When to turn off my computer?

A customer of my business recently e-mailed and asked, "Would you give me your opinion about leaving the computer on during the day."

I get this question quite often. The rule I use is, if I am going away from my computer for about an hour or less, I leave my computer turned on. If I am going away for about an hour or more, I turn it off.

When I leave the computer turned on, I usually turn the screen off (the screen uses a lot more power than the computer, so this saves quite a lot of power).
It is possible to set most computers so they will turn their screen off after a certain amount of time with no activity on the keyboard or mouse, but I don’t use these "power saving" features, because they have (in the recent past) tended to cause some problems with some programs.

If you turn the screen off, just remember to ONLY turn the screen switch on, NOT the computer's main power switch (i.e. if you forget the computer is not off, and you hit the computer's power switch, the computer will go off, which is not good for your computer).

The reason I turn the computer off when I'm not using it for a while, is that (1) it uses power when it is on, (2) the hard drive and the fans spin when the computer is on, and these wear out (as I sell and repair computers I have often seen this). The reason I leave it on if I'm just going away for less than an hour, is that (1) turning it off and on a lot causes more wear on the circuits and the hard drive, (2) it takes less time to turn the screen on, than to start the computer, and (3) if I leave the file I am working on open, I don't have to open it when I get back, which saves more time.

NOTE: If there is an electrical storm, I prefer to have my computer OFF and unplugged, because computers are somewhat sensitive to electrical variations and spikes caused by lightening. .

Email Spam

You must have seen an increase in the quantity of junk mail which shows up in your email box, or on your choicest newsgroup. The activities of a small number of people are becoming a 

bigger issue for the Internet. 

Chain letters that ask for money, whether for reports or just straight up, are unwanted whether they come in the post or in e-mail form. You may see e-mail coming from Nigeria or another African country, sent by someone who wants to use your bank account to transfer 20 million dollars. This is called a ’419′ scam and people have been killed over it.

Any email or message that you had not asked for and is from someone unknown or 

unsolicited is Spam.

Spam is flooding the Internet with many multiple copies of the same email content, in an 

attempt to force the message on on-line users who would not otherwise choose to have it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for highly doubtful products, get-rich-quick bogus plans.

One particularly troublesome type of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums). Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use programmed automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of email addresses, or use the mailing list as a straight target for their attacks to make money.

Make sure that you are not leaving your email at a place where it is said that it will be published online! There are programs used by spammers that can capture such openly left email addresses of yours and then start sending you junk email, i.e., spam.

To the recipient, spam is easily identifiable. If you hired someone to read your mail and clean the spam by clearing it, they would have little trouble doing it. What then can you do to make this process automatic?

I think we will be able to help solve the problem with a small program called Mailwasher.

This program lives on your computer and checks your email and shows you the sender and content of the email directly from your email providers mail server. With this information you can decide if a message is spam or not. Once you have decided you can either delete the message directly from the server or choose to download it to your computer with your email program if you decide the email is legitimate. In this way only email you determine to be OK will ever get to your computer.