Category: Tips

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Backup, Backup, Backup!

If you’ve had your hard drive crash and have lost all your data, I will be “preaching to the choir”, as you will most likely have kicked yourself and then bought an external backup drive already. If not make sure to read this post so you are not kicking yourself in three months about backing up your data.

There is nothing worse than starting your computer and nothing happens. Especially if all your business and billing financial records on on the computer. For any business, student, or computer user regular routine backups should be part of your routine. Businesses should back up their systems at a minimum of once a day and should both backup to the working disk as well as to another network location and to an external drive. Sounds redundant doesn’t it, you bet it is, but have a problem and you will be so glad that you had multiple backups in different locations. For the typical homeowner and student backing up your computer may be best done once a week.

There are many backup utilities and some external drives even come with their own. I use several systems. I use the Windows backup utility that comes with Vista once a week and I use my Seagate External drive back up utility once a day. Once a month I back up to another location in my network.

With redundant backups you can assure that your data is covered and you won’t miss a beat if your system crashes, computer gets stolen, or your files get corrupted.

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Your Website is Down! What Should You Do?

You just looked or a prospect or client emailed you to tell you your website was down, what do you do?

First don’t panic. Sometimes a website will go down because the server at the web host is being refreshed, serviced, or the host had a power outage. Wait for 15 minutes and try to access your site again.

In some cases you will get an error message. Make sure to copy the error message. If you get a reference to your database or header files, don’t call your web host, this is a website and webmaster problem. Meaning that something is wrong with the source code of your website or the database that runs your website has gone down (that may be a web host issue).

If your website is not up in 15 minutes or your get a database error that you have never seen before and your site was working fine before, it is time to contact your web host. In some cases it is most practical to pickup the phone and in others more practical to do a tech support ticket.

If your email is down as well, it is time to make sure that the problem really isn’t that you’ve let your domain name expire or that you did not pay your web hosting renewal bill. Here a prompt call to your web host sales department is in order. Typically if your web host has had a hiccup and our website is down, your email will still be operational.

Personally I have only seen both email and the site go down when the client has let the domain name or web hosting expire. Of course there may be other reasons, but letting the domain expire or even the web hosting expire are the most common reasons.

So if your site is down for more than a day or if your email is down too you need to take action and start by calling your web host first.

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How to Change Your Signature in Outlook or Outlook Express

Have your electronic signature help drive traffic to your Web site by making it a marketing tool! Here are some easy to follow instructions on how to update your electronic signature.

How To Change Your Signature in Outlook Express

  1. On the top menu bar click tools
  2. Click Options
  3. Choose the section for signatures
  4. Click new, type in your signature and information
  5. If you want this to be your default signature, click default
  6. Click Okay

How To Change Your Signature in Outlook

  1. On the top menu bar click tools
  2. Click Options
  3. Choose the section Mail Format
  4. At the bottom, click signature picker
  5. Click new and enter your new signature
  6. Click Okay
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Creating a File Shortcut in Office Applications

I think that you will love this neat little shortcut that I have been using, if you don’t know about it already. Follow the instructions below to add a shortcut link on the system file menu screen for any Microsoft Office Applications. Now, I just wish Microsoft would allow me to create these handy shortcuts from any Windows and systems application.

I’ve inserted an image from one of my file menus just to the right so you can see exactly what I am talking about. As I do not save my files in the My Documents folder, it is helpful for me to have shortcuts to file locations that I use frequently on the file menu bar. Here’s how to do it so you can save time too.

  1. Open the office application of your choice (Word, Excel etc.). Microsoft calls this file menu the “My Places” bar. Navigate to and select, but do not open the folder that you want to add to the menu.
  2. Click Tools and then Add to My Places. Your selected folder will now appear at the bottom of the My Places menu bar. If you don’t see it, right click on the bar and select small icons as it may be hidden for the moment or resize the dialog box so you can see your new folder.
  3. To move your new folder up to the top of the menu on the My Spaces bar, right click on the item you want to move and click move up or move down as needed.

I find the addition of my most frequently used files to be very helpful and only wish that I could do this in all my computer applications. I think that once you try it, you’ll be doing custom file additions to your My Places bar too!