……We’ve all been there, one day your PC is humming along nicely the next day you’re greeted with the Blue Screen of Death and that backup disc you’ve been meaning to make for the last 3 months is lying next to your unused gym card. Usually this happens the same day that you have some urgent online banking to do or an important report is overdue, either way, to avoid those sleepless nights and fist clenching screams at the crescent moon…..Back Your Stuff Up!

How? you ask…..well, have no fear my dear digital peasants all shall be revealed Firstly we can do things the old school way and manually copy the most important data on your computer either to a DVD Disc or to an external drive or perhaps a flash drive. The most important things you wanna save are your E-mails, Address Book, Desktop and your My Documents folder, these are the most common places Windows users store there stuff. Yes, I know, you can use a backup program to do this automatically for you but it’s always good to know where your data is actually stored on your machine.

If you use Outlook Express your e-mails are stored in following folder: C:\documents and settings\ “users profile name”\ local settings\ application data \ Identities\ Microsoft\ Outook Express

If you can’t find the local settings folder that would be because it is hidden by default on Windows XP, to unhide the folder you need to open up a folder, any folder i.e My Documents, click on the Tools menu, click on Folder Options, click the View tab and half way down the white text box you select the “Show hidden files and folders” radio button and click Apply and Ok. When you copy the Outlook Express folder to a backup location just remember to not have Outlook Express running at the same time otherwise you won’t be able to copy the folder.

The Outlook Express Address Book is kept in a separate location which you can find here: C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\application data\ Microsoft \ Address Book.

If you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail your e-mails will be stored in the following location: C:\documents and settings\”user profile name”\ local settings\ application data\ Microsoft\ Outlook . Outlook stores your contact information ( address book ) in the same file.

To copy your My Documents folder and all the files you keep on the Desktop you need to copy those folders from the these locations respectively: C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\ My Documents

C:\documents and settings\”users profile name”\ Desktop

It’s always a good idea to have a printed copy of all your usernames, passwords and e-mail settings that were given to you when you first setup your e-mail account, it’ll save you the hassle of phoning your service provider when it comes time to setting up your mail account again.

Okay, so now that you know how and where to manually backup your most important information lets look at one of the ways you can backup your data automatically. These days flash drives and external harddrives are the most common form of storage media simply because they can hold so much more data than a dvd, plus they are relatively cheap. I use a little freeware program called Universal Backup Tool to automatically back my stuff up to an external drive, you can download the software for free HERE.

Once you’ve installed UBT and clicked the icon to run the program the first screen that comes up will ask you where you would like to backup your data to, click on the blue arrow and select the backup drive where you would like to copy your data to. I usually create a new folder on my external drive called Daily Backup or Weekly backup that I backup my data too, it just makes life easier when it comes to restoring a backed up file.

Just keep in mind that UBT backups up your data into a database and not as as straight copy and paste which means that if you need to restore your files you will have to use UBT to restore them back to their original form. To do that is pretty straight forward as well, just open the program, Select restore, browse to where you have your backed up data, select the most recent backup from the list, which is dated from the most recent backup to the oldest one, Tick the box, Click the button “Restore To” which allows you to select where you would like to save your restored files to and then click restore, wait for the message that says the restore is complete and you’re done.

There we go, no excuses…..now go and back your stuff up!

One thing I’ve realized being in the computer biz is that when people encounter a problem on their PC they are programmed to panic first and then call IT Support second but a lot of times the problem can be sorted out in a few seconds by simply taking a breathe and actually reading what’s on the screen.

That’s all, no Voodoo, no crystal ball gazing, no sacrificing helpless animals in the dead of night….just read what’s on the screen. Even if you can’t fix the problem yourself you’ll at least be able to give your computer guy some valuable information that will help him fix it a lot quicker.

Facebook pages have been getting lots of search engine respect lately. Learn how to create a Facebook page here, since it’s rather difficult to figure out how to do it on your own as a newbie!

It’s 2010, and I’ve completely updated this tutorial…enjoy …more

It’s no surprise that the last few days has seen a huge amount of information bubble to the surface regarding China’s recent cyber attacks on the infrastructure of more than 30 Silicon Valley companies. Much of it is coming from the security and anti-virus companies — now that the attack has been identified and halted, the world in general and the victims in particular want to know how it occurred. The latest news, however, comes from Google itself: China might have had inside help from Google employees.

The leaked info of a possible inside job came to the Reuters news agency from sources ‘familiar with the situation.’ Google, when asked, refused to comment on ‘rumor and speculation.’ But if Reuters is confident enough to run the story, and if major news outlets are picking it up, there is more than likely a grain of truth to it.

These insiders — these traitors – are reportedly employees at Google’s China offices. If that is actually the case, you can begin to imagine the extortion or coercion that might’ve been inflicted by the Chinese government to obtain the ‘pass codes,’ or whatever was necessary to break into Google HQ.

Google is scheduled to commence talks with the Chinese government in the next few days. We’ll be sure to report what happens.

We’ve covered PDF conversion tools in the past, but given the inconsistent performance of such tools, it’s always worth pointing out potentially better ones. PDF to Word by Nitro is just such a tool, and given its claim as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, I had to give it a shot.

And you know what? It does remarkably well. Based on the test documents I tried, I really didn’t run into any serious issues, other than the elephant in the room: uploading your documents to a third-party for conversion. I can’t imagine using a service like this for real-world heavy lifting with business-related documents. I can’t hand over my sensitive documents to a third-party.

However, for business users with the same issue, there’s good news. Nitro’s PDF-to-Word conversion technology is what powers their Nitro PDF Professional desktop application, and it has recently been marked down from $99 US to $69 US, with a free 14 day trial available.

Blam! Just like that: you can now reply to Facebook status updates via email. Just hit ‘reply’, type out your response, hit ’send’, and voila!

I have no idea if it has just been enabled for the entire Facebook userbase, or if it’s steadily rolling out as I speak, but three things are for sure: I’m using it right now; it works seamlessly and it’s fast. Please let me know if it’s enabled for you or not — I’ll try to keep this post updated with the news.

It’s been a long time coming, that’s for sure. Might this also mean that we’ll soon be able to reply to Facebook mail via our email accounts? I sure hope so. Anything to avoid ads that remind me of my continued bachelorhood.

Update: It’s a gradual roll-out, so not everyone will have it enabled yet. It also works for any status ‘thread’ that you are a participant of, not just your own.

You can sleep well at night knowing it’s a perfect fade-in, though. Google tested 10 different versions of the fancy new transition, and ultimately chose one that was “positive or neutral on all key metrics.” According to Google, the new fade-in does slow users down, but it also improves their efficiency at using the homepage over time. Apparently a few extra-milliseconds to stop and smell the features actually makes a difference.

Looking for an easy way to keep your children (husband, staff, boss, dog, or anyone else) from viewing adult websites? If your systems are using Firefox to handle web browsing duties, take a look at the ProConn Latte addon.*

Latte enables you to filter by keywords and comes packaged with an extensive, preconfigured list of blocked terms and sites. You can, of course, add and remove words and import and export entire lists. Settings can also be password-protected to ensure that no one is making changes without permission.

The addon also supports whitelisting so you can ensure certain sites are always available. You know, just in case you want to make sure your users can access, say, Download Squad pages containing words you’ve marked as taboo. Without the whitelist enabled, even Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. search results for off-limits terms won’t be displayed.

ProCon Latte is compatible with Firefox versions 2+ including 3.7a1pre.