Mary writes: I have a number of folders on my C drive that contain multiple letters and numbers. I have tried deleting these, but cannot (I did read the older posts on this website on how to do that,by going to the security tab under properties for the folder and making yourself the administrator, but it didn’t work, I was still denied access). The problem...

Happy Leap Year Day, everyone (today is 29 Feb, a month that traditionally has 28 days). Many moons ago the big deal with personal computers was what used to be called "home publishing". The Mac in particular often used its home publishing capabilities to sell itself, as at one point the Mac had much better fonts, printing apps and so on. The days of...

In this week’s Inside The Insider, I talk about what’s in this week’s issue of The Insider, as well as send a big “thank you” to everybody who signed up in the last week.Creative Uses For Dropbox, some non-obvious ways to use the Dropbox service. Getting a virtual desktop… in the cloud. Minimizing the annoyance of...

Usually when one hears "full-length movie" and "YouTube" in the same sentence, the assumption is that someone illegally uploaded an entire movie to the popular video sharing site. Well, that’s not the case here. Full legal full-length movies can be found at www.youtube.com/movies. Do you need a YouTube account to watch any flicks? Nope....

Cell phones even with light use get beat up easily, and over time they get all scratched up. And these days more people are electing to stay with their old phones instead of upgrading to a new one every 1 to 2 years. It’s not that a new phone costs that much, and in some instances upgrades are free; people just get sick and tired and having to learn a new...

I was pretty much dragged into texting kicking and screaming all the way. For years I refused to use it until smartphones got cheap and prepaid options presented what I considered to be a fair deal. Ultimately, what finally got me to use texting regularly was the right phone (as in one with a touchscreen, even if a cheap model) and a prepaid provider (Tracfone)...

When using an IMAP-connected email account in Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail, there is the option to "mark to download" or "download later" if using IMAP in such a way where the messages aren’t cached locally. When you do this, you’re instructing the mail client to download a block of messages...

So, you just started playing online, huh? Noob. Wait, didn’t you know? You’re supposed to be an expert the second you start a game. If you aren’t, you should just uninstall. In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic. Unfortunately, a great percentage of the LoL community isn’t. I get it. It’s a competitive game....

A complaint that at this point is close to two decades old is the lack of proper etiquette (which used to be called "netiquette") and decorum by most new users to the internet. It’s safe to say we’ll never get back to how the internet used to be in terms of etiquette and network standards, especially considering most of you who read this...

My Whirlpool clothes washer is obsolete now as it has been running Windows 98 for years, so I decided to "upgrade" it to Windows XP:Also note that I "upgraded" the CPU from an Intel Celeron M to an Intel Atom. I noticed my clothes are now are washed with far fewer file fragments (with use of NTFS detergent), and that service packs...

Hey you. Yeah, you. The one with the Smartphone. I’ve got news for you. Your data’s not as safe as you’d like to think it is. Believe it or not, as mobile becomes more and more important to society, the ne’erdowells and net crooks are turning their attention to Smartphones and Tablets. Plenty of malware exists out there that’s...

Part of the problem with web services that tie in too many services to a single login is that you will inevitably run into a problem where something just doesn’t work. And when I say doesn’t work, I mean not only does the whatever-it-is not work, but there’s nothing you can do about it. The three web service providers that have the most...

One good thing about the Internet is that it’s really easy to ignore people who irritate us. One bad thing about the Internet is that, well…it’s really easy to ignore people who irritate us. Before the advent of digital communication, if someone was pissing us off, it was far more likely we’d, y’know…confront them on it, and...

Windows 8 is coming, and I’ve been reserved in writing anything about it for a few reasons. There’s the Metro interface thing. To me, it’s just Ubuntu’s Unity in a Microsoft flavor. I understand that the whole point is to provide a simplified interface which supposedly makes your computer easier to use, but eh.. I don’t know. I...

If you’re a member of the Tin Foil Hat club (even if just a part-time member), privacy matters to you, so here are 5 tools that should keep the po po‘s from kicking in your door. 1. Tor Link: https://www.torproject.org/ Tor is a way of browsing the internet anonymously. I tried out Tor before, and I find the best way to run a Tor browser is...

In this week’s Inside The Insider, I talk about what’s in this week’s issue of The Insider, as well as send a big “thank you” to everybody who signed up in the last week.How to get started using Evernote (a lot of people are confused how to integrate it into their lives. We’ll help.) Fixing Java on your Computer A resource...

Recently, I’ve been getting a string of annoying emails to my Gmail account from a rather odd fellow who claims to be representing some royal from another country. Apparently, they’ve got $50 million that they want to invest overseas, and I’ve been chosen as a prime candidate for the investment. Of course, I’ll get a cut of it. Obviously,...

HijackThis is a utility from Trend Micro known to many for the removal of unwanted settings and/or files from your computer. Trend Micro has recently decided to move the source code over to an open source location, namely here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hjt/ It’s stated that TM will still be actively developing the software, and if you’re a...

Ever wish Windows could show the date like this in the taskbar? Most people operate Windows using a single-tier taskbar. As most people know, you can make the Windows taskbar any thickness you want, but generally speaking, people want it to be the smallest single-tier size just to stay out of the way. The tradeoff is that when you do that, only the time is...

That title seems a little intimidating, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, there are actually quite a few websites now that are ‘tweaking’ the search results of their users. Oh, it’s not like they’re censoring anything. Far from it, they’re simply filtering your results based on what they think you want to see- based on your...