Computing Tips 

#1  Computer Triage Services

Computer Triage offers affordable, ethical, and personalized services to the home and small business community.  To find out why you should try our services over our competitors, take a good look at our list.  Why Use Computer Triage?

#2  Backup, Backup, Backup!

The single most important tip we could ever offer is to backup your data.  Whether your data are pictures of your family, intellectual property for work, security logs or applications, this data won't be available if it is inaccessible. 

#3  Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is the care and regular servicing of materials or equipment.  These services of inspection, detection, and correction at regular intervals are necessary to reduce overall costs, extends its useful life, and increases reliability and performance.  The services we provide are for both hardware and software and is extensive.

If you would like to learn more about preventive maintenance, contact us for consultation or service. 

#4  Strengthen Passwords with Unicode and Character Placement

I am sure you have read, heard, or have been told how to create a secure password sometime in your computing lifetime. The usual uppercase, lowercase, numerals, special characters, and a length of at least 8 characters, right? But is this enough?  The main reason to create a secure password in the first place is to keep others from obtaining your password easily. By using the various types of characters you can create or generate from your keyboard and the number of them in your password makes the difference between a weak password and a strong password. This in turn makes it easier or more difficult to crack. By increasing the types of characters and the length of your password increases the number of possible combination a person must go through or compute, which can be in minutes to hundreds of years based on their method and computational power available to them. Each added character in length to your password "potentially" with entropy, doubles its strength.

Crackers, or password crackers are people, but is also referred to an application that is used to crack or break passwords. These programs use various methods of guessing or brute forcing every possible combination in order to obtain your password. I won’t go into these programs or the methods of password cracking, but knowing how to secure your password or making it literally impossible for someone to retrieve your password is my ultimate goal.

Here is the usual list of creating a secure password, but I have added two additional items that you need to be aware of as well:
  • use uppercase letters
  • use lowercase letters
  • use numerals
  • use special characters (shift+)\
  • use at least 8 characters (15 characters or greater is much better)
  • use Unicode characters (alt+hex (0-9, a-f)) (example: alt+0128 = “€” (Euro currency symbol))
  • use at least one special character or Unicode character in the 2nd-6th place of the password
By adding the bold items mentioned above, you increase the complexity and strength of your password significantly.

#5  Keyboard Shortcuts

A keyboard shortcut is a key or set of keys that performs a predefined function which is used in a Windows graphical environment or other menu type of interface.  These keyboard "shortcuts" reduce the time it would normally take to perform the same function using another input device such as a mouse.  Shortcut functionality works within specific applications or operating systems.  

The following PDF files contain basic shortcuts for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.  If you don't have Adobe PDF Reader, you can get it here: 



Download Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

Download Macintosh Keyboard Shortcuts

Download Windows, Macintosh, and Linux Keyboard Shortcuts

#6  Should You Leave Your Computer ON or OFF

One question that comes up quite often is should you leave your computer on or off? Before you can answer this question you need to know how the computer is being used. If the computer serves a mission-critical service it must remain on at all times. If the computer is a standalone or non-mission-critical machine, then the next question is how often do you use it. Once these questions have been answered, then and only then can you answer the question on whether leaving it on or off is best.

Computers are very similar to humans in that they have subsystems that work individually and together with other subsystems. These subsystems like video and audio for example can be turned off, disabled, or used when needed. The problem with this is the reduction of convenience in maintaining these. One way to control these subsystems is through power management features through standards such as ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) that can power down specific components or an entire computer when not used. This leads to the last issue of power cycling, chip creep, and environmental issues that happen when a system is turned on and off frequently. When a system is cold and is powered on, the fluctuation of heat and cold causes components to contract and expand, which when done very often causes them to crack or break away from the card or motherboard they are connected to. If you use your computer daily, leaving it on is always better then turning it off and on daily, because not only does it save wear and tear on the components, the power management features can put these devices in sleep or standby mode, which reduces power consumption by maintaining a low voltage to specific required components (motherboard, CPU, memory), which increases the life cycle or lifetime usage. These power management modes of operation are many, but the most basic states are as follows:

1. Standby/Sleep
2. Hibernate

Standby/Sleep Mode:

This mode or state of operation powers down everything but the motherboard, CPU, and memory depending on your requirements. The benefits to this is you save energy compared to being fully powered and you can use your computer quickly by waking it up using your mouse or keyboard.

Hibernate Mode:

This mode or state of operation saves everything currently stored in memory (RAM) to a file on your hard drive. The benefit of this is that when you return to your computer for use, the hibernation file that was saved is used and allows you to return to exactly where you left off prior to hibernating. The only cost of this is the time it takes to power on your computer and return to where you originally hibernated from.

In order for all this to work, your computer’s BIOS, operating system, and hardware must have the capability to use these power management modes. The good news is that almost every system today is able to use this technology because of government “Green” standards and requirements.

I encourage you to use these power management features in your systems. You will be pleasantly surprised how much money you can save by using this technology and also reduces the load stress of our nation’s power plants.

If you would like to learn more about power management, contact us for consultation or service. 

#7  Credit Card Purchases

Pay by credit or charge card. If you pay by credit or charge card online, your transaction will be protected by the Fair Credit Billing Act. Under this law, you have the right to dispute charges under certain circumstances and temporarily withhold payment while the creditor is investigating them. In the event of unauthorized use of your credit or charge card, you generally would be held liable only for the first $50 in charges. Some companies offer an online shopping guarantee that ensures you will not be held responsible for any unauthorized charges made online, and some cards may provide additional warranty, return, and/or purchase protection benefits.

#8  Extend the Battery Life of a Notebook, Laptop, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

  • Use a cooling pad and proper ventilation to prevent overheating which increases fan usage and decreases performance when CPU "throttles" to a slower speed.
  • Purchase a low-power CPU device that decreases power consumption but at the cost of a reduction in performance.
  • Purchase a smaller screen or form factor device that will requires less power to operate.
  • Eject any optical media from their drives that may spin automatically when media is detected.
  • Remove any external device or peripheral that is not currently in use.
  • Reduce the screen brightness of the device.
  • Purchase a better battery with more cells or better technology like a fuel cell battery.
  • Adjust "Power Options" in Windows or use other power management features of the device.
  • Use solid state drives instead of hard drives, which use less power.
  • Turn off or disable any devices like WiFi, bluetooth, irDA, modem, network card, and any other internal/external cards.
  • Reduce background processes, services, or daemons that are not needed.
  • Use "hibernate mode" instead of "standby/sleep mode" when away for an extended period of time away from the device.
  • Single-task instead of multi-tasking when using programs or applications, which reduces CPU usage.