Bing Photos.

Whether you like Microsoft's new BING search engine or not, it's still worth a visit to see the fantastic and unusual background photographs that change each day on their main page at www.bing.com

BB&T Alerts.

Lots of River Benders use BB&T bank because of its convenient location. For those that use free online access you can request an e-mail alert to be sent to you whenever a check or deposit clears the bank. This is a great security check. Go to http://www.bbt.com/, sign in and click on BB&T alerts. Your bank may offer the same service.

Long Boot time.

Does your PC take a long time to boot up and turn off? If so, look into putting it in a hibernate, sleep or standby mode that's almost the same as turning it off power-wise, but it will restart and shutdown almost immediately.

Going High-speed.

Are you still a slow dial-up user on Internet? The least expensive broadband service available in New Bern is Suddenlink's 1 megabit-per-second service. That's over 20 times faster than dialup speed and you'll be able to watch videos and download large files quickly. It costs $26.95/month and no contract is required. Without TV cable it costs $4 more. Suddenlink also offers 8 mb/s at $41.95 and 12 mb/s at $56.95. Their 12 mb/s service is the fastest in New Bern. Check figures at 1-877-807-3788 because they could change.

Connect All your PCs to Broadband.

What do you do when you want to go broadband high speed and have more than one PC that you wish to connect to the service? You buy a wireless router that connects to your broadband service and then you connect all your computers to the router via wireless. Laptops may already have built-in wireless adapters but you may have to buy USB wireless adapters for other PCs. Lots of how-to info can be found by googling or binging wireless setup. A big advantage of connecting PCs together is that files can be accessed and shared in all computers.

Free Anti-virus for old Windows 98, et al.

Most NBCUG members use free AVG anti-virus software from http://free.avg.com/, however, when the latest version 8.5 came out it no longer supported Window versions below XP, Vista and 7. Free AVAST appears to be the answer for older versions and it is available at http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html. The problem is that the full version (at bottom of page) is 33 mega-bytes and will take about 2 hours for a dial-up user to download. Folks are welcome to borrow my CD that has AVAST and AVG 8.5 on it.