March 2003 EduNotes

EduCyber is pleased to present the March 2003 Edition of EduNotes. In this issue you'll learn about doing Internet searches, get information about upgrading your computer and hear once again from our old friend Ed Cyber. Enjoy and as always, send feedback to edunotes@educyber.com.
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Searching on the Internet
If you're at all like me, you do most if not all of your Internet searching with Google. And Google is pretty cool with their regular search engine, an image search engine and their news search engine. But there are a lot of other ways to do searches.
AskJeeves (ask.com) is a natural language search engine. You can ask real questions like "Why is the sky blue?" and get a real answer. The same search on Google turns up a real answer as well but I also get a scolding that the words "why", "is", and "the" are common words so they weren't really used in the search. AJKids.com is the kids version of AskJeeves and with the Internet having so many dark alleys, ajkids is a nice place to have around.
One search engine I never turn to anymore is HotBot. Pre-Google HotBot was my favorite. They also had more pages indexed than anyone before those Stanford guys come up with Google. Now Hotbot is just another interface to Lycos as evidenced by their URL which is www.hotbot.lycos.com. They are just a middle of the pack brand now but still useful to have as an alternate when you're not finding what you want on other search engines.
Yahoo is still a favorite of many - garnering almost as many search users as Google. The thing I don't like about Yahoo is the clutter. Visit yahoo.com and there's TOO much of everything. It's like a house that is so cluttered you can't find a place to sit. Trying to be all things to all people, they've become a search engine that I choose not to use.
But there are some good search engines out there besides Google. Metacrawler is one you might find helpful. It has one interface for you (the user) but when you do a search, it checks with several of the major search engines, discards duplicates and gives you the results all together. This can save you the time of having to visit each of the search engines yourself and still give you the widest ranging results.
Copernic is another interesting search solution. It includes up to 90 search engines in your search. You can save searches and manage your searches quite effectively. Copernic is a software download (the basic version is free) and it integrates with Microsoft's IE 5.0 and higher browsers. While EduCyber does not generally recommend installing small utility programs like this, power searchers may find that any trade off in having fewer resources (memory) available may be worthwhile with the features offered through Copernic.
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To Upgrade Or Not To Upgrade
Ahh, it's time to once again revisit the question of whether you ought to upgrade your existing computer or squeeze your budget a bit and buy a new one.
First I guess, you need to determine what led you to the question in the first place. If your hard drive is filling up, if your computer is going slow and has less than 128 MB of RAM, or if your CPU is at the low end of what the motherboard can handle, you might want to consider upgrading.
If you meet two or more of the criteria above, you would probably be better served by donating your computer to a favorite charity and purchasing a new one. The cost to upgrade two or more of these would be enough to make a hefty down payment on a new computer.
However, if you should you decide to upgrade one or more components, here are a few tips:
Upgrading Hard Drives
Before upgrading, try running a disk cleanup utility to free up space. You should be able to empty temporary files, temporary internet files and perhaps compress seldom used files.
If you have a 4 or 8 GB hard drive that is starting to fill up, you can get a new drive of 40 to 80 GB starting at $80. If your drive is formatted with FAT32, there are utilities that usually come with disks (at least with Western Digital disks) that help you to move your data from one drive to the other.
Upgrading Memory
This is one of the easiest upgrades to do and, depending on the configuration of your system, the easiest.
Check to see if you have any empty memory slots.
Check your computer documentation to see what kind of memory to purchase.
If you have less than 128 MB of RAM, you should definitely consider upgrading. We like new systems to have at least 256 MB of RAM but many existing systems will run well with 128.
Upgrading CPUs
As the CPU is the brains of the computer, upgrading it is a bit harder and the most expensive upgrade.
Unless you can sell the old CPU on eBay or elsewhere, it will be worthless.
You need to know the motherboard type and what your current chip speed is.
There are a variety of types of CPUs so check the documentation to see how to remove / replace the chip.
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Ask Ed Cyber
Ed Cyber is back with us again this month, taking your questions.
Q. Ed, I'm tired of buying expensive cartridges for my cheap printer. Are there any alternatives?
Poor from Printing

A. Mr. Printing, there are a couple of alternatives to buying expensive cartridges. The first and least expensive is to refill them. Ohh, the printer makers howl when they hear that. Most new printers include in the manual the dangers of filling your own cartridges. However I had one client who bought regular black ink at a stationery store and refilled his single cartridge numerous times. Finally it quit working so he bought a new one. I'm sure he'll re-use the new one several times as well. I tried this once or twice myself but found it cumbersome and wasn't pleased with the results.
The other alternative is to get rid of the cartridges altogether. You could take a step backwards with a dot matrix and ribbon printer but I recommend a laser printer for all of your black and white or grayscale printing. Prices for the printers have come down considerably over the last few years. You might gasp when you see how much the toner costs but remember it will last FAR longer than your printer cartridge and the print quality will be better as well.

Q. Ed, my mouse is acting strangely. Sometimes I can't move the pointer at all and other times it seems to jump all over the screen. Help!
Scared of My Mouse

A. Dear Scared, there's really nothing to be worried about here. You have two options to resolving this problem. The best answer is to get an optical mouse. The mouse you have has a ball on the bottom and inside there are three (I hate to get technical here) "spinny" things that roll against the ball when you move the mouse. An optical mouse doesn't have any parts like that that can get dirty. Optical mice start at around $20.
If you'd rather not invest in something new, the easiest answer is to clean your mouse. Shut your computer off before doing this. First remove your ball, usually this is accomplished by twisting the piece around the ball counterclockwise. The ball can be cleaned and even washed but usually it's not the ball that's the problem, it's the "spinny" things. Using either a fingernail or tweezers, remove any buildup on each of the rollers, being careful not to damage the roller itself. When the rollers are clean, use compressed air (or just blow real hard) into the mouse to make sure all the buildup has been cleared from the area. Replace the ball and fire up your computer. You should be ready to go until the next time it gets dirty.
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