After some trial and error I found the solution. With Word and the other “problem programs” maximized I right-clicked on the taskbar and selected “Cascade Windows.” That put the problem windows in a neat order and the windows were not full size. At that point I was able to size them however I wanted to.

YES!! Problem solved!

So, if you’re in the market for a new home or small office printer what should you get, ink-jet or laser? My short answer – laser. Let me explain.

When black ink-jet printers first came out you had to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. You could get a replacement ink cartridge for 20 bucks and you’re good to go. Or, you could buy an ink refill kit and refill your cartridge for a fraction of the cost of a new cartridge. Well, those days are long gone. Now you pay twenty bucks for the printer and $500 for the ink! Well, not quite, but it seems that way.

I’ve worked on printers with a single color cartridge and with one cartridge for each of the three standard colors and either way, you end up paying a lot for ink. So what do a lot of people do to save money on ink? They use their printer as little as possible. While this may seem like a reasonable solution it creates another problem; the ink dries up. Then when you go to print it’s all streaky because the ink has dried up and clogged the microscopic jets. So what to do now? You run your printer through the cleaning process, which, unfortunately, USES A TON OF INK!

Here’s the answer, buy ink cartridges on sale and stock up. Oops, wrong answer. Ink cartridges have an expiration date and usually don’t work after that date.

How about refilling? Most cartridges today use some kind of “smart” technology that knows when it’s empty and won’t work when refilled – plus it can be a real mess.

The reason most ink-jet printers are so inexpensive today is that printer manufactures use the same business model as cell phone companies, that is, give away the phone (printer) and make the profit by regularly selling minutes (cartridges). Add to that the natural trend of computer products getting cheaper and the fact that today’s printers are really cheaply made (notice I didn’t say “inexpensive,” I said “cheaply”) and you’ll see $29 ink-jet printers all the time.

But don’t think you can just buy a new printer whenever your ink runs out, because most printers are sold with “starter” cartridges which are less than 50% full.

So, what about color laser printers? Color laser printers have been around for quite a few years now, costing about ten grand and weighing 100 pounds when the first came out. Now you can get one for under $300 that weighs less than 40 pounds. So obviously it costs more to purchase a laser printer than an ink-jet printer, BUT, the cost per page is much less with laser and the hassle is greatly reduced as well.

So, for routine small office and home use these days, I recommend color laser printers. To get you started you can look at this Samsung printer or other color laser printers at Amazon.com.

I’m going to give you a few tips on how to create a secure password, but one that’s not too difficult to remember.

The first thing you need to avoid is any word that can be found in the dictionary. Let’s take, for example, the name of my website, ThatTechBlog.com. A bad password would be “that” or “tech” or “blog” but a better password would be “thattechblog” since thattechblog is not a word in the dictionary.

But what’s an easy way to make the password thattechblog even more secure without making it too hard to remember? Well, one way is to use some capital letters since most passwords are case sensitive. An easy way would be ThatTechBlog. That’s a little too easy for someone else to guess, however, so a better option would be to capitalize the last letter of each word, like this: thaTtecHbloG.

Now, let’s get a little more sophisticated. What I’ll do now is show you how to replace some of the letters with numbers, but still make it fairly easy to remember. Since a capital E looks like the mirror image of 3 we’ll make that change so now we have thatt3chblog as the more secure password. Other number for letter replacements would make your password look like this: thatt3chb10g. As you can see I’ve replaced the E with 3, the L with 1, and the o with 0 (zero).

To make a password even stronger you may want to insert symbols to replace letters, giving you a password like this: th@ttechb!og.

These examples are all fairly easy to remember and are much more secure than a dictionary word. Here’s another password that is fairly easy to remember, however it is kind of hard to type: rglrrwxgvkif. At this point you may be asking, “How can that password be easy to remember?!” Stop reading right now and take a look at your keyboard and see if you can discover the system.

Did you see what I did? I took each letter from thattechblog and moved one letter to the left on the keyboard. T became R, H became G, etc. Since the A is all the way on the left side you replace it with L, just like you would replace Q with P or Z with M.

Now, if you really want to make a strong password you can combine the above methods and turn thattechblog into rg@Rrwxgv1if. That may be a little complicated just to check your Yahoo email, but for online banking I’d recommend getting a little creative and use one or more of the methods and not just using a password like “money” or something.

It looks like passwords are here to stay, so be creative, have a little fun, and make your online activities more secure. If you want more information about creating passwords, take a look at the book Perfect Passwords at Amazon.com.

Later, however, I was called back because it kept giving the error message “Previous fan failure,” which was accurate since there had been a previous fan failure.  I went into the BIOS under “Post Behavior.” I went to “Keyboard Errors” and set it to “Do Not Report” and rebooted the computer.  It came up without reporting the “Previous fan failure” error.  I returned the setting to “Report” and now the fan error is no longer there.  I’d have to say that this was one of the more unique problems with computer fans that I’ve seen.

I decided not to use the setup CD that came with the modem since I don’t like extra software on my computer and I was going to be using the Netgear router anyway, not just a single computer. I hooked everything up and I was having all kinds of strange problems. (At my old house I had cable internet via Charter Communications and my Netgear router and Linksys cable modem worked fine there.) If I didn’t have the DSL modem plugged into the router I could ping the router, but if they were patched together I couldn’t ping the router. I swapped cables, I tried connecting wirelessly with my Dell laptop, I tried my spare Netgear router, but nothing worked.

I looked again at the bottom of my Siemens DSL modem and read the fine print – Ah Ha, the IP address of the modem was 192.168.0.1, the same as my router – I had an obvious IP conflict. With my Linksys cable modem hooked up to Charter Internet I saw no such problem because the cable modem takes the public IP address, something like 71.9.94.234, and passes that through to the “Internet” or WAN port on the Netgear router.

I wasn’t sure if there was a way to change the IP on the DSL modem so I decided to change the address of my router instead. The default IP for my model of Netgear wireless router is 192.168.1.1 but I had changed it a year ago to 192.168.0.1 since that was the default of my old Netgear RT314 router. Now that I had my wireless router set to 192.168.5.1 I was in business, or so I thought.

Since I hadn’t used my setup CD I hadn’t set up my account with ATT SBC Yahoo. I made a phone call to their tech support and spoke to a very helpful technician. She understood my not wanting to install the software from the setup CD onto my computer and walked me through the steps to get my account set up. After a little while I was online surfing at high speed.

I went to check my e-mail and saw that I had to reconfigure Microsoft Outlook, but that’s a posting for another day.