The 8th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the eighth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another collection of blog articles to help you avoid problems and get the most out of your PCs. I would like to thank everyone who contributed. If you would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion. If you do wish to host the carnival but don't wish to have the responsibility for selecting articles or writing the carnival post, don't worry I can do that for you.

The first three featured articles this month all share a theme, backing up and restoring data.

Sonny Felker posted Computer Data Recovery Procedures May be Avoided at Find Free Articles - ArticlesBase. In Sonny's own words:
A good disaster recovery plan involves more than just backing up your information, although that is a very critical part of the process, and a great place to start. But simply putting your critical business data on a CD or USB flash drive is not a strong backup process. I could not sleep well at night knowing that the information I use to run my business on, earn money from and feed and support my family with is riding on that very unreliable medium. Once again, something is better than nothing; however, there are certainly better options available.

PreparedPC develops this theme in Backup Your Hard drive Now; While You Still Have Time. Admin writes:
One of the best favors you can do for your computer is to back up the entire hard drive just in case something goes wrong. The software is free, and for the cost of an external hard drive and a couple hours of your time, you can be ready for a hard drive crash.

Jules of PCauthorities.com gives advice on How to Restore Files from a Damaged CD or DVD:
You did everything right. You made regular CD or DVD copies of your files, kept them at a safe place, and now you can not read the disk anymore! Unfortunately even CD’s and DVD’s can be damaged and deteriorate over time. But that does not mean all is lost, use a simple data recovery program to recover files from damaged CD’s and DVD’s.

Apple Macs now use the same processors as PCs, which means that it is possible to run OSX on PCs. For those of you who don't want to actually change operating systems but want to have the look of OSX, Gravity Blue presents Turn Your Windows XP into Mac OSX.

No matter what your operating system looks like, eye strain is a problem for anyone using their computer for extended periods. Do your eyes a favour and read EyeCare Tips for Computer Users posted by mayursears at The Mega Sears for EveryOne !.

On the subject of eyes, regular contributer, Andrew Edgington, explains Fixing Pet Eye on his site, Edit Your Digital Photos. While most image editing programs have a facility for dealing with red-eye in pictures of people this doesn't work with the variety of colours reflected in the eyes of animals when you take pictures of them using the flash.

In order to make sure that nobody is leaching your Internet bandwidth brennan gives advice on how to Secure Your Wireless Network at HMTech.ca. Paul Wilcox of Security Manor helps us with another Internet issue with his article, 4 Tips For Avoiding E-mail Spam, and for online gamers, Adam gives a tutorial on Connecting Xbox 360 to Xbox Live Via Vista Using ICS at Computer Tutorials.

Again, I would like to thank all our contributers and remind anyone with an IT themed blog that the carnival needs other hosts. This would not only create a sense of community but also to drive a little more traffic to your site.

More next month.

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: a view of Word

There are a number of ways in which you can view a document in MS Word. You can switch between these different layouts by selecting them from the 'View' menu, or you can use keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between them.

My preferred choice is 'Print layout', which can be selected by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys and pressing P.

To select the 'Normal layout' hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys and press N.

To see the 'Overview layout' hold down Ctrl and Alt and press O.

Or if you prefer to see more than one page at a time, go to the 'Reading view' by holding down the Alt key and pressing R.

Finally, although it is not strictly a layout, you can switch the 'Print preview' on and off by holding down Ctrl and Alt keys and pressing I.

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Bloody Computer! One Year Old

'Bloody Computer!' reaches its one year anniversary today. So, as I have done for other landmarks, I present another set of 'top 3' lists as well as other facts to go with those marking fifty and one-hundred posts.

In the last year this blog has achieved a Google PageRank of 4; a Technorati ranking of 61; its most recent Alexa traffic rank is 105,543; the blog has had 43,540 visits with 50,661 pageviews from 141 countries; and it now has 82 subscribers.

Thank you all for supporting 'Bloody Computer!' over the past twelve months.

Top 3 Most Read Posts
1. Free Lightweight Alternatives to Bloatware: 1,113 views
2. How to reboot Windows using the keyboard: 881 views
3. Windows Task Manager Explained: Part 1: 700 views
Data from the excellent Google Analytics

Top 3 Most Commented on Posts
1. Keyboard shortcut of the week: Quickly Open Link in New Tab: 17 comments
2. Keyboard shortcut of the week: a few for Firefox: 13 comments
3. Three tips for buying a new printer: 9 comments
Thank you for all your feedback

Top 3 Most Dugg Posts
=1. Tweak UI: free MS Power Toy for Windows XP: 12 diggs
=1. Keyboard shortcut of the week: New, Open, and Save: 12 diggs
2. Bring files back from the dead: 11 diggs
3. Keyboard shortcut of the week: a few for Firefox: 10 diggs
Data from Digg (the whole countdown is here)

Top Five Commenters
1. Drunken Dragon (7)
2. Eerik (5)
=3. jamie (3)
=3. Search engine positioning (3)
=3. jsanderz (3)
Data from the fancy widget by Blogger Buster (now in the left hand column)

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Another three top freeware applications

It has been a while since I suggested any freeware, but I have recently had need to find a decent video converter, a good FTP client, and some way to back-up my blog.

The free version of Any Video Converter is the best tool that I have found for converting between a variety of video formats including MPEG, Flash, AVI, MP4 and WMV. It even supports capturing video from YouTube and Google video. The interface is friendly and easy to use with a variety of output options.

Although it isn't as popular as it once was FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is still used on the Internet. So you may have need of a decent FTP client. The feature-rich FileZilla FTP Client has an old fashioned two-pane file manager style interface. Various servers can be added to the Site Manager or you can quickly type in the details on the main interface.

If you need to make a copy of an entire website, then you could do a lot worse than use the WinHTTrack Website Copier. Behind the simple wizard-based interface is a very powerful piece of software. Create a project for any site you want to download, select a destination directory and let WinHTTrack create a local copy of the entire site. You can use this program to regularly update the local copy too, ideal if you want to back-up a site without having to copy everything across each time.

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: New, Open, and Save

Just about every Windows application works with documents, which you will create, open and save at various stages. These three functions have associated keyboard shortcuts that work with most if not all the applications that you use regularly. I use the word document here to refer to anything that can be created or edited with software, whether that is a piece of music, an image or some other project.

New document
To create a new document (or in the case of web browsers - to open a new window) hold down the Ctrl key and press N. In some programs you may be asked whether you want to save your current work, this is because they only work with one document at a time.

Open document
To toggle the 'Open File' dialogue hold down the Ctrl key and press O. As with creating a new document, you may be asked to save your current work first.

Save document
To save your current document hold down Ctrl and press S. The first time you save your document the application will generally ask you for a file name to save it with, after that it will probably not give you any indication that it has saved your work.

This is probably the most important of the three as anyone who has lost work through Windows crashing, because of a power outage, or through some other calamity will tell you. Save regularly!

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The Seventh Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the seventh monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Here is another selection of some of the best blog posts offering aid with computer issues published in the last month. I would like to thank everyone who contributed. If you would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion.

We shall start with a couple of posts about quality free software. Mastersystem at TipForge provides us with a set of CCleaner Tips to help us remove all those temporary files that gather on our hard-drives. Speaking of hard-drives, Jules lets us know about a Windows Defrag Alternative at PCauthorities.com.

These two bloggers also offer advice about dealing with Windows problems: mastersystem explains Problem Reports and Solutions in Vista; while Jules shows How to Deal with Uninstall Problems in Windows.

First time contributor, Sai of American (Tech) Sai-ko submitted an excellent post, IE Cookies: Yum!, which contains everything you will ever need to know about cookies in Internet Explorer.

We will finish up with a pair of posts from two regular contributors to this carnival. Resident security expert, Paul Wilcox of Security Manor, gives advice on Removing Spyware From Your Computer and described The 3 Forms Of Computer Viruses. Digital imaging expert, Andrew Edgington, presents two more posts about Photoshop. The first explains about Changing Image Dimentions Using Adobe Photohop, and the second introduces Airbrushing.

See you next month.

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Speak now or forever hold your peace... well until next month anyway

This is the last chance for somebody to volunteer to host this month's Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. If you would like to play host to this digest of some of the best of this month's blog posts that share their author's sagely wisdom leave a comment on this post, contact me through the carnival's web page, or use the Contactify facility in the left column on this page.

There are three options for hosting: first, I can forward you details of all the submitted articles and you can select around twelve of them and write the carnival post; second, I can select the best dozen or so articles and forward you the details of those; third, I will select the articles and write the host and all you have to do is post it on your blog on the 27th July (short notice, I know).

If nobody is interested in hosting this month's carnival, it will appear here in a couple of days time.

If you wish to host a future carnival then please contact me using one of the aforementioned ways.

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