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Waiting for Tech support?
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 As you could imagine, I spend a lot of time on the phone waiting for a tech. When the problem I face at your home or office requires a repair or a warranty fix that's outside of my domain, I need to contact the manufacturer or software support team. Maybe the part on that Dell is still under warranty and I need to talk to Dell on your behalf. Now, I might have to wait, but you don't. Try one of these free services.
Fast Customer: Find a company on their list of more than 3000 vendors and click "Have them call me". Enter your phone number and go do other things. That's it. And yes, Dell is on the list.
LUCY Phone: (Let Us Call You). Select a number from the list or enter the number manually. Lucy will call you back when there's someone to talk to. If there's still a phone tree to punch through, press '**' to leave a voice message and LUCY will pass the message on for you when someone actually answers. Also available for Android.
Get Human: Has been around the longest. They'll connect you to the right people. The site also offers other methods for contacting the company(s) including additional phone numbers and email addresses.
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Texting and Driving
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 46 percent of teens text message while driving and 51 percent talk on cell phones while driving. 23 percent of the auto accidents in the USA in 2011 involved cell phones; that's 1.3 million accidents.
I drive all day, from client to client. I get a text from a family member or client and I need to make a conscious effort not to act and not to text back. The action of responding to a text, as those of us with and without teenagers know, is instinctive. It's dangerous. Here are some solutions for you and whomever else in your family is driving with a text-able phone to stop that behavior.
Drive Mode blocks all transmission. It might be a bit extreme. It auto replies to incoming calls, texts and emails to let people know you're on the road. Presently available at Google Play for AT&T customers.
Textecution automatically disables texting when traveling at speeds exceeding 10 miles per hour. You can override (or the admin on the account can) to disable the feature if you're a passenger. Android available now, I-phone soon. ($29.99)
Text-Star has a similar 10 mile an hour limit and similar features but it's free. Also for Android now and I-phone soon.
DriveSafe.ly (my favorite) does not block incoming texts, instead it reads them aloud and lets you respond by voice. Available for I-phone, Android and Blackberry. It's free.
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About PDFs
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 More and more applications for everything and anything are moving to the web, all in the form of PDFs. My kids' camp requires three different forms to be downloaded and completed for their summer stay. I also downloaded the PDF application for renewing the family passports. It's great to be able to fill out the PDF directly through the computer and just email it back. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a great free tool for reading PDFs. Windows 8, BTW, has a built-in reader that's nowhere near as good nor as easy to use. If you want to edit a PDF though, you need to buy a copy of Acrobat (writer) for as much as $400. Try PDFescape, a free software driven website that will let you convert that PDF for free.
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Shutting down Windows
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 Worth a second mention. Stardock gives Windows 8 back that start button that is radically missing on any device but one with a touch screen. Even then you might want it. If you are using Windows 8 and you've not purchased Stardock, Mouse over the right corner of the screen to bring out the slide out menu (Charms bar) and click settings. Click the power button and select from the choices offered: Shut down, Sleep or Restart. The Windows and "C" key together will also serve to display the Charms bar.
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Bits & Bytes:
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 Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL) was recently attacked by hackers who infected the Macintosh computers of some employees, the company said in an unprecedented disclosure, describing the widest known cyber attacks targeting Apple computers used by corporations. Facebook and Twitter announced that they were breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks as well.
13% of home networks in America are infected with Malware. Half of the infections are high-level threats. 2.2 million computers are infected with "ZeroAccess Botnets". Cyber criminals are using these "Bots" to take over these computers and commit click fraud. "Spam, ad malware, Trojans, fake Anti-Virus software are big revenue for these Cyber crooks. This type of software is beginning to show up on Android based devices as well.
Quote without Comment: What you send through the internet or through a phone is forever.
If you use a cloud based software solution to backup your data like Dropbox or Carbonite, or if you purchased an external hard drive with backup software included, you might be slowing your computer down to a crawl. Why? These programs are designed to monitor changes in the data on your PC and to make the identical changes to the backup set immediately. As a computer can realistically do only one thing at a time, this will delay every action you take. A better solution is to copy and paste the information you want to backup regularly onto that external drive or into that Dropbox folder. Carbonite does not allow such flexibility. Just another reason for my not liking Carbonite as a backup solution.
NB: I do write backups for clients that are simple one click items to be run at least once a day and I can do this for you remotely. The backup is efficient and copies over only new or changed information which makes the backup's run time very short. Writing most backups takes about 20 minutes and I bill for remote support only for the time of the session.
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| Quick Links |
Kill those web trackers. Start researching a new printer on the web and soon after, advertising for printers starts showing up on your web pages. Why? Cookies. Every time you do anything on the net some cookie is stored on your computer readily awaiting access by marketers. Try Disconnect.me a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. This plug-in filters out traffic from those services that track your on-line browsing without blocking the websites themselves.
Got a new android phone and you want to sync your calendar(s) and contacts with Outlook? Try Companion Link. It's inexpensive, easy to configure and works with any Android phone. IOS phones (I-phones) syncs with Outlook through Itunes efficiently.
Another site for cheap seats for sporting events, Broadway shows, Concerts and other entertainment events is Vividseats. Try it.
Best on-line Free Music for listening here:
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