BPMUG - The Computer User Group Serving Central Connecticut Since 1982

April 21, 2008

Digital Photography Tips

By BPMUG member, Bruce Metzger

It is time to learn more about how to use your digital camera for upcoming vacations and family gatherings! You can take plenty of great photos but then what? Who wouldn't want to share photos? But what is the best way to transfer that great image from your camera to your PC? And to resize it so it doesn't take forever to send via email. Digital photography can be fun and Bruce will show how to make it even more fun! Bruce will give a variety of photo tips and share his secrets on how to enjoy a digital camera and how to get the most out of those photos you've taken.

March 17, 2008

Computer Follies

By Dan Henry -- Dan Henry Technology Support

Professional computer consultant Dan Henry of Dan Henry Technology Support will be coming in to talk about computer follies. Dan has an easy way of explaining away computer mysteries in everyday language. This lighthearted presentation will cover everything from the reason putting your laptop with your checked luggage is a bad idea, to why H.P's off -shore support says new printers are out of warranty, and why your daily back-up job may not really help, and lots more. Dan will share stories of his 14 years of supporting homes and businesses for PC problems. His hope is to help us sidestep many common follies and avoid obvious problems.

February 18, 2008

Back To Basics -- Practicing Safe Computing

By Jim Smith, Owner of Blarneystone Internet Services

Jim Smith will cover the ABC of securing your PC and how you can easily and cheaply protect your PC from outside (and inside) invasions. Jim will unravel the mystery behind various terms such as firewall, spyware, viruses, worms, and more. Jim will discuss various ways that your PC can be compromised and ways to prevent those break-ins. Key to protecting your computer is by having strong password protection. Jim will offer tips on how to create and remember strong passwords without listing them on a post-it note on the front of your monitor. In his business, Jim is required to keep hundreds of passwords for clients and he will share some tips on how he keeps track of those passwords safely using one of the password managers, RoboForm. Jim will show how to use a program like RoboForm to also save info like credit card numbers and how to safely and easily use that information in completing on-line forms.

January 21, 2008

Radically Clean Out All of The Debris in Your PC

John Yearsley, General Manager at Staples

John Yearsley will come in to teach us how to bring our computer back to "the way it was". He will show how to wipe our hard drive (after a careful backup of course!), and how to start over with a new fresh installation of our operating system. He will show how to install all of those programs that we use regularly and how to configure it.

Why would you do this? You get rid of all those lingering temporary files. It completely defragments your hard drive. Any hidden spyware bugs are wiped away. Your registry gets cleaned of all those lost listings. It clears out all the lingering files from programs that were installed and then deleted. You are starting with a fresh new copy of your software. And that's a great feeling!

December 17, 2007

Holiday Party

For our December 17 meeting we had our December tradition -- A Holiday Party! One of our members shared a tip and then we opened the meeting to a party with Hors d'Oeuvers and desserts. For the tip, Barry Gordon demonstrated how to print labels using Word. This is very useful for your home, small business, or club. After Barry's tip, we celebrated the holiday season with door prizes and a raffle with some special give-aways!

November 19, 2007

How To Be Safe While Doing Your Holiday Shopping On-line

Officer Rob Riccobon from the West Hartford Police department

It’s getting close to the holiday season and it’s time to think about that special someone who deserves a gift. What better way to shop than on-line with the whole world at your fingertips. No long lines. No need to park far away and fight through the crowded holiday shoppers. Just select the goodies, add them to your shopping cart, and finally pull out your credit card and complete your purchase. It’s so easy, there’s no reason to give this a second thought... right??

At our Nov. 19th meeting, Officer Rob Riccobon from the West Hartford Police department will give us some tips for a happy and safe on-line holiday shopping experience. Shopping on line can be fun if you do it safely. Officer Riccobon will give tips on how to stay safe on the Internet.

October 15, 2007

Quarter Century Celebration

BPMUG is celebrating a quarter century of our computer users helping other computer users. That’s cause for celebration! This will be a fun meeting while we take a brief look back to what life was like in 1982 with those old computers. We have invited some of our founding members to tell us all about the fun they had tinkering and different BPMUG was then vs. now. Thanks to many dedicated volunteers over the past 25 years we have thrived and now it’s time to celebrate! After our “fireside chat” with founding members, and questions from the audience, we will have our 25th anniversary party with cake and punch.

September 17, 2007

Speed-up, Clean-up, and Maintain Your PC

Presentation by Jim Smith

Summer vacations are winding down and it is time to crank up your PC for a long winter of computing. At the September 17th meeting, we will show you how to gain control of your computer. We will demonstrate a bunch of ways that you can speed it up and clean out some of the clutter that is slowing it down. We will even pass out some “cheat sheets” so you can follow along and see how we do it. Beginners are encouraged to attend this meeting. At the end of the evening, you’ll be able to take your cheat sheet home and put some life back into your own PC. This meeting will be led by the entertaining and educational past President of BPMUG, Jim Smith.

August 2007

Vacation! No meeting in August.

July 16, 2007

Make A Splash with your Summer Vacation Photos

Presentation by Dot & Dan Doll and Barry Gordon

It is Summer and time for vacations and having fun with digital photography. For those of you who have seen Dan and Dot Doll's recent digital photos, you know our July meeting will be a big splash! Dot and Dan Doll, BPMUG members and enthusiastic digital photographers, will dazzle us with wonderful underwater digital photographs they have taken. They will share techniques on how they took their photos as well as some tips on how they digitally enhanced the photos. We have paired them up with BPMUG's Photo SIG host, Barry Gordon, who will give us the highlights of Adobe Elements and give us some ideas on how to enhance our own vacation photos. Summer means fun and what better way to remember all the good times than great photos!

June 18, 2007

How Much Security is Just Right

By John Yearsley, General Manager, Staples in Mansfield, CT

We all know that the Internet -- in addition to being a wonderful and helpful tool -- has become a breeding ground for criminals, thieves, and others wishing harm to us or our data. It is estimated that in 2004, hackers bilked the computer world out of several hundred million dollars. Total related damage done to the world economy exceeds tens of billions of dollars annually.

What do we do to protect our computer from such problems? We install an antivirus program to protect us from the viruses. But we're told that's not enough. So we put a firewall on to keep the evil-doers from entering our computer or sending out data to the world. Then we are told those pesky pop-up ads are because of bugs called spyware. So we get a spyware program or two to keep the pop-up ads from slowing down our computer. Now we are starting to feel secure.

The antivirus program starts monitoring our email which slows it down to a crawl on some days. The firewall starts watching for spyware and checking up on our antivirus program. It loads updates which slows our computer down while it installs in the background. Our connection from our computer to the Internet keeps getting interrupted and someone is blaming it on our firewall. Our browser won't let us sign up to buy a book on line because it doesn't have the right security patch. The firewall keeps asking us if we are sure we want to allow programs to run. We aren't sure so we let it load its programs. We want to buy on-line so we reluctantly enable JavaScripts and Active-X on our browser. And we want to get our email without it running through a sloooow filter so, with some reluctance, we disable the filters. Our antivirus has expired and someone recommended another one so we try to install a different antivirus program. Instead of feeling secure and having a smooth operating computer, the system seems to be going slower and slower... and we are feeling less and less secure.

Come listen to John Yearsley talk to BPMUG about computer security in a new way... how much is not enough, too much, and just right. With all the protection out there, it is now time to find out how to keep our computer secure without slowing it to a crawl.

May 21, 2007

Everything You Want To Know About Backing Up Your Hard Drive

By Shane Schmidt of Pexagon Technology

Shane Schmidt is the Technical Marketing Manager for Pexagon Technology which is a manufacturer of personal storage devices. Shane will be answering many questions we have about hard drive back-ups -- and more specifically he will cover what is a back-up, why it’s important, how often, and different types. He will use statistics that speak to the failure rates of hard drives as well as bringing in some products to show us the different types of back up and back up devices available.

The bad old days of backing up to a stack of floppy disks is gone! Pexagon manufactures the Store-It™ Thumb Drive where one little tiny thumb size drive can hold well over two-thousand floppies worth of data!. These are available in 14 colors and laser engraved with 2 lines of text or a company logo. They've also got portable Store-It hard drives that fit in your pocket and those hold more data than eighty thousand floppies (160GB). Or they have their desktop Store-It ™ hard drive (up to 500GB). That can hold data from over 350,000 floppy disks which is even more floppy disks than AOL sent us over the years (and we got a LOT of those!). With the low cost of disk storage today, there should be no reason not to back up those valuable documents on your hard drive.

April 16, 2007

Viva la Vista!

Presentation by Vista guru, Carl Lyons

Forbes Magazine, in an article titled, "Microsoft Vista: Not 'People Ready'" critically says, "The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications." PC Magazine kindly states, "The new OS is far more than Windows XP with a pretty new face. Many aspects of Vista are substantive improve-ments: stronger security, better built-in apps, networking enhancements, parental controls, --and DirectX 10 graphics support, to name just a few." But elsewhere in the PC Magazine a review summarizes, "Vista offers a lot of improvements over Windows XP, but most of them are conveniences rather than essentials."

So what's the real story on Vista? Why not find out for yourself? Barry Pilver from CompUSA has made arrangements to have Vista guru, Carl Lyons, attend our April 16th meeting and show us a detailed overview of the product.

March 19, 2007

It Was A Starry Night In March...

Presentation by Jason Archer, Planetarium Director at the Children’s Museum in W.Hartford

As a kid, did you ever look up at the skies and wonder what was there? Were you fortunate enough to peer through a telescope and dream of unlocking some of the secrets of the universe? Now with help from computers, stargazing is easier and more fun than ever. Galileo would be astounded to see how advanced this technology has become. Come to the March 19th meeting and you can be astounded as well!

BPMUG's March meeting will be led by the enthusiastic director of the Planetarium at the Children’s Museum in West Hartford, Jason Archer. He will guide us through the skies and stars with three wonderful software programs: Starry Night, The Sky, and Celestia. Bring your wildest imagination of the universe to this meeting and prepare to be dazzled!

February 19, 2007

Jump On-Line With A Free Personal Web Page

Presentation by Jim Smith of Blarneystone Internet Services

Have you ever wanted to build your own personal web site? Something to let you share photos, links, and hobbies? Or with information about your family or friends? Long time BPMUG member, Jim Smith, will be our presenter for the February 19th meeting. Jim will discuss some of the options you have available to get you started. For example, through your Internet Service Provider, it is likely that you can get a free personal Web site with your subscription. They typically have a basic editor as well for building your site. Gone are the days when complicated programming skills or knowledge of HTML are needed to build your site.

Jim will show some of the options that are out there for you to get started. He will demonstrate a couple of the free programs being offered. He will talk about various options that you can use in your web site. Whether you want to learn what a blog is and how to set one up, or just want to share some family photos or to announce your upcoming family gathering, don't miss this meeting. There will be plenty of time at the end to answer your questions.

Jim has his own company, Blarneystone, LLC and has been designing web sites for businesses for 13 years. In 2000, he wrote a book, "How To Start a Home-Based Web Design Business" and the third edition was just shipped to book stores last month. He has agreed to stay after and sign books for aspiring web designers.

January 15, 2007