More PC Trivia

RIVER BENDER - January, 2009

Access the Internet when your Internet Service Provider goes down.

How do you get e-mail when your ISP goes down? Easy. Subscribe to a free provider like NetZero (http://www.netzero.com) or Juno (http://www.juno.com), both of United Online company. They are dial-up and agonizingly slow with lots of ads but they'll enable you to keep in touch when your ISP goes down. All you need is a dial-up modem and a phone line at your PC. Both offer 10 free hours of web surfing and a 1GB e-mail account. What they count on is you upgrading to their low-cost premium service.

Remove annoying boot login.

Click on Start/Run. In XP type "control userpasswords2" in the box and press "Enter." For Vista, type "control userpasswords2" in the "Search" box and press "Enter."

From here, both XP and Vista are the same. Select the user account you want to log in automatically and uncheck the option that says "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" (If already unchecked, place a check temporarily to be able to select a user account).

Click OK, and you will then be prompted to enter the user account password, which could be be blank in your case. Click OK.

How old is the web page?

Since most web pages are not dated how do you determine when the page was last updated? You don't want to be looking at obsolete medical advice. All you have to do is copy the Javascript below and paste it in the address bar of the questionable web page and the date of the last modification will appear. I saved the script in a WordPad file and put an icon on my desktop for the file where I can copy/paste the script when I need it.

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Internet connection speed test.

Go to http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ to check download/upload speed of your broadband connection. This is the website Suddenlink uses. Dial-up speed can be checked at http://promos.mcafee.com/speedometer/test_0150.asp

With all the bailout talk what's happening to the national debt?

Did you know there's a national debt clock at http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/? Last September they had to eliminate the digital dollar sign to make way for an extra digit - the "1" in $10 trillion. According to the Treasury department the national debt has grown more than $500 billion each year since fiscal year 2003. The $700 billion bailout could send the debt to more than $11 trillion according to Associated Press.

Reminder that River Bend has a PC Help Group.

I get calls from folks with PC problems but no longer have time to visit so I refer them to the River Bend PC Help Group shown on the RB webpage at http://www.ci.river-bend.nc.us/pchelp.htm. But if your PC is down you can't access the page so print it out now so you'll know who to call for help. If you'd like to be on the list yourself and make a few bucks helping neighbors with PC problems contact me at davewallace@XXXsuddenlink.net (remove XXX).