Technology Advisor Blog

If you get a severe virus on your computer, or some sort of other system corruption, and it doesn't look like your system will ever work right again, don't panic!  It's possible to recover your system to its original state IF you have all your disks!

At the start of the Spring soccer season, I had the task of making sure all the practice and game times for my family got posted in my Outlook calendar.  With a game every weekend, and two practices during the week (times two teams), an entire season's worth of entries would have taken a long time.  The good news is that the soccer league made it easy by enabling an export of the calendar right on their web site.  With a simple click of the link to "Download for MS Outlook", they had already set up an export of the data, and all I had to do was import it into Outlook.

Keeping your computer system up-to-date is important, but every once in a while an update can cause a problem.  Recently, Internet Explorer 9 caused some trouble with Intuit Merchant Services.  In our office, what we saw is that hitting the "submit" button to complete a transaction did nothing at all (no error message, no response).  If you clicked away to "cancel", then an error message would appear.  Turns out there are several symptoms reported:  web pages missing information or not rendering properly, downloads not working, "Page Cannot be Displayed" when accessing known good links, and similar problems. 

Internet Explorer can run in full screen mode, which is a great thing if you want to show a demo of a web site, but a big concern when all your navigation is gone and you don't know why. In full screen mode, all your toolbars and navigation fields will be gone, in addition to your start menu at the bottom of your screen.

Has this ever happened to you?  Out of habit, you hit the "X" in the upper right hand corner of a window to close it.  The problem is that with the newer versions of Internet Explorer with "tabbed browsing", you wind up closing all you open web pages when you do this.  Ouch! 

Mark your calendars!  There's just one day and 15 hours left until "Pi Day".  Pi is the mathematical symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter.  Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th. Pi = 3.1415926535…  (Get it, 3/14 in month/day format?).

We routinely attach documents when sending emails, but did you know that you can also attach calendars, other emails, and business cards?

The Microsoft Windows 8 consumer preview was released yesterday and the initial reviews look good.  You can download the beta release at the Microsoft Web site, or just get a tour.  ZDNet's Ed Bott has been testing Windows 8 on a tablet and calls it "the most important software release in almost two decades." In general, the tech reviews have been very positive.

February 7 is Safer Internet Day, which is organized by Insafe each year to help promote safer and more responsible use of the Internet and mobile phones, especially among young people.  There are events all over the world today with this year's theme focused on "Connecting generations and educating each other".  This is a great idea because we can all help each other - tech savvy young people can teach their grandparents about how to get around on-line, and grandparents have the wisdom to help their grandchildren stay safe.

A year ago I got rid of all the paper on my desk and every day it's a wonderful sight in the morning to see a clear desk!  Microsoft Outlook "Tasks" are a great way to stay organized, and by changing the font, size and color of overdue tasks, you can get even more organized!