Are you safe when you use the wireless network at your local coffee shop or airport? Maybe. Maybe not. Are you accidentally sharing your files on your computer? Is your computer “trusting” connection attempts from the other computers at the hostspot? A reader asked me To improve security when using Wi-Fi at a coffee shop [...]

I received a question from subscriber and friend Ralph Campbell, who asked: A number of times I have seen you refer disparagingly of “Active-x controls”. I have seen downloads that require Active X to run properly. I have read the definition of the program, but, I guess I am just dense. What is this thing, [...]

One of my forum readers in my Windows XP /2000/etc forum (which are now shut down thanks to too many spam posts) wrote about a problem he was having. He wrote: IE6 SP1 browser..links take long time to download My computer contains: Athlon 3200gb, 1 gig Ram, I have WinXP SP2 Home, and IE 6 [...]

Firefox has a convenient function in its Bookmark Manager (Bookmarks / Bookmark Managerr). Once you’ve opened BookMark Manager, which opens in a new window, just click on File, Export and choose where to save the bookmarks file. By default, the file titled bookmarks.html. Of course, if you ever need to restore the file — or [...]

In computer terminology, Hot-Swapping refers to being able to disconnect and remove hardware, as well as installing and connecting hardware, without turning off a computer. Generally, this is a dumb idea, since most operating systems and most hardware aren’t prepared for you to do that. In fact, a lot of internal hardware (drives and memory, [...]