Tips Of The Day For March 2001

Tip Of The Day For March 28, 2001: You can use search engines to determine the number of sites that have links to a particular site. You do this by putting "link:" in front of the URL. For example, "link:http://www.PCGuide.com" entered into a search engine such as Google or Altavista will show you the sites that link to The PC Guide. (Thanks to mjc for the tip!)

Tip Of The Day For March 19, 2001: Many documents are now distributed in portable document format or PDF, which uses the Adobe Acrobat Reader. PDF files are often used to distribute information on the Internet. Sometimes you may get a message from the Acrobat Reader when you load a PDF file saying that the document cannot be opened, or that it is damaged. If this occurs, there's a good chance that somehow the document was not downloaded properly, so you may want to try downloading it again. In rare cases, however, this actually results from mistakes made by the person that created the document.

Tip Of The Day For March 12, 2001: Be sure to scan your hard disk's file system for problems periodically. The other day I noticed that it seemed my backup 20 GB drive was "too full" based on the number of files it contained. I scanned the drive and ScanDisk found a problem in the file system; when it repaired the problem, suddenly 4 or 5 GB of "extra" disk space showed up! :^) (Thanks to bassman for inspiration...)

Tip Of The Day For March 10, 2001: If you have an older PC with both of its COM ports in use and need another COM port, check the system BIOS. It may be that the COM2 port was disabled to allow an internal modem to use the COM2 setting. If so, you may be able to change the modem's resource settings to use a different IRQ line and COM setting, and re-enable the built-in COM2 port on the motherboard.

Tip Of The Day For March 5, 2001: Many of the "virus warnings" you see in your email inbox or on Usenet are in fact hoaxes. They are spread around by well-meaning but misinformed people and can circulate for years. In essence, with these hoaxes, the "warning" is the virus itself, of sorts! Be sure to check any supposed viruses against a reliable online virus hoax database, such as this one by McAfee, before forwarding any virus warning messages.

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