Congratulations!  You’re headed to college.  Many colleges have specific requirements for incoming students.  Georgia Tech, for instance, requires every student to have a laptop and gives very specific requirements. Some schools have no requirements but suggest that you check with the individual department within your college.

Check with your college to see if they have arrangements with Dell, Apple, IBM, etc. to purchase computers at a discount. Wherever you buy a computer, buy the computer and software separately. MS Office Student/Teacher edition comes in a 3 computer version — so it can be loaded onto 3 machines and not tied to a specific computer. Anti-virus products by Symantec and others also come in multi-user packs. You should check to see which anti-virus/anti-spyware software your school requires. Use their suggestions. Trying to substitute another anti-virus software will waste time and money. Some colleges sell third-party “computer service warranties”. On the surface these may seem like a good idea but read the fine print carefully. Most warranties only cover hardware problems and frequently exclude printers. Most computer problems are caused by software, viruses, and spyware which are usually excluded. Dropping the laptop or spilling liquid on the keyboard also usually voids the warranty.
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Recently a customer had an issue with travelling back and forth between two networks with his laptop. One network (his home) used dynamic IP, the other (his office) used static IP. The constant messing about with the control panel and network connections was causing him grief, and sometimes he would forget the numbers to key in. So, I wrote two scripts and placed them on his desktop.
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Some nasty viruses or other malware like to disable task manager. Most of the time, you can repair task manager by editing the registry. Please do not edit the registry unless you know what you are doing! With that warning - to try this fix just follow these steps:

Click on the Windows key and the R key at the same time. A little “Run” dialog box pops up.
Type REGEDIT, hit ENTER. If you’re running Vista, press CONTINUE.
Browse to the key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
In the right pane, look for the value: DisableTaskMgr
Right click DisableTaskMgr and select Delete.
Then browse to the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
In the right pane, look for the value: DisableTaskMgr
Right click DisableTaskMgr and select Delete.
Close the Registry by clicking on its big red X.

The change should take effect immediately. If not, reboot and see if Task Manager is now repaired.

The other day I was reconfiguring a network with multiple PCs, wireless access points, bridges, and the like. In the midst of this, I noticed that one of the PCs had a “page could not be displayed” message instead of the site being visited, which was amazon.com. Google’s site came up fine, but not amazon. I went to another PC - same issue. There is a great resource for this situation - www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com. I tried it and sure enough - www.amazon.com was not reachable! The outage only lasted a brief while, I saved this screenshot for posterity. Next time you have trouble reaching a site, why not see if others are having the same problem?

On July 19, 2009, Stewart Cink won his first major title at the 138th Open Championship at Turnberry, Scotland, defeating 59 year-old Tom Watson in a playoff. Cink had birdied the 72nd hole while Watson bogeyed, forcing the playoff. This is the sign that greeted Stewart at the entrance to his neighborhood when he returned home. Stewart likes to twitter - check out his tweets.