Subscriber Ray Lenz wrote after my articles recently
Terry,
I enjoyed your Q & A with Alice. I’m 76 myself and slowing down a little with my computer savvy even though I have been working with computers since 1966. I was a programmer on an IBM 1401 with 8K [...]

Recently, subscriber Peter Killick had a question about protection from downloads:
I was under the impression that my combination of a router plus a software firewall completely prevented anything ever being downloaded on my computer over the web without my approval, typically indicated by clicking a button. My router is a Netgear, properly and carefully [...]

Longtime subscriber Greg wrote to ask:
Terry, My desktop has started to have a couple really aggravating problems and I wanted to run them by you. 1) Every morning when I go to check my email before work, I find that all my desktop icons have disappeared and I am looking at the wallpaper only. [...]

Subscriber James McClellan wrote to let me know he was finally successful with backing up…
Terry, I hadn’t been able to get my external back-up drive to work since buying a new dell. At your recommendation, I tried Karen’s Replicator ( www.karenware.com ) It worked great and I’m now doing daily backups to the external drive. [...]

One of the easiest ways to document web pages and other printable content is to “print” them into a PDF file. Adobe’s Acrobat program provides a printer driver to create such files from anything that you can print.
Of course, Acrobat is out of reach for many people, or at least, we don’t have any desire [...]

As a long-time personal computer user, I learned the importance of backing up my data long, long ago.
There are just too many things that can go wrong when you’re working on your computer. Whether it is a hard drive that goes bad (or a floppy, in the old days), or a mental lapse on the [...]

If you don’t already have a home computer network and want to set up one, it’s easy. In fact, it’s so easy that I recommend that ANYONE using a high-speed Internet connection should use a router for the added security that it gives their computer.
A wired or wireless router (wireless routers normally have 4 wired [...]

Once we have our home network set up, often, our next desires are to be able to copy files from one computer to another and to be able to share a printer among multiple computers.
Sharing files is usually an easy step, except that Windows likes to protect us.
The first step is to open My Computer [...]

Why should I network the computers in my home?

Convenience, so you can share files and/or printers and/or the Internet connection
Backup, so you can copy critical data files (e.g., your Quicken data) to the other machine for backup
Computer access, so you can surf the Web while your spouse or kids are doing email or playing games

Basic [...]

Do you search the web using Google? I do. It’s easy and you can find the answer to almost any question via the web.
Some people, though, are intimidated by the search engines at Google.com, Yahoo.com and Live.com (the renamed MSN.com) among others. The only real problem between them is that they don’t all use [...]