As I explore and find new things, here are just a few of the “keepers” I’ve added to my regular visits to see what kind of bargains they have.

worldofwatches.com Now if you like watches, take a look at this site. They offer a daily deal on one man’s watch, and one woman’s watch. They have everything from very expensive watches to really cheap ones.

Woot.com This site is now owned by Amazon, and they offer one deal a day that’s a really good buy. The price is good only for the day they mention it, and only as long as their supply of whatever it is lasts. When all the units are gone, the deal is over until the next day. Honestly, I haven’t seen them sell out all that often, but I have seen it happen. The first day they were owned by Amazon, the daily deal was a Kindle e-reader for $150. That one went out of stock fast!

Shnoop.com This is similar to Woot; they have one hot deal a day too.

The site that I consider to be the “granddaddy” of all these is the one that first led me to them, and it is dealnews.com

Dealnews is not a site where you buy things; rather, it is a site that continually scours all the web for good deals and reports on them. Their tips on good buys is constantly changing as they come across new things. They will rate each deal for “hotness” from 1 to 5, with one being the lowest and 5 being a real deal.

They will tell you the site that has the item for sale, with a little info about it and a link to where you go to buy. They also have checked out all the sites they mention for legitimacy, so you can feel secure in ordering from a site they mention even if it’s something you’ve never heard of before. Even if you don’t care about any of the others, checking dealnews.com can lead you to some really good buys.

Thanks to Gizmo Richards’ listing of freebies, I just found a really great little addition to make my computing life even better – it’s a free program called XsX Alpha Blended cursors, and you can get it here.

When installed, the cursors are so easy to see on the screen, and they change colors according to what function they are performing. I’ve only been using them for the last half hour or so, but I was an immediate fan. I’ve installed on my desktop, my laptop, and will go install on my netbook.

Give these a try, and see if you’re not as impressed as I am.

Oh, and if you want to see other great finds that Gizmo comes up with, check out his site here

I recently was asked to help a friend whose computer suddenly started behaving strangely, and the bottom line to the story is that her computer had been infected with Koobface.  She was able to remove it by running the very good, and free, program Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

So now the question becomes, how did it get there in the first place – as I am sure has happened to many of us, she had recently been visited by grandkids, and they had been playing on the computer. Folks, that’ll do it to you almost every time. Question number two then becomes, what’s the solution to not repeating this again?

The answer is to set up separate user accounts on the computer, with only one account having Administrator privileges, and all others having only limited accounts.  A limited account is not able to download and add unwanted things to the computer.  Only the administrator can download and install things.  I’d suggest anyone who has a computer with multiple users set up separate accounts for each user or group of users depending on the needs of the individuals.

This link will take you to a very good article explaining the value of user accounts, and how to set them up.  If this is something that you need to do, I’d suggest just doing it right now while you’re thinking about it.

If you are in need of a good set of productivity tools, you can’t beat the price of this one – Microsoft Office will cost you anywhere from $80 on up, depending on which version you buy. My suggestion would be to give Open Office a try, you can always spend your money if it doesn’t suit you. I can tell you that I know of many people who are very happy using it.

There are several sites with tutorials on how to use Open Office; here is a link to a good site, complete with screen shots. Here is a link to download the program; be aware, it is a very large download, and if you do not have a high speed connection you’re going to be waiting a while.

If you are using the Vista operating system, here is a very good resource I found to explain how to stop unnecessary programs.

It’s coolnerds.com, and there is a lot of very basic, yet very good, information here.  Take a look around and see if there might be something of interest to you.

While we’re on the subject of tutorials, a site that I’ve mentioned before continues to add more and more to their offering. It’s top-windows-tutorials.com.  I see he’s even now added tutorials for Windows 7, which will be showing up in October. The tutorials here are videos, and very easy to use.

The issue this can bring up is if you are not running Office 2007, and someone sends you a document created in it with the .docx extension. Earlier versions of Office are not able to open this new file extension.

Never fear, a solution is nearby. Microsoft has available a free download called the Microsoft Office Compatability Pack – this will allow you to open and view Word, Excel, and Power Point documents prepared in Office 2007.   Here is a link that will take you to the page with instructions on how to download and use.

That first version, now known as Kindle 1, was replaced by Kindle 2, which made improvements on the first, then Amazon added yet another version, Kindle DX which was a larger version (Kindle 2 is about the size of a paperbook, the DX is about the size of a sheet of copy paper).

Recently Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 to $299, and after much researching about how happy people who had these were, I went for it. I’ve had it now 4 days, and boy do I love this thing. When you think about the wonder of being able to hold a little piece of technology in your hand that contains up to 1500 books (yes, that’s the storage capacity – now of course that’s not a hard and fast number; it wouldn’t hold 1500 copies of ginormous books like Atlas Shrugged, but still – it will hold way more books than you could possibly go through on a 2 week vacation, for instance.

I am still in the early “finding out all about it” stage, but it took me no time at all to become a huge fan. Gotta go read now.

If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, the Coinstar machines can be found in several locations, usually grocery stores. You can take all that spare change you’ve been emptying out of your pockets and put it in the machine (you don’t have to count it beforehand, the machine does the counting for you).  You then trade your coins for dollars.

Here’s the kicker: when you put your change in and trade for dollars, there is a service charge of 8.9%. In other words, for every dollar in change you get back roughly 91 cents.

Here’s the anti-kicker – if instead of taking dollars for your change you elect to take a gift certificate, there is no deduction – you get the full value of your change! I was recently made aware of this by some discussion on a message board. My interest lies in the fact that one of the gift cards offered is from Amazon, but there are many different places from which to choose (just a few include Lowe’s, J C Penney, Starbucks, Borders).

If you go to the website coinstar.com, you can put in your zip code and find a list of all the locations in your area where there is a machine. Note that not all locations offer the gift cards, so be aware of that.  When the locations are listed, there will be symbols under the address that tells what’s available at that location.

So gather up all those coins that have been piling up and get some use out of them!

Project Draw can create diagrams, floor plans (home and office), diagram furniture placement – just about anything that you would need a sketch or layout for.
Using Project Draw is fairly easy, with a drag and drop interface, a basic shapes feature, and uncluttered toolbars that can insert images, add text, and add color. You can download and save your creations to your computer, and if you work offline, it has an offline mode.

Here’s a link to the full description, and where you can get the program, with more details about how it can be used.