Byte of the Week

The holiday season tends to be a little slow for some of us in an office; it’s the perfect time to tune up our technology and back up our systems. So, around New Year I like to remind folks of some of my favorite tools for keeping your computer running smoothly.

PCPitstop
PCPitstop is a web site that will run a diagnostics tests on your computer for free. It takes a few minutes but PCPitstop will look atthe following:

• System
• Memory
• Disk
• Video
• Internet
• Windows
• Security

It will compare your systems to others like it and give you advice to improve your rating. My favorite thing is that the advice is not too techie. It’s like a cook book for non-chefs – if you can follow directions and you’re a computer user you can probably fix many problems yourself.

Back up your system
I generally back up my systems by simply burning all of my files to CD. The only potentially tricky aspect of backing up to a CD is backing up email files. Microsoft has a good article on how to do that if you use Outlook.

Don’t have a CD burner?
If you don’t have a CD burner another option is to find or rent server space online to back up your system. All the Space is a good list of cheap and free storage space on the Internet.

Share files with friends
I decided to check out Yahoo Briefcase for free storage space. It’s a little pokey because you have to upload individual files. But – and several of you have asked about a tool that can do this – with Yahoo Briefcase you can share files with friends. (Well, you can choose to share with everyone or share with specific other Yahoo Users – but for those of you looking to share PowerPoint presentations and other “public” documents this could be a good, no-cost fix.)

I have a new favorite service on the Internet – Simplelists.

They provide email list services – like the old listservs, which used to be easy to get. Well, I have looked high and low for a low-cost service to use for email newsletters or ongoing conversations among groups. These guys are the best I could find. (Here is more info on email lists.)

I like them so much that I have moved the Byte of the Week over to their service. For less than $100 per year I can maintain this list. (I used to just send messages to all of you through my email client, which was OK when the list was smaller but time consuming now.) The people at Simplelists have been helpful. The cost is right. They are sensitive to misuse of email but flexible enough in their rules to be practical for commercial use. As I said, they’re my faves!

On an unrelated note – today is the Winter Solstice. Here’s a fun site on the solstice.