Computer Tips -Tech Info

This morning I was doing a fresh install of Windows XP SP2 into a Virtual Machine. So far, things are fine I went through windowsupdate and found 3 updates the first time, then rebooted and hit windowsupdate again to see 55 updates available. A lot of times when I set up a new pc for […]

This is one that’s not as obvious as it should be. Every keyboard has a “print screen” button – usually it’s in the group over above the insert/home/pageup/delete/end/pagedown block. Sometimes (especially on laptops) it’s shared with something else. But…. most people will notice if they press “print screen” on a windows pc… not much seems […]

How many times have I had this kind of phone call…. “my computers not working”… “the light on the monitor is on, but there aren’t any lights on the keyboard. everything seems connected, but there’s nothing on the screen.” Usually, my first question is along the lines of… “have you tried turning it off and […]

This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it over and clean out the lint from the “ball” area…. The good […]

Dealing with text…. we’ve looked at a couple of basics on logging in and starting to use the command line and hopefully not feeling too helpless there… we’ve seen ways to navigate directories and how to find new commands and how to find out more about how to use them. Now it’s time to talk […]

Now that we’ve logged in and learned how to move from one directory to another (and find where we are if we get lost…) it’s probably time to start learning how to find out about other commands. Well, if you press tab at the command line you will likely see something that starts like this…. […]

This is part two in a series of “how to use the command line in linux” style articles…. these are intended to be quite basic for those that have not used a command line before…. In part one we logged in (if necessary) and found out about the help command, navigated a bit with the […]

I know many people get intimidated with a black screen, white text and blinking cursor. No mouse, not knowing where to start…. well, I’m going to spend a bit of time in this article trying to help show you how to survive the command line in linux. For starters, don’t think that linux is a […]

I did an article a while back about cron and scheduling tasks in linux (I also mentioned kron which is a graphical interface for cron scheduling…). That works well and good for things that happen on a recurring basis, but the next question is what if I want to schedule a command (or series of […]

This is one that I run into from time to time. Most laptops the last year or two (actually maybe a bit longer), have built in wireless networking. This is great and makes for easy access to wireless access points just about anywhere. In fact, most current operating systems (Windows XP included) usually do a […]