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Expert Advice
The tips, tricks and tutorials you find on this site are written by some of the brightest minds in their industry. They not only have a passion for their field of expertise, they have a passion for helping others, including you! If you find one of their contributions helpful, we encourage you to tweet about their article. Here are just some of the experts that are a part of our team:
Alan is an expert in the area of email with a wealth of knowledge in Exchange and Outlook. Alan has been an IT professional for over two decades and co-owns his own business which focuses on delivering tech support to the SMB market.
Alan Hardisty
Andrew is a computer technician who has seen many people's computers at their worst state. The majority of issues he deals with are either performance or security related and he will be sharing some of his trade secrets on these topics.
Andrew Duncan
Brandon is web developer with over five years of experience doing Wordpress theme development. His area of expertise spans multiple web programming languages and backend database systems including PHP, ASP.NET, MySQL and SQL Server.
Brandon Campbell
Daniel Park is a guru in the field of media creation. He produces many of the slick videos found on this site. Daniel was part of the talented team at TechSmith, the company that develops the popular applications Camtasia Studio and SnagIt.
Daniel Park
Kelly is a marketing expert that prides herself at being efficient with her time. This has allowed her to manage multiple projects simultaneously without sacrificing on quality. Kelly will be providing Mac and Windows tips for those looking to be a little more effective with their time.
Kelly Lynn
Jessica is an award-winning graphic designer and web developer. She runs her own successful business developing quality brands for organizations around the world. From logo design to illustrations to business cards, she does it all!
Jessica Greenwalt
Laura is an IT support manager for a mid-sized development shop. She has a tremendous amount of experience dealing with hardware, software and infrastructure concerns within a corporate environment. Laura will be discussing various software, solutions, and more.
Laura Reynolds
Michel lives and breathes JavaScript and has been using it since 1996. He has read over 10,000 pages of Javascript books and has even co-written one by O'Reilly publishing. If there was ever an expert in this area, it's Michel!
Michel Plungjan
Tracy is an Excel Extraordinaire! She has a masters in information systems and is currently employed full time as an Excel and Access developer. If there is a complex Excel issue that needs solving, Tracy is as good as any in the industry!
Tracy Broome
Latest Additions
Three New Tricks to Teach Your Old Flash Drive
If you see flash drives as simple devices that do storage well and not much else, the following ideas should be a surprise. You'll get to see a whole new side to your flash drive. You can create a superfast data storage system In general, a RAID drive is a set of hard drives that gives you extra protection against data loss by writing all your data to multiple drives at once. If one drive fails, you can always turn to the others. A RAID 0 drive is slightly different -- it doesn't offer you the safety of redundancy. Rather, it uses multiple drives to speed up data transfer. Whatever you write to a RAID 0 drive is split up into hundreds of parts and apportioned among multiple drives. Since each drive only needs to have a small … Continue reading
Wi-Fi Tips for Better Reception
If you find that the Wi-Fi at home isn't what it should be, try these tips to get it to behave. If you have multiple routers, give them all the same name Since Wi-Fi routers tend to have very small ranges, you will often need to set up multiple extenders even to cover an average-sized home. Setting up multiple routers, you might think to give them different names (SSIDs). This isn't usually a good idea, though. The problem with giving different names to the routers/extenders around your home is that most computers and devices are simply not smart enough to latch on to the strongest signal on the fly. Mac OS X, for instance, always connects to the first item on its Preferred Networks signal list even if it … Continue reading
Why is Windows So Bad at Estimating Copy Times?
When you initiate a file transfer or another file-related action on Windows, the countdown in the dialog box that comes up is usually worse than useless. Windows can wildly seesaw in its estimation of how much time any given process might take, rapidly switching back and forth between several minutes at one point and a few seconds the next. Why is Windows so bad at estimating how much time an action takes? How the misestimations happen When you first start a folder transfer or another operation, Windows doesn't give you an estimate right away. Rather, it waits a few seconds to see how fast it goes, before extrapolating for the entire folder. Simple extrapolations rarely make sense, though. The hardware part of the problem When you try to transfer … Continue reading
Getting Used to Windows 8.1
Microsoft has changed a few things around in Windows 8.1. If you miss a few features, here's how you access them. Miss the Libraries sidebar link in Windows 8.1? The Windows Libraries feature (introduced in Windows 7) is a genuinely useful idea. Before Windows 7, if you wanted to organize files and folders in different places in a way that they could be accessible in one window, you had to either copy and paste them in one folder or create shortcuts to them in that folder. Both methods tend to be awkward. With the Libraries feature, when you want to see folders from different places in one window, you simply need to create something called a Library, click on each folder you need, and then select Include in library … Continue reading
Should You Use the Inbuilt NTFS File Compression System in Windows?
All versions of Windows since 3.1 in 1993 store information in a format called NTFS. Not only does this format offer better security and convenience over the systems that it replaces, it offers a convenient space-saving feature that isn't used nearly as often as it should be: NTFS has inbuilt file compression. When you use NTFS file compression, you get to save on disk space and get access to your files quickly without going through a file expansion step. The downside to using NTFS file compression While the NTFS file compression system offers on-the-fly expansion when you need to access your files, it does require considerable CPU power to offer a seamless experience. If your CPU isn't well-enough specified, you could experience slowdowns. With most modern CPUs, though, slowdowns … Continue reading
You Have Antivirus. How Do You Know That It Works?
If you have antivirus software and firewalls on your system, you may feel safe in the knowledge that you've done your part. How do you know, though, if all your security actually works? What if it simply stops working one day, and you never realize it? It's usually a good idea to actually test your software for effectiveness. Here's how you do it. Test your antivirus While willfully getting your system infected with a virus could help you see if your antivirus still does any good, it's hardly advisable. To help you test your antivirus without risking your system, you need to make use of a fake virus. EICAR, t he European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research, has just the thing you need. You simply need to go to … Continue reading
