Backing up Facebook

Yes, you can backup a copy of everything you have uploaded to Facebook. Then you will have a local copy of all your pictures, wall posts, notes, messages, and more to browse or just keep. Or perhaps you are tired of Facebook and want to deactivate your account. Backup first and you will have a copy for yourself!

1. Open Facebook
2. In the upper right hand corner pull down the arrow to the right of your name
3. A list of options appears
4. Click Account Settings
5. At the bottom of General Account Settings, locate Download a copy of your Facebook data.
6. Click it, and then after reading the information on the screen click Start My Archive. Followed by another Start My Archive
7. Facebook will make a zip file of all your data and send you an email when it has finished.

On the email there will be a link to click that will download the ZIP file to your computer. Extract the files in the ZIP folder. It will contain a couple of folders and an executable file. Open the executable file to view your archived Facebook data in your browser. By the way, if you do deactivate your account, remember that Facebook does not remove it from their servers. Nobody can access the data, but it is still there and if you log back into your account you will automatically reactivate it.

Setting Send From in Gmail

I have many email accounts, so when I receive an email from someone at one of them I do not always want them to see my from address as the one I received it on. This is important when you have emails auto forwarded to your Gmail account. For example, I have an email at richard@rwevans.net that auto forwards. When someone sends me an email to that address I do not want my from address to be my Gmail account, I want it to be richard@rwevans.net.  

1. Open Gmail and click Tools (the gear icon in the upper right)
2. Choose Settings and then Accounts and Import
3. Under Send mail as: click Add another email address you own
4. In the new window type the email address you want to send from, and then click Next Step, Next Step, and then Send Verification.
5. Now go to your other email and open the email Gmail just sent. Click the verification link and you are now ready to send from a different address in Gmail
6. Go back to Gmail and compose a new email
7. You now have a From box and can choose an alternate address

Export Gmail Contact List
by Dick Evans

You keep all your contact information in Gmail, but the Internet is not available. How do you access your contacts and get their address or phone numbers? 



Open the Contacts page in Gmail.
Pull down the More menu
Select Export...



Choose the Outlook CSV format, and then click Export

The file downloads to your computer as contacts.csv

A CSV (comma separated value) file is a text file. It can easily be opened in any spreadsheet program (Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc) and then used to locate all your contact information on your computer without any need to access Gmail on the net.

Exporting from Gmail to your computer can be done at any time and is a good way to back up your contacts from the cloud.

PC Maintenance

I am frequently asked what I do to keep my computers running well. There are many tools out there and everyone wants you to use theirs.

The most important is an anti-virus app. Many rely on the one that came with their computer and they pay for the upgrades each year. I guess I am a "cheap geek". I have been using free ones for years and running trouble free. Now, you cannot have more than one antivirus running at the same time. They are working against each other and will slow down your machine. So if you decide to switch, remove the one you are currently running first.

I recommend going with MSE: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials

Once a week I would run CCleaner FREE to clean out the junk and clean the registry: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

I would download Defraggler FREE  and run it once a week as well: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler/download

Also run Malwarebytes FREE once a week: http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free 

In addition I recommend getting your email in the cloud with gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or another service. They all run your emails in and out through an anti-virus app before sending them to you or to your recipients.

And of course be wary of the emails you open and who they come from. Always check the address of any links you are tempted to take by mousing over the link first. In the lower left of your browser screen you will see the address of the site you are going to. Look funny? Don't click the link.

Hope this helped...

MP3 Player

I picked up an inexpensive MP3 player and wanted to load some of my music to them. I had a player in the past, but it stopped working a couple of months ago. I used to bring it to the gym to use while I worked out. It does seem to make the time go by faster.

Getting songs to that old one was pretty easy. I just opened Windows Media Player, clicked on Sync, mounted my MP3 player, and dragged my songs to it. This time it did not work. Oh, the music went over fine. They just would not play.

The new MP3 player only plays MP3 files. It does not have software built in to handle the WMA format from Windows Media Player. Somehow I had to get all those WMA files converted to MP3 so I could move them to the new player. I can’t complain about the MP3 player—it only cost $6.50 (see http://bit.ly/sVONxT).

I located a freebie called Switch Sound File Converter that does a job doing just that. And it will convert into other formats as well. You can find it at http://www.nch.com.au/switch/index.html.

A little more digging and I discovered an option in Windows Media Player. When ripping a CD you can choose to have it rip in MP3 format instead of WMA! (Organize > Options > Rip Music > Format MP3)

So if you intend on getting your music to an MP3 player, rip as MP3 and you can listen on both your PC and your MP3 player.

Showing the Desktop in Windows 7

In most version of Windows, you can clear the desktop without closing any open app by holding down the Windows key (that key with the windows flag on it) and tapping D for desktop.

Now, in Windows 7, you just have to locate the vertical bar to the right of the time and click it. To restore the desktop, click it again.

Out of Room on Hard Drive

All I have on C: is the OS and the installed programs. All my data and pictures and movie file are on a second partition. 50 gb each. I set it up this way so when my OS got messed up the next time I would not have to find a way to extract all my data and then reload the OS. Sounded like a great idea and it all worked well until...

The amount of room on C: was dwindling fast. Something was eating away at the allocation of space and it was getting real bad. Here is what I did and freed up over 15gb of space.

I moved the system restore files to my data area. That was eating into storage big time. I never realized how large those files were. Now I could have removed them all together, but that is not wise. So I shifted them to D: (my data partition) and made a starting restore point.

Here is how that was done on my Vista machine:

I started with the System Restore files. From the Start menu, I right-clicked Computer and selected Properties. On the System window I selected System protection. I unchecked the C: box which removed ALL past system restore points from drive C:. Then I checked the D: box to establish new restore point on that drive. I then forced the first restore point.

On the same System Properties window, click the Advanced tab and then under Performance click Settings. On the Performance Options, click the Advanced tab. Under Virtual memory, click Change. This lets you set the parameters for the System Paging File. If you are real tight on space you can override the System managed size and steal a few more bytes back from Windows.

Next I took a look at the Hybernate function. I really do not need to use it and each time it runs it makes a file as large as RAM and I have 4gb.

From a cmd window Run as Administrator, I ran powercfg -h off

(To run as an administrator, right-click on the command prompt in the start menu, and then choosing Run as Administrator. If you do not have a command prompt, click Start. In the search box type cmd and press Enter. Close the window that opens and open Start again. It should be there.)

This disabled Hibernate and then I located and deleted the hiberfil.sys file.

Amount of space recovered was over 15gb. Now I have plenty of room left on my system drive and can forget about that new hard drive I was considering. I have plenty of data room left, so more storage is unnecessary.

I also use CCleaner and SmartDefrag on a regular basis to clean up the junk on my drives and in my registry as well as reducing the number of fragments automatically as I am using the computer.