Finding a trustworthy place to get your computer repaired can be a difficult thing to do. Some shops want to keep your computer for weeks at a time, cutting down on your productivity. Others have you wait in a long line just to drop off the computer. It can be a frustrating experience just to talk with someone about your ailing computer.

There is a better solution. Allyte Technology Solutions repairs computers in Knoxville and Maryville, Tennessee. We provide friendly, personal, cost-effective computer service at your location. On-site service allows us to ensure the computer works properly and eliminates the hassle of dealing with messy cables and wires.

Call Allyte Technology Solutions for in-home or in-office computer service. You won’t be disappointed.

In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 1“, we established that Windows PCs are often targeted because of their large market share and that the brand of your computer makes no difference because viruses, spyware and malware occur at the software level.

To protect your Windows computer, the first and best rule of protection is to use your head and be pro-active in your browsing and clicking habits. This typically means two things:

1. Only visit websites that you know can be trusted
2. Use caution when clicking on links in e-mail that are unsolicited

Let’s look a little closer at #1:
How do you know which websites can be trusted? There is a difficult tension here – if you visit only the sites you already know, there are many useful and informational websites out there that you will miss in an effort to be cautiuos. But, if you go out willy-nilly and click on every site that comes up in the search results, your computer will get infected with malicious software sooner or later.

So the answer lies somewhere in between. More experienced users can take a little more liberty in clicking on unknown sites, but naive or less experienced users will need to be more careful when visiting unknown websites.

The truth is that malicious websites will do their best to look like a legitimate, reputable website. But these same sites will do damage to your computer that can be difficult to recover from.

Let’s look a little closer at #2:
E-mail is also a popular way to direct people to websites that are harmful not only to your computer, but to your privacy. If you get an e-mail from a financial institution, never click on the link in the e-mail. Instead, go to your browser to access the institution’s site directly.

It is very possible that the legitimate-looking e-mail you just received will direct you to  a “phishing” site that will extract your login information and allow someone else to access your accounts and information.

In Part 3, we’ll consider two types of software that can help protect your computer from viruses and spyware.

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Need to get a message out to a group of people through a phone message? You could spend several hours making the calls yourself. You could pay someone to do it for you. Or you could use DialMyCalls.com.

DialMyCalls offers a free subscription that will make 1 call per day to a maximum of 25 people. The message is limited to 30 seconds or less in length and will be branded with a DialMyCalls message. A premium subscription is available with fewer restrictions and no branding.

It’s an easy service to use, with only 3 steps required to make a phone call:

1. Create a new message
2. Setup your list of people to call (an address book feature is available too)
3. Select your call options and schedule it to call.

That’s all it takes to make automated phone calls to the people you need to contact. Give DialMyCalls.com a try the next time you need to call a group of people.

Does your decision-making process look like the one on the left or the one on the right?

Image from Zapproved.com

The decision-making process quickly and easily becomes complicated and convoluted with dozens of e-mails flying in and out of mailboxes. Zapproved.com helps your group streamline the decision-making process and keep the feedback all in one place.

To use Zapproved, you can begin by simply creating a proposal, or by signing up for a free account. The free account allows users to send 5 proposals/month; each proposal is kept for 30 days. Paid accounts start at $12/month for unlimited proposals and storage retention.

Those who serve on committees or work with groups often to make decisions will find Zapproved a simple and user-friendly tool to facilitate discussion and decision-making.

To learn more about Zapproved click here.

How do you keep up with your to-do list? Is it on paper? In your email account? As long as your system works, it’s a good one.

I have used a combination of tools to help me keep my to-do list in order. Most of the time it works pretty well.

Between visual cues (items left on the desk or by the door to remind me), items in my GMail Inbox (I send emails to myself a lot), and an online to-do list for repeating tasks, my bases are pretty well covered.

As for the online tools, I have found a couple of websites to be especially useful. For the past year, I’ve been a user of RememberTheMilk. It’s a versatile site that allows the user to organize their to-do lists in a number of ways. The free version of the site is feature packed, but if you want any integration with a smartphone (I’m on an iPhone, myself), you’ll have to annie-up for the Pro version, at the tune of $25/year.

When my RememberTheMilk account came up for renewal this year, I chose to let it expire and go looking for another tool with similar features. A quick post on Twitter yielded some great feedback. Thanks to Jason Heydasch, I learned about Toodledo.

The free version of Toodledo has as many (probably even more) features than RememberTheMilk’s Pro version. The Toodledo iPhone app is only $2.99, a considerable amount less than the yearly fees at RememberTheMilk.

One of the most useful features of Toodledo is the ability to seperate tasks by context. I work out of at least two different offices during any given week, so this feature makes it easy for me to see only the tasks that are relevant to my focus at the time.

At first glance the interface of Toodledo might seem overwhelming and slightly rugged. But take a few minutes to look over the introduction and explanation of features. I quickly picked up the interface after I understood a little more about how it worked. It’s actually quite intuitive, highly customizable and versatile.

In my opinion, Toodledo is one of the best to-do management applications available, with a feature set that will work for most anyone, smartphone integration at a reasonable cost, and lots of plugins and widgets to help you keep track wherever you are online.

The Joomla! Article Manager is one of the key elements of the Joomla! Content Management System. Take a look at the video here to see the basics of how to use it.

Joomla Article Manager Overview from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.