Awww, facebook. North America’s favourite time waster. Or was that television? I can’t remember now… In any event, millions of people login to facebook everyday to connect with friends, checkout the latest vacation photos, or coordinate Saturday night party plans. If you’re not familiar with facebook, or don’t use facebook, thats OK. Facebook is a social networking website that has become immensely popular over the years. It has appealed to adults and kids alike as a convenient way to keep in touch, post pictures, and find lost friends. Users beware though. Facebook gives you a very strong, easily accessible online presence. Also, many computers are getting infected due to facebook scams. Learn more below to avoid becoming a victim… (more…)

Most people, irrespective of their technological skill, are familiar in some way with Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It has been included with most new PC’s for 15+ years. Windows users are often curious about their main rival - Apples Macintosh. Many of my clients ask me the differences between the 2 computers, and have inspired me to write this post. (more…)

Microsoft Windows organizes computer files by placing them into folders. Well what are folders your may ask? Folders are simply containers - thats it. Folders can contain 2 things, files, and other folders. Thats right, a folder can contain another folder - this hierarchical nature is the basis for most computer filing systems. Think of folders in Windows similarly to folders in your office filing cabinet - folders organize the documents in which they contain. The folder itself is not valuable. Hence if a folder is empty (contains no files), then it can be safely deleted and nothing of value is lost. However folders are not usually empty, since their main purpose is to organize and group different kinds of computer data. For example, we can create a folder called “Pictures” which will store all of our picture files. Similarly, we can create a folder called “Music” to contain all of our music files. More specifically, our Music folder can contain several other folders specifying genre - For example, the sub-folders could be called “Rock”, “Dance”, and “Rap”. This way, we could further organize the music into categories. Yet all the while, the Music folder would still contain everything. Got it? (more…)

The Mozilla Firefox web browser is a free alternative to Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer. This piece of software has been growing in popularity for several years and has evolved into A+ material. The Mozilla developer community has worked tireless hours to put together a world class web browser providing the best in functionality, speed, and security. (more…)

The most important part of any computer system is the data. Hardware can be replaced, and programs can be re-installed. But if you lose the data inside your machine, it can be quite an awful feeling. Your important documents or precious pictures are irreplaceable, so why risk losing them? Make data backups a regular occurence! (more…)

Google has recently launched its long awaited web browser - Google Chrome. The browser is lightweight, clean, robust, secure, and simple to use. Would we expect anything less from Google? (more…)

Computers serve many purposes, and can perform many functions. Mathematics and computers are very much related, so it’s no wonder that powerful PC’s can perform complex mathematical operations in an instant. The famous Windows Calculator has long been a handy tool. It is little-known that the basic functionality of the Windows Calculator can be extended into a fully-functioning scientific calculator. Lets see how to make this possible. (more…)

Everyone likes their computer setup just the way they like it. Customizing a computer is much deeper than simply changing the background and screensaver. One of the most important aspects of the computer that people like to setup is the default program list. By default programs, I am talking about the program that opens by default when you click on a certain type of file. For example when you click on a file ending in “.doc”, your computer automatically starts the Microsoft Word word processing program. This is because Microsoft Word is the default program for handling Microsoft Word files (.doc files). The bottom line here is that these default programs can be changed to whatever you desire. So what program should we set as default to open our pictures (files ending in “.jpg”)? I recommend the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer application. Often the default program for opening pictures will have been changed to god knows what. This usually means a big delay from the time you click on the picture to the time it actually is visible on the screen. Well today, we are going to learn how to set it back to the lightweight and easy-to-use Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. (more…)