New Year Tech Hints

As I sit here in my office, with the beautiful aroma of coffee surrounding me, I realized that I needed to get back into the groove of posting and doing my best to help answer questions and hopefully to help resource my fellow youth workers.

So much is going on in tech news today, all about Verizon announcing it finally will be offering Apple's iPhone 4.  I won't be talking about that though, it's being over done right now.  If you want my opinion, feel free to ask in the comments and maybe we can write an interesting response that will come from a different point of view than all the others out there today.

What I do want to share is 3 simple words to help you as you begin the new year.  Three simple plans of attack to help you keep moving as we try to make things easier on ourselves, allowing us more time to spend with students, and saving us from a lot of headaches.

So here we go...
First of all, and I can't say this enough...BACK UP your computer! Experts say that you should have your media (documents, videos, pictures, music, etc.)  in at least 3 forms: on the computer, local, and cloud.  There are many ways to do this, but here are a couple.

• Externally: External hard drives are relatively cheap these days.  A 1TB drive can be found easily for under $100.  A cheap price for your sanity and peace of mind.  Both Microsoft's Windows platform and Apple's OS X support this right out of the box. I use Time Machine from Apple, setup is very easy, and when combined with my router it is done wirelessly in the background without me having to remember to hook it up. This has saved me at least twice from losing my information, settings, and having to go through the hassle of redoing everything.
• Cloud: There are several solutions for this, so do your research.  One that I know of is Carbonite.com, and if you do your research there are free trial codes out there, as well as lifetime discount codes. The nice thing with this service as well, as it's automatic.  The biggest issue with most people is actually remembering to do the backup. 

Secondly, CLEAN UP your computer. There are a lot of files, programs, and other things hanging around your computer that need to be gotten rid of.  If you are running Windows, make sure you use a good registry cleaner. There are a lot of good free options out there.  This will help breathe life back into your computer, and make your experience a lot better.

Lastly, UPDATE your computer.  Make sure your OS is up-to-date. Make sure your programs and drivers are updated. And make sure that your virus protection is updated.

When we do all this, it will hopefully help us sleep better knowing that at least one part of our lives is ready to face the new year.