The holiday season can be a stressful and chaotic time. Between attending holiday parties, shopping, meal planning, baking, gift wrapping, and entertaining, there never seems to be enough time. But if you organize, schedule and plan properly, you might find you even have a little extra time to relax and recharge.

The should first sit down with your family at a meeting and find out what activities and parties they are involved in during the season. If there are rehearsals for the church pageant, choir practice, or volunteer work activities, make sure you incorporate them all into your family schedule. Be sure to factor in time off that you’ve taken during the holiday season so that if they need an extra set of hands to help out at the church’s bake sale, you’ll know at a glance whether or not you can help out.

That being said, the next step is to ensure you’re not spreading yourself or your family too thin. Don’t commit to more parties than you can attend, or be coaxed into hosting your own holiday event if you simply don’t have the time. Once you’ve established your schedule with your family, do not make any changes, additions, or revisions to it without consulting them first. If you’re stretched too thin, chances are they will be as well since you’ll be unavailable to them.

Successful holiday shopping involves careful and methodical planning. A concise and specific list can save you both time and money. Remember too, the season is about togetherness and the spirit of the season, and not about how much you maxed out your credit cards by. Stick to your list and you’ll stick within your budget guidelines as well.

Keep your holiday decorating simple and minimal. Ornate displays can quickly consume your valuable time. If you do choose to decorate big this season, make sure you’ve planned for it in advance and completed it before things kick into high gear such as parties, caroling and shopping.

Santa’s got his list of who’s naughty and who’s nice. Organize and plan wisely so that you won’t become stressed and end up on the wrong side of Santa’s list this year.

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The technology of Bluetooth is nothing new, but in
many respects it can still seem like more of a buzz
word rather than an accepted technology. You may
see the ads for Bluetooth enabled devices, although
you still may be wondering what it is.

Capabilities
The Bluetooth definition is a wireless technology
that is a worldwide specification for a small form
factor, low cost solution that will provide link
between mobile devices and other electronic
devices.

Similiar to 802.11 b/g wireless and many cordless
telephone systems, Bluetooth operates on 2.4 GHz
radio signals. The 2.4 GHz band seems to be a bit
crowded, with interferences between the devices a
bit hard to avoid. Telephones are now being offered
at the 5.8 GHz frequency band, which will help to
remedy this.

The technical specifications of Bluetooth will
indicate a maximum transfer rate of 723 kbps with
a range of 65 - 328 feet, all depending on the
class of that particular device. The speed is a
fraction of what is offered by wireless standards,
so it’s obvious that Bluetooth doesn’t really
pose a threat to replacing your wireless network.

Applications
There are numerous products that will take advantage
of Bluetooth capabilities, such as laptops, PDAs,
headphones, and even wireless printer adapters.

A lot of laptops out there will include an onboard
Bluetooth adapter which allows the system to
connect to any Bluetooth device right out of the
box. For computers that don’t have an adaptor
built right in, there are several USB adaptors
available for Bluetooth.

For an awesome technology, Bluetooth is actually
hard to compete with. For short range wireless,
Bluetooth is easily one of the best. The standard
for Bluetooth keeps getting better and better,
making it a wireless technology that will be around
for years and years to come.

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When it comes to maintaining your computer, you’ve probably heard it all before. “Run Defrag!” “Scan Your Disk for Errors!” Although these two activities are important, there’s more you can do to extend the life of your computer beyond today’s predicted two-year span. In fact, by following the simple advice below, you can enjoy the use of your computer to up to five years or more - reserving expenses to simple software upgrades rather then complete and costly hardware upgrades.

One of the easiest and least expensive things you can do to extend the life of your computer is to get rid of unnecessary programs, folders, and files. A disk drive that’s clogged with unnecessary and unused files is disk drive that works harder than it has to. Although Window’s defrag system can ease some of the stress that these files place onto the drive, it doesn’t do much to get rid of the problem in the first place. This is because the defrag program simply organizes the files in a system that makes it easier for the computer to access. (Thus cutting down on the work required to find and load them). But this method merely “relieves” the symptoms that these files induce - it doesn’t attack the cause. These files need to be deleted - not “organized!”

Of course, deleting files can be a scary adventure to most users. Most computer users don’t know which files are safe to delete and which aren’t.

The worst thing anyone could do is snoop around crucial Window directories and haphazardly delete files that don’t look familiar. Doing so could render important programs inoperable, corrupt the Windows operating system, and possibly prevent the computer from even starting. That’s why using special deletion software is so important. Deletion programs will analyze a computer’s operating system and installed programs to determine which files are crucial to computer function versus which files are safe to delete.

You already have such a program on your computer and it’s Windows’ Add/Remove Programs (available from the Control Panel). This software will assist you with deleting programs that you not only no longer want, but additional files that these program use as well (dynamic link libraries, database files, registry references, shortcut icons, etc.).

But sometimes Windows’ Add/Remove Programs isn’t enough. Although this software does a pretty good job of removing unwanted programs, it can leave some files behind even after a complete uninstall - files which become orphan files. And it’s these orphan files that can really clutter up a hard drive and shorten the life of an otherwise, young and robust PC.

Orphans are usually files that contain temporary data created by a program, files created by the user, partial files left over from a computer crash, or any other kind of miscellaneous files created for almost any other reason. The problem is that an uninstall program doesn’t delete the orphan files it leaves behind because they were never part of the program when it was first installed. An uninstall program can remove only the files it placed onto a hard drive during its install routine.

So while Windows’ Add/Remove Programs can remove an entire program, you’ll need to get rid of those pesky little things with a more advance file cleaner like CleanSweep for example. CleanSweep is a unique program that will specifically seek out files that are no longer associated with a program, and then ask if you want to delete them.

The only time that you wouldn’t want to delete an orphan file is if the file were an actual document that you created before deleting a program. If you were to say, uninstall Microsoft Word, all the documents that you created with Word would then turn into orphan files. Or if you were to uninstall a graphics-editing program, all the pictures you made with the program would become orphan files.

The smart thing to do when you don’t want to lose the data that you created with an unwanted program is to:

1. Save or convert your documents to a format that will work with different program first (that is, a program that you intend to keep)
2. Archive them onto a floppy disk, flash drive, or CD-ROM
3. Proceed with a program like CleanSweep.

Using CleanSweep or any other similar type of utility could delete anywhere from less than a megabyte of hard drive space to over five megabytes and up. That may seem like a small amount of “clog material” to you, but to your computer, it’s a lot less to process!

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