It probably comes as no surprise, but it seems most people ignore routine computer maintenance and only think about it when disaster strikes. A survey done of Staples “EasyTechs,” indicated that more than 80 percent of the chain’s customers don’t bother with routine maintenance and most of the problems they call in the techs for could have been prevented. Do you perform any maintenance on you PC?

The problems the techs found included the personal record number of viruses cited above as well as some much, much ickier ones:

• Enough dust inside to fill the tech’s hand-held vacuum
• A family of cockroaches living quite comfortably, thankyouverymuch
• A bee’s nest. Yes, a bee’s nest. You know, those flying things that go “bzzzz” and sting you? A nest of those.

The techs suggested some easy tips for users that could potentially result in the techs having less work to do, but possibly getting fewer bee stings:

• Keep your antivirus software up to date. Only a third of the 105 techs reported their customers had the current versions.
• If you have a Windows computer, use Windows Disk Cleanup to safely get rid of temporary files.
• Keep your computer in a well-ventilated area and clear out any dust or dirt that’s gotten into the case.
• Defragment your hard drive regularly; it organizes your hard drive to maximize your performance
• Check regularly for updates to your OS, whether it be Windows, Mac, Linux or other, and make sure you download any security patches.
• Back up stuff that’s hard or impossible to replace – photos, music, important files – on an external hard drive or flash drive. More than 85 percent of the techs said virtually none of their customers backed up data.

In other words: Don’t be like most people and wait for your computer to crash and die an ignominious death before seeking help.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Final is now officially available for download. Other then being the Fastest Firefox Ever, new features include a Private Browsing Mode to hide browser activity, a JavaScript engine known as TraceMonkey, new location services, Open Video, and HTML5 support.

Firefox hands down, best overall browser for everyday use.  I have found that Google’s Chrome is still faster than Firefox 3.5, however Chrome has a whole host of other issues.  Reviewing thier download stats at:

http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

Show’s millions of downloads so I think the word is out.  Everything works great.  The only missing feature so far is separate process for tabs. I hope that comes with FF 4.    I think the main reason I use Firefox instead of any other browser is because of the plugins. Forecast Fox Enhanced makes planning around weather a no-brainer, Adblock makes surfing the web less annoying, and Google Preview is a great upgrade to vanilla Google.  Not to mention, it’s pretty fast and feels light-weight.

WHAT IS GOOGLE WEB DRIVE? Mac users at MacRumors forums noticed that Google’s recently released Picasa for Mac offers the option to move image collection to Google Web Drive. The company remains silent on the finding while most view this as an indication of imminent launch of the so-called “Gdrive service.”

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc. This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google’s execution could set it apart.

Stay tuned . . . .

Lucky for those seeking to find a great solution to the news delivery, Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh has developed TweetNews. TweetNews combines the results from Yahoo news and compares it with the topics which are hitting Twitter. The service then organizes the Yahoo News based upon what has popularity among individuals using Twitter. This will deliver a search engine that tracks breaking news using Twitter search results. Which will give individuals using Twitter exposure to more detailed information regarding breaking news Tweets.

It is interesting that we are now trying to combine legit news information with social news updates. The concept is promising, but it has a log way to go.

It’s been a while since I have used thsi blog to post anyting.  Well that’s about to change.  Start looking for big changes coming and a lot of new content.