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Tech No Phobia - Episode 1.3

Tech-No-Phobia

Tech No Phobia airs on Cox Cable channel 9 every Tuesday at 5:30pm MST and repeats on Saturdays at 4:00pm MST.

- COMDEX (International computer show) highlights

- WiFi

- File Associations

- Quick Tip: Ctrl-Enter

- Selective printing of web pages

- Palm OS vs PocketPC

- How do hard drives work?

Resources

COMDEX highlights
We went to Las Vegas to see what the latest and greatest gadgets were on the technology horizon.

We saw Tablet PCs, digital cameras, flat panel displays, cell phones, biometrics, Smart Displays and even some crazy furniture.

Some of the more interesting products included:

- Toshiba's PortÃ©gÃ© 3500 Tablet PC

- the Olympus C-50 5 megapixel digital camera

- Prototypes for the new Smart Display wireless monitors

- Samsung's huge line of LCD and Plasma displays

- A totally new way of looking at computing environments

- Primera's CD/DVD personal duplication system

- Nokia's 6800 cell phone with a full QWERTY keyboard

See PC Magazine's Best of Comdex list here!

Photo gallery of Ken and Brandon's Excellent Adventure to Sin City!!

How do I know which program to use to open a file I get in an e-mail message?
Windows uses the three letter file extension (after the period) to identify file types and associates them with programs that you have installed in your system. If you are asked by Windows to choose a program, this means that there is not currently a program associated with that file type.

Before you try to open the file, make sure you know what it is, since many viruses and worms hide in common file types in hopes that you will try to open them.

Microsoft has listed the following file types as potentially dangerous:

.asp .bas .bat .chm .cmd .com .exe .hlp .hta .inf .isp .js .jse

.lnk .msi .mst .pcd .pif .reg .scr .url .vbe .vbs .ws .wsh

We have posted a chart of common file types and the programs that can open them at:

http://www.computerproblems.com/filetypes.cfm

Learn more about file associations at:

http://computerproblems.com/allcolumns.cfm?columnID=34

Save ink by printing only what you select on the web!
This week's Super Geek Tip of the Week shows you how to take control of what you want to print from the Internet!

Confused about how to buy a handheld computer?
Learn the differences between Palm OS devices and those that run Microsoft's Pocket PC by reading our overview...

How do hard drives work?
The hard drive is a storage device much like a refrigerator is in the kitchen. We place our important information in it and hope that we can retrieve the data when we need it.

The are extremely precise and very mechanical and represent the most likely point of a major failure in your computer.

There are two types of hard drives, those that have failed and those that are going to fail, so keep your critical files backed up!

You can get an excellent explanation about how hard drives work at:

http://www.pcmech.com/show/internal/65/

Trivial Tech Term

Wi-Fi: is short for Wireless Fidelity and generally refers to any of the short-range wireless products that are based on the 802.11 standard. Wi-fi is an easy way to setup a network in your house without having to string cables all over the place.

Tip of the Week

Save ink by learning how to Selectively Print text from web pages: Printing out colorful web pages just to get a couple of paragraphs of text is a big waste of ink!

Most larger web sites, like CNN, have a â€˜print thisâ€™ option to generate a mostly text page of the content so you donâ€™t waste valuable color ink.

But thatâ€™s not good enough for us, because they get to decide what will print, so the next time you need to print from the web, try this tip...

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