OK, the holidays have started and you may be traveling to visit the relatives in a faraway or unfamiliar location.

You take your computer so that you can keep up with email, Facebook, your Tweets and your news and sports information.  Gee, first of all what happened to the "good ole days" when you visited your relatives?  Oh well, I guess we are more civilized now but don’t get me going on that.

Or let us say that you really are a "family-visiting" sort of person and you do want to visit and not spend your entire time with them texting and online.  On your way to visit you go to a hotel and you need a Wi-Fi connection.  You have your notebook and your Wi-Fi enabled and Wi-Fi tablet PC with you.  When you get to the hotel you find they only have a wired connection.  Well unless you are geekier than I am, you will not have a network cable with you.  But since you need to connect you hope that they have a cable to lend you.  An aside here; I experienced this very thing a year or two ago and they would "lend" me a cable…for $7.50 a night.  What a rip-off, but don’t get me going on that one either.  In that case you could connect your notebook but most likely not your tablet, phone or other non-cable ready devices.

The program we will look at today is Connectify (connectify.me). It will help to resolve this and some other situations for you.  You can install Connectify on your Windows 7 PC or XP but it doesn’t work nearly as well with XP and has fewer features available.  Once installed, you can set up your own Wi-Fi Hotspot.

This means after you plug into the network and download and install Connectify you can set up your own private wireless network.  Yes, this makes it just like home with your Wireless setup.  You will have a SSID (a network name) then you can use all of your other wireless devices to connect to your computer’s network and get online.  This shares the connection all around with multiple devices.

There are other features available with Connectify but the one that interests me the most is only in the paid version.  Check online for the price.  (I once quoted a price in a column and when it was published the prices had gone up so go check it on the site.)

This other feature can be used to extend the local wireless router you are using, even your home’s router.  OK, now I just lost some of you but here is the situation.  Your wireless router is located in the, oh let’s say, Northeast corner of the basement.  You can keep it hidden there and out of the way.  

You notice every time you sit on your back porch (on the second floor, southwest corner of the house) to read a book, check email, surf the net, etc. your Wi-Fi connection is either gone or so weak you cannot do much.  This is because the farther away from the wireless router you are, the weaker the signal.  If you use Connectify Pro you can use your notebook computer as a signal extender.  With that set up you can get much farther from your router since the notebook computer is now "extending" the distance of the broadcast signal.  You could go way across the street or out to the backyard and still receive a strong signal.

As always, make sure you secure your wireless network to keep your connection yours.

Tags: Email, good ole days, holidays, network cable, notebook, relatives, sports information, tablet PC, tweets, unfamiliar location, wifi

Last week’s column generated more questions so today I will hit a few of those.

First, “Why did you say Dell is the best computer maker? I think (fill-in-the-blank) is much better.”  Well, I understand your comment; however, that is not exactly what I said.  I believe when you reread the column you will see that I said, “At this point in time I always suggest Dell.”  I stand by that statement, but they have not always been at the top of my list.  In the past they have been close to the bottom.  My recommendation takes into account quality, price and service.  Many manufacturers have fallen down on customer service.  In my opinion, while Dell is not the best in customer service, they are not the worst.

Many of you appreciated me bringing the AIO computers to the forefront.  Some of you “googled” about them and found that they are quite an interesting concept.  Also, they are currently more expensive than most of us would like to experiment with.  So, thanks!

Now the one where I guess I drew most of the “attacks”…iPad!  I did not include iPads in my comments about computer types, i.e. netbook, notebook, desktop and even AIOs.  The reason being that although it is technically a computer it does not have all of the abilities and features of a standard computer.

The iPad is a computer whose main calling in life is to allow the user to view prepared things online. It is not used much for creation.  For instance, you can view any website, e-book, picture, movie, etc. you wish.  However, it is hard to contribute to those same things from the iPad.  Yes, I could have written this column on an iPad but from what I hear and have experienced it isn’t the most comfortable keyboard to use for longer typing.  Emails yes, documents no.  I could also purchase a keyboard that would connect to the iPad and make typing easier.  If that’s the case why wouldn’t I have just bought a netbook at half the price or less?

They are neat and I think that over time they will affect the e-book readers like Kindle and Nook more than the notebook/netbook markets.  They are perfect for reading books (once they come out with a version that has an antiglare screen) and magazines with much better quality than the e-readers and the page size is a great deal nicer.  Even an Apple lover told me that they are basically an overgrown iTouch.

I would love to own one but not at such a high price for a feature-poor computer.  One of the major drawbacks is the iPad’s small storage space.  The highest end iPad has 64 GB of storage, which is probably OK if you do not want to add many programs and save files. I personally am not for putting all of my files on the cloud as of yet.

I like the concept of the iPad but it needs some increases in functionality before it can fairly be compared to a computer.

Tags: aio, all in one, comparison, desktop, iPad, netbook, notebook

I got an email from a reader in Mt. Crawford over a month ago asking an excellent question.  They wanted to know if there was a way to keep all of their programs up to date, keeping the latest version always on their system.

In talking back and forth with them we came to the conclusion that there should be something on the market that was similar to “Windows Update”.  WU comes with all versions of Microsoft windows as all of my readers should know.  It allows you to check and see if there are any new versions of your MS products that need updating.  If there are, it allows you to update them so that you can stay ahead of the curve.

After a little Googling and searching I found a program called Secunia-PSI.  I have no idea what “Secunia” means but PSI is for “Personal Software Inspector”.  This program does almost everything the reader wanted.  I have been testing it for a little over a month and it seems to work very well.

You can go to secunia.com to read about and download the personal edition of the application.  There are actually three different versions of Secunia.  They are OSI (Online), PSI (Personal) and CSI (Corporate).  I tried the OSI and it was adequate but does not look for as many programs as the PSI and CSI versions.  The CSI version is really for the corporate environment and home users do not need it.  All three are here: bit.ly/bx3f5u.

All versions are free but I recommend downloading/installing the PSI version which seems to  be very thorough.  You will find it in the middle of the three on the page recommended above.

The default setting for Secunia runs in the background all the time checking your computer’s software for updates.  I leave it like that on my desktop since I have loads of memory. However, for my netbook I just run it once a week or so.

I pride myself in always keeping all of my software up to date, so let’s take a look at how my three computers faired after being scanned by Secunia.

My netbook scored 100% as all of my software was up-to-date, yeah!

My notebook didn’t do as well.  There were four applications that weren’t up to standards.  But I still did better than 15% of users in Virginia; Secunia gives you this info if you register the product.  (free)

Now my pride and joy, my desktop computer…oops, I had 11 applications that were not where they should be.  I spent about an hour uninstalling some old versions which Secunia advised me to do, before I updated them.  I also downloaded some of the new versions from the links provided by Secunia.  And I learned a valuable lesson, as the bible says, “Pride goes before destruction.”

Now, let’s look at  a couple of drawbacks.  It indicated that all three browsers on my system were insecure and needed updates.  They are MSIE, Firefox and Google Chrome.  Come on, give me a break!  They were all updated and as secure as possible.  I guess it wanted me to uninstall all three of them. Of course, then my surfing the net time would be cut down considerably.  I decided to ignore those threats.  You can always make rules to ignore certain warnings.

Tags: application, browsers, desktop, netbook, notebook, PSI, Ron Doyle, secunia, software, update