Q&A Presents: Maui Online!

Once again, thanks to our friends at Office Max in the Maui Marketplace, we’ve got a great prize to give away to our listening audience. This time it’s a biggie, a SanDisk Cruzer Micro 16GB Flash Drive!

Cruzer Micro is an incredibly small, portable, and smart USB flash drive. The small, compact size fits easily on any keychain. The retractable USB connector design eliminates the need for caps and protects the connector. Installed on the drive is the U3 software package, which allows you to bring applications with you on the go!

To enter, simply drop us an e-mail to mauionline@q-a.net with your name, and either a question, comment or show topic suggestion. Enter as many times as you like, as we love to answer your questions, but each person only gets one entry to the contest. We’ll take all the entries, and pick and read the best during our next Viewer Mail show!

Thanks again to Office Max and all our wonderful listeners!

Viewer Mail & Contest Winner, Part 1

Viewer Mail & Contest Winner, Part 2

We read through a whole lot of mail, and awarded prizes to three eunner’s up, as well as the grand prize from Office Max!  We also had a lot of phone calls, and had a lot of fun.  Keep that mail coming — the next winner might be you!

Alert Internet Surfer John is trying to set up a true gigabit network.  However, he has one run that stubbornly refuses to go at gigabit speed.  We talked to him about the distance involved, and also about using switches to boost the signal along the eighty foot run he described.  Gigabit is, of course, more sensitive that ethernet, so you really need to make sure the lines are up to the task.

Alert Internet Surfer Gloria asks about voice recogntion software.  Dragon Dictate is probably the most popular, and worked pretty well when I played with it years ago.  The biggest competitor of Dragon Dictate is IBM’s ViaVoice, which has similar features.  Give ‘em a try!

Alert Internet Surfer Eric from Kauai needs a new sound card.  His Sound Blaster Live blowed up, and so he’s been looking for the same kind of card to replace it.  We recommended looking for new ones on Amazon or Ebay, as finding the right part in old computers would be a frustrating search indeed.

Yep.  But really slowly.

Alert Internet Surfer Dan has filled up his external hard drive with Time Machine backups of his Mac.  He has purchased a new, bigger external, but has some things only on the backup.  The best way we could think of to make it work is to restore those programs and files that he needs from the backup, attach the new drive, and then Time Machine the whole thing onto the new drive.  A caveat here:  If your only copy of the file or data you need is the backup, it is NOT backed up.  A single copy, on whatever media, isn’t safe.  Multiple copies are the only way.

Computer Shopping, Part 1

Computer Shopping, Part 2

We ran around to the local shops to see what computers were avaialble, and for what costs.  There were all kinds of computers at all kinds of prices…from $400 desktops, to $1900 powerful rigs.  In between there were touchscreen systems, tiny portables, solid workstations, each with their own bells and whistles.  Have a good idea of what you want the computer to do BEFORE you start looking, and be as informed a consumer as you can be.