Tech-Knowledgy (Based on the book)

With Facebook being the most popular social networking site, it has alot of traffic and is continuing to grow.  Many people complain about the lack of speed while on Facebook, especially in certain games or on certain peoples profiles.  There is something you can do about it, and it’s going to be a group effort.

One major cause is constant posting and reposting of status’ like the one below which tells you to repost.  Some of the worst ones are the ones that say “If you don’t repost this, you will have bad luck, if you do repost it you will have something good happen to you”.  This is a load of crap and is just a scam to get people to repost.

“The girl you just called fat.. She’s overdosing on diet pills. The girl you just called ugly.. She spends hours putting makeup on hoping people will like her. The boy you just tripped.. He is abused enough at home. See that man with the ugly scars.. He fought for his country. That guy you just made fun of for crying.. His mother is dying. Put this as you’re status if you’re against bullying. I bet 95% of you wont re-post, but I’m sure the people with a heart and backbone will…”

If we think about this reposting issue for just a second…Your friend posts their status like above.  They have 100 friends, if all 100 friends repost this as it says to do, because they are all good friends…they each have 100 friends, and they too are really good friends and decide to repost as it says.  We now have 100 of your friends reposting which gets 100 of their friends x 100 = 10,000 reposts.  The bad thing is this can happen in a matter of minutes if everyone is online at the same time.  But this is only the first level of friends.  You see, if we take this only just one step further and say these 10,000 friends have 100 friends each, and they all repost…  That’s 1,000,000 posts which could happen in just a few minutes.  I think you can do the math if we go to the fourth level of friends.  100,000,000 posts is unbelievable, and many people have more than 100 friends but many people don’t repost either, so this is a pretty good average.

So, if you are one of those people who repost things just because someone else’s post said to do it, don’t complain Facebook is slow, because you’re one of the people contributing to the slowness!

Now, that’s only the reposting of posts that tell you to do it.  If you’re like my wife, I watched her one time playing Farmville.  She posted every single post that suggested she post it.  Do you want to share your new baby goat with your friends? Share. ,etc. etc. etc.  In 30 seconds time, there must have been twenty different things that came up asking if she wanted to share, and instead of just closing the Window, she clicked share!  I couldn’t believe it!

If any friends want to check her profile to see what’s going on in her life, like Facebook was originally meant for, they can’t.  They have to scroll through a whole bunch of Farmville crap just to find out something that they would have commented on a while ago, but they didn’t see it because Farmville messages took over her entire profile!

So speed on Facebook is one thing, but it also affects your profile and make it difficult for your friends to see anything else going on, and they could be missing out on some news that you wanted to share, because you replaced that latest important news with other unimportant news about how your farm animals are doing.

Daniel Gauthier a local computer expert in Markham, Ontario and runs his own computer repair company www.twinbytes.ca

I’ve had this happen to me so many times I figured it’s worth writing about it.  As a computer repair technician, I get calls from someone trying to explain what is going on and they continuously refer to their wallpaper as their screen saver and/or vice verse.  This really confuses the hell out of me as I’m sure it does many other technicians.  Rather than  get frustrated with my client, which I know most of my competitors do, I explain to them the difference.

It really makes a huge difference in some cases if you say one thing versus another.  When it comes to technology, if you are having trouble and you are trying to explain to your technician what the problem is you are having; keep it simple.  Don’t try to talk techy because you’lll probably only confuse your technician and the job will take twice as long, and trust me, they will charge for their time, or even worse, they will purchase you the wrong part and you could be stuck with restocking fees or the entire cost of the part.  Like another issues many people have is they say they need a bigger hard drive when what they really meant to say was they need more RAM/memory.  Many technicians would argue that “You said you wanted a bigger hard drive, I bought and installed a new hard drive, now you pay for the new hard drive”.  So you paid for something you didn’t want because you asked for the wrong thing, and that still didn’t fix the main issue.

OK, now that I’ve gone off on a rant, let’s answer the question in our title here.  The difference between a screen saver and wallpaper.  A screen saver is what comes on your screen after you don’t touch the keyboard and mouse for a certain amount of time. The amount of time depends on what you have it set to.  The wallpaper is the background picture/image that is showing when you have no programs open and you are looking at all the icons on your desktop.  If you don’t know what your desktop is, there’s another article to write.

Basically, your wallpaper is stationary and typically never changes or moves, although some do.  It’s only visible when no programs are open covering it up.  Your screensaver will always change and or move around on your screen and it’s purpose is to save your screen from burning an image into it when on your screen for too long.  This is why it’s called “Screen” “Saver”.  It comes on over top of everything that is open.

When a client calls me and says, my computer just rebooted and I see my screen saver now, I kinda know they couldn’t possibly see their screen saver now because they just rebooted, they probably mean their wallpaper.  When they say they can see their wallpaper, I pretty much know they are really talking about wallpaper.  So in the end, even if you can’t explain things correctly and you are really trying to, a good technician will probably be able to figure out what you are talking about, or at the very least, the technician should ask you questions to confirm you are both talking about the same thing.  My recommendation is, if you are trying to get help, don’t lead your technician off in the wrong direction by trying to talk techy.  It could cost you.  If you want to talk techy, it can help you so they know they can’t take advantage of you, but do yourself a favor and learn the proper terms first, otherwise they’ll know you have no clue what’s going on and they could take you for everything you got.

Daniel Gauthier is not only the president of Twinbytes Inc doing computer repairs and consultations but also is the author of Tech-Knowledgy where you can learn all the tech terms and what they are, what they mean, and what role they play in the computer.  This truly levels the playing field between computer techs and non-techy’s.

My last blog as posted below shows part of the solution to a problem thousands are reporting online but no one seems to have an answer for it.  Many people saying they had a problem with their hard drive mysteriously getting full, out of no where, right before their eyes!  I found that it was folder duplication, but the problem was to find where it was.  If you right click on each folder, you would expect it to tell you which folder has how many files and sub-folders, etc.  It doesn’t report the actual number which is what makes this impossible to find.  There is a way to find out where the problem is exactly, but then the next step is how to delete all those files.

Some cases, it’s the computer itself that got a virus and is recreating the folders, in that case you might need to format the drive.  But if you have more than one computer in your office or home, that other computer could be the culprit, which was my experience with a client of mine.  We had to clean the 2nd computer that was causing the problem and remove the duplicates from the main computer.

Part of the trick was finding where those files where that were duplicated, which at the time, we didn’t know where duplicates.  We just knew there were lots of files taking space somewhere, but when you right click each folder, it doesn’t tell us the true size of the folder because it’s hidden the actual count.  Even with show hidden files turned, on etc. that didn’t help at all.  There are several free programs online which can show how many files are where on your computer.  Some work, some don’t.  I found one that worked and was able to tell me where the huge folder was with sub-folders taking 300GB of unnecessary space.

Using the program in my previous tip, we solved the problem by removing those duplicates.  Many blogs and forums are talking about checking other settings, etc but those answers are all wrong, since the question was “The hard drive filled up right before my eyes”.  System restore points and things like that happen over time, not over night, and especially not right before your eyes.

Daniel Gauthier is a tech expert with Twinbytes Inc and can be hired for this and many other types of jobs at www.twinbytes.ca Although Twinbytes is local in Markham, Ontario Canada, with the power of the Internet and remote control software, many issues can be resolved anywhere in the world, remotely.

Name too long to delete?  If you need to delete a huge amount of subfolders that have file names too long to delete and you can’t go through one by one deleting them all, you need a program that will delete them for you regardless of the length of the name.  I found a software program that lets you do this.  It has a free trial, but it’s good enough to clean up that computer the one time you probably ever have to do it.  No need to purchase it, the free trial is enough to do the job.

http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/ is the direct link to download this free trial of the software program.  It’s easy to install and use.  It gives you three trys and/or 15 days.  That’s long enough to do the job.  It was good enough for me to do for a client that had impossible to delete files in the thousands that were created by a virus.  Long story, but once I found the cause of the problem to be duplicate files in this directory, I simply deleted the directory along with all subdirectories and it worked with this program, freed up 300GB of space.

Daniel Gauthier is a Computer Repair tech expert with Twinbytes Inc.  If you’d like to hire him, visit www.twinbytes.ca for contact info and more info on Twinbytes computer services.