New Website
I wanted to inform you that I have created a new blog site and will no longer be updating this one. To get to the new blog simply go to www.therevkc.com. I have more creative control at the new website to give you all the tech blog you deserve. So check it out and let me know what you think.
New Website Coming
Hello world. I just wanted to give you all an update on what’s going on here. I am in the process of launching a new blog website. I have decided to switch to a hosted site. It will give me more control and allow me more customization features. I will not be writing anything this week. I hope to be done with the new site by the weekend, so hopefully will have some new content for you next week. I have a few reviews I plan on doing, as well as a new promotional video. So, some cool stuff coming your way. So hang in there.
The Rev
Protect Those Kids
This week I am going to share with you a cool little tool we have been using for our business clients for the past few years. It is www.opendns.com. Until I received an email at work the other day, it didn’t click that this could be easily set up at home to protect your children from going to unwanted sites. Now I am about to switch to ‘”geek mode” so bear with me. This free app replaces the DNS settings on either your PC, or router, and filters anything you don’t want to have access to, such as porn, drug and alcohol content, dating, etc.. It is easy to setup, and you can either choose from the four levels of filtering, or customize your own.
We use this tool at most of our grocery stores and a few other businesses, and it works great. After you have it configured, test it to make sure it works before letting the kids start surfing. I have had a few instances where the settings did not take affect and certain sites were not blocked. As always if you have any questions or would like us to come out and configure this for you, shoot me an email at bbeckwith@mktsmart.com.
Spring Cleaning
Spring Cleaning
Spring is here! We all think about cleaning winter away in our houses and planting new flowers while tending to your garden. But now is also a great time to optimize your PC performance.
We all see the cheesy commercials and billboards wanting us to visit a website so we can pay big bucks for someone else to clean our PCs. But I say, save your money, because I am going to tell you five easy steps so you can do this for free.
Step One
You must install an overall crap cleaner. We use and recommend CCleaner. Not only is it very effective at cleaning your temporary internet files, internet history, cookies, and more; it also cleans everything, and also helps keep your pc secure. A full list of what it does can be found here: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/features.
Step Two
Download, install, and run Malware Bytes. This app will clean-up any malware or spyware that has been installed. You can find it here: http://mktsmart.com/index-2.html
Step Three
Don’t forget to make sure your antivirus software is up to date. Whichever AV program you are using, there should be an update button somewhere on the main control panel.
Step Four
Defrag, Defrag, Defrag. The makers of CCleaner also make an excellent disk defragment tool called defraggler. It can be found here: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler. This one is also free, and in my opinion, much better than the one built into the Windows OS.
Step Five
After you finish the above steps, I recommend running Windows Updates. This will install any security patches, service packs, or updated drives from Microsoft. Some of you might have this set to download and install automatically, which is fine, just skip this step.
After all this has been completed, your PC should be running smoothly, just like it did the day you bought it. As always, if you have any questions, or run into any problems performing any of this steps, shoot me an email at bbeckwith@mktsmart.com.
“Remember Everything”
This week, I am writing about an app that I recently downloaded on my phone and PC. I fell in love with this free application called Evernote. This app is genius, and if you are like me and are forgetful, this is a life saver. So what is it? Evernote is a tool that lets you write down your ideas, thoughts, to-do items, and then saves them to the internet so you can have access to them from any computer or phone.
How does it work? You download I client to your phone (they support android, iPhone/iPad, palm, and blackberry) and also download a client to the PCs on which you will be using Evernote. A screenshot of the PC client is below.
Evernote is very simple to use. You can enter text notes, upload pictures, or even record.
Let’s say you are at work and you are making your grocery list. Simply write your list like I have showed above and hit Sync in the upper right hand corner, and it instantly syncs with your phone. How awesome is that? If you are out and about and come up with an awesome idea, but don’t have paper or a pen, simply create a txt note or audio note on your phone, and it will show up on your PC the next time you access it. It is that simple folks.
There is also a plug-in for Firefox. So if you’re at a website and you see some stuff you like, just highlight it and hit the Evernote button, and it sends it to your list of notes. It will also send the entire page if you want. Very cool.
If you want a useful note taking tool give this one a try. You can find out more about it at http://www.evernote.com/.
I Need A Hero
This week’s post is going to be about my new phone. I have been a long time BlackBerry user, and decided in February to try Sprint’s HTC Hero. Now, I will admit I was seriously considering getting an IPhone. After hearing what my brother pays for his a month, I decided to stick with Sprint. Plus, I still had a year left on my contract.
I scouted the papers and Internet for the best deal, and finally Best Buy had one that I couldn’t ignore. So I bought the HTC Hero for $100. After a few months of using it, I figured it was time to write a review.
Let’s get to the specs on this bad boy. The phone comes with a 2 GB micro SD card but can support up to a 32 GB card. It has a 3.2 inch display with a 320×480 screen resolution. It also has a built-in 5 megapixel camera with automatic focus adjustment. The lithium-ion battery has a 250 min talk time. It has a 3.5 mm jack on top for headphones. There is a data port on the bottom that will accept the Blackberry charger and data cable if you flip the connector upside down. It also has the Google Android platform. It has 6 buttons and a trackball below the touch screen. The buttons are menu, home screen, search, go back, call, and end call. To keep from pocket dialing someone, press the end call button to his lock the screen.
Ok, let’s get to the apps that I have installed and use.
Social Media:
• Facebook – Needs no explanation!
• Twidroid – I have found this to be the best app for Twitter
• Foursquare – Geo tagging app (very addictive)
• Word Press – Blog app
• WI Finder – Wi-Fi hotspots locator
Games:
• Bonsai Blast – addictive marble game
• Texas Holdem – poker
• Family Guy Puzzles – awesome time waster
• Toss it – another awesome time waster
• Live Scores – get updated scores for any sport
Misc:
• Movies – find show times, view movie trailers, find DVD current and new releases
• Google Sky – hold it up to the sky and find stars, constellations, planets. Very cool
• iMusic – find and listen to every and any song known to man or woman
• Jersey Shore Soundboard – a must if you are a Jersey Shore fan
• TasKiller – kills any running apps that might be slowing your phone down
With the Hero, you get 5 screens to hold all of your apps. You navigate by sliding your finger left or right. These screens are customizable. I have all my games on one screen, work type apps on another, a calendar screen, and a misc. app screen.
There is a full QWERTY keyboard for typing emails and txt messages. In portrait mode, it is a bit cramped, but when in landscape mode, you get bigger keys.
I have found it sluggish at times, and often find myself cussing at the phone. If you are coming from a phone that has a full physical keyboard like I did, it takes some getting used too. I found the camera to be pretty good. It has auto focus, and to take a picture, you simply press down on the trackball, very simple. There is a bar on the side that you can use to zoom in and zoom out.
Now as far as must have accessories, with any touch screen phone or device, you are going to want a clear screen protector. Best Buy or even Sprint will try to sell you one of these for $20. You can get a four pack on Amazon for around $5. If you are constantly dropping your phone, you will want some sort of case. I found a rubber case for $4 on amazon that works really well. As soon as I got to my car from Best Buy, I dropped my phone three times. Luckily it was in the car, and didn’t suffer any damage. If you are switching from a BlackBerry like I did, you can reuse your car charger and data cables. The phone does come with a charger/data cable.
If you are in the market for a new phone, and have Sprint as your carrier, I highly recommend the HTC Hero. After having it a few months, I would choose this over the IPhone any day.
HP Media Server
So every now and then, I am going to bring in someone to guest post for you all. A few posts ago, I mentioned the HP Media Server as an excellent choice for a backup solution. Well my buddy Heath had already written about this on his blog. So with his permission, I copied what he wrote below. After you are done reading it, please go check out his site at http://www.ourcandyfamily.com
A few posts ago I mentioned how it is important to back up your valuable data. One way to back up your data is with an HP MediaSmart Server. This is the option my friend Jason and I chose to use. I have had this for about 1 1/2 months and it is pretty cool. Unlike just an external hard drive it has the ability to replicate your data over multiple drives. This feature is pretty important because if one of your drives fails then the data is still on another drive and everything is safe. It has 4 bays that are hot swappable so while the server is running you can pull out a hard drive or place a new hard drive in there without turning anything off or dissecting the case to get in. So far I have the 500Gig drive and a 1TB for a total of 1.3TB of usable storage space. I plan on buying at least 2 more 1TB drives for those of you that do not know what a 1TB (Terabyte) is it is equal to 1000 Gig or 1,000,000 MB. And if you still don’t understand then the extreme non tech answer is that it is a wicked lot of megabytes.
Since this is a Server running a dumb down version of Server 2003 it is capable of allot more than just storing data. It has the ability to back up all your computers overnight so that if your computer ever gets a virus or if the hard drive crashes then you can just restore it from the server and it is good as new. Also, if you find that one of your files is corrupt you can restore a single file as well.
One of my favorite things to use it for is a media server. I store all my DivX movies and my Mp3’s on there and I have the ability through my Xbox360 or my PS3 to play that media on my TV. I also have it download podcast and I am able to watch video podcast from the server through my Xbox360. There are other types of media extenders that you can buy that are just media extenders and not game systems but they cost almost the same amount as the game system and you can’t play games.
Another cool feature is that I can access my home server from anywhere I have an Internet connection and add or get files. For example let’s say I am in North Carolina and I have an MP3 I want my mom to hear, I just open a web browser and log into my home server over the web and download the MP3. I can also set up user accounts for people to view my files and even create a photo book for others to view their pictures.
Some other uses that I am not using are to use it as an email server, or a web server to host my website. There are many things you can do with the HP MediaSmart Server and if you have a about $500 it is a good investment to keep all your data safe.
Thanks to Heath Phillips for buying this server and writing a review on it for us. Again, go check out his website at http://www.ourcandyfamily.com.
Is Your Data Safe?
Data Security: What are you doing to protect your PC against viruses, malware attacks, etc?
This quarter the majority of my service calls seem to be virus/malware related. Let me try to clear up some of the confusion.
Step 1: Firewalls
First, let’s discuss the kind of software you need. At a minimum, you must have windows firewall enabled. However, I recommend taking it a step further by also using a secondary firewall application. I use Comodo Firewall; and have used it for some time now and haven’t had any problems. Oh – did I mention the best part? It is free! If you would like to try a different one, you could use Zone Alarm.
Step 2: Antivirus Application
You also need a good antivirus application. Bit Defender is great. It has a built-in malware scanner. But what makes it even nicer; a license is good for 3 years – updates included. So unlike with Norton and McAfee, when you buy Bit Defender 2010, when 2011 comes out, you don’t have to purchase it again. AVG is another great free program. Microsoft has one called Microsoft Security Essentials that so far seems to be good. I use ESET NOD32 Antivirus. It is a little pricey, but it works great. I also got a free one year license from a tech convention. I would recommend it.
Step 3: Malware/Spyware
You are going to want a good malware/spyware utility, too. One that scans real-time would be ideal. I have been getting a ton of calls this year to remove malware, and if they had a real-time scanner, their PCs wouldn’t have been infected. The paid version of Malwarebytes is a good one. The ESET AV program that I have installed also seems to be working great. I am cruising on the internet all day long and have yet to get infected.
Step 4: Cleaner
Don’t forget a cleaner! I recommend CCleaner. It not only cleans up your PC, but also your registry. It is also free.
Step 5: Internet Browsers
For internet browsers, do not use Internet Explorer as your main browser. It is full of security holes and is very slow. You can instead use Opera, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I use Firefox and it works great.
Now that you have the tools, I would recommend doing at the least monthly scans and cleansings. This will keep your PC working like new. Almost all of the applications I have mentioned in this blog can be found at www.mktsmart.com and www.ninite.com. If you are using something that I didn’t mention, that you really like, send me an email and I will review it.
Be Safe, Backup
Ok, so this week I am going to talk about data backups. Hopefully you all are using some form to back up those important pictures, home movies, business related data, etc…
I have had about four service calls this year that could have been avoided if they had a reliable backup solution in place. Luckily I was able to recover the data without having to send it to a specialist where that can be very $$$$$$.
There are a variety of backup solutions out there. If you go the external drive route, please make sure you are using it as a backup drive and not the main drive to store your data. USB flash drives work great for pictures, but they are easily misplaced.
I have a few co-workers that have invested in a media server by HP. It not only acts as a backup server for all your PCs on the network, but as a media server as well. You can store all your pictures, videos, etc. and watch them on your PS3, Xbox, or any other PC or device that is connected. This awesomeness in a box will cost you around $500 though. But you can have up to four hard drives, which are hot swappable, with a maximum storage capacity of 9tb. That is a lot of stuff.
The last one I am going to talk about is online backups. You can get this awesome service from us. We use a vender called offsitecomputerbackup.com. They offer a free 30 day 100 GB trial, which can be found at http://mktsmart.com/index-2.html. What is cool about this company is they charge you by space, not by how many PCs you are running this on. So, if you order say, the 10 GB package; then you can run this on as many PCs as you want, as long as you stay at 10GB or under. We use this solution at almost all of our customer sites. We have not had an issue with it yet.
So, I hope I shed some light on some of the different options out there, and I hope all of you are using something to back up everything that is valuable to you data wise. If you have any questions on what solution would work best for you, I would be happy to sit down with you and figure something out. Email me at bbeckwith@mktsmart.com
“One Shot Kid”
I know I was going to talk about backup solutions on my next post, but wanted to talk about something else first. I will talk about backups next week. Right now I wanted to tell you about this awesome new website we found for installing freeware. It is www.ninite.com. This site is pretty sweet. We use it when we setup new PCs, or when rebuilding one. You select what programs you need installed (anti-virus software, web browsers, office tools, media players, etc.) click a few buttons, and then walk away and let ninite work its magic. Not only does it download it, but it installs it as well. No more sitting there and clicking next a bunch of times. If you don’t see the program you need, there is a place at the bottom of the page that lets you request it.
To get to this little gem, go to www.mktsmart.com and click on technology. Scroll down and you will see it on the right side of the page.
The Rev
Backup, Backup, Backup
Next week’s topic: back up solutions
I will be talking about different ways to back up your important data. If you do not have a back up solution in place, you need one, like now. If you have any specifics you would like me to talk about, send them to me.
The Rev
Help!!!!
Hello, everyone. I am going to start writing a blog for MarketSmart TEK. They are a small IT company that provides anything and everything IT related to small businesses and the everyday home user. They have been around for around 10 years, and they are very good at what they do. I was brought on as a Contractor/Consultant three years ago, and have watched our customer base grow and grow.
As a way to say thanks, we are creating this blog for you, or customers. I will be writing about anything tech related that I feel will help our customers better themselves and grow. I will also be giving tech tips, explaining any new services or products we offer, and reviewing any new gadgets that I think are really cool.
So with that said, I ask for your help. I have a few topics I plan on covering, but I want to know what you would like to read about. Shoot me an email at bbeckwith@mktsmart. com and give your thoughts and ideas.
