Whether you need a USB cable for your computer, or a cable to hook up your DVD player to your TV, watch out! Many stores mark up the price of cables. The put a Computer or TV on sale and then mark the cable prices way up to try and make up the difference.

For example, a 6 foot long USB cable which you might use to hook your printer up to your computer costs $34 at one local store while the same cable at another local store costs about $8. How about an HDMI cable to hook your DVD player up to your TV? At one local store the cheapest 3′ HDMI cable is $27 while at another store it’s $15.

You might wonder if perhaps the cables at the more expensive store are higher quality. The answer is no. The same quality. And while we are on that subject, should you pay extra for a brand that is supposed to be higher quality? A brand of cable that is generally considered to be higher quality will often cost twice as much as other brands. While the quality of the cable is may be slightly better than the other brand, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

In general, don’t purchase cables at big electronics retailers. Purchase them at discount stores. Better yet, if you can wait a few days to get the cable, you can save even more money by purchasing online. Remember that USB cable we priced at a local store $34? You can find the same cable for $5 including shipping online.

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The Computer viruses and spyware we have had in the past all attack Windows or Software running under Windows. But there is a new strain of computer viruses that are attacking hardware. You may wonder how that is possible. Many hardware devices contain chips that are programmable. These new viruses are infecting these programmable chips.

There is a programmable chip on the main board of your computer that is called the BIOS. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. When you turn a computer on, it’s the BIOS that starts first. It initializes all of the components of the computer. Then Windows boots up and provides a user-friendly interface for you. Traditional Anti-Virus software can help prevent your BIOS from becoming infected, but can’t remove a virus from the BIOS once it’s infected.

Other devices that have recently been discovered to be infected with this new type of virus are DSL Modems and some routers.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to make sure you have good, up to date, security software. If your computer acts weird or you get any pop-up messages, give us a call.

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Many of us send and receive pictures attached to e-mail. But an e-mail can actually contain a picture embedded in the e-mail itself. Most commercial e-mail advertisements and newsletters are this way. These e-mails often look more like a web page than an e-mail. We sometimes embed pictures in this newsletter.

Most e-mail programs have the capability to block these embedded pictures and many of them do that by default. You might ask, “Why would I want to block pictures from my e-mail?” There are two reasons. One reason is that spam e-mail often contains offensive pictures like porn, for example.

Another reason is that an invisible picture can be embedded in an e-mail so that you don’t know it’s there. This invisible picture can notify the spammer that you opened the e-mail they sent you. This doesn’t allow the spammer to harvest any identifying information about you and it doesn’t infect your computer, but it does tell the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. And the problem with that is that once a spammer knows he has a valid e-mail address, he’s going to send lots of spam to it. In addition, he’s going to sell that address to other spammers. So the biggest reason to block images is to avoid getting more spam.

If your e-mail program is set to block images, when you display an e-mail, there is usually a button or link at the top of the e-mail message that gives you the option to unblock pictures for that e-mail. So if you get an e-mail from someone you trust, you can click that to view the pictures. Otherwise, they will be blocked.

If you don’t like that, you can change the options on your e-mail program so that it allows the pictures. If you do that, however, we recommend that you set your e-mail program so that it does not show a preview of e-mail messages.  If you turn preview off (called reading pane in some e-mail programs), then to read an e-mail, you have to double-click on it.

If you use webmail like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or Gmail and you read your e-mail on a website, then you don’t use an e-mail program. Most webmail will allow pictures by default but if you look at e-mail in your junk mail folder, it will block them there.

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If you’ve got pictures on your computer, a fun thing to do is to create a slide show. And to make your slide show more enjoyable, you can add background music to it.

Your digital camera probably came with software that allows you to pull pictures from your camera, organize your pictures, edit your pictures, and so forth. Most of the software that comes with camera isn’t all that good. Some are better than others, but did you know that you do not have to use the software that came with your camera?

The highest rated software for organizing and editing photos is called Picasa. The best part is that Picasa is free. You can download it for free from Google by going to http://picasa.google.com. Picasa has a lot of features, but in this article I want to concentrate on how to create a slideshow with music playing in the background.

First, Picasa can only play music that is stored in mp3 or wma format. So make sure your music is in one of those formats. If you aren’t sure what format your music is in, look at the file name.  All files in Windows end with a period and then three letters (or numbers). This is called the file extension. You can identify what kind of file something is by the file extension. So if your music files have a file extension of .mp3 or .wma, then Picasa can play them. There is a setting in Windows that may prevent it from showing you the file extension. If you don’t see any file extensions, then you can hold the mouse pointer over the file. Hold it there for a few seconds and it will tell you what kind of file it is. If it says MPEG Layer 3 Audio File, it’s an mp3. If it says  Windows Media Audio File, it’s a WMA file. If it says anything else, it’s not in the right format for Picasa. You can go to Download.com and find a free audio converter to convert them.

To create a slide show with background music, select the pictures you want in your slide slow. Now right click on one of the selected pictures and choose “Add to Album” and then select “New Album”.  Now you will get a window that asks you to give the album a name. Enter a name for the slide show. At the bottom of that window, put a checkmark next to “Use Music for Slideshow and Movie presentation” Now click the Browse button and select the music you want to play during  your slide show and click Open. Now click OK. That’s it!

To view your slideshow with music, click the green play button. You can turn it into a movie by clicking the “Create Movie Presentation” button to the right of the play button. This will create a movie file. You only need to do this if you want to send the presentation to someone, or if you want to burn it to a DVD that can be used in a regular DVD player.

Picasa is a great photo organizer and it’s easy to create a simple slide show with music, but it’s very limited on what it can do. If you want to create a nice slide show movie with titles, text, effects, multiple songs with the flexibility to control each picture and each song, then try Windows Movie Maker. Windows Movie Maker comes with Windows XP and Vista, so you probably already have it.

Would you like to see a movie created using Windows Movie Maker? Click here. Scroll to the bottom, and play the bottom video. This video was created using Windows Movie Maker and is a combination of videos and pictures set to music.

For information on how to use Movie Maker, click here. 

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Over 90% of e-mail traffic is spam. And that number is growing. I used to think that most spam came from foreign countries where there weren’t laws against it. However, 3 times as much spam originates from the United States than from the next highest spamming country which is China.

In the United States, spam is legal as long as it follows certain rules. The subject line of the e-mail must be truthful. There can be no false information in the technical headers of the e-mail or the sender’s e-mail address. There are some other minor rules, but those are the main ones.

So when you get spam trying to sell you a watch, for example, that’s most likely a legal spam. Kind of like the junk mail you get in the US Mail. If you have a spam problem, we recommend spambully. This will only work if you use a program like Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird to read e-mail.

If you get a very large amount of spam, like me, then you may want to consider a spam service. The advantage to a service is that they filter the spam out before it gets to your computer. So your computer doesn’t have to waste time processing the spam. Before I switched to a spam service, when I started my e-mail up, it would take several minutes to process the spam before I could start reading e-mail. And this is on a high performance system. If you are interested in a spam service, we recommend Vanquish.

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Facebook has replaced MySpace as the most popular social networking website. At least for now. That’s always changing. But no matter which social networking website you use, you probably get e-mail notifications from it. For example, you might get an e-mail from Facebook that says you have a new friend request from someone. Be aware that many spammers are sending fake e-mail alerts that look like they are from Facebook and other social networking sites, but they aren’t.

So when you get one of these e-mail alerts from a social networking site, whether you think it’s legitimate or not, don’t click on any links in the e-mail. Instead, simply go to that website, login to your account, and take care of it that way.

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We’ve mentioned them before, but they just keep getting worse and worse. The most common type of infection we see these days are these fake security programs. They pretend to be a security program when in fact, they are an infection. Never download any security software, or any software for that matter, from a web page if you aren’t sure it’s legitimate.

The people who create these fake security programs are very tricky. You may get a pop-up message from a website or see a banner on a website that says your computer is infected and you should click here for a free scan. Don’t do it! There are a large number of these types of infections out there. The most common ones we see include DriveCleaner, Antivirus XP, SpySheriff, Antivirus 2009, SpyAxe, and Antivirus 360, just to name a small fraction of them that we have seen lately.

If one of these programs gets on your computer, it will pretend to scan your computer and then tell you there are infections. Then it will tell you that you have to purchase the program in order to clean off the supposed infections. Don’t do it!

Some of these programs put icons or messages on your screen that look like official messages from Windows or from Microsoft. But they are fake. You can try to uninstall it, but that usually doesn’t work. They usually need to be removed by a professional.

Be careful what you click on and what you download.

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In case you don’t know, Vipre is security software that provides protection against viruses, spyware, and other malware. We currently recommend it as the best protection available at this time. If you don’t have Vipre on your system, you may want to skip to the next article.

If you do have Vipre, you may have noticed that the icon may change color or that a second yellow Vipre icon may pop-up from time to time. Here’s what each of the icons looks like, what they mean, and what action you should take, if any.

 Everything is good. No action needed.

 Vipre is scanning your system. If you don’t want it to scan right now, right-click on the green Vipre icon and choose “Scan” and then choose either “Abort Scan” or “Pause Scan”. You may want to adjust the schedule for when scans happen. On Vipre’s overview screen, click on “Schedule Scans” to set or change the schedule. We like to schedule scans during times when we know we won’t be using the computer. For most people, 1am works well.

 This means that either Active Protection or E-mail Protection is disabled. To fix this, open Vipre. You will be able to see what is disabled. Click on “Edit Settings” next to whatever is disabled to enable it.

 This icon will show up in addition to the regular icon, so you will see two icons. If this icon appears, that means that there is something that Vipre wants to alert you about. Double-click on the yellow icon to see what’s up. If you see that Vipre was not able to update it’s definitions, but later on was able to, just close it and don’t worry about it. You may see that there was some sort of error with the service, but it is now corrected. If so, just close it and don’t worry about it. This icon can also alert you that there is a new version of Vipre available to install. It may also be telling you that your subscription is about to expire, or has expired.

It’s very important to pay attention to what Vipre, or any other security software, is telling you. Don’t ignore it or your computer may become infected.

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Have you ever clicked on something and it didn’t take? Or double-clicked on something and nothing happened? Chances are, the reason is that you moved the mouse while you were clicking. If you move the mouse while clicking, or move it in between clicks when double-clicking, it won’t take. So be sure to keep the mouse still when clicking.

Did you know that you can access some very useful and convenient functions by right-clicking on some things? Right-click on a blank area of your Windows Desktop and choose “Properties” or “Personalize” depending on if you have XP or Vista, and you can change the display properties on your computer. Right-click on a file and you can choose “Cut”. Then right-click in another folder and choose “Paste”. You just moved a file from one folder to another. You can also copy a file that way.

Often in Windows, you see a list of things. It could be a list of e-mails, contacts, files, folders, or lots of other different types of things. You know how to do things with a single item. For example, you know how to delete one e-mail. You highlight that e-mail in the list of e-mail and then click the delete icon (usually an X in the toolbar) or hit the delete button on your keyboard. But did you know that there ways to select multiple items in Windows? Here are some examples of things you can do to save time.

If you want to select everything in a list, click once on any item in the list and then hit Ctrl-A (hold the Ctrl button down and hit the letter A) on your keyboard. This will select everything in the list.

To select certain items in a list, left-click on one item that you want. This will select that one item. To add other items to the selection, one by one, hold the Cntrl key down (on your keyboard) and click on the other items you want to add to the selection. Keep holding the Cntrl key down until you are done. If you select the wrong one accidentally, click on it again to deselect it (still holding the control key down). When you are done selecting all of the items you want, let up on the Cntrl key.

To quickly select items that are all next to each other, left-click on the item at the top of the list, scroll down to find the last item you want to include in the selection. Now hold the Shift key down and left-click on the last item you want to include in the selection. Windows will select everything between the first item you selected and the item you shift-clicked on.

You can also click in an area where there are no items and start dragging the mouse. As you move the mouse while holding down the button, a box will appear. You can change the size of the box by moving the mouse around. Any item that the box touches will be selected. When the items you want are all selected, let up on the mouse button and they will be selected. Note that this method does not work in as many programs as Cntrl-click and Shift-click does.

Once you have a list of items selected, then you can do something to all of them at the same time. What can you do? Well, it depends on what the items are and what program you are in, but in general, you can delete, copy, move, or change certain common properties.

For example, let’s say you want to delete all of the e-mails in your inbox that arrived before January 1st, 2009. Sort your inbox by date received (usually by clicking the column header). Now click on the top item in the list you want to delete. Scroll down to the last item you want to delete, hold down the shift-key, and click on the last item. Now hit the delete key on your keyboard.

In a similar example, let’s say you wanted to move a bunch of e-mails to a folder. Once selected, instead of hitting the delete key, just click on one of the selected e-mails and hold the button down and drag and drop the list on top of that folder.

There isn’t enough room in this article to go into every possible way you could use this, but you get the idea. Give it a try!

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