For all of the time I have been using computers my son, Sean, has been my guiding light and my technician. He started with computers at a very young age with a Commodore 64 and has graduated to more equipment than I can understand and even writes professionally for technical blogs. We have seen the computer world evolve from dial up modems and clunky consoles to wireless connections and sleek portables like my iPod Touch.

But all of the improvements don’t mean that everything has become easier or necessarily simpler to understand for new or older users. On the contrary some improvements present a whole new set of problems.

On a recent business trip my husband, who occasionally accompanies me, met his frustration wall. He is fairly new to the world of computers and age wise he could even be considered an ‘old dog’. He checks his e-mail and plays games and that is about the extent of his day—anything more takes guidance and patience on the part of my son and myself. We almost always stay with one particular hotel chain and Wi-Fi is almost always their connection of choice. Passwords are necessary with such Wi-Fi service as generally there are clusters of hotel around offering wi-fi service and you need to connect to the right one. Sounds simple-huh? Well it is generally pretty simple but only when the hotel help at 11:00 o’clock at night give you the full password. No matter how many times he tried the ‘pass word’ wouldn’t work. Multiple calls were made to the front desk—is the modem working? Is there a problem? Is the password correct? Finally it hit the boiling point—the desk help was rude, we had to threaten to call their corporate office about the rudeness and my husband ended up yelling at me. I was all of the sudden the reason his limited grasp of the situation made the password not work. Confusion, stress and hurt feelings ensued. I finally convinced the help to call the night manager and guess what? The password wasn’t right.

This is how StarterTech was born. I do not feel it is fair to anyone –no matter what age or involvement in computers to be so frustrated that their head hurts or their blood pressure rises. I know there has to be a better way—this is a place to make that better way happen. If you are frustrated please come here—ask questions, ask for help. Believe me—we understand and if we don’t know the answer we find it for you. Welcome to the family!

In a recent post I spoke of using canned air and Swiffers to rid your keyboard and electronics items of the hard to get to dust that seems to accumulate. In this post I would like to expand on the use of Swiffers in my seemingly never-ending dust battle.

I am sure that there are days when you, like I, sit in front of your computer monitor in complete amazement at the thick coating of dust that just seems to be always there. We are not nuts, we are not caught in a time warp—we are living with a fact of electronic life—electronic anything collects dust a rapid rate. It appears that the very electronic gizmos that run our computers also generate the static that collects the dust in thick sheets. It is a never-ending battle and I am always on the hunt for a simple solution.

It seems that I have finally found my answer in the shape of a little rectangle of ‘fake’ cloth (I really don’t know what it is). Swiffers were designed to allow housewives to dust without having to polishes and oils to make their furniture dust free. The one step process would make it seem as though the work was not hard—one step instead of two.

While I have used the Swiffer product line for just this reason the real workouts come when I need to clean my computer equipment. The dust just clings to all of it—the CPU, the keyboard and most of all the screen of the monitor.

My son has probably told me a million times not to use any solutions on anything to try and grab the dust, and that is especially true for my monitor. I have just about gone nuts trying to use a dry cloth (old diapers don’t even work well) to clean the screen and all it seemed to do was move the dust around. Then came Swiffers! I turn off my monitor and with Swiffer in hand I can wipe the screen and the dust clings to the Swiffer cloth—yes, the dust clings! It is a beautiful sight as dust is a virtual enemy of electronics and has been winning the cleaning war for long enough. This process will also work on your TV screen—just be sure to turn the TV off first or you will cause more of the dreaded static and the dust will win again. And while you are in a cleaning mood don’t forget the mini blinds—Swiffers work great there too.

I just installed a new keyboard on my main computer in my office and so far I am very happy with it. The only problem is that it has made my old mouse pad look very old and worn out and in need of replacement. Replacing a piece of foam should be simple or is it?

Mouse pads are basically just pads for your mouse to travel on while you point and click—simple, huh? NO. Mouse pads are made in varying thicknesses, materials and configurations and finding the right one for you can be a bit daunting. My son loves his mouse arena—I can’t use it. It is a mouse pad with a stand attached to keep the wire out of the way and it also provides a wrist rest all the way around it. This is fine for him because he has the longest fingers in America but my digits are stumpy and I am not comfortable at all using it.

Most mouse pads are flat affairs made of foam in different thicknesses and covered with a surface that is supposed to make dragging that mouse around easier. Wrong. I have had mouse pads that were slick and some that felt like a bumpy road. I couldn’t tell which was which while it was in the package but at work or home the truth was there. I have returned mouse pads because they were simply not usable.. If you get the wrong one don’t be shy about returning it—after all that small piece of equipment is used all the time at your computer and you need to be comfortable. The very theme of this blog is to help avoid frustration and I believe that starts with even the most basic items such as your mouse pad.

Take a few moments when you are shopping at your favorite computer wonderland and look at all of the mouse pad offerings. Don’t hesitate to ask the store help for their input—micro pad (really flat – no foam at all) arenas, pads with wrist rests or upgrade to an optical mouse which does not require a mouse pad at all. The whole point is to be comfortable at your work or play space and for you to be happy with your setup

I just got a new Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 for my computer in the office and I am moving my old one to a little used back–up computer. I usually take the opportunity of moving a piece of equipment to a new place, or repurposing a piece of hardware, to give it a good old fashioned clean up. Usually my choice of any cleaning is soap and water but you really can’t use that on electronics so what do you use? — Canned air and Swiffers!! Don’t laugh—I am deadly serious.

Air comes in pressured cans with a neat attachable straw like item that allows the user to point and spray into tiny places. Keyboards are especially prone to itsy bits of dust and dirt and nothing works better than a good shot of that pressurized can. Hint: turn your head away from the spry trajectory as the dust will really fly and go right up your nose—achoo! I use the air on items I can’t move easily too. It’s great on stacked electronics, computer towers-just about anything that you can’t use common cleaning items on. Just point, press and spray—no dust!!

Swiffers are cloths that electrostatic ally attract dust to their fibers and you just take it away. They don’t hurt anything and collect dust like a dream. The Swiffers that you attach to a plastic stick allow you to use them on stacked electronics to get the dust in-between the stacks and under then to dust the furniture they sit on. The instructions say to throw them away (Swiffers) once they are dirty but I cheat and wash them to use again.

Well, that is my cleaning lesson for the week—next week—coffee cups!

My Mother called me today because she needed something right away. Is this an unusual occurrence? No, she calls me a lot to help her out—she is 88 and afraid of falling so she calls me to do the heavy stuff. The interesting thing is that she called me when I was in my car on my way to the bank. Yep, she called my cell phone from her cell phone. For some people cell phones are like an appendage for my mother they are a mystery and for her to actually call mine was a giant step forward in her tech training.

I researched phones of every kind with every payment program until I was dizzy. She wanted simple—no bells and whistles and certainly no big monthly bill. After days of searching I finally found it—pay as you go. Beautiful in its simplicity and brilliant in its service—you can make calls if you have paid for the time. You can buy very little time or thousands of minutes and most of the purchases can be made on online. The phones are generally very simple and therefore do not cost an arm and a leg. The amount of minutes you buy are your choice and there are no extra doodads you don’t want. Simple, simple, simple!!

Many service providers for full service plans have ‘go phone’ or pay as you go plans—the one I chose is done by T-mobile. I was so impressed with their service and plan that I also got one for myself to use when my ‘bells and whistles’ phone is out of power or has no service. The beauty of these phones is there is not a great financial investment to make you feel bad if you find that you hate the phone or just decide you are not a cell phone kind of person. Don’t feel bad if you decide that cells phones aren’t for you—it happens!

At that point you can just store the phone away and if your minutes expire (look into the deals for minutes that last a year) and you decide you want to try again all you have to do is contact the provider again and buy more minutes. There is absolutely no reason for you not to be able to try a cell phone and see if it is for you. New territory can be scary but there are very few unknowns with these plans and that should be a comfort.

First of all I want all of my readers to know that I am not on the Apple payroll. That being said, I invite you to visit the new glories of the Apple iPod Touch.

This week has been extremely stressful for me as I once again prepare to leave town for the road part of my job. Yes, I am a road warrior. I stay in too many hotels, eat too much fast food and up until now I carried way to much equipment with me in and out of said hotel rooms.

As I have stated, my laptop weighs a ton and that weight plus the weight of my computer bag is sometimes too much to face when I roll into the hotel at midnight. I admit I have let my e-mail go for two or three days because I didn’t want to drag that laptop out. Most hotels have a business center but there is almost always someone using it for hours checking out eBay or playing blow up the aliens for hours and I don’t have the strength to wait.

So now I have a new piece of equipment that allows me to leave the ten pound weight in that 20 pound bag while I check my e-mail and make sure my website is up to date without waiting to see what new aliens have attacked New York. My iPod Touch is my new friend. Since I have been home for a week (a grand amount of time in my world) I decided to treat my evenings as though I was on the road. I have checked my e-mail, surfed the web for wholesale product and even looked at pictures of the same puppies that were licking my feet at the time. It is so extremely simple that I often check with my son (my own personal techie) to make sure I am not breaking it. Turn it on and off with one button—turn it off without having to close programs. That is right –just push the button when you are in AOL or on a website and there you go—you are off! When you turn it on again it goes back to where you were, but there is no problem in going back to your icons to choose where else you want to go. I don’t have to provide passwords for e-mail—the iPod Touch knows what to do. E-mail takes half the time—more time for a hot shower!! The only glitch I have found in the AOL e-mail area is that once you read an e-mail it is transferred into your old file and no longer shows up on the new page. This seems to be peculiar to AOL only but I have not researched my other e-mail providers.

As more cities are attempting to Wi-Fi their boundaries I am sure that internet connections will become super available and simple, but while I wait for the whole country to be one giant connection I am going to research various businesses for connectivity. As I start this next series of road warrior adventures I am going to visit various advertised locations to check out their purported consumer friendly connections and the untapped glories of my Touch. I will, I hope, be happily reporting that everything works as advertised and that I am a happy little warrior. I’ll be back soon.

I am no computer wiz. There, I have said it in public! I have to use computers in some way everyday in my work. Yes, I said computers—my laptop or my desktop are used everyday in some way. My desktop has so many programs on it that it takes forever to boot up and the same can be said for my laptop. At least I don’t have to heft the desktop so that is a plus. My laptop weighs about 6 pounds by itself not to mention everything that I need for it in my computer bag—who needs to exercise?

I have whined for a long time about the non-portability and complication factors of computing in my life and asked the air why something couldn’t be developed that would make applications like logging on for even the most simple of tasks easier. Well, it seems Mr. Apple himself, Steve Jobs, heard me and developed the iPod Touch just for me! Really it is the answer to my prayers-small, idiot proof and really cool looking! I can check my e-mail in a flash, make a hotel reservation in record time and look at new pictures of my 3 cocker spaniels while I am riding in the car. All I need for the really serious business of e-mail and web searching is a wireless connection which may be obtained in my home or office or one of the tens of thousands locations offering free wireless, such as McDonald’s, across the country.

The Touch turns on with the press of a button and presents you with a page of choices for activities that you have setup for your needs. From there it is just a tap away from what ever you have chosen to do and another tap away from going back to the beginning if you made a mistake—brilliant! Not even as big as a dollar bill in dimensions the Touch weighs only a few ounces but delivers like either of my larger pieces of equipment. I am checking my e-mail as I am writing this article—it took me about ten seconds to turn on and log into my AOL account—wow.

I know there are wonders and applications I haven’t found yet and I can’t wait to discover them. As I become more Touch savvy I will relay the applications to all of you, but in the meantime I have one more thing to say to you—RUN, don’t walk, to your nearest favorite computer shopping site and buy a Touch for yourself and then share its wonders with your family and friends. ‘Touch’ everyone—they will thank you for it.