It doesn't happen very often (ho ho!) but yes, even Gurus sometimes make mistakes!

Thankfully we know how to undo them so quickly that no one would ever notice.

The Ctrl+Z shortcut is a wonderful, wonderful friend of mine.  I love my keyboard shortcuts - but this one where we hold down the Ctrl key (bottom left of keyboard) and tap the Z key at the same time can be an absolute life-saver.

Have you ever accidentally deleted the wrong file - or chopped out a whole bunch of text without meaning too?  Have you ever duplicated files while trying to select them with your mouse?

Fear not!

Do the Ctrl+Z manouvre and it'll undo it!

How cool is that?

Try it out in Windows Explorer as well as virtually any well-written application.

When you operate a small/medium business, you usually don’t have the luxury of a dedicated, full-time IT Person to help you recover from problems quickly.  That’s why, I strongly recommend thinking about how to deal with a computing catastrophe before it happens. (And trust me... it will)

Here's 3 simple guidelines you should think about, while all of your PCs and applications are running smoothly and your stress levels are still (relatively) low.

We've seen a huge demand for tutoring - and it's a very different thing to tech support.

Surprisingly, we've seen demand from both domestic users and business users - although what the users want from tutoring is quite different.

Are you interested?  Would you like a TutorGuru to visit your home or business and spend some time with you walking you through the basics?

It really does take a special kind of person to be a teacher.  They need to be patient and trustworthy.  It's a different skill-set to your standard Guru who is usually more knowledgable and well... sometimes less patient!

We're investigating whether we should provide tutoring services for basic computer skills, basic internet and entry-level Microsoft Office.

Please click one of the below and let me know if you'd be interested for yourself or your staff.  Setting this up will depend on the demand!

I'm interested in home user tutoring

I'm interested in business user tutoring for myself

I'm interested in business user tutoring for my staff.

When the "Check Engine" light comes on in your car - what do you do?  Do you take it to the Mechanic or at the very least - get someone knowledgable to take a look it?

Well there's something siilar that happens on a Windows XP/Vista PC - and I'm amazed at the amount of people who just flat out ignore it!

In the bottom right hand corner of your screen - down near the clock - you will sometimes see a little yellow shield with an exclamation mark in it.  This is letting you know that there are Windows Updates waiting to be installed.

Now some of these aren't all that important - but many are.  In fact, many of them are actually security updates which means if you continue to read email and surf the web without applying these patches - you're probably going to end up with a slow or non-functional PC.

So what to do?  Well if you're using Internet Explorer as your web browser, go up to the TOOLS menu and select "Windows Update".  Visit the site, follow the prompts and install all of the outstanding patches.  If you haven't done it for a while (or ever) this may take a long time and it may also involved some reboots.

But it's worth it.

The alternative is an expensive visit to the PCGURU Workshop - so please do your preventative maintenance and save us all the headache!

Concerned about the kids usage of the home PC?

Go to the Control Panel and select "User Accounts and Family Safety". Next, click on the link that says "Set up parental controls for any user." From there, you can block inappropriate Web sites, set up a time schedule for playing games, limit use of instant-messaging software, and create boundaries for browsing the Internet. You can even print out an activity report for your child!

Maybe you could do the same for staff members who do the wrong thing!