Every time I need to find one of these I always end up searching for the key combinations to write the special characters and in an effort to save time for you (and myself), I’m going to include the most common ones here.

For Microsoft Windows:

Note: Use all this codes with the combination of Alt. For Example you need to type © than press and hold the “Alt” key and type 0169.

© - 0169
® - 0174
™ - 0153
• - 0149
§ - 0167
† - 0134
‡ - 0135
– - 0150
— - 0151
¶ - 0182
¥ - 0165
§ - 0167
¼ - 0188
½ - 0189
¾ - 0190
À - 0192
Á - 0193
» - 175
÷ - 246
ø - 0248
þ - 0254
ß - 225

For Mac OS X:

These are a lot easier to figure out on your own. You basically just use the option key as a modifier with any other key and see what happens. Here is a chart of the most popular ones:

© - Option+G
® - Option+R
™ - Option+2
¶ - Option+7
• - Option+8
§ - Option+6
– - Option, then minus sign i.e. Option+-
— - Shift+Option+-
† - Option+T

For a more complete list of the character palette for the Mac check out this page, for accents, check out this page.

MakeUsOf.com, which according to their site is a daily blog that features cool websites, computer tips, and downloads that make you more productive, has a collection of really useful “How-To” guides in PDF format that you can freely download on them.

Of particular interest is the Apple Snow Leopard based Mac Manual, the computer networks guide, and the Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop.

You can check out the whole list here.

With the release of Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the free upgrades that people were promised if they bought a new computer after June 26, 2009. The problem is that the method is different for each major computer manufacturer, and all of them are as troublesome as trying to get a rebate these days. Thankfully, PCMag.com has posted an article clarifying the process by manufacturer so you can hopefully get your computer up and running with Microsoft’s latest and (hopefully) greatest.

You can check out the article here

Also, if you want to read the world’s most in-depth review of Windows 7, the popular tech site Ars Technica has 15 pages worth over here.

Much like your transportation and communication needs, the computer has become an irreplaceable part of our lives. In 2009, it is unfathomable for most of us to imagine going back to a simpler time before Quickbooks, Facebook, Email, and iTunes. So how do we keep up with our digital lifestyles in these tough economic times?

The average lifespan for a computer can vary greatly depending on many factors, but in most big businesses the magic number is 3 years. If a computer starts to fail due to a mechanical issue after the 3 year period, it will cost more to repair it then it is worth. That’s a pretty draconian outlook on your hardware, and for most small businesses and home owners, its just not realistic (save for major component failures like the processor). So if your want to squeeze some life out of your PC and you don’t want to splurge on a new one, what are your options? RAM upgrades (system memory) are always the easiest way to economically give your computer a new lease on life. The more RAM, the faster the computer can work with files. How about your hard drive? You might still have plenty of free space, but that 5400 RPM hard drive that came with the computer could be replaced with a new faster 10000 RPM one. Its a good idea to replace your hard drive every few years anyway as they are the most common thing to fail in your computer, and also the most valuable because all of your files are on it (although they are relatively inexpensive themselves). These are two things that practically any computer – desktop or laptop, can have upgraded.

Ditch the color printer. I don’t mean throw it out, I just mean the ink on common inkjet printers are more expensive than gold. So why are you printing out Aunt Selma’s joke of the week with it? Most of what people print out can be done in black and white. A decent black and white laser printer will save you hundreds of dollars in ink costs. Laser printers usually cost more than 50% less to print per page versus an inkjet printer. if you don’t want to buy a new printer, you can also lower the quality of your printouts to save ink. Check the instruction manual or manufacturer’s website of your printer to see how to do that.

Paying top dollar for DSL or Cable? Most companies offer a tiered system of bandwidth. The rub is that the higher end tiers rarely ever perform as well as advertised here in Charleston. Check out www.broadbadreports.com and run a speed test on your connection. If you are getting less than what you are paying for, change your plan accordingly! Are you a cable subscriber and want to cut your costs a lot? AT&T has an unadvertised DSL plan for $10.00 a month for new subscribers. It is for their lowest tier of bandwidth, but for most home users, that is enough to get by with. I know some people who are constantly switching providers to take advantage of special offers, so keep your an eye on all of the local provider’s websites to see if anything good pops up.

Get a check-up. Preventative care can be a good way to avoid a disastrous problem before it happens. Replacing a dying hard drive before it crashes will cost you a fraction of the price of replacing one after the fact. You may also be suffering from a malicious infection that is slowing down your PC and not even know it. Just like the doctor, you should periodically get your computer looked at by a professional.

In a time when people are cutting the traditional phone cords in their home and using just their cell phones, how about cutting your cable/sattelite TV service as well? Lets be honest – traditional TV seems so archaic today. The unbelievable amount of commercials have forced anyone with a DVR to record their favorite TV shows and watch them at a later time so they can save the 20+ minutes per hour of commercial time. In a recent episode of American Idol, millions of viewers missed a surprise ending because they ran late and went into the next hour’s programming time when the DVR’s had already shut off. This is a sign of a major shift in the way people are watching TV content. Now you can watch most of your favorite shows on the internet for free with little to no commercial interruptions. Services like Hulu are bringing the big budget shows and movies, while YouTube is covering the independent home-brew stuff – kind of like the internet’s public access channel. With all of the major channels streaming their content as well on their own respective websites, why is anyone still paying Comcast over $100 a month? Even switching to the most basic services to get news or sports will save you some money. Furthermore, digital set top boxes like Apple’s AppleTV, Roku’s Netflix player, and even an XBox 360 are letting users get digital content on their TV sets.

Hopefully these ideas will spawn even more ideas to help you cope with tough economic times without sacrificing too much in the technology department.

The company also known as a verb for the word “searching” on the internet is now delivering a web browser to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, & Opera. On Monday, September 2nd, tech blogs reported about a leaked virtual comic book describing the reasoning behind Google’s foray into the web browsing software market. By Tuesday evening, computer users were able to test drive the new browser, titled Google Chrome.

Chrome is delivered as a beta product, which means it isn’t quite finished, but like most Google products that are released as beta, it is surprisingly stable and polished. Chrome is also distributed as an open source project, which means that the underlying code for the browser is freely available to download, and you can make any changes you want to the code and totally recreate the browser – as long as you too share the code you add or alter. The underlying rendering engine is the same engine as used by Apple’s Safari, which is called Webkit. It is this rendering engine that contributes to its amazingly fast page loading capabilities. It also handles javascript quickly, which makes web based applications work quickly. So how does it compare to the other browsers out there?

Well, I’m currently typing and posting this article using Google Chrome, and so far I am impressed. It is very clean and simple in design, but has some innovative and powerful features. I personally like the dynamic tabs, which let you drag a tabbed window out of the application to create a new window, and even add it to another existing window. If you have multiple monitors, this is pretty neat. The way Chrome handles download is also pretty cool – it puts them at the bottom of the page and has a button that lets you choose what you want to do with the downloaded file. How does it compare to my favorite browser, Mozilla’s Firefox? It currently is missing the main feature that makes Firefox so great – and that is the thousands of useful add-ons that let you customize it to do exactly what you want it to do. I do like it better than Safari on Windows, but since Chrome is not yet available for the Mac, it is hard to compare. Safari shines on a Mac, but is awkward on a PC because it neglects the Windows design standards set in place and tries to look like an OS X application instead of a Windows one. I have not used Opera in a long time (except on Nintendo’s Wii Console), and honestly have not had a reason to revisit it ever since Firefox came out, so unfortunately I really have no opinion on it. As far as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is concerned, I still think it is the worst browser ever written. Microsoft is hard at work on Internet Explorer 8, and has just released a public beta version to try out. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from version 7, and from the screenshots it looks like more of the same. The reviews for IE 8 have been quite positive though, so it might be worth a try. But lets be honest, it took me less than 1 minute to download and install Chrome. With Internet Explorer, you’d better have a good 20 minutes to get it up and running.

I’m excited to see what the future holds for this sleek and fast browser. More standards driven web browsers out there means that more websites will be forced to work on different kinds of computers and internet devices, and that is a very good thing.

This morning I had the unpleasant surprise of firing up my media center computer (a Mac Mini I have hooked up to the family TV that stores videos, music, and pictures) only to have it freeze and then not successfully power back up. After some quick diagnostics, I realized the internal hard drive (where the operating system, programs, and data are stored) had read its last bit. In other words, it died. When I woke up, I thought I would have a computer-problem-free Sunday to sit around and watch movies and the Olympics with the kids all day. Luckily, I was able to quickly return to the day of rest because I regularly back up my computer. Being a computer technician also helps as I had all the tools and a spare hard drive to quickly fix the computer, but for the average non-technical person, the most important thing in this situation is the data backup. Here are some easy ways to backup your computer to be prepared for the inevitable bout of data loss that every computer user will have to deal with at some time or another.

First of all, you need something to backup to. In the old days, people used floppy disks and magnetic tape to back up. These were slow and unstable, hence a lot of bad back-up habits were born. With the introduction of writable CD’s and eventually DVD’s, the act of backing up remained unchanged, as the process was slow and for a lot of people, too complicated. The biggest issue with these older back-up methods is that they require you to remember to do it! That is why I prefer an automated system. There are two main types of media that an automated method works well with.

The first type of media I want to discuss is an external hard drive. These are relatively inexpensive – for about $100.00 you can get 500GB of disk space to back-up to. These are really easy to install – they do not require any special software to work – you just plug in the USB cable to your PC or Mac and the computer should recognize it automatically. The only difficult part is picking a backup method to move your data to the hard drive.

If you’re running a Mac that has OS X version 10.5, you will have the easiest possible back-up software ever written built right in. It is called Time Machine, and it is so easy to set up that when you plug in a new external hard drive, the computer asks you if you want to use it for backing up. If you say yes, then you are done. As long as you have the disk plugged in, the computer will automatically periodically back up your Mac without any further interaction. For older Macs, there is a great free program called SilverKeeper, which will let you set up scheduled back-ups, but it takes a little setup and testing to make sure it is working.

For Windows-based PC’s, you have a plethora of options. In Windows XP, you can use the built-in back-up program. Microsoft has a great article on their website on how to make use of their back-up solution. Windows Vista has an even more user-friendly back-up program – you can read about the features here, and you can take it a step further by checking out this in-depth guide to using the Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista. On my Windows based systems, I prefer to make image based backups of the whole computer hard drive. What this does is create a complete copy of the whole hard drive, so that if a hard drive fails, I can replace the physical hard drive and restore the image to the new drive. This saves me hours of time because I don’t have to install Windows or any programs first, once I restore the image to the drive, I’m back in business. I used to use a program from Norton called Ghost, but like most of their software, I believe it is now a waste of space on my computer. I have found a much cheaper and quicker program that I love from Paragon called Drive Backup. For $40.00, this program is well worth the price and is quite reliable. It comes with a program that creates a bootable CD, so that in the event of a failed hard drive, you can boot off of the CD and run the program to restore you backed up hard drive image to a new drive. Like the built-in backup programs in Windows, it lets you set a schedule to automatically backup your computer.

The other type of “media” I want to talk about is online backup solutions. There are a bunch of companies out there that do the same thing, but you really need to ask yourself who you would trust with your most sensitive data. I personally trust EMC, who have been in the computer information management business since 1979. Their product, called Mozy, is affordable and painless to set up. It also works on Windows PC’s as well as Apple computers. The way it works is that you you set up what data you want to back up, and it works in the background encrypting and then uploading your data over the internet to their remote backup servers. It does require you to have a high-speed internet connection to work, and in the event of data restoration, you will have to add the amount of time it takes to download all of your data to the time it will take to get you back up and running. Still, in the event of a disaster such as a fire or a tornado, nothing beats having an off-site data backup solution in place to ensure that your data is safe.

The best practice is to use both the external hard drive backup and the online backup solutions to cover any disaster that comes your way. In the event of a hardware failure, a hard drive backup will get you back in business very quickly. In the event of a disaster, an off-site online backup will ensure that you won’t lose your important data.

As we cross the hump of summer and head back into the school season, a lot of college goers and even high school and grade school students will have to “gear up” for the academic year. I frequently get asked to help out individuals and businesses alike to choose the right machine for the job at hand. So this year, I’m going to compile a list of suggestions that I think will be suitable for educational purposes.

There are a couple of trends that parents will have to cope with and accept. Modern youngsters depend on their computers for everything. Therefore, their needs are a bit higher than the average business computer. The current generation of techno-enabled scholars don’t watch TV (with the exception of live sporting events). They use video sites like Hulu.com, Youtube.com, and even the network TV channel’s respective websites to stream TV shows. They also download them either legally though iTunes and Amazon.com, or not-so-legally through sites like thepiratebay.org. They take thousands of pictures and store them on their computer and/or cell phone. They have digital music libraries that make your CD or Vinyl collection look quite minuscule. They also read digital books on their computers and iPods. So when it is time to buy that new computer for junior, you’ll want one that will be future proof without breaking the bank (and by future proof, I mean 3-4 years).

The first machine I want to talk about is the Apple MacBook. As of this writing, the Apple rumor sites are flooded with rumors of new versions of Apple’s laptop offerings within the next month or so. If you have time to wait around for that to happen, then you might want to skip this. Otherwise, the current lineup of MacBooks have been around for a while and the design is tried and true.

There are multiple price points for the MacBook. For the average student, the mid-grade priced MacBook, priced at $1,199.00 for students is the way to go. I would upgrade the hard drive to the 250GB option for an extra $90.00 and add the AppleCare extended warranty to the package for another $183.00. AppleCare will ensure that your child’s laptop will be free from defects for 3 years, which is a must, as well as access to Apple’s phone support techs. Unfortunately, Apple does not offer any accidental damage plan, but you may want to look into insurance to cover drops and theft. Apple is also currently running a promotion for students to receive a free 8GB iPod Touch or Nano with the purchase of a laptop. That is a $300.00 value!

Total price before tax for this configuration: $1,472.00

There are a couple of Dell laptops I currently favor. The first one is the new kid in the Dell line-up called the Studio 15. The base model is very attractive and almost fully-loaded. The only customizations I would make are to bump the processor up to the Intel Core 2 Duo T5850 2.16 GHz model for $50.00 and add a spare AC adapter for $26.00. This machine includes a 1 year warranty, but with students, it is wise to invest in a good warranty. The 3 year warranty is an added $190.00, and includes 24×7 phone support. Dell fortunately offers accidental damage and theft protection for another $119.00 on top of the extended warranty.

Total price before tax for this configuration: $1,184.00

The next Dell I like is aimed at the budget-conscious student. I’ll skip the extended warranties on this one to keep the price as low as possible. This laptop is actually only available through the business store, so you will have to state the name of your business when checking out. They don’t require any type of proof that you are a business and will deliver to a residential address, so don’t worry if you don’t think you qualify to order from this section of their website.

The Dell Vostro 1000 is a no-frills workhorse that has a base price of $399.00. I wouldn’t recommend it at that configuration though, so here is what you need to add to it when you choose the customize button on their website: First, change the processor to the AMD AthlonTM 64 X2 Dual Core processor TK-57 for $25.00. Second, change the operating system to Vista Home premium for 29.00. Next, change the memory to 2GB of RAM for $25.00. Then, you’ll want to select the 120GB hard drive option for $15.00. You will also have to choose the 8X DVD+/-RW w/Double-layer DVD+R Write Capability optical drive for $15.00. Finally, select the 6-cell battery for $50, because a 4 cell battery will barely make it through a lecture. It sounds like we added a lot, but the price is still half of the other laptops I’ve suggested.

Total price before tax for this configuration: $558.00

You will notice that there are no desktops in the above computer recommendations. The reason is that you can’t fit your desktop rig into your backpack to take notes during class. I understand the reasoning of why a lot of parents don’t want their kids to use laptops at college, but it is pretty much a necessity to have a laptop at college these days, so if you are buying a new computer for your child, don’t make him or her suffer!

The next item I would suggest is a good old laptop sleeve. These are usually made out of a good protective fabric such as neoprene and truly assist in transport of laptops from class to class in addition to a good laptop-ready backpack. You can find these at anyplace that sells laptops cases. My absolute favorite is from Waterfield Designs. They run about $40.00 and last forever.

As for laptop bags, I like the swiss army bags you see at Best Buy for about $50. For the more fashion conscious, Crumpler is the way to go, but it will cost a bit more.

Another necessity is printing. There are plenty of options available, and you will have to talk to your student about their needs. If they will only need to print out black and white text documents like reports and such, a good laser printer will save a lot of money over the course of the school year as the toner yield a lot more printed pages for your dollar. You can get an HP LaserJet P1005 CB410A from Newegg.com for $49.99 plus $9.99 in shipping. The toner is also $49.99, but it is rated at 1,500 pages. That should last them through the school year and then some.

If they need color, and the ability to scan or copy, there are plenty of multifunction options out there. The HP Photosmart C5280 Q8330A is a popular item that offers color printing, scanning, and copying. The ink will cost about $60.00 for both the black and color high-yield cartridges and will get you about 750 pages.

A great item to consider is the iPod Touch, which makes a great PDA, and comes with the MacBook if you are a student. This is a great alternative to use as a to-do pad as well as listen to audio-books and run a scientific calculator. An iPhone is an even better investment if it is within the budget, as you child will have access to email and the internet even when not within range of a wi-fi network. There are cheaper smart phones such as the Palm Centro, which will do most of the same things as an iPhone, and the Blackberry Pearl or Curve is also very useful for today’s student.

The final thing to consider is a laptop lock. It is basically like a bicycle chain for you laptop, and will help deter a casual thief from taking advantage of an unwatched laptop.

Hopefully these suggestions will help get your back-to-school computer shopping done quickly and with a piece of mind that you made a good choice. Now go to the beach and enjoy the rest of the summer!

***Please keep in mind that prices and availability of all of these items are subject to change at any moment***

On Saturday, July 26th 2008 Apple opened their very first retail store in all of South Carolina. Apple obsessed fans started lining up the night before to be the first to take in the simplicity of Apple’s retail presence.

Photo by khawkins04

You can also check out the Post & Courier’s article and watch a video of the event created by former Charleston Tech Support technician Geoff Marshall.

I think having an official Apple store here in Charleston will help the rapidly growing population of Apple users in the low country continue to grow and flourish. Don’t forget that Best Buy in North Charleston also sells Apple computers and accessories, but to anybody in the know, it is just not the same as going to an actual Apple Store.

After evaluating the current pricing for technical services in the Charleston, SC area and comparing them with my local and nationwide competition, I have come to an increase of $10 an hour starting on July 1st, 2008 to make the rate $85.00 an hour. It was a tough decision, but with the cost of doing business and the cost of living increasing so much this year, I was left with no other choice. I am happy to report that Charleston Tech Support is still one of the most affordable technical support solutions with no hidden fees and no product up-selling. More importantly, Charleston Tech Support has resolved thousands of service calls for the Charleston area since I started the business three years ago, and through that service I have met a lot of great and inspiring people as well as made some excellent friends.

As I look to the future of Charleston Tech Support, I hope to keep that number of satisfied customers growing, and I am excited about the friendships that await! I hope you have a great summer.

Joseph Nienstedt
Owner
Charleston Tech Support

Let’s all help the best web browser in the world break a Guinness World Record on June 17th, 2008. Head on over to spreadfirefox.com (or click on the graphic above) to pledge to download the software, and don’t forget to go back on Tuesday to get it! If you just can’t wait to try out the latest version of Firefox, go here to download the latest release candidate.