IT Tips

As an avid user of the Sleep function on my laptop, I’ve been more than irritated with Windows 7 or Vista’s habit of changing the Sleep/Shutdown button into an “Install Updates and Shut Down” button whenever there are updates from Windows Update.

After the last time I accidentally clicked this stupid button when I just wanted to enter sleep mode, I decided to look for a solution.

Update: Windows 7 does the same thing to my Shutdown button, and this same registry hack fixes the problem.

Click Here for a detailed walkthru.

Windows 7 or Vista automatically configures Disk Defrag to schedule defragment to run once a week, usually at 1am on Wednesday. I don’t know about you, but I’m usually awake at 1am on wednesday, and I’d rather schedule it for a different time.

Click Here for the walk thru.

Until Amazon’s Kindle Fire hit the market late last year, no Android-powered tablet had made even the smallest of impacts on the marketplace. With its $199.99 price tag and customized user interface, the Kindle Fire was a real success.

Samsung is now aiming to grab a significant piece of that success by building its own low-cost Android tablet. The catch is that Samsung’s new entry, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, looks anything but low-cost. In fact, it features a much better spec sheet than the Kindle Fire, and uses the same streamlined body design as its more expensive brethren.

With a price of $249.99 for the Wi-Fi-only model, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 is an instant best buy. And when you consider that it is one of the few devices on the market to offer Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as its operating system, it’s even more of a steal.

Hardware

From a hardware perspective, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 looks much like any other recent Samsung tablet. This particular model features a black front with a titanium silver rear cover, and it feels very nice in your hands. There’s a lot to be said for the 7-inch tablet form factor.

The 7-inch TFT display on the Tab 2 7.0 offers users 1024 x 600 pixels of resolution. The colors it generates are very bright, and the display’s viewing angle is surprisingly good for such an inexpensive device.

Dual speakers flank the 30-pin Samsung connector that is found on the bottom of the tablet (when held in portrait mode). The volume and power keys are on the upper right edge of the tablet, and a 3.5mm headphone jack can be found up top. The 3.5mm jack also supports a line-in function.

The Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 measures up at 193mm x 122mm x 10.4mm (7.6in x 4.8in x .41in), which makes it a bit thinner than Amazon’s Kindle Fire, though its tapered design makes it feel even thinner than it really is. It weighs a perfectly fine 345g (12.2oz), making it a device that you can hold for hours on end without fatigue.

For More on this story including videos and pictures Click Here

It seems like every month, a handful of companies disclose that their user database has been hacked, informing you that you should change your password and monitor your credit card statements for strange activity.

In late 2010, popular blogs Gawker and Gizmodo were hacked and their databases were posted online. In 2011 there was another security breach that affected millions of users.

When news broke of the Gawker attack, I searched the actual database that was posted online, and sure enough, there was my email and my favorite password at the time, listed in plain text for the entire Internet to see.

I did some common password searches, just out of curiosity. You’d be surprised at the number of people who use “password”, or even “ABCDE” or “1234” as their password. It was staggering, to say the least. Now, I know, these were probably mostly throwaway passwords, right? I really hope so.

Next, I set about changing my own passwords at every site I could think of. Before long I had set a new password for my accounts after a lot of crossed fingers that I still had access to my email account, but I was still using the same basic passwords almost everywhere because I wanted to remember them. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I did it anyway, because I was lazy–there, I said it!

Experts say… you need to Click Here to find out more on how to protect yourself!

Is your company using best practices when it comes to protecting your online information? Contact our Houston IT Consultants to find out.

If you’re upgrading from Microsoft Office Excel 2003 (or earlier) to Microsoft Excel 2010, you’ll no doubt have questions at first. For example, you may wonder where certain buttons are in the new ribbon interface. To help you get used to Excel 2010, we created a short guide that answers common customer questions about the transition. Click the link below, and the guide opens as a PDF file in Adobe Reader. You can then view the guide, print it out, or save it for later use.

Click Here to read more on this story and see this very handy guide!

Don’t have time to upgrade it yourself? Contact our Houston IT company and have us do it for you!

If you want to keep Outlook 2010 clean and run faster, one method is to set up the AutoArchive feature. Today we show you how to configure and manage the feature in Outlook 2010.

Using AutoArchive allows you to manage space in your mailbox or on the email server by moving older items to another location on your hard drive.

Click Here for Step by Step instructions and more information on this topic.

Did you know:

•Online ads track your browsing habits closely?
•Every detail you put about yourself in social media sites can be detrimental?
•Mobile apps can access confidential information about you

As a business owner, you are doubly responsible for safekeeping the information you put online. But before you can protect your business data, you need to learn to protect your personal data first. Keeping yourself updated with the newest threats and security measures ensure all your private information remain private online.

Be a responsible digital citizen. Know how to properly customize the settings of your web browser and social networking accounts to secure your personal data and, consequently, that of your business.

Read the Trend Micro Digital Life e-guide, Be Privy to Online Privacy, and know more about these facts:

•Online advertisers are tracking your browsing behavior.
•What you post in your social media accounts can and may be used against you.
•Some mobile apps can access the information stored in your mobile device, if you allow them.

Click Here for more information

Let us help you secure your personal and business information. Contact our IT Consultants and we’ll get you on your way to a more digitally secure lifestyle.

Most people traveling abroad for vacation or even business can set up some password protection and simple encryption and rest easy knowing that their data is reasonably safe. Others, however, might be headed for more serious situations — for example, journalists or human rights workers traveling to overtly hostile countries. After all, you don’t have to be James Bond to worry about hacking threats abroad.

In these cases the potential consequences of exposing your data are considerably more serious than having to cancel some credit cards. If you’re headed somewhere beyond the ordinary world of holiday travel and want to make sure you don’t end up in some foreign gulag, you need to make sure that your data is encrypted and kept doubly safe from prying eyes.

Here’s our guide to making sure that your digital ass is covered while you travel to world’s darkest corners.

See more on this story by Clicking Here

Gadgets proved especially popular in my family this past holiday season, as I’m sure it did for many others. My brother got an Xbox 360, while my mom loved her new Kindle Fire. Meanwhile, friends of mine around the office unwrapped their new iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones.

Some folks may be looking to add some parental controls to these devices: you might be looking to block adult content on your iPad if you got one for your family this season. I’m happy to report that, no matter what new Internet-connected device you added to your network this season, OpenDNS can protect it. Best of all, there’s no additional software to install, and it’s completely free. If you can use the device to surf the web, we can protect it while it’s connected to your home’s wi-fi network.

Of course, you’ll get the other benefits of OpenDNS’s Free Parental Controls too, regardless of whether or not you choose to enable Web filtering: phishing protection, and an overall safer, faster, smarter and more reliable connection. While I don’t need to set up any parental controls on my mom’s new tablet, I’m sure she’ll appreciate the added phishing protection

Click Here for more on this artical.

Be it screensavers, desktop wallpapers or font type and sizes, visual customization at the OS level is usually important to all kinds of users. Recognizing this, Microsoft has made it easier than ever to apply and adjust individual themes with Windows 7. We looked at this last week showing you how to find hidden themes buried in your hard drive as well as sponsored ones available through Microsoft’s online Personalization Gallery.

This time around, we are going to show you how to customize the Windows 7 login screen. There are various methods to accomplish this, with and without third-party software. I understand many people might not want to rely on a third-party application, while others would appreciate a quicker, safer route. First up is the more hands-on approach, and then the utility.

Click Here to visit TechSpot’s “How to” section for more information.

Contact our IT support team to learn more about enhancing your Windows 7 experience.