When it comes to memory, a computer can’t have too much.  These days, I recommend, at the very least, 1GB of memory to run Windows XP or Vista.  I recommend 2GB for regular use, and more than that if you are doing intensive stuff.   Memory is currently quite inexpensive, and if you only have 256MB or 512MB you will definitely see a performance boost by upgrading.

One thing to keep in mind, and where people get confused, is when they upgrade their computer to 4GB memory, but the computer reports only 3.5GB.  Most computers have a 32-bit edition of Windows, regardless of what the hardware is capable of.  32-bit operating systems are unable to read over 4GB memory TOTAL — which includes any “invisible” cache memory, etc… thus only a portion of your new memory is available.  64-bit operating systems can see much more, so you shouldn’t have a problem… however there are other issues with 64-bit such as driver & application incompatibilities that you may have to check out.

If you would like to attempt to upgrade memory on your own, it’s fairly simple, but you need to ensure you get the right kind.  All forms of DDR memory are interchangable (ie. PC3200 memory will work in a system requesting PC2700)… but are not compatible with DDR2.  DDR & DDR2 are completely different, and have a different pinout so you can’t accidentally put the wrong chip in a slot.

With that said, here is a nice video which shows how to upgrade your memory:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiFIgSQOY7g

Here at computerdumb.com, I would like to post relevant information for folks who need genuine help with their computer problems.  Please feel free to comment here or post to our forum with ideas of topics or articles you would like to see.

Thoughts for the future:  how to upgrade hard drive/memory, how to clean up spyware/viruses, how to optimize your computer, etc.  I’d love to hear from you.  Let’s get this party started!

Don’t you just hate it when you delete something from your Outlook inbox, and then you delete it from your Deleted Items folder, and then you figure out two days later that you actually needed that email?

If you are on a corporate network with Exchange, and they have it enabled, you can use “Recover Deleted Items!”  — Go to the folder where you deleted the item (if it was permanently deleted from “Deleted Items,” you’ll need to go there) … Then go to Tools->Recover Deleted Items … If it’s not showing up, then likely your system administrator hasn’t enabled that feature.

You should now see a list of all the things you’ve deleted in the last 30 days, and you can individually select them and recover them by the icon on the toolbar.

What is “RecoverDeleted Items” is Greyed out and Unslectable?

All may not be lost.  Despite appearances, it may just be disabled locally, but can be re-enabled via a registry key.

If “Recover Deleted Items” is greyed out in the tools menu, there is a way to enable it, to see if it’s working on your corporate network, but this requires editing your registry.  If you don’t have any experience editing your registry, I wouldn’t recommend doing this, as it can get hairy in there, and you could cause some serious damage if deleting the wrong things.

1. Open the registry, by clicking start->run, and typing “regedit”
   and pressing ENTER.
2. Navigate to
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options.
3. Add a DWORD value named DumpsterAlwaysOn and set it to 1.
4. Restart Microsoft Outlook to make the change take effect

Now, as long as the feature is enabled in Exchange, you should have “Recover Deleted Items” lit up, and selectable.

Please comment below if this worked or didn’t work for you… or if you know of other ideas that work better.

Have fun recovering your deleted stuff!

Welcome to

Does that box in the corner of your room growl and look menacingly at you, perhaps even mocking your inability to do certain tasks?  Well, if that’s the case, you might need professional help.  But…

Would you like to be able to do things such as systems opimization, virus removal, hardware installations, etc, on your own, without having to pay an expensive technician to come out and do it for you?

ComputerDUMB.com was created for you!

We are building you an informational & community site specifically catered to those who claim to be lacking in PC abilities.  This site is just starting out, so I would love to hear from you if you have ideas of topics we should cover!  Please reply to this post and let me know your thoughts!

Welcome to the first article on ComputerDumb.com … I thought I’d start with a very important topic that has the possibility of touching the lives of many: Computer backup.

Oh, everyone knows that you are supposed to backup the data on your hard drive every day… and of course everyone actually does it!

Wait a second… you haven’t backed up your hard drive in weeks? … months? … years??

I can’t tell you how many customers have come to me wondering if their accidentally deleted files could be recovered somehow, while sheepishly telling me they don’t have a recent backup. Or worse yet, the customers who have a complete hard drive failure, and the only way we could recover their data is to send it in to a service that dismantles the drive in a cleanroom environment and pulls the data off the platters sector by sector. That option is freakishly expensive! (to the tune of $500-1500!)

Now that we’ve established you should backup, the first thing I want to mention is that I highly recommend making sure you have an OFFSITE backup. If you use backup media, make sure you rotate them, and keep a copy outside of the building your computer is in. This ensures that if something happens to your home (ie. fire or theft), you still have a current copy of your data that you could restore to a new computer.

So, how do we backup our data? There are a number of options available. For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume you are a home user or small business with only a few PC’s.

Manual Options

1. CD/DVD burner – This is probably the most common method. Just about every computer sold today has a DVD burner, or at least a CD burner, and the disks are cheap. The trouble with this method is that its terribly tedious, and takes a long time, depending on how much data you have. If you are lucky, your computer came with software to assist you in actually backing up, rather than simple “add your data files and go” … likely it didn’t, so this process becomes a tedious game of finding the files you want to backup, and dragging them into the software and burning. If you have a lot of data, you may also be stuck having to swap out several disks.
2. USB Flash Drive – This can be just as tedious as the CD option, but requires manually copying any files you want to backup to your flash drive on a regular basis.
3. Tape/ZIP/Jazz Drive – This option isn’t very common for the small office & home enironments, but most of the time tape drives will come with backup software automating your backup scenario. This still requires swapping out the tapes so you have something offsite.
4. External Hard Drive – One of the more common solutions is the external hard drive. Many drive manufacturers are including backup software with their drives now, which makes this a nice option, as long as they do, indeed, do that. External hard drives are nice in the fact that they are inexpensive, and come in very large capacities. The downside is that they are usually inconvenient to disconnect, and usually don’t leave the computer’s side.

Automated Options

1. Backup Software – As mentioned above, some hardware comes with backup software, but most do not. You can, however, buy off-the-shelf software to make your media-based backups more automatic. However, these are not foolproof, and still require some amount of manual intervention.
2. Remote Data Backups – Backup your data via a a small software
   utility over the internet to a remote datacenter.  This is the most
   reliable and user-intensive option, and also allows for instant restores to
   multiple previous versions of your data.

Recommendation

Remote Data Backups – By far, the most trustworthy, secure & efficent method of backing up is remote data backups. This is an online service that, through an automatic process will continuously record and backup your system to two offsite mirrored secure datacenters. There are a number of services out there, but we have only come across one with the professionalism and infrastructure in place to make it a trustworthy backup solution. Support is top notch, and backups & restores couldn’t be easier. If you want to roll back a file to yesterday’s version after you made a stupid mistake… no problem! Need to roll back your entire system to a week ago? No problem!

These powerful, easy to use data management tools
help you work more efficiently and effectively, providing you a
significant return on investment (ROI).

Get more information about this solution, and try a 30-day free trial at
http://startech.databu.com.