Milli Vanilli

With dental offices being swamped with paper bills that that need to be paid each month, it's nice to find an easier, online way to handle this. Manilla is a safe and secure online bill management tool that makes it easy to pay anything from banking bills to insurance statements. Besides utility bills, you can even manage and update your travel rewards programs and magazine subscriptions in one convenient dashboard. And since companies on Manilla save so much on paper and postage costs, Manilla is completely free. With just one site, managing paper clutter, shredding old statements, manually filing documents or sorting through it all to find previous documents are finally a thing of the past.

Cable Killer

Many dental offices want to provide TV for the patients, whether it's in the reception area or the chair. However, cable isn't cheap, and adding cable boxes to each op jacks the price up. There are now, fortunately, many budget-friendly alternatives to cable TV.

Fire in the Hole

The first real (in my opinion) competition to the iPad was announced today: The Kindle Fire. It's made by Amazon and will be Wi-Fi only and run the Android platform. The good news? Only $199...compared to Apple's cheapest offering at $499. Going to place my order today!

Rough and Tumble

When the going gets tough, most technology throws up its hands in defeat and wilts like a flower. The majority of gadgets on the market just aren’t built to face the drop-down, submerged-in-liquid realities of everyday life – just ask anybody who ever had to replace his smartphone after spilling just a few drops of soda on it.

You won’t find any of that wussy gear in this gallery.

Up to Snuff?

Is your practice management software doing all that it can? Are you struggling to go paperless? Well, there are certain questions you should be asking your PMS company. Come to my webinar tomorrow night to see what I mean!

Speed Zone

Next to the speed of your computer, your Internet speed—the bandwidth of the pipe you use for downloading and uploading data—is the most important thing in your computing arsenal. The world is moving to the cloud and without a fast connection, you'll be left behind. Here are The Fastest ISPs in the U.S. 2011.

NoteWorthy

If you just want a better way to keep your notes, memos, and other tidbits of information organized, you have a number of applications to choose from. Some of them just help you get your thoughts down quickly, others sync with online services that organize your notes for you. Here are the top five apps or services for the job.

Craptastic

Whether it comes bundled with your computer, bundled with other software, or is just the go-to program for a specific task, the Windows ecosystem is rife with oft-used, yet craptastic software. Here's a list of the least favorite crapware, and the better programs you can use in their place.

Start Me Up

Everybody that’s owned a PC has had to deal with the eventual system boot slowdown. Here’s how to use Event Viewer to track exactly how long your system takes to boot up and shut down.

Inquring Minds

Are you in the market for new software? If so, there are certain questions you really need to be asking the new company. Come join my webinar tomorrow night to find out what questions you need to ask!

Gone Baby Gone

When you delete a file in Windows, only the reference to the file is removed from the file system table. The file still exists on disk until other data overwrites it, leaving it vulnerable to recovery.

There are many tools available out there that allow you to securely delete files so they cannot be recovered. This article provides a summary of some of the free tools available out there, many of which are portable, allowing you to securely delete files you may temporarily save to public computers. Especially for dental offices who are giving away their old computers, from a HIPAA standpoint, this is critical.

New Webinar

Even the oldest dental procedure in the world, extractions, has now gone high tech. Want to learn more? Attend my webinar tomorrow:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/510201546

Lockdown

Dentists and dental staff often need to wipe off the display of your system, and clean the keyboard and mouse (if you use one). Cleaning the keyboard is probably the most important part of this because keyboard is the part of the system which accumulates lots of dusts also known as Keyboard Dandruff.

Now, suppose you are working on your system and you feel like cleaning it with a piece of cloth, in such case you have choices, either you shut down you system and continue with the dusting (else unknowingly you will press several keys and this can land you up in trouble, may be you end up deleting some document or file and so on) or be very careful while dusting so that you don’t press any key, isn’t it? Now here is a better choice, how about an application which can help you with this scenario. Here is the answer, a Free application named as Toddler Keys.

This tiny application once installed on your system can be accesses by using the System Tray icon. Right click on the Toddler Keys icon in the system tray icon, and now you get the options to lock your keyboard, lock the drive doors (e.g. the button to open your CD/DVD drive won’t work), etc.

Speed Surfer

If you use Google's Public DNS server or OpenDNS as your DNS server, you may notice starting today that YouTube videos load faster and other web content comes in quicker. If you're using your ISP's DNS server as the default, now's a good time to try Google's or OpenDNS.

Speed Freak

Are you one of the many people frustrated with the way the search utility changed in Windows 7? Handy features from previous versions have been moved or removed and it can be very slow for a lot of files.http://beta.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

You can tweak the Windows 7 search utility to speed it up and you can even disable the search tool in Windows 7 so you can use a third party program, such as Everything, to search for files. Here's another utility, called FileSearchEX, that provides a fast, Windows XP-like simple search interface with low system requirements.

Full Boat

The dreaded moment has come and you can't download a movie you want to watch, or install some games you want to play because your hard drive is full. What's worse, you have no idea what to delete to make some room. Thankfully there are several apps you can turn to that will give you a good idea what's using all of your drive space.

Quittin' Time

Every computer user at some point will likely have to deal with a program that just stops responding. The application simply freezes or hangs. Here's how to completely close the program with Windows' Task Manager or Mac OS X's Force Quit.

Top of the Lap

While many people might be tempted to keep their laptops plugged in all the time, it's actually not all that good for the battery. Here's how you can preserve your battery life on your laptop.

Share and Share Alike

Many offices are realizing that the old methods of sharing info with other offices, such as mail, fax, and giving things to the patient, are no longer a good option. Web-based is the way to go. Want to find out more? Attend my webinar tomorrow evening at 5 PM PDT.

Rise and Shine

If you like to turn your office computer off at night (not something I normally recommend), but hate sitting and waiting for it to boot up in the morning, there's a way you can make your computer start automatically in the morning so it's ready for you when you get to the office. Here's how.

Get Back, Jack

If you've just bought a new laptop or pre-built desktop running Windows it's more than likely you do not have a disc with the operating system. You may have a restore disc or hard drive partition that will restore your computer to factory settings, http://beta.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbut having an actual disc to install Windows is good to have if you need to reinstall just your operating system.

Luckly, you can download full ISOs (disc images) of the various types of Windows 7 from Microsoft and Amazon.com. These ISOs were put there to be freely available for customers who purchase copies of Windows7 online, but if you have a legit product key there is no reason you can't use the ISOs to make your own Windows install disc. Tech blog My Digital Life has collected several download links for all versions of Windows 7.

Attack of the Geeks

Here's a great site I found. Many of you are looking to get a smartphone but don't know which ones to get. Well, wander on over to Geekaphone. You tell it the type of user you are, filter by about 100 dhttp://beta.blogger.com/img/blank.gififferent things, and it finds the best phone for you. Very slick!

Guest Pass

Many dental offices want to allow patients to access the Internet while they are waiting for their appointment. What they don't want, though, is to compromise their security and have people hog up the bandwidth. Here's how to run your network http://beta.blogger.com/img/blank.giflike a coffee shop.

Lost and Found Redux

With so many dentists using mobile phones to communicate with their office and patients, it's critical that you don't actually, you know, lose your phone!http://beta.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Losing your phone doesn't mean you'll never see it again. Using your phone's GPS and the right mobile app or service, you can track your lost phone, find out where you left it, and hopefully get it back. Thankfully there are services for all kinds of smartphones that promise to help you find your lost phone. Here's a look at the top five.

Imaging in the Cloud

Are you thinking about moving to a web-based practice management software but worried about how imaging will be handled? Then you must register for my webinar, which will be be presented tomorrow night at 5 PM PDT.

The Root of the Route

Dental office networking is something we all have to deal with, but it can be confusing as heck. Today, we're going to turn you into a networking wizard, starting with getting to know the most important device on your network: the router.

Cat Fight

Many dental offices are either new builds or major renovations. Knowing what cables to run can be critical for the well-being of your network. Not all Ethernet cable is created equally. What’s the difference, and how do you know which you should use? Let’s look at the technical and physical differences in Ethernet cable categories to help us decide.

Movies on the Go

Having a media server is really awesome, unless the other people on your network don’t know how to share the bandwidth. Using some simple QoS rules, you can give your computer a priority and stop your streams from dropping out. This is a great tutorial for dental offices that stream media for use by their patients.

Androids R Us

With many dentists using mobile phones, more and more of us have critical info that needs to be backed up. Android phones are quickly becoming the operating system of choice. If you want to get serious about backing up your Android phone, including everything from system app data to saved Wi-Fi nodes, Titanium Backup can help.

To Error is Divine...

Anyone who uses any modern gadget (PCs, laptops, smartphones, gaming consoles etc.) faces some errors which need to be resolved. The first step in the resolution of errors is that the nature of the error be found. Usually, error type can be judged from the error code which accompanies the error. Here's a list that contains seven tools to find what error codes mean.