Tech Tip Archives - Page 27 of 29

10Nov2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: When Is Healthy Green Tea Not Good for Your Legal Nurse Consulting Business? When It’s Spilled Into Your PC!

Every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who uses a laptop will one day face the peril of having their coffee, lemonade, margarita or healthy green tea spilled onto their laptop computer. It will never be on purpose and it will be an unpleasant surprise that comes at the worst possible time (Don’t they always?). How you react and how quickly you react may make the difference between life and death for your legal nurse consulting PC. ICU nurses will have an advantage over the rest of us, but today’s Tuesday Tech Tip will help to level the playing field, while still allowing for a successful resuscitation. Legal nurse consultants who are desktop users may only end up with a sticky mouse or sticky keyboard, both easy to replace. If you’ve somehow managed to spill liquid into the case of your desktop computer, well my CLNC amigo, you’ve got more problems than just a wet PC. Instead, I’m going to focus on laptop users.

3Nov2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Legal Nurse Consultants Tell Your Attorney-Clients to Zip It or StuffIt – (Politely!)

Any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant using a computer has run into issues when trying to receive large files from an attorney-client or transferring large files from one computer to another. If you’re attached to a network, moving files is pretty easy. You just drag your file from one computer onto a shared drive and then go to the other computer and drag it off. But if you don’t have a network or shared drives, what can you do? In the good old days of AOL and unlimited file sizes on email attachments, you could just email your file and pick it up on any other computer. Today, corporate email servers have put limits on attachment file sizes in their email “gateways” to restrict the transfer of large attachments (and often the type of file also).

13Oct2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: It’s Almost Time for Windows® 7! Are You Ready? Should You Be? Do You Care?

Windows 7 will officially be released into the wild on October 22 and will be sold with new computers. If you’ll remember, Windows XP is no longer officially supported by Microsoft (although it will be available for limited purchases until 2010). People who are buying new computers with Windows Vista will be given the opportunity to make a free or low-cost upgrade. That’s the news.

6Oct2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Can Legal Nurse Consultants Afford to Backup? Or Can You Afford Not to Backup?

I was speaking with a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant the other day who had just spent the last couple of days rebuilding her file system after a virus infected her computer. When I asked her why she didn’t reload her data files from her backup, she confessed that she hadn’t run a backup in over five months. The time she saved by not performing regular backups was minimal compared to the time it cost her to rebuild her system and search for “lost” files.

29Sep2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Legal Nurse Consultants – Color Me Green (with Envy) or Orange (for Organized)

Any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who uses Microsoft Outlook for email has probably looked at her inbox and wondered if there is any way to separate the important messages from the rest of them. If you’re not using the “junk mail” filter and have not created filtering rules, the answer is a resounding “No.” One thing I’ve learned though, is that you can designate different display colors for the people who email you. This allows you to scan your inbox and quickly identify the emails you have coming in by the person or category you’ve assigned to them.

22Sep2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: How to Create and Remember Secure Passwords in an Unsecure World

In last Tuesday’s Tech Tip I discussed the need for strong or “hardened” passwords. As I’ve said before, and will say again today, too many people use the same too simple password for too many website logins too many times. In short, a lot of legal nurse consultants are using the same password for PayPal, eBay and First Crushing Debt Bank online banking sites as you use for your gmail. It’s time for this to end – today.

15Sep2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Do Not Password Protect Go and Do Not Collect $200

Other than tech factotum and chief PITA, I play one other major role in our office. As network admin for LegalNurse.com, I can make or break passwords at will. A few clicks in Active Directory (AD) and your password is now one of my choosing.

8Sep2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: You’ve Got the Power – to Extend Your Legal Nurse Consulting Home Network

You’ve always heard that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. What should people who live in metal houses not throw? Magnets maybe? Or wireless Internet signals? I live in a house that’s got a lot of metal in it – the frame, the roof, the furniture in my office and the spare suit of armor in my closet. I’ve also got a pretty fast Internet in the home office, although government-grade, fiber-optic, warp factor 9 speed still isn’t fast enough for Vickie. She likes instantaneous (or faster) downloads that end before they begin. Having grown up in the days of 26k bps modems, I’m happy just getting (and staying) connected. In the home office we’re both happy because we sit within a sight-line of the speedometer on our router and can tell how fast we’re cruising on the information superhighway. It’s the one time Vickie doesn’t tell me to slow down.

1Sep2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: How’s UPS Working for You?

I keep telling Vickie that UPS means more than the hunky guy that delivers packages to the Institute. Sure UPS stands for United Parcel Service and that’s what springs to most people’s minds when they hear it. But to a techie, UPS is more than just another way to get cool stuff delivered to your home or office. It’s what protects your computer and other equipment from electrical power surges and it protects your data from accidental loss.

25Aug2009

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Data Recovery for Legal Nurse Consultants

Let’s face it, every CLNC consultant (or their significant others) has accidentally deleted files at one time or another. And, immediately following the injudicious use of the “delete” key, we’ve all wished we had at least one of those files back. In Windows, recovering a deleted file can sometimes be as simple as looking in the Recycle Bin to see if it’s still there and then clicking “Restore” to put it back into its original location. But when the file you’ve deleted was on a USB flash drive or on a camera’s media card, recovery is a little more difficult.

Tag: Tech Tip