This is an old but still valid article from the Register-News. Enjoy.

Are you giving away your information?

Probably. Pam sent an email question that definitely needs to be covered: “…how does one go about purging all the information from an old computer so that there is no way anyone can glean information from them before they are recycled? I have heard that there are still ways to get information from them even when you think you have completely purged them?”

There are two parts to that question, and I’ll tackle the last part first. Yes, it is very easy to retrieve deleted items from a PC, especially Windows. The simplest way to retrieve these files is if you just delete it. From there, it can just be restored from the Recycle Bin.

However, even if you delete a file from the Recycle Bin, it can still be found. While Windows will let you think that the file is gone forever, that is not the case. When Windows deletes a file, it actually just deletes the ‘address’ of that file so that the space can be overwritten. This is fine as long as your computer is not stolen and you overwrite that space. Unfortunately, the space may not be overwritten for a long time, or ever. This means that the information is still available on your hard drive.

A large amount of software is available that serves the sole purpose of finding deleted files on hard drives. Some of this software is quite costly, but you can find free programs that perform the same job – finding information that you don’t want found. This software comes in very handy in police investigations of criminals, but can be dangerous if your PC is donated, trashed, or stolen.

So now we have a tool/machine that you use, that has personal information such as passwords, photos, emails, and more. That personal information can be retrieved by most anyone, and even for free. How do we solve this problem? Well, that would be the answer to Pam’s first question.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN.org) is the answer to this issue. I have personally used DBAN many times to clear both personal and business PCs. From the DBAN website: “DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.” DBAN can be downloaded free, burnt to a CD and used with simple instructions.

DBAN accomplishes its ‘data wiping’ by writing across your entire hard drive with ones and zeros several times. I am no data forensics expert (the people paid big bucks to retrieve erased information), but DBAN uses Department of Defense quality data destruction. If the DoD standards are met by this software, it probably can handle deleting your emails to grandma and bank passwords.

My warning: DBAN WILL COMPLETELY ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE. NOTHING WILL BE LEFT.

This means no operating system such as Windows, OSX, or whatever you may use will be left should you be donating or selling the old PC. People probably won’t want a PC with no operating system, but your information should be gone. I suggest including a CD with Linux for them to install if you don’t feel like reloading an operating system on the PC.

Linux is free and quite easy to use in today’s distributions. My personal preference is Kubuntu (Kubuntu.org), but there are many to choose from and they are all free. I am beginning to collect old PCs to give to disadvantaged youth as well. Not everything can be used, and I will cover recycling next week. If you have questions, please drop me an email.

This is an old article from the Register-News, but I still use Linux for my operating system and use Google Chrome as my primary browser.

I use Linux as my operating system instead of Windows, specifically Kubuntu (kubuntu.org). Deep down, it is very different from Microsoft’s offering, but in general they run a lot of the same programs. Google’s Chromium browser has been available for some time for Windows, but still is not a stable release for Linux, so I have been waiting to try it out. Finally, I decided it was time. Here are my opinions.

To begin, my reason for leaving Firefox (mozilla.org) was that Firefox has a memory leak. This is something that Mozilla has not fixed over the last few releases, and if you leave your machine running for any amount of time (as I do at work) Firefox will continue to keep expanding its hold on more and more memory. Eventually this makes Firefox and your whole system run very slow. The only way to reclaim this memory is to reboot your machine.

After having to reboot my machine at work several times, I decided that it was time to explore optional browsers. Several of my co-workers have been using Chromium for a few weeks so I gave it a shot. After installing the browser (chromium.org), I first went looking for extensions. If you don’t recall, extensions or add-ons are ‘mini-programs’ that add features to your browser.

My main requirements for Chromium to stay is that my extensions be available to make the browser useful. The short version is that I found Adblock (blocks ads in webpages), Xmarks (synchronizes bookmarks and passwords across different computers),  Google Voice (voice.google.com), Forecastfox (weather), and Chromed Bird (Twitter) all available for Chromium.

My first test was passed. Now can Chromium work without crashing, bugs, and hogging my system memory? The short answer is mostly yes.

Chromium has not crashed in the week I have been using it. It has an extremely simple interface, and is very ‘clean’ in its presentation. If you cannot survive without the File, Edit, and other drop-down menus, you might not like Chromium. It presents very few buttons – back, forward, home, and an address bar by default. To the right of the address bar is a Settings drop-down menu. Below that row is space for a bookmarks bar, which is quite nice to keep your favorite sites one click away.

A feature of Chromium that I like is the address bar is also the search bar. This makes sense as the browser IS from Google after all. Being big on privacy like I am, I worried about how much information Google would be harvesting to sell to marketers and such. After some looking around the web, I found out that they keep track of EVERYTHING you search for using the bar. Good or bad is up to you to decide, but I went into the settings and turned off that feature. It means the bar isn’t quite as good at predicting my searches now, but I’m willing to accept that.

The negative that I have found while using this browser is that some buttons on a few sites do not operate properly. In the rare case where a site doesn’t work properly, I fire up dependable Firefox and do whatever I need to do. From what I understand, this is not an issue in Windows or Mac versions, so most of you reading this should not have the button problem.

Overall, Chromium does take a little getting used to, but it has extensions, imports your settings from Firefox or Internet Explorer, and does not eat your memory. I think it is definitely something to check out if it sounds interesting to you. Also, neither Firefox nor Chromium seem to be as vulnerable to attack as Internet Explorer. Go give an alternate browser a chance, you might like it!

This is an old post, and Charter no longer uses Twitter as a support method. Many other companies do still use Twitter however.

For those of you who are not aware, Twitter (http://twitter.com) is a site and service that lets you post messages or your thoughts up to 140 characters. This size was chosen because Twitter was originally updated primarily using text message, and that is their limit.

Twitter has evolved from just thoughts and messages, however. Twitter is used to provide news, weather, comedy (jokes), gossip (kinda news), and many other types of information that its founders say they never expected. Put simply, if it can be put into words, Twitter can be used to relay the information.

On Twitter you choose whom to follow rather than being forced to watch everyone’s updates. This makes it easy to pick just a few people or friends you like to keep up with, or follow everyone under the sun if you want to try to keep track of their updates. Many people choose to follow a few celebrities that they like, some local and international news feeds, and of course their friends.

One way that I have found very convenient to use Twitter is for customer service. I know it seems hard to believe, but several companies have service departments that do nothing but monitor social media (Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc.) for customers with problems, needs, and praise.

Personally I discovered that Charter Communications has a Twitter team by accident. I ranted about some problem I had at that time using @Charter, and got a surprising reply from Eric Ketzer who is now Charter Communications’ Social Media Communications Manager. (the @ symbol is a way of mentioning another user so that they are notified) Eric actually has a whole team of people who help monitor social media (SM) outlets and assist Charter customers as needed.

Recently, Eric agreed to answer some questions from me for this article, and here are the questions and answers.

1. Why/how did you get started using Twitter as a support avenue?

We started taking a serious interest in Social Media in mid 2008. We monitored traffic on various Forums, Consumer Advocate sites, Blogs, and Social Networking sites. When we decided to start proactively engaging in January of 2009, Twitter was our top priority. The site is pretty open and has a really good search engine which allows us to find and engage our customers in real-time. We have since moved into all the areas mentioned above, but Twitter still accounts for over 70% of our traffic.

2. What are some advantages/disadvantages to support via 140 chars?

There are definitely tone limitations when trying to operate within 140 characters, really when using any written communication, but Seesmic and TweetDeck have both incorporated TwitLonger functionality, so if we feel it would be best to not break-up the communication between multiple tweets we can do that. Still, for the most part, we stay to 140. If we can reduce the dialogue to 140 we are more efficient and can get more accomplished to help our customers.

3. How do you measure success of your interactions?

Like any business organization we have key metrics that we have put in place to determine how successful we are as a team. We are particularly focused on how we are perceived in the Social Media spaces, how efficient we are, and how much SM traffic we are actually able to work. But the real measure for us is the thanks we get from our customers after we have been able to help them.

4. Oddest request?

Ya know, I started my career as a Sales Agent on the phones over 11 years ago. While I have definitely seen much more creative language used from folks in the SM world, the oddest requests that I can think of have all come from customers on the phone. Our SM customers are pretty no-nonsense. They may have used the full creative potential of their 140 in their initial post about us, but they usually have really great questions or legitimate concerns, and we are happy to be able to take care of them.

5. Additional thoughts from you or your team?

The one piece of advice that I think will help organizations that are considering engaging in Social Media the most is it is about Customer Service not Social Media. I see a lot of companies jump in these spaces, and they seem to spend more time tweeting about the power of tweeting than actually taking care of their customers. The companies that are the most successful are focused on taking care of their customers not becoming the next Social Media Guru. If you jump in fully prepared to resolve customer concerns in real-time, you cannot fail.

As you can guess, Charter is not the only company with a team dedicated to social media, however my experiences with them have always been positive, and they are an active company in our community. Should you have need of Charter’s help on Twitter, use @Charter and they will respond – quickly from my experience.

If you need assistance from another company, it may be to your advantage to ‘@’ whatever their company’s Twitter account is using for an account name. Twitter is busy, but usually not as busy as a call center where many, many other people are calling in to address an issue. Generally, they will be more concise and direct since they only have 140 characters to use in communication.

Hopefully this has been informative for you, and if you would like to follow me on Twitter, I use the account ‘danvoyles’. Happy Tweeting!

This is a reprint from several years ago.

I’m sure most of you have seen compact fluorescent lights (CFL) in the stores, and I’m relatively sure that like our family, you have been using them in your homes and/or offices.

Back when we changed from standard filament bulbs to CFLs our home electric bill dropped about $20/month. Apparently we leave lights on a lot around the house. Still, most everyone should be able to notice at least a moderate drop in their electrical usage since a 60-watt CFL only uses 13-watts of power. That is less than 1/4 the power used for the same amount of lighting.

I have to say the perceived light from these bulbs has greatly improved in the past 5 years as well in my opinion. When we began replacing bulbs as they burnt out in our home, we would only get the 100-W versions (really only 23-W) since they only seemed to actually put out what a ‘normal’ 60-W incandescent bulb did. Now, we can buy the 13-W CFLs and they provide plenty of light to read by in a small room.

In our experience, you still ‘get what you pay for’ with the CFL bulbs. The no-name bulbs that are less expensive also seem to fail sooner and don’t provide as much light as the name-brand bulbs available for just a little more.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to using CFLs as replacements for tungsten-filament bulbs. CFLs do have mercury in them, which can be poisonous to people and animals. To protect us in everyday usage, most CFL manufacturers have begun putting a layer of plastic around the actual CFL tube to prevent mercury from escaping.

However, even with the breakage protection, there is still the problem of how to dispose of the bulbs once they wear out (after a few years). Some larger cities have begun offering recycling for these bulbs so that the mercury does not get to a landfill and then possibly into our water. Thankfully, Lowes will take the bulbs for recyclying locally. Please think about the environment and the future before tossing a CFL into the trash.

Another option is to use light emitting diode (LED) bulbs. LED lights for common use are still very expensive at about $20 per bulb. Also, they are not available that I’ve seen in stores yet. My search for LED bulbs led me to the Internet, where I found quite a few spotlight bulb replacements and very few Edison-type bulbs.

LEDs are great in that a 9-watt using bulb can replace a 100-watt standard bulb, and they can last up to 20 years or more. These bulbs contain no mercury like the CFL bulbs, so there is less pollution or poisoning risk as well.

To summarize, if you haven’t converted to CFL bulbs yet you might consider it to reduce your utility bill and energy usage. Please think of the environment before tossing them out though. If you can afford it, you might also consider the LED technology and its advantages over CFL bulbs.

This article is a reprint from some time ago for the Register-News. I am going through and posting the archives online.

Fifty cents does not buy you a good computer. Some think that they can pick up any deal of the week at the local discount store and go edit home movies. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Purchasing a new computer is quite similar to buying a new car in that there are many options to consider, including what your primary use will be for the new PC.

If you are like a majority of users, the ‘deal of the week’ at your local department store might be okay to use for a little while, but eventually it will slow down and become frustrating. One reason for this is that programmers create software to use future hardware, not current.

If that programmer designs a program that operates on a high-end dual-core processor with 6GB of RAM, then by the time the program is tested, fixed, and shipped, your ‘deal of the week’ PC from a year ago with a low-end dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM will struggle.

Here I will try to offer my opinion of what type of PC you should buy, and include some reasons for minor changes according to your unique needs. This advice may seem extremely simple, but hopefully it helps those of you who will be purchasing a new PC after the holidays or this spring.

The first and most important thing to do before you decide what to look for is to take stock of what you do with a PC. Do you just surf the Internet? Do you edit photos? Are you editing home movies? How fast is fast enough for you? Do you keep (legal) copies of movies on your PC? Is your music collection growing daily? Do you have mail, web browsing, and music running while you watch YouTube videos?

Each of those questions is extremely important in deciding how beefy your new PC must be in order to give you the type of experience that you need. If you are watching or editing movies, you need a better video card. If you are just surfing the web, a simple model may be all that you need.

In terms of processor, most people will do just fine with a 2.8GHz or higher dual-core model. There are subtle differences in the processor models, but they fit within this range. Quad-core processors are out and are quite powerful, but they are not needed unless you are doing heavy gaming or video/photo editing. Wait for them to become commonplace in a few years because they just add price in today’s market.

When you are looking at RAM, be sure to get no less than 4GB. Now, you may buy a 2GB system and upgrade (add) the RAM yourself, but either way I would have a hard time recommending less than 4. Again, the exception would be if you are doing high-end gaming. Gaming likes a LOT of RAM, and I would suggest no less than 6GB for gamers.

Video cards are generally optional – as they should be today. Many computers have built-in video processors that can handle quite a bit of demand. Used to be that built-in video was a joke, but not so much anymore. My advice is to get a 256MB video card if you plan on watching movies, especially in HD. Gaming geeks will probably opt for at least a 512MB card to keep their sessions going strong.

Hard disk drives are unbelievably inexpensive today. No one should buy a PC with less than 500GB in HDD space. Storage is incidental today. Personally, I have a hard time filling a 100GB drive, but movies and games will eat storage quickly, so get a big drive to eliminate concerns. It is generally not a big concern in desktop models, as you can purchase a larger drive cheaply and put it in the tower yourself. In laptops, however, be sure to get a good, large drive when purchased so you don’t have to muck around in those tiny machines.

Those are some base numbers that cover both desktops and laptops. None of these items are set in stone, and you may need more RAM or a faster processor for your own needs. Everyone is different in how they use the PC and what they expect in terms of performance.

If you are shopping, go to a retail store and play with some of their demonstration models. It might involve a trip to Saint Louis, but that’s better than making a large purchase decision and having to mess with returning it.

My experience in designing my next laptop (I can dream) has shown me that I will need to drop no less than $1000 on my purchase. That amount is NOT for my dream machine, but for a well-built machine that is expandable in the future. To be frank, know that I imagine most people should plan to spend at least $800 for their next PC. It’s not cheap, but with good planning it is an investment that will pay off more than spending $500 every other year.

Let me know what questions you have about buying a PC via email, and I’ll see if I can’t get them answered for you. Hope you all have a Happy Holiday and a great New Year!