James Oliver’s PC Guide & Tips

Many people love to hide their tower inside their desks. Have you ever opened the door on the front of your desk and just felt the heat flow out of your desk? While it’s nice to have somewhere to put the PC hidden out of site, you might consider making sure you have proper airflow.

If you’re going to keep your system running inside of a desk, make sure that you either don’t have a back on the desk to allow the hot air to escape.

Another option would be to cut a couple of holes in the back or another hidden area to allow for airflow.

Your computer generates a lot of heat and has fans inside the case to exhaust this heat, but if you’re storing your PC inside a cubby hole slightly larger than the case itself, you’re not allowing the hot air to exhaust and this will keep the components inside getting very hot which can damage some of these components.

Yet another option is to leave the door open where the heat can exhaust out the front. As long as you leave room for airflow, your components should be safe from heat damage.

If you have Windows XP and don’t have AT LEAST 512MB, No.

If you have Windows Vista and don’t have AT LEAST 2 GB, No.

More than likely, if you do much more than check your e-mail and open Internet Exploder (not a typo), you probably need 1GB of memory.

I say you need 2GB for Windows Vista because I’ve seen systems almost every day out of the box that have 1GB and most of that is being used up.

Random Access Memory (RAM) is used by your computer as temporary storage space for data. It has no moving parts like a phyiscal hard drive. It has higher bus speed.

When you fill your memory with programs your computer is actively using, it has no choice but to start writing things off to the hard drive and this slows down your system.

If you right click on your task bar (the bar that runs across the screen from the Start button to the clock), choose “Task Manager”. Next, choose the “Performance” tab. A decent measure for you to know if you should get more memory to speed up your system is to look at the “PF Usage” (on windows) and . If this number is very close to or higher than your physical memory amount, you need more memory!

Hope this gives you a good scale for choosing. Memory is cheap and easy to install these days. You CAN have too much memory, but it’s rare!

First, what in the world is the “Windows Logo Key”? It’s that little key most people never use usually located between the Ctrl and Alt key on your keyboard. Go head.. Press it. What happened? The start menu popped up! That’s annoying when you hit that key instead of Ctrl or Alt!

However, it really does serve more purposes than just being annoying.

First, i want to highlight the shortcuts I use on a regular basis…

1.  Windows Logo + M = Minimize all Windows
2.  Windows Logo + D = Show Desktop (almost the same, but show desktop will even show the desktop with applications that do not minimize.
3. Windows Logo + L = Lock Workstation (If you’re profile is password protected, it will take you to the login screen)
4. Windows Logo + R = Run Box (Same as clicking Start.. and then clicking “Run”.. only faster once you use it a bunch)

Here is a link to many more keyboard shortcuts on the Microsoft Website - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449

Enjoy a part  of your computer rarely used!

Many people get caught up in the software system maintenance side of things, but rarely consider the physical maintenance.

What do I mean? Computers have fans installed inside the case that are pulling air into the case as well as fans pushing air out of the case. These fans pull all kinda of dust bunnies into the system. This stuff builds up on components inside the case and causes air-flow problems. This stuff gets all over heat sinks, fans inside, down in fan bearings.

Over time, this buildup can cause a variety of problems. Bearings wear out faster causing fans to slow down and not have the RPM’s necessary to keep the components cool. Buildup on heat sinks causes air-flow through the fins. This causes components to over heat and can be damaging.

What can you do about this? Well. Nothing really. You can’t prevent the stuff from getting into your computer because it pulls it out of the air. However, you can clean it out on a regular maintenance schedule.

Depending on the environment where the PC sits will determine the physical maintenance schedule. If it’s a very dusty environment, you may need to do this monthly. If it’s a rather clean area, maybe quarterly will suffice.

Here’s what you do: Get yourself a can of compressed air from your local walmart or staples, open your case (by following directions in the manual), and blow all those components out (Might want to do this outside).  Just blow off all those fans, blow off all the dust you can see right out of that case! Blow out the power supply as well.

Many cases just have a couple of screws holding a side panel on. Some cases these days just have little releases that allow you to remove the side panel, or somehow it will separate.

Hope this helps you allow that system to run cooler and longer!

Recently, I’ve been working with Peter Dunbar from www.pcaholic.com on some video tutorials to show folks how to use different aspects of social marketing to drive more traffic to their websites.

Our first combined effort was our “HubPages Video Tutorial” series and was a massive hit! We launched these videos as a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) in the Warriors Forum. It was an instant hit!

We launched www.tutorial-videos.org as a release avenue for our different tutorial series.

Through our efforts, we met Todd Gross, who has been a great resource of information and he’s agreed to launch our latest series we’ve entitled “Social BookMarketing”.

This series was brought on by the questions we received about bookmarking websites. We wanted to show folks how we use bookmarking sites to drive traffic to our websites, blogs, hubs, lenses, etc.

If you’re interested in learning more about driving FREE targetted traffic to your websites, check out our “Social BookMarketing Video Tutorial Series“. (will open a new window)

Via that link to Todds website, you get a special webinar with Todd Gross, Myself, Peter Dunbar, and Dr. Ron Capps A.K.A. the Niche Prof on May 7th at 7pm CST. Also, another special bonus located at http://MarketingTutorialVideos.com

Don’t Forget to BookMark this post!