Well, the holiday season is upon us, some of us lucky moms may have a 2nd monitor in the horizon. No better time than now to be ready so that you can get that baby up and running and enjoy on Christmas day. If you’ve never had two monitors before then the big question you’ll inevitably ask is how do you do this?

Two ways. One, if your computer’s graphic cards have two outputs. Many of the latest cards do have two. One for regular VGA and one for DVI. Most monitors include the required cabling. But it never hurts to have one extra. If you are currently using the VGA, then you’ll need to get a DVI cabling and vice versa.

The other method works well if your computer only has one monitor output. It is a multi monitor adapter. Because it is USB, you can get as many adapters as you like and chain it into a USB hub. How sweet is that? One such adapter is the Arkview USB-1612. Check out the image below to get an idea how it works. It’s got pretty good reviews too. Although I already have two monitors, I think this might be the one I’ll look in to when we ever add a third.

When we lived in a tiny apartment clear across town, our power was supplied by a small electric Coop. I’ve never given much thought to power outages because they were kinda rare and if there were any, it would be taken care of quickly. Now that we moved, we have a big company for our power company. Ugh! I cannot understand how a small coop can out perform a company with all the resources at their hands… wait a minute, I take it back. I can but that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole and not the point of my post.

Living in a hurricane prone zone meant we are aware of how even the smallest surges can completely fry our computers and just about anything really, but because the computers are such a big part of our lives, well, we put them all on a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) or backup power. We’ve added more since we moved because of that unreliable power company thing. I tell you, it’s a good investment. So many times, I would have lost all the work I spent hours on if not for the UPS. When the power goes off, it gives me 30 minutes to safely shut down the computer, monitor and any other peripherals we’ve hooked up to it.

This is huge – it is not fun to have to spend what you thought was your extra money that month on a fried monitor or computer or – fill in the blanks -

These things can get a tad pricey, if you can only afford a small one, I’d still say go with it. Remember, it’s not only the computer you may have to replace but you could lose all the data on the hard drive too.

Hey ladies (and a few gents around), just wanted to give you a heads up that Zone Alarm is running a 50% off deal from now until December 1st, 2009. I’ve been using Zone Alarm for 5 years now, if not longer and have been quite satisfied. Happy to report that other than small annoyances, I’ve not had an issue with viruses for a long, long time.

Now, that doesn’t mean this is a magic pill, I do a lot of other things to keep my computer safe and secure as well – we’ll talk about that later, but ZA is definitely my first layer of defense. If you want to try something new, why not do it for less. There are no coupons required. Just visit this page or click the banner.

Sometimes, when I direct someone to a website or page to find something they need, they don’t see it immediately. That is totally not their fault but the web masters’ for not making the site easy to navigate or find information people need. Most people would just leave.

Image by Su

But what if really need to find the item whatever it is? It often amazes me why people don’t use the magic buttons – Ctrl+F or Command+F for Macs. It’s like having a built in mini search engine for the page you are on. Great way to find stuff on a page.

I use it a LOT, on all kinds of pages and sites. Sometimes, instead of reading through a long list of replies on a forum I use Ctrl + F. Also, sometimes download links are not always easy to distinguish from ads. What I do is, Right click on the page, View Source and then Ctrl+F and search for “.exe” or whatever extension the download is. May not work all the time especially if the download uses a click tracker, but in that case, search for the word “download” or the name of the file if you know it. Huge timesaver, especially if you’ve been on the site before and know something is there but somehow just miss it.