some HP paper products. Five first prizes are an HP OfficeJet 7210, a copy of Photoshop Elements and some HP paper products. Only one entry per email address will be accepted.
http://www.hpworksdata.com/win.php
Email Question of the Week
Q: my wife has a Gateway laptop, model
#400SD4. Served its purpose well, no operational problems with it to
date.
However, it has a very loud fan which comes on periodically
and seems to be getting louder with time. I can here it running in the
next room when she works at home. Do you folks know, or can you find out,
whether there is a fix for this issue? It is getting to the point where we
are now discussing a replacement laptop if a solution cannot be found.
Thought I would try asking you folks first. :)
Thanks in advance
for any info. This is a great service!!
A: I too have had this same problem with
the same model run of laptop,
and I have asked Gateway support about it
before. I have good news and
bad news for you this morning. The
good news is that you can quiet the
fan for the most part by doing a few
things. Number one is to take your
vacuum, and pull any of the dust
you can out of there. My laptop was in
a very dusty situation, and
that cleared things up a little. The second
thing to do is to find
some way to raise the laptop up off the desk more
so that more air can flow
under it. Part of the problem with them
running loud is that they have
no air naturally coming by, so the fan
has to run non-stop to pull any air
it can find. Now the bad news.
It's probably not going to clear
up for you 100%. This will take the
noise down some, but not all the
way.
I hope this answers your question and helps you with your
problem!
Daniel A. Williams
daniel@thepcgurus.com
Contact info and legal
stuff
If you have tech support
questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by
visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click
on the “Email the Team” icon.
Copyright 2001-2006 The PC
Gurus, all rights reserved.
Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent,
however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is
forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.
Information provided in this
publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed
or implied. Although the
information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL
systems. Make use of any
information supplied at your own risk.
The PC Gurus are a group of
volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and Linux users in the
Kentuckiana region.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter send an email to microdome@seidata.com with the words “unsubscribe newsletter” (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.