Don Zeigler dot Info

It's nearly impossible for any company today, regardless of size, to do business without an Internet connection in its office(s). However, the downside to this is the potential for abuse by employees. It's a pretty safe bet we all know at least one person at work who seems to spend more time on Facebook or eBay than they do actually working!

Installing "watchdog" type software on individual workstations is time-consuming and expensive. How about an approach that would encompass every machine on your office LAN and also be extremely easy to administer? I can show you how.

My web content filtering solution will protect your LAN from phishing attacks, and also block access to adult-related sites, sites offering or condoning illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters. All this is done without installing any software on your local machines.

If one of your users attempts to access a blocked site they receive a brief onscreen message telling them that access to that site has been disabled (and the message can be customized with your company logo and your own text, too).

Contact me for more information on web content filtering for your office (or home!) My usual hourly rate applies to install this service… actual setup time is only a few minutes but I do have a one-hour minimum charge. So, for only $30 you can enjoy greater peace of mind when it comes to Internet security, and also have the assurance your network's resources are not being misused.!

People often confuse their hard drive and their memory (the RAM, or Random Access Memory) of their computer. Both hold information, and both are important to the functioning of your computer.

Your hard drive (or hard disk) can be thought of as the filing cabinet of your computer.  Even when your computer is turned off, the hard drive is still storing all of your files (such as your email or a recipe you save with MS Word), your programs (such as MS Word itself) and everything else the computer needs to be useful for you.

When you turn your computer on, some of the data that is on the hard drive is pulled into memory – it is what your computer is “thinking” about.  As you need to the computer to think about more things, those things are brought into memory.

For example, if you decide to surf the web, your web browser (such as Internet Explorer) is pulled into memory so the computer can “think” about it.  It is also left on the hard drive, so it is really in both places.

If you ask your computer to think about too much, sometimes the computer has to, in essence, take notes on what it is thinking about to make room for the new stuff.  Hey, we all have to do that, right?  The computer does that by putting some of what is in its memory back onto the hard drive using what is called “virtual memory.”   This allows the computer to work with those notes faster than it would if it had not noted the data at all, but it still slows things down.  You can often tell if your computer is doing this a lot of you hear the hard drive “grinding” as you move from program to program. Memory is completely released when you shut your computer down.

The most common item to upgrade when you want to increase the speed of your computer is its memory.  Most people do not have to increase the size of their hard drive – modern ones hold massive amounts of data.  It is not uncommon to have 300 or 500 or more Gigabytes of hard drive space on a new computer, where 1 or 2 Gigabytes of memory is typical  on a modern computer (if you do not know what a Gigabyte is, just suffice it to say 1 or 2 units is a lot smaller than 300 to 500!)

If the above is confusing to you, know this: for most people, the best way to extend the life of an aging computer is to add more memory.