It’s been a tough week for me in more ways than one! My poor little grandkids have been hit by a nasty tummy bug (NOT the swine flu, I’m happy to say ) I always hate to see one of the little ones in misery and it was multiplied by three this week! THEN they decided to practice what we preach by sharing – the tummy bug – with me! NOT fun. Mine was mild but still misery-inducing!

On top of all that, I ordered one of my favorite new smartphones last week since my poor Pantech phone kept dropping calls. As a caregiver on call from a variety of directions, I depend on my cellphone and need to know it is at least 75% reliable (Be honest, is there ANY cellphone that is 100%!!! Not in my price range and hand size!). My cellphone was dipping down to 30% and I was eligible for a cheap upgrade. I loved my Pantech phone and wanted to get another. It fit my hand well, was easy to use, and I would then have had two cellphone batteries. I would have LOVED that.

Well, so much for that plan. They were out of the new ones so I had to go with refurbished ones (used ones that have been spruced up). The first one thought it was from Europe and neither AT&T nor Pantech could fix it so back it went. The second one dropped calls worse than the one I was replacing. Literally. EVERY 4 seconds! It’s in the box heading back on Monday.

At that point I gave up and switched to a NEW Pantech phone, the Matrix Pro . It worked well, but when I tried to sync it to my computer to get my contacts, etc., it thought it was a cable modem instead of a cellphone. Talk about identity crises. All these cellphones seem to share in that problem! Two very helpful employees at AT&T couldn’t figure it out. My last hope was back again to Pantech.

FINALLY I found someone who had heard of this issue and knew just what to do. Just in case any of you ever run into it I am sharing the information here. I couldn’t find this info ANYWHERE on the net and wanted to make sure it was out there for other poor sufferers like me.  To sync my Pantech Matrix Pro , he told me to go to:

• START SETTINGS
• CONNECTIONS
• MODEMLINK – Make sure that was INACTIVE. Sure enough, when I checked, it was showing active. Once I changed it to INACTIVE it worked! YAY! I can’t tell you how relieved I was.
• I also checked the one other concern he mentioned, that the USB to PC box was check marked. In my case, it was so I didn’t have to do anything there.

My new cellphone is now working great , complete with all the info I need when caregiving away from home, at the hospital, traveling, etc. The joys of technology once again have simultaneously bit me and encouraged me mightily this week!

Speaking of the joys of technology, this is a great time to remind us all to do our monthly tech chores such as:

• Make a computer backup of any important documents, including photos of grandkids, music, medical bills for aging parents, etc. Whether you do online backups or backup data on an external hard drive or USB stick, it’s vital to do this regularly! I’d always rather spend the time making these backups than have it crash big time leaving me with the much more time-consuming and frustrating dilemma of having to fix my computer!
  
• Make sure all important programs are fully updated – including browsers, operating systems, security and antivirus software, etc.
• Run any and all antivirus protection software as well as whatever spyware removal program you prefer, such as Norton Internet Security or PC Pitstop (I also like to run SystemWorks One-button checkup on a regular basis to keep things humming along smoothly)
• Defragment your computer
• Weed out any unnecessary programs and documents and archive such things as your Outlook email files

Well, that’s my saga of going from woe to rejoicing. My Pantech phones have taken me from the pits of despair to the valley of successful cellphone calling, my computer is beckoning for me to follow my own advice as I make my own computer backup and my tummy is again ready for a yummy piece of chocolate cake. I hope your week went better and that your cellphones as well as that of your aging parents are working great – at least 75% great. 

Tantrums! They aren’t just for two year olds, that’s for sure. Eleven year olds can throw them. Teenagers can throw them. Grownups can throw them. Even computers can throw them! What’s a Sandwich Generation-er to do? Well, I’m afraid I’m still learning on the people tantrums, but I do have a few suggestions for the computer version.

Wondering why I bring this up? Because I am sitting between two computers who are both throwing tantrums at the same time. I’m not sure if a new update did it or a new software product (I’ve been experimenting with several things over the last couple of weeks.) I suspect it is just pure coincidence since the symptoms are quite different for each. But as I type on this computer while waiting on my iTunes backup on my older computer, I’m reflecting on some steps I did take and other steps I SHOULD have taken to hopefully avoid this.

When you add new software, you should always turn off any antivirus protection software you have running. I must confess, I’m really bad about that and usually I get away with it. I’m thinking that this time it is a possible cause for at least one of my problems.

Stay on top of regular good maintenance. You should defragment your software on a regular basis, regularly clean up temporary files, and keep your desktop free of too many icons (I really blow it there. I work best when I can see all my files on my desk, and that is true on my computer desktop too!). Make sure you have a good antivirus protection software or a complete firewall program and keep it updated. Use spyware software regularly as well. I use Norton Systemworks, Norton Internet Security, AdAware, Spybot, and PCPitstop’s Optimizer and Exterminator. My computer still throws its tantrums as it is doing today, but Praise God, I have never had a virus succeed at getting in my computer.

Regularly degunk your computer . One of my favorite computer books is called Degunking Windows, by Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann. I’ve used it many times, both for regular maintenance and for trying to troubleshoot a computer throwing a tantrum. It goes into great detail helping you clean, weed, and degunk your Windows computer in order to tame it into submission. The copyright on this book is 2005 but since it only covers computers up through XP that hasn’t been a problem for me. From the research I’ve done, Vista is supposed to have been built to fix all these regular maintenance issues on its own. How well it’s really doing at that I’m not so sure. I have one XP and one Vista and I’ll take my XP any day. Then again, it’s the one that’s really acting up so…

Reading the chapters in Degunking Windows gives you a good idea of where you’ll be going as you work through this book . Getting rid of files that shouldn’t be there, uninstalling programs you don’t need and tweaking those you do, organizing your remaining files and folders, tweaking your desktop and start menu, preventing spam gunk, cleaning up email gunk, cleaning and tweaking the registry (I personally leave that up to Norton SystemWorks), optimizing your hard drive and startup system, and  installing upgrades for your system. These are all things we should be doing at least a couple of times a year, more if you use the computer as much as I do. But in between elderly caregiving, grandchild caregiving, and life in general, it’s not that easy or feasible. This book helps me to know what to do and how to do it. It even has a great section at the very beginning showing what to do if you only have 10 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, three hours, or half a day. It follows that with 20 ways to degunk your computer in your spare moments. Hmmm, I wonder if the writers are caregivers. It sure sounds like it is made to order for us!

By the way, in researching for this posting, I discovered Joli Ballew has also written the book, Degunking Your Mac, for all you Macintosh owners. I’ll have to grab one of those for my Mac loved ones since I help them with their computers as well.

Practice safe computing. Be cautious when opening email. I never open attachments unless I know who sent them and even them I often won’t. They could have been infected without realizing it. I almost never open any attachment in a forwarded joke or fun email.

Backup, backup, backup! I have seen grown men cry when their hard drives failed and they lost vital information. I didn’t cry but I was sure mad at myself last year when my hard drive crashed and my last good backup was about ten months old! You can lose a lot of valuable things when you lose ten months worth of documents, emails, etc. I would suggest a minimum of monthly backups, and if you are in business, weekly or even daily backups are essential. Whether you do a computer backup to an external hard drive or online backups, just make sure you back up. It’s best to keep a copy on hand and another copy at another location in case of fire, theft, etc. That’s something I need to work on but I do email myself anything really vital. I send one copy to my second computer and one copy to my online email account where it sits in limbo until and unless I need it.

Nuke that baby! Even when you are really careful and do most of the right things, computers can get slower and slower with time and age. Sometimes, the easiest solution is to just do a complete reinstall of everything and take it back to the way it was when it was fresh from the store. REMEMBER, BE VERY CAREFUL THAT YOU HAVE MADE A COMPLETE COMPUTER BACKUP OF ALL DOCUMENTS! This will wipe out EVERYTHING! Also, be prepared to spend hours rebuilding your computer. Make sure if you do rebuild it that you not add back any software you haven’t been using. That will safe you space on your machine.

Well, hopefully you will learn from my mistakes and not have any problems with your computer. In the meantime, I’m going to go do some heavy nuking! If you have other regular maintenance tips or schedules you’d like to share, please leave a comment below or send an email to Kaye@SandwichINK.com .

Peforming a regular computer backup is vital, whether you’re a high-profile business, or a grandma with cherished photos of your grandkids. As Sandwich Generation caregivers, we often stay so busy juggling duties, we tend to forget to do some kind of backup, whether online backups or backing up onto a cheap external hard drive. As I promised you in the last post, here are the steps I personally take to do my monthly backups.

First I purchased an external hard drive that plugs into my main computer using a USB cord. I really like the Seagate Free Agent, which is a cheap external hard drive that works well, but there are lots of other great drives out there as well. I made sure I got one with plenty of memory to hold all the documents I wanted to back up. (I went to the original icon of My Documents – not the shortcuts – right clicked on it and chose Properties. That showed me the amount of gigabytes my documents were taking up.) Then I added more gigabytes to allow for backing up my Outlook files and a couple of other programs I have – 250 gigabytes total. If you work with a lot of large photo files, you will probably need even more than that. One of my friends just bought a hard drive with a 1000 gigabytes! WOW!

I plugged the external hard drive into my PC. It was plug and play for my Windows PC. It takes a little more work for Mac. I right clicked on My Documents, moved them over to the new hard drive, and selected COPY. When that was done, I went into Outlook, scheduled it to backup directly to the hard drive. I did the same with two other programs. That worked fine for me originally and if you don’t get fancy with your file names, it should work for you as well.

Lately, I’ve had some problems with files not copying because the file name was apparently too long. I discovered a nifty program called FolderClone . They offer a free trial to see how you like it, which I always appreciate. This has solved 99.999% of my problems and is a very easy program to work with.

There are other programs out there that can do the backup for you. If you own a Mac, I love the backup program, Time Machine, that comes with it! I have tried some of the more inclusive programs but they were a little more headache. I finally gave up and settled on this routine as a good compromise. I have all the original disks to my programs, so if my hard drive dies again, I just have to install all the programs, then add back in my documents. It’s not perfect but it’s simple and it works.

All of that was the easy part. The hard part is making sure I do it on a regular basis. I’ve added it to my calendar in Outlook, but it’s really easy to ignore those reminders, especially when caregiving duties keep you busier than busy! Between aging parents and grandkids, I’m the first to admit I often push this off too much. I’ll keep doing my best and encourage you to do so as well .