Friday, May 28, 2010

Driver Wizard

I work on many different computers. A few times a month, people come to me asking about reinstalling Windows, or neededing to upgrade to Windows 7. This has continually brought with it pain and agony trying to find the most recent Dell driver for a soundcard that just wont work.

I looked for a solution. I came across a program called Driver Wizard. In short, for $30, you install it, it finds all your drivers, and you can go back to your life.

At first it seemed like a silly thing to pay for, since it just finds free stuff for you, but I gotta tell you, the amount of time it saved was well worth it. In my case, I wont ever have to go find random drivers all year (yeah). I was so excited, I went around installing it on all my own computers. It updated driver that I know I would never bother doing on my own.

Yext

Today, I would like to blog about companies like yext.com. Basically, you pay them a fee, and then you get entered into their referral system. They take out Ads on google, google sends the visitor to yext, and yext sends them to you. Yext fee is $30 per phone call. So while it sounds like a good idea (even at $30, it is still a solid sale), all they ever sent me was crap broken laptops that I could not fix for under $250 in parts alone (that no one would pay). I just thought you should know.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Ebay Sales

My bill arrived for the month. Which made me look back. I made an estimated profit of $160.00 and the bill was for $140.00. Even if we streach it out, what did I make? $50.00? What theives,

Friday, May 14, 2010

TMobile Even More Plus

After I became completely fed up with AT$T Prepaid Sim charging me $1.00 per day, $0.10 per minute, and charging even more for using my own WiFi router, I went down to T-Mobile and got an Even More Plus account. It came with 1000 minutes, unlimted text and web, and I paid an extra $5.00 for Backberry email support.

Side Note: Sprint Blackberry emails came in once every 20 minutes or so. It was terrible. They blamed my email server for denying them access. T-Mobile, however, alerts me to new emails like 10 seconds after it is received by the server. Amazingly awesome.

I received a text message telliung me that I had $5.00 available in my flexpay account. This caused me confusion. I wanted to know what it was talking about, for professional reasons more than anything else, so I called in to ask about it. They explained what it was for, and that when I don't actually use it (as I won't), it will just disappear. This bothered me, as I paid an extra $5.00 to use this service, and I will never use it. Sure wish I had an option. Also wish it was explained before I got some random text message about it.

The lesson here, is be clear, and explain to your customers what they can expect. If you don't, you are just asking for more time, and trouble, in the future.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

How to change your IP Address

Someone had asked how they can manually change their IP address. That's easy. I fyou look at the bottom of your router, it will have a MAC Address. This is the factory default identifier of the router. If you log into the router, and look around, you will likely find a place to change the default. Go ahead, make something up. Numbers and letters. Turn off your modem and router. For best practice, disconnect the cable/dsl line as well, and leave it for a few minutes to flush out the modem's memory. If you restart, you will see that you have a new address. Even better, if you change it back, your old IP address may come back. Neat, huh?

Avanquest

They have several products at Staples. On the boxes, they look like great products. My official take on the 900 Check Refills, Bookkeeper 2010, and that other thing I bought, is that it is crap. All of it. Don't buy it, any of it. I would tell you why, but then, that would be a further investment of my time. I wonder if they will let me retun the checks? The box is opened and sheets used....

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Google Base Lessons

I have been off Google Base for the past month now, and my visitors have plumetted. Because I have had few visitors, my Organic rankings have dropped. These 2 are definately tied together, for obvious reasons.

I was off Google Base for 2 reasons. One, was that I was rebuilding much of my website, so not point in being online. The other, even more important, is that I could not get my stuff listed. Here were the 2 causes, and solutions.

Problem: Google said I had not claimed my website domain, even though I swore I did... over and over again.

Solution: Verifying and Claiming are 2 different things. You need to Verify from Webmaster Tools, then Claim it from Google Base. When done properly, your Google Base Settings - General - Website URL will be checked as Verified and Claimed.

Problem: It kept saying Invalid Attribute for my Payment_Accepted option.

Solution: The wording in Google's help file, is not entirely clear. Do not add any spaces between the comas. Like cash,mastercard,visa,discover is correct. My real problem, seemed to be in Excel, however. I save as Tab Delimited, but the damn thing would put quotes around just that block of text. I could not see it from excel, but once I opened in a text editor, I could see them.

Once I made the 2 changes above, it accepted my feed without complaint.

PrePay Sim Cards

I needed to use a Prepaid card while I am between phone numbers. So, I put an ATT Sim card into my Blackberry 8320. It worked Fine, and connected to my WiFi. I used the internet, on what I thought was my free Local connectrion. When I made a phone call, it said I had no money left, because it sucked it up.

I called ATT, Complained, and they gave me most of my money back.

Lesson learned: Diable WiFi when using a prepaid Sim. When using the WiFi, disable the Sim.
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