urban legends, email hoaxes, and Internet lore - oh my!

Urban Legends & Internet Lore
Is Penny Brown still missing? Is Bill Gates giving away his fortune? Did those 2 guys really catch that catfish? What about President Bush fishing in flooded New Orleans after Katrina. We get these emails all too often that clog our inbox and spark fear or wonder in us...It's time to stop the madness!

Before you forward that email about the Giant Cat or the Shark attacking the helicopter, check the email's validity at urban legends on the about.com website. They have a Top 25 list of the most popular topics for the past week, a search you can perform to find an urban legend, myth or hoax, and while you're there, take the quiz to test your knowledge - is it real or is it fake? You'll be surprised how many of these things you've received in your inbox and about.com will give you the information you need to find out if it's true or not.

xm radio and xm online

Do you have an XM Radio in your car?

I'm currently leasing a 2005 Honda Accord which came with an XM satellite radio. I love the variety of the channels and the commercial free music channels. I'm also a NASCAR fan, so the NASCAR channel is great to listen to when I'm on my way home on any Sunday afternoon - I don't have to keep looking for a station broadcasting the race on the FM dial since XM doesn't lose signal.

If you have an XM radio subscription, you can also login to the website and listen to the channels through your PC. The channel lineup displays what songs/programs are currently playing and you can also create a preset lineup of your favorite stations! I have a pretty good speaker setup with subwoofer, so it sounds pretty good!

basic pc health and preventive maintenance

I really need to get started posting regularly to this blog, but am finding it difficult to manage my time between 2 jobs, 2 kids, 1 husband, 2 stepchildren, 1 grandson, a dog, a cat, etc...

the list just goes on and on and on...

one thing that has caused me to lose a great deal of time is trying to clean off all the junk that has a way of infiltrating my kids computers. Once about every 2-4 months, one of them has a crisis and can't get on the Internet; we have 4 pc's running on a wireless network in our home. When this happens, I have to reverse engineer what they've done then spend hours upon hours attempting to repair the problem or restore the system.

Here are some basic things you need to keep your computer healthy and running smoothly:

1. Install antivirus software and keep it updated!

2. Make sure that system restore is turned on if you are running Windows XP

3. Use a firewall like ZoneAlarm, or if you're not sure how to do that, at least turn the XP built-in firewall on.

4. Install an ad removal program like AdAware and/or Spybot Search and Destroy and update and run them regularly to make sure you're pc is not being bomarded with spyware and adware. These can cause your system to run slowly because some malicious spyware/adware actually runs processes in the background.

5. Keep your Windows Operating System up to date - turn on the automatic notifications and install the updates as soon as they are available.

More to come...

I do have a purpose, here...really!

this blog was created as a place to store interesting computer, Internet, pc security, pc repair, web design, and any other computer realated tidbits, info or stories that I run across or think about. Please feel free to comment and/or send me information you feel may be relative to this blog.