The Internet Tourbus (turn on images to view this message)
If your software garbles this newsletter, read this issue at InternetTourbus.com
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The Internet Tourbus (turn on images to view this message)
If your software garbles this newsletter, read this issue at InternetTourbus.com
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And as much as we know we should back up all our important files, most people don't. So when your hard drive fails, should you try to fix it yourself, or send it to a hard drive repair service? There are some common hard drive problems that you can fix yourself, with a bit of self-education. But unless you're fairly geeky, trying to save the hard drive yourself may cripple it even further. 
If you do everything just right, you'll end up with a perfect hard drive. Your operating system will be bug-free; your applications will play well together; your data will be neatly organized in folders; everything will be just perfect. And then it will change. A lot of unpleasant things can happen to your hard drive, even if you're careful. 
I'm sure you've noticed that on certain forums and blogs, some people have an avatar that appears next to their comments. But it can be a nuisance to upload your avatar to every site where you participate. And if you want to change your avatar, you have to do it all over again. Gravatars solve both those problem. 
Millions of users have decided to skip Vista and move directly from XP to Win7. But there's a bit of bad news for those people. Unfortunately, you can't directly upgrade an existing Windows XP installation to Windows 7. Microsoft is reserving that option for people who have an existing Windows Vista installation, opting not to provide an "in-place" upgrade option for the XP customers. 
Joel Tenenbaum is a grad student at Boston University who was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for activities on file sharing sites. Tenenbaum was found guilty and has been ordered to pay damages to RIAA in the amount of $675,000. That's $22,500 for each of the 30 songs that he illegally downloaded and distributed via peer to peer networks. 
I've started a new feature on AskBobRankin recently, which I call the Geekly Update. It's a weekly roundup of what I think are the most important stories about the Internet, computing, gadgets, security issues, social networking, web tech, search engines and related topics. And you don't really have to be a geek to get it. You'll never again have to endure the embarrassment of not knowing the latest cyberbuzz at a social gathering. 
