Tech Geek

Is your computer not running quite as fast as it did when you first booted it up? Over time, installing and un-installing software can leave behind gunk that slows down your system. This article is going to be focused on Windows PCs, because they're what I know about and because they're probably more likely to have problems than Mac or Linux systems anyways!

There are many different ways to clean up a system and every geek probably has their own favorite tools. These are not necessarily the best tools, but they're the ones that I use and am familiar with. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. As you may have picked up from my posts to this point, I am fond of tools that work and that are free to use. But before I get to those, I'm going to make two hardware suggestions.

The first thing to do is to make sure that your system has enough memory. Windows XP needs at leat 512MB to run and really prefers 1 GB, which is equivalent to 1024MB. Windows Vista needs 1 GB and runs much better with 2 GB of RAM. Installing new memory is, literally, a snap. If you don't know how to do it, find one of your students and ask them to do it for you. I was helping an older gentlemen out last week who was thinking he would need to buy a new computer because his was too old. We spend $60 on memory to take his Windows XP system from 256 MB to 1 GB, did some clean-up work, and now he feels like he has a new machine.

Second, if you are using a built-in video card, you might also surprise yourself at how much more responsive your system is if you switch to an add-on card. This helps in two ways. It moves the processing of graphics data from the CPU to the card and it also releases whatever shared memory you were using for graphics back to the system. I'm not a gamer and don't think you need an expensive card, but even a lightweight card can make a difference.

After the hardware is performing well, it's time to take a look at the software. The first program I would suggest running is CCleaner. You can guess what the C stands for. This tool, available for free with donations requested, scans your computer for temporary files that have been left behind. You do want to make sure that you know what you're deleting, especially when messing with the registry, but this tool will most likely speed up your system slightly.

Next, make sure that you don't have spyware that's causing things to run slowly. There are lots of tools out there, some available for free from Yahoo and Google, and some of which you may have already purchased as a part of your anti-virus solution. There are also some online scams that promise to scan your system and then offer to sell your a program. I'm just guessing, but I think they never fail to find something! I have had good luck with Microsoft's Windows Defender. Run a scan when you install the program and then set it up to scan each evening so it will work to keep your system free of spyware.

Finally, defragment your hard drive to help programs load and run more quickly. Windows has a built-in defragmentation program, but I've found that UltraDefrag, an open source program, tends to work better. One of the things I like about it is that you can set it to run on a boot, so it can defragment system files before they are in use.

Don't forget that I love to receive questions so that I'm talking about things you're interested in hearing about!

Fliers, brochures, registration forms, health info forms, covenants, postcards, newsletters, etc. We all create all sorts of information that we distribute on paper for people to see and maybe return. Sometimes they e-mail us and want us to e-mail them something back so they don't have to wait for the snail-mail. It sure would be nice to send it as a PDF (Portable Document Format), but who wants to spend hundreds of dollars on Adobe Acrobat in order to create those? I know I don't!

If you created your document in Open Office or in Microsoft Office 2007, you can use the Save to PDF feature of either of those programs. You may also use another program, such as Print Master, that has a Save to PDF option. That works great. But what if the program you're using doesn't have that option? You could set up a geeky program called Ghostscript and convert from Postscript to PDF, but that requires a geek and, while very powerful, is a bit inconvenient to use.

The simplest option that I've found is called doPDF, available at www.dopdf.com. It's a free, although not open source, program which allows you to create PDF files on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. It installs as a printer on your system and then you select the doPDF printer from any application that you're using and it creates a PDF file for you. I have only started using it recently, but it seems to work quite well and has received good reviews from other people on the net. It doesn't put any watermarks on your output and seems to generate relatively small files that are easy to e-mail.

Before I upgraded to a machine with Windows Vista, I used PDF Creator, an open source program that works similarly on earlier versions of Windows. They are offering $150 to anyone who can figure out how to make it work on Vista! I like the fact it's open source, but was disappointed when it didn't work on my new system.

For those of you that have a bit more geek in you, Ghostscript, in combination with GSview, can be used to not only create PDF files, but also to convert them to a wide variety of other image formats. This can be quite useful for posting a picture on your website of a fancy poster you created in some program that can't export to JPG. If you are interested in learning more about how to use this program, e-mail me and I'll devote a future space to it.

Don't forget that I love to receive questions so that I'm talking about things you're interested in hearing about!

How many instant messenger clients do you have running? Yahoo Messenger, Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, MSN/Windows Live! Messenger, ICQ, and the list goes on and on. Each one of those clients take a small bit of the power of your computer and when you add them all up, they may be slowing it down significantly. One thing I hate is a computer that is unnecessarily slow.

I have accounts on many of the various messaging systems since I can't get everyone I know to stop using whatever they are using and switch to just one. There has been some progress towards inter-op-ability of the various clients, Yahoo Messenger users and Windows Live Messenger users can now send messages to one another, but you still need to run three or four to stay connected to everyone. There are features that are unique to each client and features, such as webcams, that you can only use within an individual client, and so I do download and install each one that I use. But for general purposes, I have stopped using all the different ones on a daily basis and switched to Pidgin. I set the other clients not to load on system startup and enter all my accounts into Pidgin.

Pidgin, available at www.pidgin.im, let's you send and receive at least the basic text messages from users of:

• AIM
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• IRC
• MSN
• MySpaceIM
• QQ
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• Sametime
• XMPP
• Yahoo!
• Zephyr

It is an open-source program, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and runs on Windows and a variety of Linux distributions. There is also a related program called Adium designed for Mac OS X.

According the the Pidgin website, "Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more."

I haven't used all of these features, but I do appreciate having to only run one program to talk to people from a variety of networks at the same time.

I received this question from an ELCA Youth Ministry Network Member in Kansas: What's the easiest way to do backups that will be stored offsite? We aren't doing any! (arrgh!)

Kudos for realizing that you should be doing backups! So should I and so should everyone else. I do backup some things, but I am not as attentive to it as I should be. This was a challenging question for me because I haven't paid as much attention to is as I should. So I am not able to make one good recommendation, but I will point out a couple of options. My current backup practice is redundancy. I keep things on my UFDs (see last week's post), on multiple computers at the office, and on a variety of online places. What else could I do? What else could you do?

I don't backup my e-mail because I don't have to. As you may guess from my earlier posts, I use a Google Mail (www.gmail.com) account which currently gives me 6355.160193 (and counting) megabytes of storage for me e-mails and attachments. I'm only using about 5% of that space at the moment! All Google services are hosted on their servers and they redundantly back them up and keep them secure.

On my computer, I try and store everything that I might want back under a single folder. Windows makes this easy by providing the My Documents folder. If I use another program that wants to store its data somewhere else, I change the folder to be a sub-folder of My Documents. That way I know that copying that folder to another machines provides some level of backup. I routinely copy my laptop My Documents folder to a shared folder on our network.

You can use the built-in services that your operating system provides. Windows Vista Ultimate, which I am running, has a backup service built in, as do most other operating systems. You could use one of these to copy your data to a portable hard drive, or to another machine on your network. As one example, Amazon.com is selling a SimpleTech SimpleDrive that has 500GB of capacity for only $129.99. I would think that most church offices could copy all of their machines to a drive of that size. Then, of course, the drive needs to be carried elsewhere so that if the church burns down, the data isn't lost with it! And, of course, you need to remember to bring it back in and re-do it every week or so. If you are going to go with a physical backup system, this is probably the way to go. Otherwise you could find yourself going nuts with backup CDs and DVDs stacked to the ceiling.

There are also a variety of online options available. I am not going to try and list all of them here and I have not used most of them. They range from free to quite expensive in price. One of the currenlty free ones, Microsoft FolderShare (www.foldershare.com), allows you to synchronize files between multiple machines. If you set this up between a home desktop and an office desktop, that will keep your files in two places. Good backup security requires a third location as well, so ideally you would find a third machine to synchronize with as well.

• These services provide automatic backup of data from one PC
  • Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) unlimited storage for $49.95/year
  • iDrive (www.idrive.com) 2GB of storage for free; 50GB for $49.95/year
  • Mozy Online Backup (mozy.com) 2GB of storage for free; unlimited for $4.95/month
    
• These services provide space, but you must manually copy files to the service, often using a separate program. They generally allow sharing directly from the internet as well.
  
  • ADrive (www.adrive.com) 50GB for free
    
  • MyOtherDrive (www.myotherdrive.com) 5GB for free; 25GB for $19.99/year; 75GB for $49.99/year; 200GB for $99.99/year
  • XDrive (www.xdrive.com) 5GB for free
  • OmniDrive (www.omnidrive.com) 1GB for free; 10GB for $40/year; 25GB for $99/year; 50GB for $199/year

The time that most of us think about the ineffectiveness of our backup "solution" is about 45 seconds after we realize that our hard drive has crashed or the sprinkler system has ruined our computer and we don't have any of what we've spent years putting together. Planning ahead can make these sorts of tragedies a little less traumatizing.

So, you got a new computer for Christmas, or with that end-of-year budget surplus? Congratulations! But now you've spent the whole budget and you've discovered that your new computer comes with a trial version of Microsoft Office, which is going to stop working in 60, 59, 58, 57...days. You could spend a substantial amount of money in order to convert that trial version to a full-fledged version of the program. Perhaps you could take advantage of an educational or non-profit discount, which is a good way to acquire Microsoft products. (I'll write about this option in the near future.) You may also be able to use alternatives that are free and, in some ways, better. I would like to suggest a few of them.

Open Office is an open source office suite. It includes a word processor, presentation program, spreadsheet program, database program, and drawing program. All of these are able to open and save the corresponding Microsoft Office files. Open Office is developed by many people around the globe and there are new versions released frequently. While it cannot do absolutely everything that Microsoft Office can do, it is able to do everything that most people actually need to have done. It will run on modest computers, of both the Windows and Macintosh flavors. I think it is a good solution for those who are running older versions of Microsoft Office because it is patched and more secure than they would be. Open Office may be downloaded from www.openoffice.org at no cost.

Another option is Google Docs, found at docs.google.com. You need to have a free Google Account in order to use these services. Google Docs includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and simple presentation program. All three of these are able to open and save the equivalent Microsoft Office files. While not nearly as robust as Microsoft Office, these tools provide most of what people need on a regular basis. They also provide a great solution for those who routinely work from multiple machines. Once you sign-in to the website, you can access your files from any internet-connected computer, running any modern operating system and web browser. Another noteworthy feature of Google Docs is that you can collaborate on files with multiple people at the same time. It is very interesting to be editing a file and watch text in another portion of the document get changed as someone else edits the file simultaneously. There are easy ways to e-mail files, download them as Adobe PDFs, and to share Google Docs files with website and blogs.

There are some other options available as well. For a "vintage" computer, Abiword is a free word processor that runs well with minimal system requirements. It can be downloaded from www.abisource.com. It will also open and save a variety of file formats. Some people will need to use Microsoft Office, but for many people, it is over-kill and over-priced and one of these other options will serve their needs quite nicely. I'm writing this article using Google Docs, because I can easily work on it from different computers. If I really wanted to, I could even view it on my cell phone!

Don't forget, if you have questions or topics you'd like me to address, e-mail at techgeek@elcaymnet.org

I do some of my best thinking and planning while I'm driving. Good (and some not-so-good) ideas pop into my head and I ponder them for a few miles, then lose them before I commit them to long term memory or write them down. It might be an item for my to-do list, a person who I need to contact, or a program idea, but most of the time it used to be lost because I didn't keep it in my head until I could actually use it. Enter Jott, a free service that transcribes voice to text and sends it to a variety of places. It's also useful to keep track of those pesky expenses!

Don't forget, if you have questions or topics you'd like me to address, e-mail at techgeek@elcaymnet.org.

What are you up to? Whatcha doing? Busy? I was late to the whole blogging game and late to the mini-blog game as well. I've been playing with Twitter for just a short amount of time and I find it an interesting exercise in sharing what I'm up to throughout the day. Sometimes I only update it once a day and sometimes more frequently. Probably no one even cares! But maybe there are folks in your youth flock that do find it interesting.

Twitter is a service that lets you post mini updates about life from the web (www.twitter.com), by e-mail to a special address, from your phone via SMS or mini-browser, from a Google Desktop Gadget, and probably a bunch of other ways that I have not yet figured out. Each update can only be 140 characters long, but you can post as many of them as you wish. You can also set up people that you want to follow and see their updates in a variety of ways. This is somewhat interesting, but what I was really interested in was ways to post a single update and have it show up in multiple places.

I only update my blog every once in awhile, when I have something I feel like updating about. But, by using the Twitter Badge for Blogger, my Twitter updates are shown right on the blog. So there is at least something new! To add that, I logged into my Twitter account, then went to http://twitter.com/badges and installed a badge on my Blogger page. You can also add badges for MySpace, Facebook, TypePad, and just about any other site.

I also added an application called TwitterSync to my Facebook page. This copies my most recent Twitter update to my Facebook status. The official Twitter/Facebook badge is supposed to do this, but I have heard people had problems and I've had better luck with TwitterSync, available at http://apps.facebook.com/twittersync/ while you're logged into Facebook.

Don't forget, if you have questions or topics you'd like me to address, e-mail at techgeek@elcaymnet.org

Many of us know that Google has practically become a verb up there with Xerox, Band-Aid, and Kleenex. We use it to refer to searching for something even if we're using another site like GoodSearch to do the actual work. GoodSearch is a site that donates a penny or so for each search performed in its site to a charity of your choice, including Lutheran Disaster Response, the ELCA, or Lutheran World Relief.

Google has lots of other great features in addition to searching for web sites. I'm writing this very article on Google Docs, their online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program. I keep my calendar at Google Calendar, because it allows me to access it from any computer or even my cell phone. I use Picasa Web Albums and the desktop photo management software, Picasa (available for Windows, Macs, and Linus), because it lets me easily tag photos and use them in web albums, blog posts, or e-mails. I even use GMail for my e-mail, because of the sorting features, and my chat client.

I use all of these services from Google because they get how the web should be used. I can get into my stuff from different machines, even different technologies. They provide interfaces for other programers to use in developing tools that branch out from these services. I've also used Google to create web pages and, yes, even to search for things! As the ELCA Youth Ministry Network's new Tech Geek, I'd like to share with you, my youth ministry colleagues, some of the ways I've found to use technology to enable ministry and relationships. I'd also like to hear from you about the sites, widgets, and gadgets that you use in your daily life and ministry. E-mail me at techgeek@elcaymnet.org with your suggestions and thoughts for use in a future TGIF.