The Older Geek

Everybody wants a piece of the pie, I always say– your pie! Whenever you download a new music player, for example, that new music player may (and often does) take over ALL media files associations on your computer. For example, perhaps all your media files (mp3, wav, etc) had once played in Windows Media Player [...]

If you download your Gmail into your Windows Live Mail (WLM), you may notice duplicate emails in the handy “Quick Views” folder in WLM. What is up with that? The problem lies with the IMAP settings for your Google account. The fix is amazingly easy, but there’s also a second step that you should not [...]

I work at night sometimes, typing away into the late hours. When I’m ready for bed, I’m READY for bed. I want to kick off my womens boots, shut down the computer and relax. But then I accidentally hit that stupid little “Updates” Shut Down button. Gah! I have to sit in the dark and [...]

Windows Aero is beautiful. But what a resource hog! If you have a computer with a budget graphics card or simply want to squeeze out every bit of processing juice from your computer, ditch the Aero. I do a lot of photo editing and some video editing, and while Aero is pretty to look at, [...]

This trick has been around for a long, long time. But it’s still a good one. Your computer’s HOSTS file is a small text file that maps Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. In layman’s terms, the HOSTS file serves like a small contact list. When you type in, for example, www.theoldergeek.com in your browser’s address bar, [...]

If you’re like me, you write a lot of quick notes or lists or like to open files in Notepad. Notepad is a great little program because it’s just that– little. I don’t like waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my great big beefy word processor program to open when all I want is to [...]

Microsoft completely changed their premier email client, Outlook, with their release of Outlook 2010. Rather than using their familiar “menu bar” interface of previous versions, Microsoft developed a new interface they called a “ribbon.” They assumed that everyone would love this new “ribbon” which supposedly made it easier to see all your choices at the [...]

Windows 7 added a few special new features from Vista. One of them is the Desktop “Snap” feature. This feature allows you to drag an open program window to the top of the desktop, where Windows will automatically “snap” the window to fill half your screen. Doing the same to the other open window will [...]

I addressed the dangers of browser popups in Internet Explorer and how to block them in my post “How to Prevent Popups in Internet Explorer.” You may have followed my advice and set the popup blocker to a high setting, blocking all poipups unless you manually override it or created a whitelist of allowed sites. [...]

Browser popups are much more than annoying. Popups are a security threat. Whenever you go on the Internet, an exchange of information is relayed between your computer and the website’s server computer (and sometimes through a number of other server computers along the way) through open doors called “ports.” Internet Explorer opens certain ports to [...]

Windows 7 is a very nice operating system with many improved features over Vista. I was dismayed, however, to realize that many programs no longer sit neatly in the system tray next to the clock, but sit in the taskbar, clogging up my neat work station. I have used Windows Live Messenger waaaay back when [...]

AutoPlay is a convenient feature for Windows computers. When you plug in a USB flash drive or CD or DVD into your computer, AutoPlay automatically launches the drive and/or the software on the drive. While convenient, AutoPlay has become a vehicle for the spread of malware. If you insert a virus-infected flash drive into your [...]