The end of XP support ........... in 3 years.

8^th of April 2014

This is the date that Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. Microsoft even made a gadget that you can stick on your desktop that counts down to the date that they throw XP under the bus. A little tacky in my humble opinion, but whatever floats their boat. They have done this to the rest of their old operating systems and XP has lasted much longer than I think even Microsoft had planned. The funny thing is that computers have really reached a point over the past 10 years that any kind of improvements that they make in them really can’t be seen by the average user. Does your word processor really work faster than it did 10 years ago? I will have to admit that my 10 year old laptop doesn’t really do that great with HD video however my 10 year old desktop with a 3 GHZ Pentium 4, 2 GB of RAM, XP, and a nice video card does, and it plays games great too.

So what does it really mean when they say they are not going to support XP? Well, they should stop updating Windows, security holes won’t be fixed, so it might not be good to hook an XP computer to the internet, if you don’t hook it to the internet then it doesn’t matter. I have one laptop with a dual processor and 4 GB of RAM that is running XP, I could upgrade it to Windows 7 if I wanted to. Or I could run Linux on any machine that hooks up to the internet and have a secure connection and a fast running machine.  I guess my point is that your computers will still be good enough to use, you will just have to make some decisions on whether to do some sort of operating system change so you can keep on trucking with the machine that you have. Or go down to Best Buy and pick up something new at a cost of $300 to $2000 and turn your old machine into a server, give it to charity, or sell it on ebay.

While I have your attention if you have a desktop computer and you haven’t vacuumed it out lately (or ever), then take this time now to shut it down, open the case, and vacuum all of the accumulated dirt out of it. Do a good job so it will last until 2014. Electronic circuits don’t like dirt, it tends to cause shorts and make your system get hot. You don’t want to be forced to go to Best Buy do you?

So basically don’t sweat it, let’s see what happens in 3 years.

Dan

Turn that old Laptop into a Server

I recently was able to replace my old Toshiba Satellite Pro. It is a 1.6 GHZ P4 with 1 GB of RAM, and running XP. Not exactly state of the art but with plenty of power to do server duty for my family.

To get it ready for server duty make sure your server is hooked up to your router. The best way for your server to be hooked up is with an Ethernet cable. The next thing to do is to go into the Control Panel and select power settings. I made sure that the laptop didn’t go to sleep when hooked up to power and that the LCD turned off when the lid is closed. This way it stays on and doesn’t get hot having the screen on when closed. I also have it sitting on a cooling pad so it doesn’t overheat.

The first task that I gave my new server was printer server duty. I hooked up the old HP LaserJet 1000 to it. I then shared the printer so anyone could print to it. This is how it’s done:

• Open Control Panel.
• Select Printers.
• Right click on the printer you want to share.
• Then select sharing.
• Select share.

Now other computers on your network can find the printer and print to it.
This is how the other computers find the printer. On the other computers:

• Open the Control Panel
• Select add a new printer
• The add a Network Printer and follow the prompts.

It may be a little different depending on which operating system you are using but the process is about the same. You should now be able to print to the shared printer from whatever computer you are using.

The next task I gave this computer was to turn it into a phone. We recently got rid of our landline because it was an extra cost we just didn’t need. We have cell phones and how many phones do you really need to have. I instead loaded Skype on our server, Skype allows you to make free calls to anyone else who has Skype for free, but for a small monthly fee it can be also used to call landlines. We pay $2.99 per month so my 11 year old son can call out on it when he’s home alone. You can get a Skype phone off of Skype’s Web site or on ebay. This way you can call anywhere in the country, or mom and dad just like having a landline without the cost.
One note: I did have to plug in the phone into a USB 2 port for it to work well. I had already added a USB2 card in the PCMCIA port at an earlier time because this computer came standard with USB1. There are various Skype phones and high end ones can be connected wirelessly to your access point.

The next thing I did was turn the old laptop into a file server, as we needed a place to store all of those pictures we have so anyone could access them. Even though my old computer only had a 30 GB hard drive it wasn’t a problem. Hard drive space is cheap these days and I easily added an external 1TB hard drive for plenty of storage for under a hundred bucks. To share this drive you go into My computer right click the drive and select share. The system may give you a hard time about sharing a whole drive, but tell it to “just do it will ya!”
To access the shard drive from your other computers, open My Computer or Computer and select Map Network drive. Now this drive will show up as if it is located on the computer you are using.

So there you have it, a new use for you old laptop, and a way to make your home network more useful.
Dan

Turn your PC into a WIFI hotspot for free

Have you ever been someplace with your laptop and there is only one Ethernet connection in the wall like a hotel room or an office space. You have multiple people who need access to the internet, or you have a portable device like an IPad, IPod touch, or Droid device that only connects to the internet wirelessly and there is no WiFi. Well fear not, you can turn your laptop into a WiFI hot spot, here’s how:

Windows 7 is pretty easy to set up, you download and run a free, open source program called Virtual Router. This free program which also works with Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ve used Virtual Router to connect up my iPod Touch to the WiFi transmitting from my laptop. It works great, and it’s simple to use. You give your server a name and a password then any Wifi device can connect up to your Hot Spot. A Laptop, Smart Phone, iPod Touch, iPhone, Android Phone, Zune, Netbook, wireless printer, etc. These devices connect to Virtual Router just like any other access point. You can share any internet connection (WiFi, LAN, Cable Modem, Dial-up, Cellular, etc), and for security the connection uses WPA2, which is the most secure wireless encryption.
For Vista, XP, and MAC OS10 here is a great Cnet Video that will show you how to set up a secure hotspot with your laptop by simply changing some settings it up in your operating system. XP takes a little more work but it’s still not too hard to do.

Sync IPod touch/IPhone calendar to PC

Here was my challenge, how to manage 4 Gmail and 1 Yahoo email accounts on my PC and have everything sync with my IPod Touch. I use my IPod touch when I’m out and about to check email and surf the web when I’m away from home. I was getting tired of having to go to individual email accounts to answer email messages. The IPod Touch has a great interface for dealing with multiple web email accounts and will tell me when I receive a message from any of those accounts. I could answer them on the IPod but I don’t like to fumble with the small on-screen keyboard if I don't have to. I would much rather answer them on my PC.

I played around with Windows Live email, and I like the Outlook like feel. It's a nice free Microsoft software package, but alas it’s really a stripped down version of Outlook and is missing some features that I want to use. So I ended up downloading Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a free full featured desktop email application that is able to take care of all of my Gmail and Yahoo email accounts. That being said it is full featured and I needed to do some tweaking to get it to look and feel like other email package I’ve been using.

Thunderbird’s default settings are to have new messages come to the bottom of the list, and for replies to emails to go to the bottom of the conversation. This is pretty much backwards from what everyone else in the world does, but it can be changed. Simply by going into the account settings for each email account and selecting Composition and Addressing you can set Thunderbird to behave like other email packages. It’s one of the best free desktop email programs around, and there is a bunch off free Add-Ons that can be installed to enhanced your email experience. Changing the way it looks and feels is really no big deal.

The next goal was to be able to have a desktop Calendar that would sync with the Calendar on my IPod and to do it for free of course. There really isn’t a direct link between the Calendar on my IPod and a desktop application, however Google or Yahoo Calendar can be used as an in-between to make it seem like the connection is direct.

Here’s how:
First off the IPod touch will sync with online Calendars from Yahoo and Google, so what I did was Sync the IPod Calendars to one of my Google accounts that I’m using for email. Then I use Sunbird on my Desktop. Sunbird is a free cross platform Desktop Calendar application. I added my Google Calendar account to Sunbird and now any change made on my desktop get made on my Google account, and passed over to my IPod Touch. It works the other way too. Here are the step by step instructions for setting up Sunbird to work with Google Calendar.

So now I have all of my email in one place on my desktop and my IPod and a Calendar that I can update from my IPod or my desktop via a little smoke and mirrors. Both Thunderbird and Sunbird come to us from Mozilla the creators of the Firefox web browser.
Dan