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Earth Day, recycling computers and e-waste

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With Earth Day upon us millions of people are thinking of recycling plastic and paper. Those are certainly important but equally important is the need to recycle electronics. E-Waste is a global problem as people toss out computers, televisions, phones, printers, and other consumer electronics. You can recycle those devices but better yet, why not make the gadgets you have last longer?

Rick Patin, a computer repair technician tells me computers today should last around 6 years. What’s coming to his shop died before their time. Part of the problem is many people buy cheap computers.

“Those machines, they’re not going to last very long,” said Patin. There’s also a mindset when you buy a machine that is inexpensive, you’re not going to spend $200 to fix it. You’re going to throw it away.”

What he sees are computers that slowed down due to malware or a virus. He can fix those, get them back up to speed with programs designed to clean the hard drives and registry. He recommends Malware Bytes and CCleaner.

“If you’re talking about a general PC, that’s a Microsoft product, you’re going to see mostly viruses and spyware. A lack of updates, Windows updates,” he said.

The latter can be remedied by downloading those updates manually or set them to update on a schedule. Resetting or turning off the computer before you go to bed will take care of that as well.

How often should you restart a computer?

“Reset or restart your computer once a week,” Patin said. “That allows all the updates to happen. If it’s off, they can’t do that.”

 

He also recommends that consumers upgrade their hard drives to solid-state or SSD. These hard drives do not spin, thus they have a longer life span than older drives.

 

And before you do anything, back up the contents of your hard drives so you don’t lose precious memories such as photos and videos. 

You’ll Love These 4 iPhone Tricks

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 We all spend an enormous amount of time on our smartphones. Maybe not long enough though to discover some little-known-tricks only power iPhone users know. Here are some of my favorite iPhone tips, tricks, and hacks.

(don’t miss iPhone Tricks Part 1)

iPhone Trick #1  

If you frequently send information over text, Facebook, or email that requires a lot of tapping this trick will save you a lot of time. Let’s say you will often need to send information about your business such as a list of clients you work with. Rather than type out that list in an email or text, go to your settings and set up a shortcut.

Under general settings look for “keyboard”, then “text replacement” and then the plus icon. In “Phrase” enter the words, sentences, or numbers that you frequently need to send. Under “shortcut” come up with a couple of letters or numbers that you’d not normally use. Here’s an example: if you have 10 clients you want to mention to a potential client in an email, enter all of those clients as the ‘phrase’ and *clients* as the shortcut. Next time you need to send someone the list of clients just type out *clients*. 

iPhone Trick #2

  emoji text message in iPhone To dress up iMessages you can send them with flair. Type out your message and then hold down the blue ‘send’ button. As you do a fresh screen appears with the option of sending the message as a “bubble”. Choosing the “screen” option you can send the message with balloons, fireworks, confetti, or any number of animations. Try it out by sending someone the Tinkerbell emoji as a screen and it’ll take over their screen before ending in the text line.

For more fun, text someone the words “pew pew”.

iPhone Trick #3

Have you ever typed out a message then thought you should change or delete it? Rather than tapping on the back button to erase the characters simply shake the phone. You’ll be given the option to undo the text. Shake it again to re-do the undo.

iPhone Trick #4

One of my favorite shortcuts in iOS 14 is the ability to tap the back of the phone to launch an app. To do this tap on settings > accessibility>touch and scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen until you see “back tap”.

You’ll be given many options to set a shortcut by tapping the back of the phone twice or a triple tap. Use it for any apps or features you want to access quickly. For example, I use a double-tap to take a screenshot and a triple-tap to Shazam a song I hear playing. I can’t tell you how many times I missed a song by not opening the Shazam app in time. The triple-tap makes it quick and easy.

These shortcuts are definitely time-savers but they’re also pretty fun.