Please DO NOT use the address bar as a repository to return to sites you use all the time...eventually they will get lost. The address bar history maintains a small amount of your recently visited site and can easily be wiped out via an update or disk cleaning and maintenance tools.

Instead, use the Favorites (Internet Explorer) or Bookmarks (Firefox and every other browser). Favorites/Bookmarks are designed to save and give you quick access to your most used sites and sites you just want to keep track of for later use. Also, you can back them up easily.

If you are like me, you visit a handful of web sites every single day and sometimes multiple times per day. Having bookmarks to these sites works fine, but that requires a minimum of three clicks to reach your favorite sites.

In this video, I describe how to get 1-click access to your favorites using the extremely underutilized Links toolbar (Internet Explorer) and the Bookmarks toolbar (Mozilla Firefox).

This tip requires no downloading and no installation of extra software. Everything is built-in to the browser and available to you right now. So watch the video and learn how to take charge of these extremely useful tools you never knew how to use!

I know I'm late for this year's Christmas season, but you can learn and start using this tip TODAY to make next year's Christmas card mailings a breeze.

Too many computer users have no idea what a database is, how to use it, and how to merge it with another program to create labels. Since printing mailing labels is only a once per year activity for many of you, learning how to do it again every single year requires too much time and frustration.

External hard drives are spacious, cheap and relatively easy to use, but...

I resisted talking about backup this early in the year, but a phone conversation I had today illustrated my philosophy about backup perfectly. The gentleman I spoke with suffered an external hard drive failure, and he used it as the sole storage of his digital photos. Once again, my heart sank with his story of woe. He didn't want to spend the hundreds of dollars it would require from a data recovery company (he also, unfortunately, opened the drive and tried to manually spin the hard drive platters), but was hoping for some sort of magical tech pixie dust that I might be storing in my pocket.

The point of the story is to scare you into backing up your data. Backing up your data means that your important data exists in at least two different locations. By different locations, I'm referring to two different digital media. Hard drive, and external hard drive. Hard drive and CD or DVD. Hard drive and USB flash drive. Hard drive and online backup. External hard drive and CD or DVD. You get the picture.

Exceptional backup systems would include having important data copied

Twenty questions and answers in this week's videocast. Questions this week brought to you buy the number 2009 and Bill, Naomi, Rod, Rex, Craig, Jerry, Richard, Dolores, Denise, Shirley, Rita, Betty, Ralph, Merrill, Jerry, Bill, Carole and Bonnie.

This is a pretty specific tip for a relatively new device, but with WalMart now carrying iPhones more and more people will want and need to learn how to take advantage of their investment. The iPhone is a wonderful little tool...IF you learn how to use it and make it work for you.

One of the first things you can do with any piece of technology is customize it to fit your needs. With the iPhone, learning to customize the interface makes the unit more usable for you. This week, I show iPhone users how to customize the location of their icons on the iPhone launch screen or home screen.

1. Touch and hold your finger on any icon
2. When the icons start to jiggle, take your finger off the icon.
3. Now you can drag any icon to any position by touching and dragging it to a new location or even a new screen by dragging it to the left or right edge of the screen.
4. You can also drag the default icons off the toolbar at the bottom and drag the ones you use most often to the toolbar
5. When you are finished moving your icons to positions that work best for you, push the button at the bottom of your iPhone.
   

As always, these tips make more sense by watching the video! And even if you aren't an iPhone user, I think you will find it interesting to see the kind of tech that can be found in a phone today.

2009 is upon us and computer prices are incredibly low, but if you can wait a year to buy a new computer, I would highly recommend it. Why? Microsoft plans on releasing the next version of Windows either late in 2009 or early in 2010. All indications point to the earlier release since Microsoft is anxious to bury Vista.