Credit, love it or hate it, is something that’s necessary for many people to buy things. And I’m sure there are more than a few of you out there who have applied for credit online and been denied faster than you can say, "Hey! My credit rating is good! What gives?"

What gives is that you’ve been dealt the cold shoulder of a computer that deemed you unworthy of a credit line.

If you need credit for anything, my advice is simple: Apply over the phone or in person whenever the option presents itself. The rep you speak with on the phone has more of an interest in approving you compared to a non-human computer.

Lines of credit worth having for computer stuff

Apple Financial

Macs are frickin’ expensive. With Apple Financial/Juniper they have 0% for 12 months on any first (keyword there) purchase over $1,000 – which is unfortunately quite easy to rack up when buying Apple products.. (sheesh!) If you plan on buying Apple stuff, you’re going to need this unless you have really deep pockets.

Phone: 1-800-MY-APPLE

Dell Financial Services

Good for consumers and small-biz owners that specifically want to build credit. The nice part is that with DFS, they’ll allow you to finance just about anything – even for super-low amounts, and that’s an advantage.

Phone: Depends what type of customer you are. Info is here. If you’re just a regular consumer, call the main line 1-800-WWW-DELL.

Bill Me Later

Both NewEgg and TigerDirect accept this, as well as many other retailers. Granted, the interest rate sucks, but you get 90 days no-interest no-payment on any cart purchase over $250 in most instances. "Cart purchase" means that the items in the online shopping card meet or exceed $250. So if you buy a motherboard, CPU, monitor and lump it all into a single purchase that goes over $250, that’s financeable thru BML.

Note that you don’t have to apply for it. Just use it on purchase at checkout. However it is recommended you get yourself an account at the BML site to track spending better.

For you gamers out there with not a lot of cash, or just want something different in the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) arena, here are 5 free ones for you to try out.

Twelve Sky

Type: 3D Fantasy, oriental style, martial arts

2Moons

Type: 3D Fantasy, action

4Story

Type: 3D Fantasy, medieval style

5 Street

Type: 3D Music/Dancing

9 Dragons

Type: 3D Fantasy, martial arts

These are all MMO games, so if you’ve got the gaming itch but want something you can download now, now you have 5.

Each of these games routinely has many users playing, so you won’t have to worry about entering the "world" and not having anyone there.

I, like a lot of you out there, use online banking. If I remember correctly I first started using it in 2003 or 2004. The NetTeller system was what my bank at the time was using. Was it free? Ha! No. I had to pay a fee just to apply for it back then. The bank I was using weaseled $15 out of me even though I was doing them a favor just by using it. Thankfully all modern online banking is free these days.

NetTeller was clunky, very un-user friendly and looked like it had been programmed in 1998, but it did do its job.

To note, only smaller banks usually use NetTeller. It’s billed as a "turnkey cost-effective solution", which translates to "Run a bank? Are you cheap and can’t afford to program your own online banking system? Use us!" Smaller banks will also usually charge fees just to use this type of system for the wad of cash they shelled out just to get it. But I digress.

There are a few things I’ve learned over the years when it comes to banking online. Some I’ve learned the hard way. This will be presented in question and answer style.

Q: Is it better to have the online system mail a standard payment check or for you mail it yourself?

A: Let the bank do it.

First of all, you save the cost of a stamp. Secondly, if the bank mails a check and it doesn’t get there, you can blame the bank and be 100% in the right because they were the ones that were supposed to get it there on time.

To date, I have never had a mailed check from the online banking system not arrive when the system said it was going to.

If you live in an area where the mail system is just outright crappy (which unfortunately happens in some parts in the world), that is even more of a reason to have the bank do the mail-outs for you.

Q: Is it better to have the online system mail out a high-priority payment check or you mail it yourself?

A: This one is the exact opposite, you mail it.

High priority payments should be done by overnight check mail-outs so they can be tracked.

For example, if you were going to send an overnight payment to a credit card company, you call them up, ask for the "priority" or "emergency" physical payment address (because you can’t overnight a check to a PO Box), then do your overnight mail-out that way.

You may ask, "Couldn’t I have just done an electronic payment? That’s supposed to be processed in 24 hours, right?"

Yes, it’s supposed to be. But some companies have become shifty and will delay electronic payment processing by up to seven days, thereby making your payments late. One wonders if this is done on purpose.

When you mail and track it, you have physical proof it got there on time, regardless of when whom you sent the payment to processes it.

With electronic, the receiving system may subject you to delayed payment processing. I would not trust the "processed in 24 hours" claim for a hot minute.

Q: Should you trust electronic drafting?

A: Only if you watch your bank account like a hawk.

Some people have some or all their bills set to have the payment be automatically drafted when the payment is due.

As to what you should trust with electronic drafting, this is dependent on whether or not the monthly amount due is consistent or not.

With credit cards there is little to no consistency due to the ever-changing rates. I strongly advise against having a credit card company auto-draft payments.

With wireless phone plans, these are also inconsistent unless you always stay within your allowed minutes and data allowance per month.

For car payments, yes you could auto-draft because the payment is always the same. There is consistency here.

For mortgages, if it’s fixed-rate, yes you could auto-draft because once again you’ve got consistency from payment to payment.

But as I said in the beginning, auto-drafting serves you best if you watch your bank account like a hawk. You have to confirm that any money taken out was the proper amount for each payment. To me it is worth the slight inconvenience to manually send out payments so I know exactly what’s going out.

Q: Is it safe to go "paperless"?

A: This depends on whether you value physical copies of bank records or not.

All banks encourage their customers to use paperless statements, as in the kind that’s delivered to your email address and nowhere else.

Person A would say, "Yes, that would be more convenient. I get enough postal mail as it is and less mail is better."

Person B would say, "To conduct business with a bank and not have physical paper records of your transactions is foolish."

Person B is correct. You should keep paper records of statements.

Going paperless is safe, but not necessarily smart. Database records can change dynamically. Physical printed paper records cannot.

Final notes

Online banking is something that is best practiced in moderation. I would never tell anybody to conduct 100% of their transactions and other banking activities online because it’s too easy to lose track of where you money is coming and going. There are times when you need to physically mail stuff out and have paper copies of transactions for record keeping. There’s simply no way around that.

Do you trust your bank’s online system?

Has it worked for you? Did it work well or was it awful? What would you tell people to watch out for with online banking? Let us know in the comments.

With many online retailers (like NewEgg, Dell, Dotster, etc.) there is an option at checkout to enter in a coupon code to take some money off the final purchase price, be it a straight value (ex: $25) or a percentage (ex: 15% off).

If you do a search for coupon codes, unfortunately you are usually shoved towards affiliate links. This can get frustrating quickly because all you want is the code. You don’t want to play the click-here/click-there game. “Just gimme the code” is all you’re thinking.

There are two places where it’s relatively easy to find this stuff.

The first place, believe it or not, is the old school snail mail way.

Dell for example does send out coupon codes you can use for online purchases later. The best ones are in print. It’s basically the only reason you would ever want their promotional material in your mailbox (as in your real postal box, not your email inbox).

Is it worth it to deal with Dell’s promotional flyers to get a deal? Yes. There are periodic specials that can literally take off as much as $400 off a PC or laptop purchase, and that’s no chump change. It can turn a $2000 computer purchase price into $1600 easily. And bear in mind that’s an instant discount and not a rebate. That’s a big deal.

The second place is online. Personally I have found the best place to grab codes is at xpBargains. It covers just about every major online retailer you can think of. Yes, there are those stupid affiliate links – BUT – there are also many instances where you’re given the code(s) you’re looking for that you can enter in at checkout time.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Codes for many different items are listed  in plain sight, states what they do and (important) when they will expire. That page I just linked is really long but really worth a look if you’re a bargain hunter.

Where do you go for coupon codes?

Do you use coupon codes at all? If so, where do you find them? Did they work for you? Let us know.

Many (and I mean many) PCMech readers buy stuff online. In fact, a fair amount of them shopped online during the “bad old days” in the pre-2005 era. Continued

Modern day home computing is not as it once was. Not-so long ago it used to be that in order to bring the most potential out of your computer box you had to use proprietary software.

Any app that runs solely on a specific operating system is proprietary. And yes there’s still lots of this stuff out there.

For the past few years I have been slowly transitioning the stuff I do on the web to being as cloud-based as possible. You’ve heard the term "cloud computing" so much that it probably makes you sick to hear it at this point – but you have to do it if you expect to make smooth transitions in the future from computer to computer.

If you don’t start transitioning now it will be very painful and stressful to get it done later.

A plain English description

"OS-less" means to be able to do what you do on a computer without the need for any specific operating system.

Using myself as an example, here’s a few things I do:

For my photos I made the decision to push those all to Flickr. It’s web-based. I can access it on any computer using any OS.

For my e-mail I decided to switch over to Hotmail (or to be more specific, Windows Live Admin Center). Previous to that I used self-hosted IMAP and before that plain ol’ POP. I can get to my mail from anywhere on any computer using any OS in any web browser – and it’s all there. It’s backed up and readily accessible.

For important documents that I need to hang on to (and even the not-so important ones), I push those over to Google Docs. This acts as my backup that is just as accessible as my mail is. Once again it’s accessible on any computer/OS.

Are you still in the stone age?

If you’re still using apps that are OS-proprietary and local to your computer only, you run the risk of losing all the data you have without warning. Let’s say for the moment you’re really good at backing things up routinely. What if your hard drive fails and the backup doesn’t work? What then? You basically curse and swear, then realize you lost it all and start from zero.

Nobody wants that to happen.

And what happens when you buy a new computer? Do you really want to go thru the process of reinstalling all your apps all over again, configuring them and wasting hours of time when all you want to do is just get going?

Of course you don’t.

Is it possible to go completely OS-less?

Not at present. However you can move over a significant chunk of what you do to cloud territory now. The more you move out there, the better.

Get your docs, photos and e-mail out in the cloud

No matter how much of an old fuddy-duddy you are (as in the type who positively refuses to try anything different), bear in mind the transition is stupidly easy to do for docs, photos and mail.

Docs

Google Docs is still your best bet. Get an account and upload them. Don’t worry, they’re all private uploads unless you specifically enable a share-out option (which is off by default).

Photos

If you use Flickr, get Windows Live Photo Gallery (Windows), Flickr Desktop Organizer (Linux) or Flickr Uploadr (Windows, Mac). Get a Flickr account and start uploading.

If you use Picasa, the Picasa client is well known to be super-awesome and super-easy to use. Works in Windows, Mac or Linux. Uploads stuff easily. It’s a no-brainer.

E-Mail

This is the one people fear the most – especially those who use POP and are under the impression it would be absolutely impossible to move hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of mails to another account.

Your two best bets are Gmail and Hotmail – and yes you can move all your mail over to either.

The short version of how to do it:

All modern e-mail clients support multiple e-mail accounts.

With Gmail, you can set up the new account alongside the old POP account in Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail or any number of other clients that support IMAP.

With Hotmail, you use the Windows Live Mail client. It will easily import all your old mail from Outlook or Outlook Express. Then you set up your Hotmail account alongside your POP account.

No matter which method you choose, once you have the multiple accounts set up you just drag and drop the mail from the old to the new. All the timestamps are saved and nothing is lost. Everything is moved over including the sent mail, attachments and so on. Furthermore the mail is instantly accessible on the web as well as in the client at that point via hotmail.com or gmail.com depending on which you chose.

Once done you no longer have to rely on your computer to send, retrieve and store your mail. All of it is in the cloud, backed up and accessible at any time. You can also still use the mail client if you feel like it. You can get to your mail either way when you push it to the cloud.

The long version of how to do it:

I go into grotesque detail on how to do this and it would take way too long to explain here – so watch for another article on it soon!

I am telling you now – start transitioning to the cloud

Said honestly, don’t put this off. You’ve got your docs, you’ve got your mail and if you take photos, those are most likely local to your computer box as well. Push this stuff out to the cloud (that being the internet).

You can continue (obviously) to perform local backups, but when (not if) the time comes that you get a new computer, the painful process of moving everything over will be so much less painful when you realize you can just open up a browser and get to everything – instantly.

Yes it’s true that there will be things you simply can’t push to the cloud (yet), but for the stuff you can get out there – do it.

Do it if for no other reason to have a secondary or tertiary free backup. The price is nice and all it costs is a small amount of your time.

This is the first time I’ve found something Linux can do that Windows (or OS X for that matter) cannot, that being to backup a large Flickr account.

I’ll explain.

My paid Flickr account has 1000+ photos in it. I use it routinely, realized it was frickin’ huge and felt the need to back it up.

The only semi-decent tool available is flickredit. But there’s one huge problem with it. If you have a ton of photos it simply won’t work. Sure, if you want to do periodic backups of say 500 photos or less it will do just fine. But over that mark it will just stop in the middle of a backup. You’ll have to start it all over again and do it piecemeal style (such as 50 at a time, etc.)

Very, very irritating. And slow.

Linux on the other hand has this thing called flickrfs. It mounts your Flickr account as a drive so-to-speak. However it is very "linuxy" and the installation may scare off some (read: command line crapola).

The alternative? Use Desktop Flickr Organizer. From what I understand it uses flickrfs and there’s absolutely zero command line crapola to deal with. This is directly available from Add/Remove in Ubuntu and looks like this when you go to get it:

When installed it’s available here:

When you run it, it looks like this:

Said honestly, if you use Flickr, you will love DFO. I’ve never seen its equal. It uploads, it organizes, it sorts, it tags, it does sets (and creation), it has search and most importantly – it downloads with no problems whatsoever.

I was able to download my entire Flickr photostream – which is 1000+ photos – on first try and DFO didn’t skip a beat. I was impressed.

Like with any application you use to access Flickr, you have to have your Flickr account "allow" it first. This only takes a few clicks of the mouse and you’re off to the races.

This is one real-life example of something Linux can do that no other OS can. In addition this Linux app is without a shadow of doubt better than any Windows or OS X offering for Flickr photo organization/backup. Normally whenever I see a Linux app it’s usually behind – but not this one. It’s way ahead.

If I want to backup my large Flickr account with no issues, I have to use Linux to get it done. Is this good or bad? Well if you’re a Linux user, not bad a’tall I’d say.

Said honestly it’s amazing that if you ask someone, "Where’s the best place to buy or sell stuff online?", the the typical answer is "eBay".

I disagree with this. The best place is Craigslist (abbreviated commonly as just "CL").

First, a few facts about CL:

• It’s been around just as long as eBay has (since 1995).
• It’s far easier to use than eBay overall.
• It loads way faster than eBay does.
• You can place ads for free.

I don’t know about other countries, but in the United States people genuinely appreciate being able to conduct business on a local level. eBay has never really been able to accomplish that, but with CL you can quite easily.

For example, my local is tampa.craigslist.org and chances are your local is listed here somewhere.

My reasons for preferring CL over eBay when buying and selling items are as follows:

Staying local works

As noted above, with eBay it’s a challenge at best to go local and stay local. Sure, you can set options on your item when selling it to keep it regionalized – but why bother forking over cash just to post an auction when all you want is a quick local sale?

PayPal is annoying

I’m sure there are more than a few readers out there who can say how much PayPal sucks at times. With eBay it’s more or less required to use PayPal just to buy or sell. How many auctions have you seen that state very loudly "PAYPAL ONLY"?

If you use PayPal, you only do so because you have to, not because you want to.

Better for the bargain hunter

Are you cheap? No, seriously.. are you really cheap? You’re in luck because CL has a "free" category for every local. Here’s an example from the Tampa local. You’d be surprised at the stuff people are willing to give away.

Some quick Q and A

Can you get scammed on CL?

You can get scammed anywhere, be it online or in person and CL is no exception. You know the old saying "let the buyer beware". If you think something sounds like a scam, it most likely is.

CL states very clearly to deal locally with people you can meet with in person, never wire funds, don’t do checks or money orders, don’t give out any of your personal fiscal information, avoid deals involving shipping or escrow and so on.

Even if you decide not to use CL, you should go to that link anyway just to get educated on how to spot scam stuff. It’s a good read.

Can you meet "scary" people from CL?

Of course. But CL has tips on that also.

Can I really post an ad for free and sell using straight cash in person?

Absolutely.

Can I get everything I want from CL?

Possibly – but I don’t know what you want to buy or sell. CL is free to use so you have nothing to lose by checking it out.

Are you doing your holiday season shopping now?

If you are you should definitely check CL out for yourself whether you’re buying or selling.

Generally speaking, buying computer hardware online is always cheaper than the store. The reason for this is because you skip out on tax, the middleman and so on.

However there is some tech hardware that you should never buy online if at all possible no matter how much you’d save.

Monitors

When purchasing any monitor online there is always the possibility it won’t work when you receive it. Or it will work but have things wrong with it. A classic example of this is the "dead pixel policy" many online retailers impose. NewEgg for example states you must have at least 8 dead pixels else they absolutely will not accept a return for any LCD monitor sold.

The vast majority of in-store retailers on the other hand will accept a return no-questions-asked – even if you just didn’t like it. However watch out for "restocking fees".

Keyboards

If you plan on spending any more than $20 on a computer keyboard, buy it in a store. You are going to see – and moreover feel – things with the keyboard you that you can’t experience online via a product photo gallery.

Mice

Yes you will spend about $10 more for any mouse you buy in a store. However there’s only one reason you do this – the return policy.

Most modern-day mice come with blister-pack style packaging even inside a box. Ridiculous? Yes. But true. At least when you purchase from a store you can bring it back with the packaging all messed up (you have to just to open the !@#$%@ thing) if it doesn’t work or you don’t like it.

Any networking gear

Of all the computer stuff I’ve purchased over the years, personal experience has taught me never to buy any networking hardware online because it has the highest probability of arriving DOA. This includes modems, routers, cabling, hubs, switches, etc.

Sound systems

The obvious reasons you don’t want to buy this stuff online is because:

1. It’s bulky.
2. You can’t hear it before you buy it (unless a friend or neighbor has it and you heard it there first).
3. Return shipping costs will be high if you have to send it back and the retailer makes you pay to ship (which a lot of them do).

Recently I had to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop and had to view a PDF but didn’t feel like installing the Adobe software. As most people know, the PDF viewer from Adobe is huge, clunky in operation and a huge memory sucker. Furthermore the modern variant of the software does that "view inside the browser" crapola which is extremely annoying.

Note before continuing: Yes I know I could have downloaded and used the Foxit Reader, but all I wanted to do was view a PDF with no fuss, no muss.

I thought to myself "There must be some way to view a PDF online without installing any software."

The first option is to use Google Docs. But they only allow a maximum filesize of 500k. Boooooo.. not good. They offer 7 gigs of e-mail storage but won’t load a document over 500k in Google Docs? Ridiculous.

Then I finally found what I was looking for. It’s simply titled Online viewer for PDF, PostScript and Word. NO software to be installed. NO registration required. Upload the file (or enter the URL of where it is) and you’re good to go.

To note: Yes it looks a bit "ugly", but who cares? You can load PDFs and read them and that’s the whole point.

I hope that site stays online forever. It’s simple and lightning fast – the way it should be.

One of the easiest ways to make money on the internet is to write electronic documents (i.e. a PDFs) and post them for sale. These documents could be about whatever you know. They can be short or long but longer is obviously better.

However you don’t want to put a whole bunch of time and effort into writing something only to get a few sales and nothing more. You want continuous revenue, as in the kind that keeps on coming and isn’t just flash-in-the-pan style.

This article will outline what you need to do so the documents/books you publish keep bringing in the cash.

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I don’t like Google Docs. I don’t like Microsoft Office Live either. But I do like OpenOffice. A lot. Wondering if there was any means of using the OO suite online, I did some searching and found that yes, there is a way. It’s done thru Ulteo’s web site.

After signing up for a free account with Ulteo you’re greeted with this:

Ulteo is actually a lot more than just OpenOffice, but being that’s what I was interested in I clicked the Start now! button for OO.

On the next screen you get this:

You choose the app in the OO suite you’d like to launch. I wanted Writer (the OO word processing app), so I waited a few seconds for the Java load to complete and clicked the green Launch OpenOffice.org NOW! button.

Once inside, yes this is a real true-blue OO Writer app – 100% Java loaded. This is not a web page thing pretending to be an online document editor.

Said honestly this is cool. My only complaint is that the Java is a bit wonky at times, however this is a true Writer app. Considering how large it is it loads up quick.

For those wondering, yes you can store stuff online via this site. They offer a free 1GB of space to anyone who has an account. For docs and so on that’s not bad.

You might want to try this for yourself – especially if you wanted to see OpenOffice in action without actually installing it.

Today’s banks and credit unions in the United States all have ways in which you can access your account online with a feature usually called "Bill Pay". The vast majority of the time the Bill Pay service is provided free by the bank. In rare instances you may pay a small monthly fee, but at least it’s small.

Over the years I’ve learned a few things with paying bills online.

Continued

For members only, watch as David provides a broad overview of how exactly PCMech.com generates revenue.

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A way to make money online is to offer a service. Now, this method of making money is heavily dependent on the service you are offering. To open up your venture to the widest possible audience, it is recommended that you do something that is not dependent on your location or the location of your client. Some examples:

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