A Dozen Web Sites to Add to your Summer Reading Program

As we enter these dog days of summer, why don’t you take a break and visit some of
these interesting web sites to see if there are utilities you would like to use to
make your life a little easier.

I thank the folks at Nicom IT Solutions, particularly Barry Milne, for sharing these
with us. (The sentences in quotations following the web addresses are how the companies
describe themselves.)

www.xobni.com – “Drowning in Email? Find People,
Email & Attachments Instantly.” Xobni  is “inbox” spelled backward. This
is a clever little utility you can download and plug into Outlook to help you manage
your email traffic.  It keeps track of email conversations and organizes them
by person and topic. It identifies with whom you converse the most and what’s the
best time of day to find them at their computer.

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Managing Your Desktop or Laptop Computer

A few months back I wrote an article about keeping computer networks safe and secure. Now it’s time to write about desktop computers. That shiny new piece of gear you just got for Christmas will be a source of frustration if you come to depend on it and it fails you. So here are some things you should do to keep your system running smoothly.

Get familiar with Windows Help and the Control Panel. Most of what I discuss in this article can be found via the Control Panel. Or you can click Help and Support from the Start button and search for the feature.

Back up your data files frequently. Windows comes with backup and restore programs you can use for this purpose. At the very least, do frequent manual copies of critical data files from your hard drive to an external backup device.

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Holiday Mixture of Advice

Some advice is good even if it’s not necessarily precise. Just the common sense behind it is enough to be worthwhile. Here is one example: A while back, an article on email management stated that if you opened an email message and decided you could deal with it in two minutes or less, then do so immediately and get it out of your Inbox. I can’t remember where I got that from but I’ve been using it ever since and it’s helped me a great deal in managing the size of my Inbox.

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