Email Advice of the Week: Do Your Research First!! (Please.)

Posted in: Email

After all these years I still get them, and I’m guessing you do, too. Those annoying conspiracy/warning/beware/disaster/gossip forwarded emails that your friends and coworkers send out to every person they’ve met since kindergarten.

I’ve seen them all — from the email claiming Obama refused to cover his heart with his hand during the National Anthem to the email stating that disposable chopsticks are loaded with carcinogens to the email with the story about the Concentration Camp survivor coincidentally reuniting years later with the girl who had secretly helped feed him.

Unfortunately, whenever I receive one of these emails, I know there’s a ridiculously low chance of the forwarded information being correct. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the emails contain nothing more than urban legends or myths.

Please, please stop blindly forwarding these emails. I’m so very tired of receiving them and, to be honest, so are all your friends and coworkers. The next time you receive an amazing or terrifying or disgustingly sappy email and you feel the urge to share it with everyone you know, please first go to www.snopes.com and determine whether that email contains a single shred of truth.

Tech Tips of the Week: Ways to Increase Your Printer’s Efficiency

Posted in: Computer Tips & Tricks

With seemingly everyone working hard to come up with new ways to make their dollars stretch further, I thought it might be helpful to share a few money-saving tips of my own. The three techniques listed below will enable you to help extend the life of your printer’s laser toner or ink cartridges.

#1) Don’t let your cartridge dry up! Not surprisingly, this tip is especially important for people living in areas with low humidity and at high altitude. And thankfully, keeping cartridges fresh and preventing dry-out is simple; just make sure to use your printer to print out at least one page per week.

#2) Print just the text you want! If you’re looking to print out a selection of text from a webpage, there’s no reason to print out absolutely everything you see on the screen (extra text, graphics, photos, etc.). Simply highlight the selection of text you’d like to print, go to File > Print, and then in the dialogue box that pops open, make sure to choose “Selection” before clicking the Print button.

#3) Reduce the default print quality! Unless you need to print high-quality pages on a regular basis, you can easily save ink/toner by setting your printer’s default print quality to “Draft”. Making this change is simple, but the process varies from computer to computer. The steps in this online article should work for most PC printers: http://tinyurl.com/avp9fu.