In honor of Earth Day I am re-posting my article on The Green Machine.

Did you know that going green with your PC can save you some green?  By powering down your PC or using power management correctly you can save up to $60 a year per machine.  For the Planeteer that equals a half a ton of CO2 a year that will not be adding to global climate change.  Go planet…and wallet!

Turn off your PC and Monitor
To maximize energy savings turn off your PC and monitor every night.
If you want to make Captian Planet really fly high, unplug your PC and monitor when not in use.  An easy way to do this is to use a power strip (with surge protection) and turn it off after powering down your PC gear.

MYTH – Turning your PC on and off wears it out.
Today’s PCs are can handle an average of 40,000 power cycles.  That’s a power-up and power-down once a day for almost 55 years.  Perhaps at the dawn of the PC era (the mid-1980s) there may have been some truth to this.  So if your PC looks like this

Complete with dual 5¼ floppy drives and green text-only monitor, then you may want to leave it on…or put it in a museum.

MYTH – It takes more power to turn on your PC.
The small electrical surge used when a PC turns on is far less than the drain of a PC that keeps marching 24 hours a day.   I won’t overload your circuits with specs on amps used on power-up vs. over time, but if you think about it, it makes sense to give your PC a rest.

Give It a Rest
Even those with the best green intention may not be able to power-down the PC every night.  The next best thing is the proper use of power management.  Here are the recommended power management settings:

• Monitor/display sleep: Turn off after 15 minutes or less
• Turn off hard drives/hard disk sleep: 15 minutes or less
• System standby/sleep: After 30 minutes or less

Instructions for enabling power management vary by operating system.
Click the below links for Power Management Instructions:
Windows 2000/XP
Windows Vista
Mac OS X

Hibernation
Also, you should enable hibernate.  The hibernate mode only use about 5 watts of energy for your monitor and 2.3 watts for your PC.  This is virtually the same as a powered down PC.  To do this go to Control Panel, click on “power options,” and set your PC to “hibernate” after a specified time (most recommend 30-60 minutes).

Here are some other green tips that will help save you money while saving the planet.
Screen Savers Don’t Save
Those cool 3D screen savers do not save energy.  It is expense wallpaper. If you like fish, put a picture of Flipper by your PC and use the recommended power management settings.

Flat Screen Use Less Power
Not only do flat screens save power, but they save your eyes.  Flat screen users notice less eye fatigue.   Flat screens are easier to move and take less space.  And the price barriers have dropped making these cool looking devices fit into even the tightest of IT budgets.
Just don’t forget to give you old CRT a proper burial by appropriately disposing of it.  Click here for more info on how to dispose your monitor and other PC equipment.
How to Dispose of Computer Equipment

Laptops Use Less Power
If you are looking for an excuse to go mobile with a new laptop, play the green card.  And low laptop prices make this almost a financial wash for the accounting department.

Clean and Green
When you go green with your PC, you also go clean.  An orderly shutdown of a PC allows it to run maintenance clean-up routines that keep it humming along.  Think of it as giving your PC clean underwear.  Dirty underwear is just gross!

There are few win-wins in this world and give and take world.  But going green is one of those no-brainers that appeals to the hippie and yuppie in us all.
For more on going green check out the Energy Star website at http://www.energystar.gov/.

Experts estimate that 59 percent of computers worldwide are infected with malware.  In many cases the PC owner is not even aware of the infection.  An untreated PC virus can lead to poor performance or even data loss.

Is your PC running slow?

Are you concerned that your PC may be vulnerable to viruses?

Now it is a good time to do some PC spring cleaning.

Click here to contact TechAdvocate Solutions for a PC Spring Cleaning.

I found this video of the Designing Women discussing computer viruses.  This was in the 80’s.  Very Funny!

But it’s not funny if your PC gets infected.  Today, you still need protection from PC bugs (and other things).

While everyone is worried about the swine flu (I mean H1N1), don’t forget to make sure your PC has an up-to-date anti-virus program.  Let me know if you need any help!
http://www.techadvocate-solutions.com/contactus.php

You updated your old PC anti-virus program, but now your PC is running slow.  It may have short term memory loss.  Here’s a way to get it back on the fact track.

The Conflicker worm has become a celebrity, getting more press than a Lindsay Lohan midnight pleasure drive on the LA freeways.  And it has everyone thinking about PC security, which is a good thing.  So you update that old anti-virus program you haven’t thought about in years.  But you notice your PC has become as slow as that car you are always behind when you are running late for an appointment.

Someone tells you the new supped-up anti-virus program is using more memory.  So you think that deleting files on your hard disk will free up memory and your PC with pick-up the pace.  Hit the brakes; you are going down the wrong road.  And while getting a new PC is temping, consider adding more RAM.  For just a few $$$ you can get more mileage out of that old PC, the one your have spent hours configuring and don’t look forward to doing that again with a new machine.

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Now that we made it past the April Fools virus scare and the cyber-world did not implode, it is a good time to do some PC spring cleaning. You can do this by updating your anti-virus program and doing a full scan.

You should allocate several hours to do this scan. I suggest letting it run overnight.

If you don’t have an anti-virus program or it is out-of-date, click here to download the free version of AVG:
http://download.cnet.com/AVG-Anti-Virus-Free-Edition/3000-2239_4-10320142.html?part=dl-10044820&subj=dl&tag=button&cdlPid=11016903

Here’s a great video describing the latest version for the popular AVG program and how to use it:
http://cnettv.cnet.com/9745-1_53-175.html?tag=nl.e404

Did you know that going green with your PC can save you some green?  By powering down your PC or using power management correctly you can save up to $60 a year per machine.  For the Planeteer that equals a half a ton of CO2 a year that will not be adding to global climate change.  Go planet…and wallet!

Turn off your PC and Monitor
To maximize energy savings turn off your PC and monitor every night.
If you want to make Captian Planet really fly high, unplug your PC and monitor when not in use.  An easy way to do this is to use a power strip (with surge protection) and turn it off after powering down your PC gear.

(more…)

I realize that operating system patches are about as exciting as new plumbing.  But if you can imagine your house without working pipes, you get a picture (and smell) of patch importance, especially if you are a Windows/Vista user.  The patches coming down the pipe for March include a core update deemed critical to your PC’s operating system plumbing.

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We’ve all heard the stories of PC viruses, malware, and other cyber-nasties lurking the in the shadows of the information super highway.  These nefarious entities exist for one purpose – to make your virtual life miserable.  The only thing more intimidating than a PC virus is trying to come up with a defense to protect your PC.  But there are things even the most non-techie can do to help insure safe web surfing.

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This past Tuesday (2/10/200) Microsoft released some critical patches for “Patch Tuesday” for all Windows users.   Did you get it?

What is Patch Tuesday you ask?  It’s nothing like Fat Tuesday, that’s for sure.   Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month, the day on which Microsoft releases security patches.  Who knew? 

Like a Fat Tuesday party, the February Patch Tuesday was a big one that you probably don’t want to miss.   This is especially true if you use Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).  Which begs the question, why are you using IE7 anyway?  Read my blog post about browser safety at http://www.biologyoftechnology.com/?p=4, but I digress. 

Microsoft declared many of this month’s patches as critical for IE7 running on Windows XP and Windows Vista.  This patch fixes IE7 holes that allow an attacker to break into systems that visit websites with specific malware land mines.  So if you use IE7 and you don’t want an attacker to penetrate your PC, you need this patch.

To make sure you have this update, go to the Microsoft update website at the following link and follow the prompts.
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

If you are up for some real “exciting” bedtime reading about Patch Tuesday, you can read more than you want to know about this “techie” holy day at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday

By the way, the real Fat Tuesday this year is February 24, 2009.

See you there!

If you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client then size matters and less is more.

With the growth of email, Outlook is one of the most popular email clients.  With all this email you need a way to organize it.  Outlook allows you to setup folders to manage the flood of email that we all have to handle.  But if you keep every email it will not take long for your Outlook to bloat to the point that performance suffers and you run the risk of data loss.

In the days of Outlook 2002 (XP) and older if your Outlook file grew to 1.8GB you were hosed.  And by hosed I mean you all your email data (inbox, folders, contact, and calendar) would become corrupt and unreadable.  In Outlook 2003 and later the file size supposedly increased 10 fold.  But allowing your Outlook to grow so large is like driving a Mac truck everywhere you go.

Here are some simple tips to help you manage your Outlook file size thus improving your PCs performance.

How big is my Outlook?
To see the size of your Outlook folders:
•    Select Tools | Mailbox Cleanup… from the menu.
•    Click View Mailbox Size….
•    Click Close (two times) to close the mailbox size view again.

Get fid of the big ones first
In your Folder List Click on the “+” to expand “Search Folders”.
Click on “Large Mail” and you will see the largest email (including attachments).  Start deleting from the top and you should be able to recover a lot of email space quickly.  There’s no need to keep the email with the 4MB attachment of the cat playing the piano.  It’s on YouTube.

Here are some tips for cleaning Outlook
•    Every time you send mail a copy is left in your ‘Sent Items’ folder. Please check this folder for messages you no longer wish to keep and delete them.
•    Delete messages with large attachments.  Chances are you have already saved the attachment to your hard drive.
•    Empty your Junk E-mail folder (right-click over Junk E-mail, select Empty “Junk E-mail” Folder)
•    Once you have cleaned all your folders, empty your ‘Deleted Items’ folder.  When you delete mail in Outlook, the mail actually goes to the ‘Deleted Items’ folder. By default Outlook does not empty the ‘Deleted Items’ when you exit. To empty the ‘Deleted Items’ folder, right click on the ‘Deleted Items’, then choose ‘Empty “Deleted Items” folder’.  Saving emails in your ‘Deleted Items’ folder is the equivalent to saving important documents in your trash can.

Archive
Outlook allows your archive data to another file.  This helps keep you main Outlook file size under control and still have access to your data.  The following link provides a good description of the archive feature and how to use it.
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aead.html

If you do not think you have backed up your Outlook data then you probably haven’t.  This means you could loose everything…well, everything in your Outlook data file.  And in many cases, your Outlook data contains your important contacts.  But Outlook backup is a topic for another time.

Need Help?
If you need help with your email and/or Outlook data, click on TechAdvocate Solutions and let us help you.