Computer's and the Internet

• Chat Rooms. There are millions of chat rooms on the internet that offer all forms of conversation. IRC(Internet Relay Chat) is and was the first form of chat rooms on the internet. You access IRC with a chat client such as Mirc or a java based client on a webpage. Many websites have these that connect to only one IRC channel. IRC is not recommended for children though. As most chat rooms are not. If you do let your kids in chat, make sure you watch them or you have a program that will watch where they go and limit which chat rooms they go into. Some basic chat guidelines are:
  Typing in all CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE THIS is considered yelling and people will ignore you if you do this.
  There are abreviations for alot of things because not everybody types at 105wpm(words per minute).Below is a list of the ones I know, of course there are probably alot more I don't know.
  LOL- Laughing Out Loud
  ROFL- Rolling on the Floor Laughing
  BRB- Be right back
  ATM- no, not the cash place :) stands for at the moment
  BTW- By the way
  IMHO- in my humble opinion
  J/K- just kidding
  IM or PM- Instant message or private message
  


• Advertising. The Web has alot of advertising on it these days. Millions of people to target for ads on here. So some people have set up ways to block advertising on websites because if your using a dialup modem you don't want to have to load 50-100k advertising images on websites. One program that does this is called The Proxomitronclick here for info it is a simple proxy server that filters all of the content you receive from websites. Another way to filter ads is the hosts file. The hosts file is a file in your windows directory if thats the OS your using that your browser uses to get to various sites on the internet. You can block certain sites using this file. A Hosts file with all relevant advertising url's to block is Here all you have to do is follow the directions and you will be practically ad free. There is One downside to this though, some websites are starting to ask for payment upfront before you can view their content because so many people are blocking ads now.So if you have a broadband connection, I'd recommend not downloading this just to keep the web free.


• Spam. This is the plague of the internet these days. In short it is Unsolicited Commercial Email. Email is free to send and people that want to make money are utilizing this service very well. Spammers collect email addresses from various sources using "robot" programs that do this. They collect them off of personal websites, message boards, newsgroups, chat rooms and anywhere else email addresses are posted. They also utilize what is known as dictionary lists. A program just generates email addresses from the dictionary and uses them to send commercial email to. So an easy way to prevent getting spam is just to make your email address an unusual name with letters and numbers in it. And do NOT give that address out to Internet Companies! They resell your address to spammers. I use yahoo's free email service and I give that address out to companies I deal with on the internet. No spam to deal with. You may also receive emails with images in them. When you load the email in your email program, it loads the image from an offsite server. This tells whoever sent the email to you that your email is a valid address. Mozilla and yahoo email has a setting to prevent images like this from being loaded. The first piece of spam was sent in 1994 to a newsgroup. Here it is if you want to see


• Services. Windows XP has these background tasks running so many of the tasks you do on your computer work. Some of them are not required however and even a bit of a security risk. To see what services you have running on your system if you have Windows XP home or Professional, press ctrl alt and delete at the same time. To disable some of them first go here to BlackViper's website and find out which ones are "safe" to disable and which ones should be running. Disabling some of these services can also improve your system performance if you play games alot.


• Instant Messaging. This is just about the same as email, except it is instantaneous and your address is not something@something.com just a screenname like joesmith34235 or 34564364 which icq uses. There are several instant messaging services available but the best IMHO is yahoo's messenger.You can get it Here. There is also another client that works with all of the various instant messenging services and it is called Trillian. You can get it Here and again, like email don't use Instant Messaging to send your personal info, like credit card numbers or your social security number.


• Broadband. Having this means you have a highway of data instead of just a dirt road connecting you to the internet. You can watch streaming video, listen to streaming audio, watch movie trailers, play mmorpg's(games) and alot more. At present time there are three types of broadband available for most users. DSL uses standard telephone lines for broadband service. Cable uses the same cable that your television cable uses to get you the data. Satellite service like Hughes Direcway uses satellite signals to get you the data. Satellite however is not recommended for playing games with. It takes a longer time to get you the data over satellite and makes playing games very difficult if not impossible to win at. BroadBandreports is an excellent site for learning about the various services and you can compare them to find which one is best for you.


• Ping. This is a term used alot in gaming over the internet. Ping is simply the time it takes data to get to your computer from anothe computer on the internet. Open a command line window, do this by typing in cmd in the run box from your start menu and type in ping and any website address you can think of. This will give you your ping time to that website address's server. If it's lower then 100 you have an excellent ping and probably have a broadband connection like dsl or cable. Or you can go to this site-Here and find out more about your ping time.


• Networking. This is simply getting two or more computers to communicate to one another in either a home or business enviroment. Today there is Home Networking in 2 forms. Either wired or wireless networking. Wired is cheaper then wireless, but you have to string several feet of wire between your computers and who wants wire all over their home or office for people to trip over. Well maybe a practical joker would, but for most people wireless is the way to go. For information on networking windows operating system computers WOWN(world of windows networking) is a good site to start. For information on networking the linux operating system, Linux Networking HowTo is a good place.
• Backups. Hard Drives fail. Some hard drives will last as long as 5 years, but even new ones just a few weeks or months old fail. If you don't have a backup of the data on that drive, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to get the data off of it when it dies. There are lots of programs out there that will backup your data either to a cd,dvd or another hard drive which is what i do. I use Norton's Ghost software to create a backup image of my main hard drive and I also backup my documents folder,my profile from mozilla and software that I download onto cdrw discs every month or so. I used to do this manually with ezcd creator 5, but I found a program called EZBackup that does it alot easier.
• Deletion. Alot of us delete stuff that we don't mean to delete. I know I've done this myself by accident. When Windows delete's a file, all it does is writes a character to the file so that it appears gone, but in reality it is still there. File Recovery software can see these files and in most cases you can get that file back.Handyrecovery is a software program that does just that for free. This also brings up the fact that if you have personal information on your hard drive you would want to make sure that information doesn't fall into someone else's hands. In order to completely erase a file you need to overwrite the file with random 1's and 0's.Eraser is a program that does this for free as well.
• DLL files. These are files that are used by several different programs in order to display menu's and common graphics. It makes it easier for programmers to just reference one common dll file that you already have on your system then having to program individual functions into their program. But this also makes it worse for you if you accidentally delete a certain dll file that one program needs. You can do this whenever you uninstall a program from your system. Sometimes it will ask you if you want to delete a dll file that is shared by other programs. It's a good idea to NOT do this. However if you do, you can sometimes restore the dll file you need by just reinstalling the program you deleted or using the windows disk that you have. Or you can find various sites on the internet that have these dll files to download. DLL-files is one such site.
• Hardware. Ever have a piece of hardware in your computer and have no idea who manufactured it and how to get the correct drivers for it? There is one way you can find out. You can use the FCC ID number that is on the piece of hardware to find out. Just look for a sticker with FCC ID on it and go to this fcc website to find out who made it-FCC ID Number Search,