Yesterday, I saw an e-mail on our internal Labs e-mail list about an idea to create a message board site for the Survivors of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, I thought what a great idea and went on about my daily work.
Today someone told me a small team of our technical staff had taken it upon themselves to turn that idea into a reality. In one of the most altruistic efforts I have seen in some time, EarthLink staff members produced Katrina.EarthLink.net.
If you are looking for someone and/or would like to let people know you are okay, visit this site. Please tell people about this site and link to it on your web sites and/or blogs.
Recently, we have received the same question a number of times so I thought I would address everyone’s question in a brief post.
The majority of questions start out something like this: “John/Jane has been sending me e-mails but they’re being blocked. How do I fix this"?
First, let me get the disclaimer out of the way. The Protection Blog e-mail address was put in place to allow readers to communicate with the authors. The feedback e-mail isn’t for getting technical support. We have many avenues set-up for that which you can access here.
From the descriptions most gave in their questions it appears you need to add the people that aren’t able to send you e-mail to your address book. When you have your spamBlocker setting on high only those people in your address book can send you e-mail - directly to your inbox. Please keep in mind this is only the case when your spamBlocker setting on high.
If someone NOT listed in your address book were to send you an e-mail, it is held in your suspected spam e-mail folder until you select it to be moved to your inbox. If you want that person to be able to send you e-mail directly to your inbox in the future you’d need to add them to your address book.
Microsoft released 6 new security patches yesterday. If you haven't gotten them yet, go get 'm now.
The Washington Post has a nice article explaining the current security issues. The scariest bit is that even if you use Firefox, you still need the IE patch. And, of course, you have to use IE to get the patches.
The EarthLink Protection Blog provides information and tools to enable Internet users to stop online hazards and annoyances and get more out of their Internet experience.
This post goes under the "... get more out of their Internet experience" part of that statement. I came across this article and thought you all might benefit from reading it.
5 Easy Ways To Speed Up Your Laptop
by Nathan Holsing
Does your notebook seem slower than molasses these days? Do you often find yourself coming to the point of heartache and even yelling a few choice words at your machine? If so, then the simple steps listed in this article are for you.
In this article we will take a look at some of the easiest things that you can do to automatically speed up your laptop. And as a bonus, all of these tips can be done for free!
1.) Defrag - How can defragging your hard drive speed up your notebook? Maybe by explaining how a defrag works, you will see how important it is.
When your hard drive is new and has no data on it, things get stored in blocks easily. When files and/or programs are stored in nice chunks, they can get accessed quickly – This is why your hard drive is blazing fast in the beginning. As time goes on things start to slow down. Files get deleted and this creates empty blocks in the hard drive.
New files and programs will get saved to these empty blocks, only they aren’t all together – They are spread out. When files/programs are spread out among different blocks of storage, they get accessed much slower. Defragmenting your hard drive brings related files and programs back into a nice big block. This is achieved because your computer knows which files and programs are related through their address.
2.) Empty Recycle Bin – This one is pretty self explanatory, and may even seem like a non issue. Maybe it is, but there are plenty of people that keep their recycle bins full, all the time. If something is in the recycle bin, you might as well empty it.
3.) Erase Temporary Files – The internet as well as your operating system often store temporary files in special folders. These temporary files are just that, temporary, but they often stay on your computer for a number of days or even indefinitely. I don’t recommend going and deleting stuff in folders if you are unsure of what you are doing. Thankfully though, there are many programs out there that will go through and delete unnecessary files for you.
You can set many of them up to run periodically, and they will do many of things talked about in this article. You can find many of these programs on freeware download sites.
4.) Spyware & Adware Removal – Both spyware and adware are real computer killers these days. You have probably been bombarded by offers to buy programs that will get rid of all the junk on your computer – The simple answer is you don’t need to get these programs. You can find freeware ones all over that will work great. I like to use two programs simply because sometimes one will find stuff that the other won’t. My favorites are Ad-Aware by Lavasoft and Spybot – Search and Destroy.
5.) Hard Drive Space – Ok, I’ll admit, this one may not be free. If you have deleted everything off of your hard drive that you possibly can and you still have a shortage of space, you are simply going to need a bigger hard drive. If you have less than 500 megabytes still available for storage space, I highly recommend getting a bigger hard drive, as a computer with a filled up hard drive will perform very sluggishly.
By periodically doing all of the above you can generally keep your notebook in tip-top shape, and save your yelling for something else :)
