Online Computer Tips Monthly Newsletter - April 2008

Apple QuickTime Alert

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Apple QuickTime, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information or compromise a vulnerable system. This is a highly critical update and should be addressed immediately.

Check out this link for more information and for links on how to get the QuickTime update.

Virus Help
Spyware Help

Using the Microsoft Office Clipboard

Microsoft Office comes with a handy feature that allows you to keep recently used clipboard items within Word, Excel etc so you can reuse them as many times as needed rather than have to type them again. Let’s say you had a several paragraphs that you wanted to use over and over with a document or documents. Once you copy them they are added to the clipboard viewer which is displayed on the right side of the screen. To re-use or re-paste the item into your document simply click on the item in the clipboard and it will be inserted wherever your cursor is.

To turn on the Office Clipboard Viewer go to the Edit menu and select Office Clipboard. For Office 2007 products click on the Home tab and then click the Clipboard dialog box launcher. There are several options that you can configure for the Office Clipboard such as turning it on and off, having it show in the taskbar and having the clipboard show when Control-C is pressed. The Office Clipboard Viewer is capable of remembering up to 24 items that you can re-use.

All Tips

If you are sick of hearing all those geeky tech terms and don't know what they mean then you shoud check out the TechWeb TechEncyclopedia for the answers.

Mike writes in with a troublshooting question
Question: We are unable to upload photos on the USB port and our printer is on but not responding to print requests. We bought a new USB cable to see if it would help but that didn't do it. We opened the hard drive and blew out the dust. There appears to be a wire that is not connected that is bundled with the wires coming to the USB port in the hard drive but we are not sure whether it was originally connected or not. Any ideas? The motherboard is an Amptron ISO-9001 and the printer is an hp psc 1315v. We suspect the USB port may be the problem.

Answer: The USB ports on the back and front of the computer connect to the motherboard via wires to a group of pins that should be labeled something like USB1 or USB2 etc. If the plug that connects to the cable came loose then that would explain your devices not working. Do you have USB ports on the front of the computer you can try? They should be connected to a different USB port on the motherboard. If these don't work either it can be a case of your motherboard going bad or Windows not recognizing the ports. Look in Device Manager under Universal Serial Bus controllers to see if you have any yellow exclamation points or question marks indicating a problem. If so you may want to see if you can reinstall or update the drivers via Device Manager and Windows Update unless you have the motherboard CD for your computer which should have the drivers on it.

If you cant get them to work there is an option to add an internal USB card which will give you 4 or 5 USB ports separate from the ports on the motherboard. Here is an example of the USB card.

All Questions

'The Grid' Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

The grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

Full Story

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