Opening .dat Files On A Mac

I ran into this problem once when I received an email from someone who wanted me to read a pdf he/she had attached. It might have been from a windows user, but I did not have time to ask and simply needed to read the darn thing. I expected a pdf file and instead got a file that had the .dat extension. Imagine the frown on my face. I quickly did a little research on such formats in relation with macs and came across a nice site that carried the solution to my problem:

http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/

It is free and easy to setup, and you will be able to extract the pdf/s from the .dat file with ease. Hope this helps.

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Increasing Font Size On Windows

This is fairly simple to achieve:

On Windows XP

1. right click on desktop
2. select properties from the pop-up menu
3. select the "Appearance" tab
4. under "Font size", you may choose from the 3 available options (normal, large, or extra large)
5. after making your preference, click "apply" and then "ok"

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Recycling In Retrospect When Hard Drive Is Full

Retrospect is a handy back-up management software which anyone can use to automate a back-up for important files at work or at home. Those of you who have never used it and are looking for a back-up solution should consider taking a look at it. Now for those who have been using it, some of you have probably came to a point where Retrospect cannot back-up anymore due to insufficient space. What to do? Well here I will enumerate a step by step procedure on how to 'reset' your hard drive so that it can go about its back-up business until it needs to be 'reset' again. The following procedure may be customized to meet your needs:

1. open retrospect
2. automate
3. scripts
4. double click "EasyScript Backup"
5. click schedule
6. click add
7. check "single date" and hit "ok"
8. enter [todays date] and [adjust time to preferred time]
9. under action set to [Recycle Backup] to [current backup hard drive plugged in]
10. click "ok"
11. click "ok" again
12. close "Backup: EasyScript Backup" window
13. click "save" on pop-up window
14. close retrospect
15. wait for it to run at the time you specified and it will recycle (reset) your hard drive resulting in more available space for Retrospect to conduct its operations

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Internet Speed Test

I found this cool and handy tool to test your internet speed. Feel free to test your connection anytime!

Note: If the speed test does not seem to display correctly, just click Here and it should do the trick.

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Restore Missing DVD Drive

So your dvd-rom icon under My Computer decided to runaway?! I had this happen to me early this year and have only recently had the urge to fix and restore my missing dvd drive. Restarting many times did not help, and at one point I almost came to the point of reformatting my computer. Instinct had me do a more comprehensive search in the internet before using my last resort option of having to reformat. I found to forums which helped me fix and restore the missing dvd drive:

• www.theeldergeek.com
• support.microsoft.com

The first link is pretty straight forward with instructions and the second link has a more in depth explanation with instructions along with instructions for various windows operating systems.

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