I get a lot of questions about stuff. Maybe I allow people to think I know a lot more than I actually do, or maybe it’s that I’ve given folks advice in the past and they thought of me when they needed more. Anyway, I’m always getting questions about stuff – random stuff, computer stuff, whatever. I figured I’d put some of my collected knowledge here – I know, it’ll be a short page.
Office/Home PCs
I prefer HP computers/Media Centers – they just seem to work better. I browse at Best Buy until I find a model that I like, then go online to hp.comand check their refurbished store for deals. Customize the hardware, and pay the extra $5.00 to purchase the ACTUAL Windows recovery disks. HP computers include a great, no-fuss recovery program that will reset the system back to the original installation.
Gaming PCs
For the Big Robot Gaming cafe, I ordered and customized PCs from Cyberpower, a great computer outfit in California. I made the chassis very colorful and flashy – kids love ‘em! I needed to order and customize from them to get XP at the time – I’m not sure if that operating system is even available through them anymore.
Operating Systems
I love Windows XP – I use it for all my gaming computers at the Big Robot Game Cafe and I have it at home for our Media Center (see below.) Just got Windows 7 on a new PC at work (Vista crashed and couldn’t be recovered) and it’s the bomb. Don’t be scared to get Win7, and avoid any/all Vista machines as if they were on fire AND infected with the Ebola virus.
Media Centers
For our Media Center, which controls our main TV and stores all of our music, movies, pictures and recorded TV, I use Windows Media Center 2005 with all three updates. I’ve played with Vista Media Center but we never upgraded.
Web Browsers
Google Chrome is the bomb – they’ve implemented a new extension (add-on) system and I switched over from Mozilla Firefox early in 2010. Tabbed browsing, great use of screen space, and it never crashes. Plus thousand of add-ons. Whatever you do, don’t use Internet Explorer, no matter what version. Microsoft halted all innovation as soon as they put Netscape out of business and they’re still playing catch-up to the big boys in browsers. Plus it’s a security nightmare that’s full of holes!
Websites
For creating nice looking websites, the WordPress content management system is the only way to go. Completely customizable from the ground up, with thousands of themes and widgets. I do all my sites in WordPress. For website hostingand site management, I’ve had a lot of luck with BlueHost Web Hosting and Domain Solutions – I’ve never had any downtime with them.
Defrag
Completely defragging, or defragmenting your hard drive on a regular basis can really speed up your computer and make things run much more smoothly. I recommend the old built-in XP fragmenter, which worked perfectly fine, or Defraggler, a nice visual defragging tool from the folks that make CCleaner, another nice system maintenance program that cleans up registries, etc.
Hard Drive Space
Completely defragging your hard drive is a great step towards keeping your computer chugging along, but sometimes you just need to SEE WHAT’S ON YOUR PC and it’s very difficult to get a visual representation of the different folders and files on your computer. Give the free Spacemonger utility a try – it only does one thing, but it does it very well: this program scans your hard drive and shows you a picture of everything on the drive, with big files represented by larger boxes. Simple and intuitive, you’ll wonder how you got along without it. And it’s free. I literally have this utility on all 9 of my PCs to find out what’s taking up all my space – plus use it to scan external hard drives and NAS.
Accounting
Quickbooks is amazing, and I’ve had a lot of luck with it. If you’re leary about biting off more than you can chew, give Quickbooks Online a try – it isn’t quite as rich or deep as the stand-alone package, but it does have a couple GREAT things going for it – it’s accessible from any computer with internet access, and it’s upgraded and maintained by Intuit on their own systems, so you don’t have to worry about your PC crashing.
No comments yet.