Letters, we get letters
Reader mail has clogged the box along with pitches for Chinese pharmaceutical stocks, so let’s get right to it (the mail, not the stock picks).Q. I have a new Dell laptop but I am barely getting an hour of battery life from it before I get a warning on the screen and I have to power it off before I lose everything. Is that normal? What can I do to get better battery life? I called Dell but I got nowhere.
A. Well, you have a couple of things to do. If you bought a low-end Dell you probably got a low-end battery. You can shop around and upgrade to a longer-life battery for less than $100. Secondly, you can reduce the brightness of your LCD screen when you’re running on battery. That will sharply lengthen the amount of time your laptop will run on battery power. On a Dell you just hold down the Function Key (marked “FN” in blue) and hold the key marked with a sun symbol with a down arrow until it is as dark as you can stand. To increase brightness, you hold down Function Key again and hit the sun symbol that has the up arrow. (Other brands will do this differently; look in the user manual.)
Lastly you can enter the Windows control panel and look in the power section and assure that your laptop is set for maximum battery. That will spin down your hard drive and such at short intervals.
Q. A friend of mine told me I could fry my laptop if I put it down flat on the bed while it is running. She always puts hers down sideways open, like a V, while it’s running. I told her I was going to write you and loser buys the beer.
A. Fork over the Budweiser. I have a small stack of laptops in our shop of burned out laptops where people have laid them down on carpet, beds and whatever and covered up the fans. That resulted in them burning up as they overheated and died a horrible, miserable death. When I lay down my running laptops, even my Apple (which has no fan on the bottom), I lay it sideways. (This all being said, there are few “right” answers in computers. As I have said before, these kinds of things start fistfights in nerd bars.)
Q. What is the best free e-mail account to avoid spam?
A. The “best” word is a tough one. I have used free accounts with all of the big providers at one time or another and probably my current favorite is Google. Its “gmail” service offers a ton of storage (1 gig of free storage is a lot) a good spam filter. Yahoo has gotten much better lately at filtering spam as well. The key with a free account is picking a non-obvious user name. That way the spammers that use the dictionary programs to send spam won’t tend to get your email address if your user name is “j45q3211p”. (The trick is, of course, remembering it.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Ever wish you could vote about what news was on the front page? Now you can with Digg (www.digg.com).
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
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