Dan's Web Spot

There are a lot of articles and videos circulating about how to set up Yahoo! POP3 email accounts in Outlook 2007, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook Express, etc.  Yahoo! requires users to pay for a premium subscription to have POP3 access.  Most of these proposed solutions are a bit dated as of the time of this writing, and almost all of them involve changing your regional or location settings to Yahoo! Asia.  None of these seem to work any more; my settings didn't even have Yahoo! Asia as an option.  Besides, who wants to pay to have Yahoo! email offline on your computer when it is free on the Yahoo! Mail web site, and even on your mobile phone?

Maybe Yahoo! has grown wise to the situation by now, or the 2011 Google issues with China has, let's say, "adjusted" the Internet relationship between the United States and China (a large part of Asia).  Whatever the case may be, in the Northeastethern US, changing any of the POP3 settings in the Yahoo! Mail web interface hasn't worked.

The good news is that Outlook 2007 supports IMAP as well as POP3 email setups.  This article provides an alternate way to set up Yahoo! within Outlook 2007 that does work.  It involves using IMAP mail settings, instead of POP3. IMAP synchronizes content with the server better anyway... » More...

Most of us use some kind of anti-virus, anti-malware or both on our computers (hopefully).

Chances are that you are probably using an Internet security suite from one of the big name vendors like Trend, Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, etc. If so, you are aware how expensive these software packages can be.

Even if you purchased a new computer that came with a 90 day trial, you will likely see a renewal notice with a link that takes you to the company’s web site, only to find that they want $60 or so to renew your subscription for a year’s protection.

Check out this useful article posted on CartierConsulting.com. You can save some serious money on your Internet security software subscription(s)!

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Bluetooth and the Bluetooth logo are © Bluetooth.com

My Dell Inspiron 9400 originally shipped with Windows XP, but came with a free upgrade to Vista. It also has a built-in Dell TrueMobile 355 Bluetooth + EDR module, so I decided to get a Bluetooth mouse to use with it. One slick advantage of having this built-in Bluetooth adapter is that a Bluetooth mouse can connect to it directly and there is no need to plug in an external USB Bluetooth 'dongle' for the mouse.

My mouse is a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000. Every once in a while, I had to reset the Bluetooth connection to get my mouse to re-connect, or turn the mouse off then back on, but it was never frequent enough to complain about it...

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Problem:

When you try to delete or rename a file/folder in Windows Vista, you may receive an error message that says:

"Item not found. Could not find this item. This is no longer located in [folder]. Verify the item's location and try again."

But the file is there...

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If you're familiar with Power Toys for Windows XP, you know that if you install the Image Resizer Power Toy, resizing images for the web or email can be accomplished by selecting 'Resize Pictures' in right-click context menu. Not so in Vista. For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided not to include such functionality in the context menu, nor was I able to locate a 'Power Toy' for Vista that did this.

I tried out a few free image resizer tools but really didn't like any of them until I found one called Prish Image Resizer, made by a gentleman named Prish. You can find his Windows Live! blog about this tool here. If you'd prefer to download this cool, free tool directly, you can get the Prish Image Resizer here.

Microsoft still needs to work on getting some XP-equilvalent functionality like these XP-only Power Toys provide into Vista as well. My second favorite Power Toy is the TweakUI for Windows XP Power Toy. With this tool, you can adjust many core and even hidden Windows settings, all from one easy-to-use interface. You can adjust menu pop up speed, the icon overlay image on shortcuts, whether or not to prefix 'Shortcut to' on all shortcuts, and even hide user accounts on the Welcome Screen. You can get TweakUI for Windows XP here.

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