James Oliver’s PC Guide & Tips

Someone just developed a really cool application for FaceBook that allows you to receive messages on via text message directly to your cell phone from Facebook and reply back to them from the cell phone!

That’s not the coolest part. Check out Facebook ChatToText to get all the info.

If you’re trying to remove spyware and having problems with that, please check out XoftSpySE on http://www.antispywaremechanic.com

 I’ve not personally had the time to check out the product, but my friends over at Anti Spyware Mechanic have. They stand by the product.

If you’re looking for a way to uninstall programs on your computer without leaving behind all the nasty remnants on your hard drive and in your registry, you have got to check this utility out!

It does a great job at uninstalling.. far better than Add/Remove programs and it can forcibly remove nasty programs.

Check it out on http://www.perfectuninstallerdoctor.com

Today, I found out about a site kinda like Squidoo or Hubpages. It’s called Knol by Google and a Knol is a unit of knowledge.

To test it’s effectiveness, I’ve created a knol entitled “Why Update PC Drivers?” to see how quickly it gets search engine results. If you’re reading this, please feel free to check out the Knol and post a comment on there.

We all know that Squidoo, and Hubpages are loved by Google. I wonder how much love they give their own service?

Guess time will tell.

Been a while since a tech writing. I will post something soon if I find something really cool.

This is a plug for my company where I do on-site computer repair in Granbury, Glen Rose, Stephenville, and Cleburne, TX.

When I first started my company over 5 years ago, SOLFAN wasn’t used as much as it is now. For those just reading this for the first time, I named my company this after stressing out over a really cool technological sounding name. I finally settled on “Sick Of Looking For A Name“.

I’ve done remote support all over the world for clients and friends.  Primarily, I focus on on-site support in Granbury and the surrounding areas. Please visit my Services Page on my company website to find out more about the services I provide to my clients. Being in a rural area, it’s hard to list all the things I take care of.

Besides Computer Consulting, I also do Internet Marketing, SEO, and some small website maintenance.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the new website!

Click Here To Visit SOLFAN Consulting

RegCure is an application that scans your registry and cleans out all of the “crap” in your registry. This could be links to files that are missing. Perhaps you uninstalled something, and reminants were left in the registry. This application cleans all that junk out.

I’ve known it’s necessary for quite some time and could see how this might be useful, but I never figured I needed it. But, being that I like to try out new apps so that I can make the best recommendations for my clients, I try out a bunch of applications on a test machine I use.

It’s one of those download it, scan it, it found a load of “bad stuff” in my registry. Ok. Let’s clean it up… DOH! Gotta pay for it. Ok.. so I need to test this. I bust out the ol card and pay for RegCure.  It finishes up the cleanup. And I restart the system. It had a noticable speed increase on my system.  I was actually suprised. That was my test box.  I decided I’d try it out on my main system that I run CCleaner (Registry clean option and file cleanup) and other applications as well.

RegCure still found crap on there. So, I’ve got it. It cleans the registry. It does in fact make your system run faster. I didn’t have any noticable errors, but I’m sure it would take care of actual errors since they proved themselves in other claims.

With all that being said, if you want to check it out, get it over at RegCure Scanner.com

If you’ve found this post interesting, by all means, bookmark the heck out of it.

I used to spend hours and hours updating drivers on my own and clients systems. Sometimes, it’s difficult even on newer systems to find the appropriate drivers. There are applications that can help you know exactly which equipment is attached to your system to help locate the appropriate drivers.

On older equipment, the different manufacturers have the device drivers archived off somewhere making it more difficult to find.

I recently found and began testing some Automatic Driver Update Software called Driver Detective that tells me exactly which drivers are out of date and with the click of a button, I can have it update everything for me. Shocking at how simple this actually is. I wish I were a developer because I’d have developed this a long time ago and been a billionaire by now!

I hope this software is able to help you out like it did me. It makes my life tons easier. I might require my clients purchase this!

Find it available at http://www.PCDriverDoctor.com - What driver are you searching for?

This has been a long time coming. A friend asked me to look at the Magic Jack for him to see what I thought. I checked out the site and was intrigued by the device. I told a few other people about it and finally someone broke down and made the purchase.

After a few weeks, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I bought my own. This nifty little USB device came in the mail packed nicely a few days after ordering online. One evening a few days after I ordered, I decided to check the tracking number sent to me. It was almost 10pm. It showed to be in my P.O. Box. I didn’t know if it would fit in my box, or if they’d put it in a bigger box and leave a key like they sometimes do, or if I’d be wasting gas driving the 7 miles to town to get it.

When I got there, it fit in my box. I opened it before I even left the post office.

I inserted it into my PC as soon as I got home. It automatically started loading software, went through a little update, and let me register and pick out a phone number and all that stuff.

After I got it all set up, it was time to make calls. I had no idea that my friends would ignore random calls at 11pm at night! But, they did. No one answered. Finally, I called a friend from my cell phone and they answered. I told them to answer when I called back from my new Magic Jack that I was testing.

The quality was great. No drop outs. There was a slight irritating buzz that my assumption is that it was created from my crappy headset or something. When I plugged a telephone into the Magic Jack, it worked like a charm. Since that time, I’ve called many people from 2 different systems and from the phone and headset. It works great!

To give you a little more insight, this device costs $40.00 and that includes the first YEAR of service. Each year after that, you can get the service for $20.00. There is a special offer at the time of purchase that you can get 5 years of service and the Magic Jack for $99.00 or something. Saves you 20.00 over the years.

What is the service?

Unlimited Phone calls on VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. That’s right! Unlimited! With services like this popping up, what will companies like Vonage do?

I would recommend this to anyone. It’s a great price for an unbelievable device.

Check out the Magic Jack on their official site http://www.magicjack.com

In my computer consulting business, I’ve had the opportunity to see many anti-virus products. I’ve seen free ones. I’ve seen paid ones. I’ve seen some that the customer thought was free, bit it wasn’t

For many years, I was a Norton Anti-Virus fan. It was used at every corporate office I worked at. I assumed that they were the top, and at the time, I believe they were. However, now, they’re simply a long time brand name that can produce a crappy product and set it out on the market and people will still buy it because it’s Norton. Don’t ever assume because something has a big name that it’s the best. Do your research!

For a couple years, I tried several anti-viruses before I found one I could settle on. I tried NOD32 and it was awesome! I could scan clients systems in less than 20 minutes. Found out that was because it over looked a lot. I switched to Dr. Web. It was slow and missed things. I tried Trend Micro. I tried a couple FREE anti-virus products.

So now, I believe the best anti-virus is Kaspersky products. This won’t be the only blog you read this one. This won’t be the only place you’ll find this information. Kaspersky is consistently rated #1 in comparison charts.

More information on the best anti-virus, Kaspersky, can be found by clicking right HERE.

Here’s also another one of my opinions.. If you simply can’t afford to purchase an anti-virus, a free AV is better than no AV (but just barely).  With all the risks on the Internet, why take chances?

Hope you enjoyed this post.

No, sorry guys. I’m not about to tell you how to steal Microsoft Office.

However, I will tell you about a great alternative! If you can’t afford to spend a bunch of cash on MS Office, there is a great alternative available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. If you’ve not heard of it, check out Open Office.

It has a pretty much the same applications that MS Office has. And the kicker? It’s actually pretty compatible with MS Office! That’s right. You can open Word Documents, Excel SpreadSheets, and more in Open Office.

Open Office is absolutely FREE. No cost. You can donate to the project and I’m sure they appreciate that. It’s open source, but they work hard to bring a killer product to the market.

I’ve been using Open Office for a couple of years now. It’s a great product. I’ve found very little that I can’t do with it. Definitely a nice alternative.