March 2011 Q&A

Task bar moved

Q: My grandson was playing with my keyboard and somehow moved the taskbar to the top of the screen. I can’t move it back.

A: That can happen from people and even a cat that’s sleeping or playing on the keyboard. To fix it, right click on an empty spot on the taskbar and uncheck Lock the taskbar if it’s checked. Then left click on the taskbar and drag it to the left or right edge and then to the bottom. Checking Lock the taskbar should keep it from getting moved again accidentally.

Effects of the Internet

Michael: I want to discuss the effects of the Internet, and especially Facebook and Twitter, on recent news in the Middle East. Many observers say that Facebook was a major way that people were alerted to rallies, marches and other events, without having to distribute fliers or other written material. For many people around the world, Facebook is replacing e-mail, and, in fact, the fastest-growing segment of users is those over 50. Facebook messages were used to convey information, sometimes with code words. The number of women at one of the Egyptian rallies was reported to be the most women in the square in recent history.

Search engine optimization

Q: Can you explain how search engine optimization works?

A: A lot of the hype for it is just snake oil, but the idea of search engine optimization is to make your Web site move to the top of the list — or at least the first page of search results. Google has not fully explained how sites are ranked, but two things are clear: Keywords that people would use in a search should be in the title of your page, and the more legitimate sites that link to your page, the higher your ranking will be.

Optimization is most important to people using the Web for sales because people generally don’t go far beyond the first or second page of results when they search. People who sell search engine optimization, also called SEO, will usually be involved with the site for several days and charge large amounts.

So-called "link farms" can hurt your ranking, rather than help it, and Google has declared war on blog sites that are just link farms. One good way to get more links to your site is to take part in discussions and message boards that cover the material you’re trying to sell. At first, just post information or answer questions from others to promote yourself as a knowledgeable person. Later, post a note about your site, with the URL, and explain how it can be helpful to those reading your notice. Lots of people who take your money for SEO will promise lots of things they can’t deliver and do things that might hurt your ranking. Although it can make for long titles, your page title should have all the words that might be used in a search, something like "Paul’s amazing beech wood bird feeders and bird houses for your backyard."

Rick Curry: Cascading Style Sheets are also supposed to be important, according to what I’ve read.

Michael: Interesting. I hadn’t heard that.

Another approach to improve your ranking is to ask webmasters of related sites that are good to link to you.

Wireless devices

Q: Is N the best wireless standard right now?

A: Yes. Wireless routers and other devices have changed over the years because of frequencies they use. You might have noticed sometimes that a portable telephone has problems if someone turns on your microwave (the two run on the same frequency). N is the newest standard and has the longest range between the base station and the device.

Q: What’s the best brand of router?

A: That’s often a matter of opinion.

Most of the Internet runs on Cisco. Those of you who remember IBM computers might remember its laptops. When IBM decided to get out of the laptop business, Lenovo, which made the laptops, asked if it could buy the business and for the last two years before IBM got out of the business Lenovo asked to use both names on the laptop: IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo. As time went on, the Lenovo name got bigger and IBM got smaller until it disappeared. The same thing, I believe, is happening with Cisco, which bought Linksys. I think the name Linksys will ultimately disappear.

I don’t think there’s that much of a difference, but as a tech guy who has to work on the things, I want a company that lets me talk to a human being when there’s a problem.

We’ve trained the computing industry that we want to pay as little as possible for a device, and that means there’s not going to be much support. The exception is Apple, which costs more but provides the support. If you buy a $300 netbook and something goes wrong, you might as well throw it away because it’ll cost $200 to fix it. High-end, expensive items are an exception. If you pay $800 for a gaming motherboard, there will be support for it.

Tracking links to Web sites

Q: Is there a way to track "back links," that is, sites that have linked to you? My ISP said it has a way to do it.

A: I’ve never heard of that, but if it does exist it would be expensive, not something you’d download for free, because of the limited interest in such a tool.

‘IPocalypse’

Michael: I’m usually the person who comes up here with things to scare you, but I want to discuss something that will get a lot of attention even though it will have little effect on most of you anytime soon. There are only 4.3 billion possible numbers for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and the last one was given out last week. While 4.3 billion sounds like an impossibly large number, if everyone has five devices that need an IP address, such as cell phone, computer, router and so on, the number of addresses in use grows quickly. The current IP is IPv4, which is listed in this format: 207.178.213.229. The newest version, which will make many more addresses available, is IPv6, which will be shown as 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:73 34. (The first address is for cipcug.org; the second is a sample of the new protocol.) For the moment, this makes no difference to people who already have IPs. It will ultimately mean changes to routers to allow the additional addresses. Most of you will never have to worry about this. For instance, do any of you know what IP you have at home? It is probably not 192.168.1.1 but something from your ISP like 72.75.79.244 (mine at the moment). There IS a possibility that yours could be 192.168… from the ISP, but if that’s the case, it’s running a router on its end to take care of all of this for you (and to manage its pool of addresses). Bottom line: There is probably nothing you will ever need to do about this subject.

New search engine

Michael: There’s a new search engine you might want to try at bleko.com. It’s still in beta, but you might want to try it. I like its clean page, which doesn’t have a lot of ads, as opposed to some search sites like Yahoo that fill the page with all kinds of ads and other things.

Search requests

Q: How do search engines handle search requests?

A: Basically, the same way your home computer handles a search for a single word. It is a database that uses similar search technology as your word processor or spreadsheet. When you type Ctrl F (find) and a word in the search box, the program will compare that with the index of what’s in the document and take you to that part.

Q: What if I use a question like "What is the best router for home use"?

A: It seeks out the most important words, "router," and "home use." "What is" will lead to one set of results, "How do I" can lead to another. You can trim most searches to just the key words.

Q: Does capitalization make a difference?

A: No, but quotation marks do: "find these words" will show results containing those words in that order, while find these words (no quotes) would give results for the individual words. (There are other ways to limit searches, but if you don’t want to learn all the Boolean methods, Google offers its advanced search, which lets you search for exact words, some words but not others [i.e. cats and dogs, but not raining] and site-specific searches, among other things. — Editor)

I think Watson sort of cheated on "Jeopardy" because the computer got a text file of the question and didn’t have to understand English like the rest of us do. Watson was doing a massive search. But the fact that the computer beat the people is still a groundbreaking move for artificial Intelligence and its search abilities. On another related matter, there was a kerfuffle between Bing and Google recently, with Google charging that Bing was stealing its algorithms because search results of the two engines were remarkably similar. Google said it proved it by developing a Web page with a made-up word, and within three days the results were the same as Google’s. Bing said of course it looks at Google results and furthermore that those results would be the same because the Google page was the only one that had that word. Most of the industry agreed with Bing in this case. The results weren’t exactly the same, and that’s not surprising.

Rupert Murdoch

Michael: The death of newspapers is not a big surprise to most people because, while many older people read papers, the younger ones are getting their news from the Internet and other sources. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. is starting a paid news site for only the iPad that is more magazine-like than newspaper-like. He’s hiring lots of reporters for just the site, but one of the problems he’ll have to face is that there will be very few stories that will be exclusive to the new site and not available on the many free news sites. Movie and TV DVDs face a similar problem. I was in a Thousand Oaks Blockbuster not long ago looking for the sixth season of "MI5," a British TV show. Blockbuster is in bankruptcy, and I was talking to the clerk about how things were going and whether she had the show I wanted in stock. She had never even heard of it. The variety and volume of content available through the Internet can never be matched by a physical store with physical products. I think the future of all video is on the Internet through such things as Roku, which has many free channels and several hidden channels, including TV.com, which has CBS, Showtime, CW and several other networks with full shows the day after they’re on TV. (It is probably also coming directly to your TV as it gets smarter and more Internet aware as the months/years go by)

Future of WiFi

Q: Will WiFi be the thing of the future rather than using cable?

A: Let me put it this way, people do not drive horses and buggies any more, but there are still horses. There are still horses and buggies for daily use if you are Amish. They will not disappear forever, but I think wireless will be much more prevalent. One of the reasons is that as a person working at Ventura County Computers we have many clients that are offices of doctors. They by law cannot have this computer wirelessly connected if it has patients’ data on it because of the Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPAA). I am not a lawyer or a doctor, but it my understanding that this data cannot be wireless. If you go to your doctor, the person behind the counter will be using a computer. It is illegal for it to be wireless. No, there are certain applications that must be hard-wired. Now, if the law changes, the computer hookups could also change regarding data stored on a computer.

In another situation, I do not want my ATM to be wireless. I want it to be hardwired inside the bank because I do not want someone in a van out in the parking lot when I am using the ATM somehow receiving wireless copies of something I am doing. There will be certain applications that will always be wired until things change. I could be wrong, but that is where I stand right now.

Understanding megas

Q: Please help me to understand different types of megas. Some have to do with amounts and others with speed. Sometimes I have to pay a certain amount for a storage device of a certain size, and other times I am paying for a service that provides me with download speed. What is the distinction and practical way to go?

A: I can see you are holding up a smart phone with a data plan. You have a device that can connect to the Internet, but you are not connected to this building’s wireless router and connecting to the Internet through it. You are connected directly to your carrier’s cellular connection to the Internet. There are two numbers: The first number refers to the speed that comes from the air, from the cell phone towers to the device, and you have a number which is your monthly cap.

You can upload or download only so much volume of stuff; there is a limit. When you go over that limit, you will pay a huge amount of money, which means you do not want to watch "Hawaii 5-0" on that device. Two days of watching stuff from the Internet, getting your email, watching You Tube, etc. and you are done for the month, you will have hit the cap. The speed in which the material you want from the Internet comes down is totally a different number. You can have a huge fire hose, but how useful would that be if there is nothing behind the firehouse except one 5 gallon bucket of water? That is where you have a difference.

For home users, you do not normally have a cap on the volume you can get from the Internet. Whether you are on dial-up, which would be a tiny trickle of a faucet to DSL (which, if you imagine water, is a good way of thinking about it) your Internet Web pages come in a little faster and finally you get Verizon FiOS (fiber optic). You are talking fire hose there; that is the fastest available in this area, and, as long as you are unlimited, perfect. Do you need a fire hose? My home DSL — I just upgraded from the basic plan and went to the 3,000 or 3 Mbps (megabits per second). I am not getting that, I am only getting 1.5 Mbps, but that is fine for me. Let me demonstrate with my Roku box here.

Watch the screen. Here, at this meeting site, our speed is amazing. See how long that retrieving took? At home, the retrieving may be a little slow, but once it starts it will be fine. The slow connection I had three weeks ago would get to about here and the whole thing would freeze and it would just say "catching up, catching up." See the blue progress bar? As for me, I do not need anything faster than 1.5 megabits per second. Any more than that is a waste of speed (and my money).

Speed home users need

Q: How would that apply to a home user and what speed might be available one could practically use?

A: Basically, video is the big thing. For e-mails, it makes no difference how fast your connection is. Do any of you think your e-mails come in too slow? Nobody really cares (unless you’re still on dial-up and people are e-mailing you pictures). If all you’re doing is e-mails it does not matter, but where it does come into play is video. This is the future, and if you are not watching videos in your house coming from the Internet yet you probably will. How many of you do not own one of these boxes (Roku or Netflix streaming DVD player) or are slightly interested in it certainly before Christmas time? How many of you already have one? Look at those hands. This is the future.

The good news is you do not need more than 1.5 Mbps; 3 Mbps would be great. DSL is still coming through the phone line and then converting to Internet stream. My phone line coming into my house is not clean enough to get faster than 1.5, so it is a waste of money to pay for any more. At your house, you may have a different connection.

Testing a phone line

Q: How would I find that out?

A: You will need to call the phone company and ask it to test your lines and it will tell you how far you are away from the switching office. Do you have DSL at all or are you thinking of upgrading it?

From the audience: I have DSL, and it is great. I also qualify for a faster rate. I paid for the faster rate, and I am still 1.5. So I called AT&T, saying I might qualify electronically from your schematics, which appeared that I would get the speed, but I am not getting that speed. They sent out a technician to verify that I did not get that speed, and they refunded my money. The point is, if you ask for the 3 do not pay for the 3 until after you test it because you may still be getting 1.5.

A: Very good point. In my case, the price of the 1.5 and 3 Mbps was the same. I have had my 3Mbps for only 72 hours. I think the thing that makes the most difference is how far from the hub or switching office you are. If your house is at the end of the line, that will make a huge difference than if you are right next door or close to the switching center.

Computer turns off if printer goes on

Written question: Desktop computer turns off when laser printer is turned on and off.

A: Your computer is powered by an uninterrupted power supply (UPS)? Tough question. If your laser printer is connected to your computer by a USB cable, I would replace that cable. In the future, there will be no wires at all. As you were saying before about wireless, I am reminded that someone gave me a fax, printer, scanner machine, which is now in my home. My computer is not connected to the printer by a wire at all. What I did was to connect my printer to my router so that when my wife is in the living room, she is actually getting a lot of work done. She has a laptop on the coffee table, and she works while the TV is on. Now she is thrilled that all she has to do is hit Ctrl + P to print. and in the bedroom it spits out whatever she was working on. That’s cool for her. She doesn’t need to know how it works, or why it works.

Q: The printer is not connected to the computer when it is switched off. They are not plugged into the same power supply.

A: This sounds more like a wiring problem in your home. When a laser printer is turned on, it causes a big surge of power. It also sounds like your laser printer is old.

From the audience: I had the same problem with my laser printer. I had a four-box circuit, 20 amp panel I brought from my office, and that solved the problem. The house wiring was not adequate to accommodate the entire load when that printer came on. It did not turn anything off, but lights dimmed, and you knew it was sucking a lot of energy.

Time Warner pricing

Q: Can you talk some more about Time Warner because I have the middle tier?

I also have another question — the CDs that are sold at Costco and other places, like we have for raffle prizes, for music — are they the same type of disk as for data now?

A: Any cable speed is higher than the highest DSL, which would be at least 3 Mbps.

Time Warner offers "up to 10 Mbps," "up to 15 Mbps" and "up to 20Mbps." (Fig. 1.) Verizon, my telephone provider at home, offers DSL at 768 kbps to 1 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps, 4 Mbps to 7 Mbps and finally 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps (Fig. 2). According to these charts, you are getting the best deal of the two (price over speed).

As to CDs for music and data, yes, they can be used for both. How many of you have an iPod or an MP3 player, and how many of you still put plastic into your car radio? The radio installed in your next new car will probably not have a disk slot; it will have a hole into which you plug a jack that connects to a portable device.

Good news, they do make CDs that are just blank music CDs. If you want to spend the money, go for it. I believe the music CDs differ from other blank CDs and they are supposed to last longer and be of higher sound quality. However, if you are going to play the CD only twice in the next 100 years, what difference does it make what quality it is?

Q: Did you say that you use your iPod and headphones while you are driving?

A: No. What I am saying is that my car radio has a hole in it so I have a mini jack wire that has one end that goes into the headphone jack on the iPod and the other into my car radio and then music comes out of the car speakers. I also have a car radio that has a USB jack and an SD card slot so I can have a USB stick with all the Beatles on it and I plug it in and it literally goes through all of their albums. When I am tired of listening to the Beatles, I unplug the USB stick and plug in a stick for Mozart or something else.

Defragging issue in Windows 7

Q: I had a quick question. When I had XP and defragged the hard drive, a graphical interface came up and showed you how badly it is fragmented. In Windows 7 it does not show up. Is there a way to see that?

A: That is interesting. No, the Windows 7 version of defrag doesn’t have that pretty graphical display as it works. By the way, Windows 7 SP-1 is out and by the time you read this in The Outer Edge you can find it through Windows Update. If you want it today, you can Google it and get to the Microsoft download page (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx? FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda) and you can manually download it and be up and running. It is a huge update so they cannot give it to everybody at the same time. If you go to the Web site it is available for 32-bit and 64-bit. Size of the SP1 is 500 MB for 32 bit and 800 MB for 64 bit. The Service Pack would not be an optional update. From the audience: I was gone for three weeks, and when I got back, my Windows 7 had 14 updates it downloaded during the time I was gone. A: To tell what version of Windows you are using, go to Start, right click on Computer, left click to Properties, and it will tell you what version you have in the middle of the screen under system like you see here (Fig. 3). If you are buying a new machine and want to have 64 bit, you are going to need at least 2 GB of RAM, and 4 GB RAM would be better, a very good processor and new hardware. The safest and more economical all around is with 32 bit, especially for those who are upgrading old hardware and have not had any higher than 32-bit machines on XP.

Defragging in safe mode

A: Every couple of weeks I defrag my computer, and while I was waiting for it to defrag, I read the fine print, where it says for best results, defrag in safe mode. Is that actually true?

Q: Yes. Partly because of the speed. When you try to defrag in regular mode in Windows 7 it will work; it just takes a lot longer. For best performance and speed, I use a third-party defrager which I believe is on the CIPCUG freeware flash drive. I do not even use Windows defrag. It is Auslogics Disk Defrag, a free and extremely fast disk defragmenter that will speed up your computer by optimizing the file system. If you Google it, there will be a free Download — for Auslogics Disk Defrag and Auslogics Boost Speed (Fig. 4).

Degragging the registry

Q: From the audience: What about defraging the registry?

A: Anything to do with the registry, I tend to be a bit leery of. I have discussed this with others, and anyone who claims they can do something to the registry to make your computer 100 percent faster — well, a lot of registry stuff is snake oil. It really does not do what you think it does, it is just one big text file. No big deal, but if you want to play with yours, you can. Just make sure you back up everything before you try anything with the registry.

Repartitioning in Windows 7

Q: Is repartitioning the hard drive in Windows 7 easy?

A: Using the Computer Management tool in Windows 7, it looks like this. I got there by tapping the Windows key and typing "computer" into the search box. Computer Management will then show up at the top. Click it and then double click on Storage, double click on disk management and you will see your drive 0. Here you see mine is divided into System Reserved 100 MB NTFS (DO NOT TOUCH THIS) and C: 148.95 GB NTFS. Now you are saying you have two partitions, a C and D is that correct? You would like to shrink D and make C bigger. OK — the first step is BACK UP. This process is not for everyone.

A: Start with D: Right mouse click and select Shrink Volume (Fig. 6, next page). Let it do it. Click apply and then go into your C drive and extend. FOR EVERYONE: Back up everything before you attempt this, just in case. For instance, if you had someone in the house running a laser printer at the same time, you would not see anything again. As I understand it, you may want to just eliminate the D partition and give all the space to C. Great, just make REALLY sure you have copied everything out of the D partition. and then you would use the above steps but select Delete Volume. Then you can Extend the Volume of your C to use your whole drive.

Backing up in Windows 7

Q: With Windows 7, can you back up to more than one drive and also to an external drive?

A: Yes. In fact, the Windows 7 backup is designed to accept an external drive or even a secondary drive inside your computer. It works best not in the C drive but somewhere else. In fact, there is one available now at the raffle table. It is a 2 TB external hard drive. If I take that out of its box, plug it in now to this machine to which it has never been attached before, plug it in, wait 10 seconds or so until it is recognized, and go to back up, it will immediately realize what it is and be able to back up to it. Tomorrow, I get a different one, I plug it in and I want to back up again, and it will do it just as easily. I can make a backup image to every hard drive in the world if I wanted to; there is no limit. How do you recover?

How many of you have your Windows 7 install CD? Actually, that is not really important. When you finish the image backup, on the left of the screen, it will say Create System Disk; click that, get a blank CD, plug it into your drive, it will burn it. Label it "Recovery CD" and put it somewhere special. Now some day I discover that this hard drive is dead. I literally unscrew it, pull it out and put a brand new hard drive in, turn the computer on with the CD in the disk tray and it will boot to the CD and say, "There is nothing on this hard drive, what do you want to do?" Pick I want to restore the image on the external hard drive.

Starting the image program

Q: Where do you go to start image?

A: Very simple. Click on Start, (or tap the Windows key) type "backup" and you will see "Backup and Restore" at the top (Fig. 7). Click on it once and you will see the screen in Fig. 8 (next page). On the left you will see Create a system image. Click once.

If you have more than one drive in your computer or an external hard drive like the wonderful door prize today, a 2 TB HD, then when you click on the Create a system image your computer will ask "Where do you want to save the backup" and if your external is plugged in, it will see it and suggest that as the best place to back up to.

After you create your system image, grab a blank CD and click on "Create a system repair disc" as seen in Fig. 8, click and boom, done. The repair disk is really cool. It is not an entire copy of Windows, it is just enough for you to restore your image. It also does a little bit like a check disk on there in case your computer does not boot, you can try the repair disk to do a general check disk, that sort of thing. Again, this was so smart to have built this into Windows so that you do not have to worry about third-party stuff anymore. They got that right finally.

Now if something should happen and you do not have a Windows Disk to re-install Windows, no problem — just boot with that system repair disk, make sure your external HD is plugged in and it will restore EVERYTHING — programs, e-mail, data — automatically.

This is really helpful if this hard drive starts running out of room and you want to get a bigger one. This is exactly what you do. You back up to an external hard drive, create a CD, which is part of the program, put in the brand new, bigger hard drive, restore your image, and you will then not need me anymore. I should not give away my secrets.

Partitioning is unnecessary in Windows 7 (my opinion). I remember back when Gene Barlow was promoting Acronis, a backup program, in fact he did a webcast for one of our meetings. I understand the concept of having separate partitions for Windows, data, etc. for the purposes of backing up (partly, I understood, because the backup medium was smaller than your whole HD), but it is no longer needed with Windows 7 and external hard drives. If you want to keep doing it, so be it. It is your computer. If you want, there are already videos on YouTube that demonstrate all of this. There is something new coming soon called Windows Premiere, Microsoft Premiere. However, we will discuss that when it drops. Right now, it is not available to the public.

Support for MailWasher

Q: I have MailWasher for free, but I do not know how to run it. Do you know where to get the specific instructions on how to use Mail Washer?

A: Basically, you can Google "MailWasher." What I understand is that it’s a third-party spam fighter. It looks at your e-mail when it comes in, and it washes it by trying to separate your Viagra ads, getting them out of the way and junk you do not care about. I am not sure if it includes a free anti-virus program. Google it and see if there are frequently asked questions or how to use it.

Q: I have done that, and it comes up with a lot of third-party comments and so forth.

A: If you get a free program, you can guess what kind of support you are going to get. However, you came to the right place, you paid your membership and you are getting free advice from other users. Getting something free on the Internet — and I have heard about MailWasher and it is not written by someone in the Ukraine trying to sneak something behind you, but supporting it is tough for the people who made it because they let it be used for free. So I do not know the answer, but I know people who have it installed. I do not know how good it is, or how it does what it does. If you do find out, please come to the SIG next month and share your information with all of us. You could try reading this: http://www.mailwasher.net/frequently-asked-questions (A quick start guide for the paid version of the program is at http://www.firetrust.com/en/products/mailwasher-pro/quick-startguide. — Editor)

Support for Picasa

Q: How about Picasa and how to use that program?

A: This is a free photo editing program, although you can Google "Picasa users group" or something like that and see what tips and tricks and suggestions are given. I like IrfanView (also on the CIPCUG flash drive) because Picasa to me is a little more complex than Irfan-View. It does the same thing, but Picasa, I feel, is really more for Adobe Photoshop users who do not want to pay for the Photoshop program, but still want to have all the tools and the tool bars and things like that. However, it can be very confusing. Ask if anyone else uses Picasa and what they think of it. (The official Picasa help site for the program and its albums is at http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=14609. — Editor) Browsers are slow

Q: I have Internet Explorer, and it is taking forever to open up any Web sites; however, Firefox takes even longer. Is it the settings, or what could be the problem?

A: Just do not use Internet Explorer; seriously, use Google Chrome, just install it temporarily, go the same Web sites and see how fast they load. Only use Internet Explorer when you absolutely have to for possibly your bank or other sites that need it. I am actually even moving away from Firefox, but Internet Explorer security holes are being found all the time. PARTICULARLY Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Also make sure you have all the latest Windows updates. Check how many toolbars you have, whether you see them or not. To uninstall them, go to Add/Remove Programs, uninstall because although you do not see them, they are still there and could be one of the problems.

I had a customer in the shop yesterday asking, "How did I get this?", "How did I get that?", etc. A lot of you see pop ups that say Java needs to update or Adobe Acrobat needs to update and those you need to update. However, when they come up and say, "OK, we are updating. Do you also want the McAfee Security Scan?" and it is already checked, "also do you want the Ask toolbar?" and that is already checked, etc. Be very careful and look for the extras with boxes already checked and uncheck them if you do not want them. You just want the update, nothing else, no free additions such as toolbars, some complexities, and other stuff. There are a lot of those hidden things now. The good news is that almost all of them have a check box saying, "I also want this, that and I also want to sign up for the newsletter, e-mail advertisements, etc." Uncheck all of those because you want only the update.

Automatic defrag in Windows 7

Q: Windows 7 automatically defragged my hard drive. Why would I want to defrag manually when it does it automatically?

A: You just ignore others and let Windows do what it is going to do automatically. Now, there are some people who want to be in control of their computers. They can do whatever they want, but you do not have to.

Russian spam

Q: What is happening with the e-mail ads I am receiving? I thought I got rid of most of them, but now I get some from Russia.

A: Matt Cutts is the man who is responsible at Google for cutting down spam in gmail, and it is his job to write algorithms. Google is taking it very seriously, but it is an arms race. Eventually someone will find a way to get around it and they will come back.