1TB, or Terabyte.  That’s 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of information!   A byte is one character, say the letter “c” or “x”.

So, how much is that in real life?

I still have a 40 Megabyte hard disk in my collection from 10 or 15 years ago. I actually forgot when I got it.  And, that was HUGE at the time. It cost a couple of hundred dollars to boot.

If we can assume that storing text from an average magazine page uses one byte per character, one page would equal about 5000 characters.

That means my old 40 MB hard disk was able to hold about 900 pages.

Now, lets fast forward to today when you can buy a 1 TB hard disk for under $100 on sale.

My new 1 TB hard disk would hold a whopping 220 million pages!

To use another analogy, a DVD movie averages 6 Gigabytes, or about 136,000 pages.  I can fit between 100 and 125 DVD quality movies on a 1TB disk. I could fit 250,000 high quality digital photographs on it. Or, more than 200 million mp3 music files. Don’t tell the kids.

Guess what?  Most people who use a digital camera or video camera can fill that up in no time.

With all of the digital content we collect today, music, documents, software, videos (Youtube and our own), is it any wonder that our information truly is more valuable than the machine we store it on?

That “IS” the best reason in the world to back up you data.  But, that’s for a future story.

        

This e-mail comes to me through my website from Lois.

Her e-mail was quite long-sought edited it to save some space.

Here is a little information about the machine I’m using.  It’s a custom made desktop is running Vista.  I have had it about two years.  I get my Internet connection through EarthLink, and I run their e-mail through Microsoft Outlook.  I have recently started having problems, and I’m not sure if it’s with EarthLink, Outlook, or both.  For the past several months, I have received several phishing e-mails from PayPal.  I forwarded to spoof@PayPal.com and then delete it however, over the last two weeks or so, I have received several of the same phishing e-mails I have been unable to forward.  I can pull up the forwarding e-mail and address, but I cannot send it.  After I close out of the forwarding e-mail and the phishing e-mail, I find that I am not able to open any e-mail.  If I close Outlook completely, I find that I am unable to reopen the unless I restart the computer.

Thank you in advance.

Hello Lois, thank you for asking your question.

You did the right thing by forwarding the phishing scam e-mails to spoof@PayPal.com.

However, not knowing which version of Microsoft Outlook you are using or how you have it set up I can only think of two solutions that may help you.

The first solution is to make sure that you have run the battery of utilities that I have in the downloads section of my website.

First go to the downloads page of my website, once there select the first item, which is the Savemybutt Utilities Instructions, and save it to your hard drive for future use. Download the programs that are listed in the instructions and follow them step by step.

If by chance you have gotten some form of malicious bug on your computer that is causing this problem with Outlook, these procedures may fix it.

If that doesn’t work, the only thing I can think of to do would be to write down all of your connection settings for EarthLink and then reinstall Outlook. Depending on the version of Outlook that you have, you may get the opportunity to repair it during the installation process.  If not, he may actually need to reinstall the whole program.  Make sure you have all of the updates and see what happens.

And, don’t forget to back up your address book and your e-mail file.  If you do a search of your hard drive for a file that looks like this *.wab, that’s your address book, and a file that looks like this *.pst, that your e-mails and contacts.

If you have to install Outlook from scratch, when you open the new installation for the first time you will have to point Outlook two location where these files are at.

I hope that helps.

        

John writes:

Mike was friendly and engaging, moving along and explaining things as he went along, and when we got to a slow time, he talked to me as if he knew me for a long time, making the whole experience fun as well as informative.