Google Docs Spreadsheet

This spreadsheet is a list of free applications I put together, I have also included the link to each application if you want to do some more research on them. Spreadsheet

Screencast

I did my screencast on how to do a basic windows backup of the windows directories and files including a system image. Screencast link

Interesting Wiki's

I found two particular wiki’s that I felt were both interesting and very informative. The first is called Lunarsoft.net wiki. This wiki lists a ton of information about computer topics just to list a few are guides to cleaning up your PC, security for your PC, different freeware programs and links to go to their pages, how to boot your computer into safe mode and the list goes on. It also has a downloads tab, this has many good tools that you can download to keep your computer running smooth. This wiki is good for both computer technical people and the average computer user looking for a good reference page. The second wiki I liked was called Computer Security Wiki. This site is geared towards security software, spyware, ad-aware and malicious software removal tools, as well as it explains some common viruses and spyware out there and provides reference links you can click on to read more about them. It covers both computer and network security. There is a section called Security News and this shows recent security threats and vulnerabilities in programs and applications. Both these wikis I found to be clear and easy to navigate. I bookmarked both these sites and will be using them in the future.

Google Blogger for Dummies book report

Google Blogger for Dummies book report

Google Blogger for Dummies is a great starting book for the blogging beginner or a good reference source for the advanced blogger that is looking to get a little more out of their blog or maybe someone that wants to start using the blog to generate extra income. In any situation I think everyone can overall benefit from reading this book and pick up some new information and tools they can incorporate into their blogs. Google Blogger is a blogging site that is owned by Google and completely free to use.
This book starts out hitting on the basics of building a blog, it takes you through a step by step procedure on an account setup and creating a profile, along with pictures to guide you along. After your initial setup it explains all the features that are available to you with include your dashboard, templates, sidebar and gadgets. While walking you through how to use these tools to build your new blog it gives you a brief description on why you may want them on your blog, keep in mind not all of them may fit every single users blog, it’s a good thing to try a few out at a time see which fits your blog best.
I found this book to touch on four key things when starting your blogging adventure, they are: plan out your topic, driving traffic to your site, keeping your audience interested and communication.
Planning your blog is crucial. The first part being what you want your blog to be about, you want to pick a topic you are both interested in and know a good amount of information about. Picking a topic of interest will make you want to keep posting to your blog and having knowledge on the topic you can easily make posts without having to research each time.
Driving traffic to your site is very important because your audience or as we call them in the blog world followers, are what can make your blog successful. The more people that go to your blog and are interested in your topic and posts with most likely become a follower and then in turn then brings there followers to your site and can turn into a snowball effect in your favor, driving new traffic to your blog each day.
Keeping your followers interested is an ongoing task. Most bloggers normally post several times throughout the week. The more you post the more opportunities for your followers to read and comment on your posts and this opens up great lines of communication.
Which brings us to our last key feature communication. Communication if what drives the blog world, without communication their really wouldn’t be much need for blogs. Why would you spend your time posting and adding content to your blog if no one commented on it. First of all you wouldn’t know if anyone was even reading your blog and second how would you know if people found your content interesting. So in your posts it’s always good to include a few open ended questions that can be used to start up some dialog and get your readers involved. With that goes responding to your comments. If your readers are going to take the time to comment on your posts then you will want to follow up and respond to them, specifically if they are asking you questions. If you don’t keep a good dialog going your followers may not comment on your posts any longer and this could result in taking traffic away from your blog.
Another great feature for some bloggers can be the monetary gain. Google blogger allows you to put advertisements on your blog page. There are several different types to choose from. Most of them you will need to fill out a short application that must be reviewed to see if in fact your blog qualifies. The advertisements companies want to ensure they are paying money to people that have a lot of traffic visiting their blogs on a daily basis. Another thing to keep in mind is it’s good to have advertising of products that are in the same category as your blog, so if your blog is about pets, you probably don’t want to have ads about guns and tobacco. These ads can make you extra money but don’t expect to become rich overnight. It will take time and tracking to see what works best with your blog. The book gives you great examples of some free tracking tools for your blog.
Along with the key features, I liked this book because it a gave many third party sites and resources that you can go to and collect tools to post to your blog, most of free some may cost money but either way it’s your choice how involved you want to get. This book just shows you a little bit of each part of a blog, if there is any single part that you want to dive into more it suggests information and sources where you can find that information. I think this is great reading material for beginners but for someone that has had a blog for awhile they may want to just skip to a chapter of interest to get more sources where they can look on a specific topic of interest.

Advanced SystemCare Free 3.5

The Advanced SystemCare utility cleans and maintains your computer with one simple click.
The maintenance portion features four areas which are: spyware removal, Registry cleaning, privacy scan and deletion of junk files. The diagnose button provides optimizing tools which are: disk defragmentation, it detects spyware and scans your system for any hijacked windows settings. The whole scan normally takes less then 10minutes. Running this at least once a week will keep your system cleaning and running like new.

EZ iTunes transfer

You’ve spent hours organizing your complete music library into iTunes and finally got it just the way you want. Well now you decide you want it loaded on to a new computer or even multiple computers. There are many programs out there that claim to be able to transfer all you music and playlists for you, well maybe those programs do work, but why pay for something that you can do for free. I will give you easy step by step instructions to seamlessly transfer your complete library of music I did last night and it worked great, the longest part of it was just copying all of the music to a temporary location with either a usb drive, or external hard drive. The whole process took less then a half hour.

1. On the old computer, open iTunes
2. Click Edit –> Preferences from the menus
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Click the check box next to Keep iTunes Media folder organized (if it isn’t already)
5. Click OK
6. Now close iTunes and copy your entire My Music folder to an external hard drive, or you can do as I did and pull the hard drive from the old computer and use an USB hard drive adaptor to connect it to the new computer.
7. DON’T COPY THE MUSIC TO THE NEW COMPUTER YET.
8. Instead, download and install iTunes on the new computer
9. Start iTunes and repeat steps 2-5 (above)
10. Close iTunes
11. Open the Music folder on the new computer
12. You should see an iTunes folder, double-click it
13. Now you will see either an iTunes Music or iTunes Media folder (doesn’t matter what name it has)
14. Click one time on the folder and delete it
15. Connect your backup media device to the new computer and navigate to the My Music folder and open it
16. copy all contents in the My Music folder
17. Paste the files to the Music folder on the new computer
18. Click yes when asked if you want to overwrite any existing files with the same name
19. Close open Windows
20. Start iTunes and your library, including playlists, should be there.
Let me know if you have any questions with this 

Accidentally delete the wrong file?

Well if you are like the rest of us then your only human and probably have deleted something by mistake. Better yet let’s just say your computer crashed before you had a chance to save it. Well either way now there’s no worries. Recuva is a file recovery software program that can retrieve these files for you. It can recover files from your recycle bin, usb drive, camera media card, and even files from your ipod or mp3 player. It has a very easy to use interface even for beginners.It also has a mobile edition so you can take it with you on your usb drive.I will put a link to this in my Reference links on my blog. Oh and did I mention it was Free :) Screenshots below: