Here are some of the things we looked at, at yesterday’s Computer Club meeting.
Creating new folders, re-sizing them and re-positioning them
… see blog entry for Dec 18
How to use a flash drive … see entry for Oct 28
How to dispose of, or recycle, an old hard drive? See below
How to join Googlemail … see entry for Sep 24.
Think about having another email account ...
~ to use for family and friends (to keep it spam-free)
~ to forward emails from one account to another, so as to back-up
any important ones
~ to store photos, small videos and important documents ~
send them as attachments to your second email address.
Free online storage with Box.net, Humyo.com and Mozy.com
http://www.box.net/
I had problems working out how to load up my files with this. Perhaps I
should have used it more, as some of my files are still on it … this is a low quality image (100kb) of one of my grandchildren.
http://www.humyo.com/ (this one offers 10GB of free space)
http://mozy.com/ (I’ve used this and it worked very well,
but I used up my free 2GB fairly quickly ~ you have to pay for more space.
I accidentally deleted a large folder of U3A photos from my computer, and
got them all back, thanks to mozy).
Moving things around …
Drag & drop
Copy & paste (Rt mouse click or keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + C,
followed by Ctrl +V)
Selecting folders …
Ctrl + A … to select all
Ctrl and a few dobs with your mouse .. to select a few.
For Windows XP users … using a DVD writer to burn stuff onto
a CD (to save some photos and other stuff onto a CD) …
1. Tidy up all areas on your computer … put everything into yellow folders.
Create new folders if necessary.
2. You’ve got 700MB of space to fill on a CD, so after putting on all the
photos, you may be left with another 300MB left to fill.
3. Open up your main Desktop photo folder / “My Pictures”
4. At this point, you could add extra folders of info to the large photo
folder, to make full use of the CD … drag & drop stuff from other folders.
5. Click on the words: “copy to CD” in the left hand side panel.
6. Windows now copies everything in your large photo folder / My Pictures
7. Pop a blank CD into the tray.
8. Windows will now take you through a sequence of actions as it writes
everything onto your CD.
9. Write down on paper the names of all the folders you’ve put onto this CD
(eg 1208pics, 0109pics, 2008u3a, 2009u3a), and today’s date, to keep with
the CD.
For Windows Vista users … using a DVD writer ...
1. Open up your main Desktop photo folder / “Pictures”
Re-size & re-position it
2. Put a blank CD into your computer. This will start up by itself
(autoplay). Select the option “Burn files to disc (using Windows)”
3. When the DVD writer screen appears (after formatting), re-size and
re-position it.
4. You will see a message on the DVD writer screen, inviting you to drag
your folders across to add them to the CD.
5. When you’ve saved all your photo folders onto the CD, you can fill
the remaining space with folders from other areas ~ Documents and your
flash drive … re-size and re-position these windows alongside the DVD
writer screen and then drag the folders across.
If one of them is too big to fit on, you could then strip away some of
the contents (drag & drop into a “rubbish folder”) and then save the
slimmed-down folder.
6. If your computer is a laptop, press the “eject” button to eject the CD,
and then Windows will finish formatting the CD before the CD pops out.
Label the CD as regards its contents as above.
