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Welcome to this week's edition of the Computer Kindergarten Newsletter.
Today is Sunday, January 20, 2008
In this Issue:
Special Feature: Charity Scams to Avoid
Tips & Tricks: Rename a File
This Week's Topic: Vista Time Limit Controls
Question: Sizing Windows
Websites of Interest: Martin Luther King, Jr.; History of the American Circus; Worst Movies Ever; Don't Get Sick!!
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Special Feature: Charity Scams to Avoid
The following is from scambusters.org
When a charity you've never heard of lures you with an emotional plea or proposes an unlikely sounding scheme, it's time to start asking questions.
Real charities will spend 60 to 99 percent of the money they collect on the people they are supposed to serve. By contrast, charity scams often wind up spending most or all of the money on its "administrators."
Here are four charity fundraising drives you may have wondered about.
1. The Donate A Car Deal
Donating a car to charity sounds like a win-win proposition. The donor has a hassle-free way to get rid of an old car and gets a tax deduction for doing it. The charity gets an asset it would not have had otherwise.
The problem is often very little of the car's value goes to charity. For-profit businesses handling the cars on behalf of the charities pay costs to tow, condition cars and advertise. They then sell them at wholesale auctions, leaving very little for the charity.
Even worse, some sleazy middlemen purposely disable cars so they can be sold more cheaply, then re-sold for a profit after they are "fixed."
Action: The best way to donate a vehicle is to identify a charity that actually uses vehicles in its programs, for example, delivering meals to the homebound, taking elderly or blind people to the doctor or on errands, or training future auto mechanics.
You can contact the United Way, Goodwill, Salvation Army, community college or vocational school to locate a program that actually uses cars.
2. The Email Charity Scam
Unless you have signed up to receive email from a charity, do not respond to email charity solicitations. Real charities do not normally recruit new donors by email, and especially not by spaham (misspelled intentionally).
Email charity scams may use legitimate sounding names and link to a website where you can make a donation. These tend to be fake websites made to look like an organization's official site.
Be wary of websites that ask for personal information like your Social Security number, date of birth or bank account information, which can lead to identity theft.
Action: If you want to help the charity mentioned in the email, contact them directly with a phone call or use a Google search to find their real website.
More and more charities are accepting donations made on their official websites, so it's not wrong to make a donation this way. Just don't use an unsolicited email to get there.
3. Police and Firefighter Charities
Police and firefighters put their lives on the line for us every day. So, some well-deserved backup often seems like the right thing to do.
But where is your donation to that police charity really going? Just because police leagues, sheriff's associations or firefighters' relief organizations have the words "police" or "firefighter" in their name doesn't mean your local officers will be the ones who benefit.
Action: Before you give, make sure you know whether the group is a local, state or national organization. Get specifics on the programs your donation will fund and make sure you understand how they will help your local officers.
Ask how much of your money goes towards the officer program. If the donation is used to purchase an ad in the charity's journal or to buy circus tickets, most of it may well get eaten up in production costs.
One useful resource (not only for checking out police and firefighting charities) is CharityNavigator.org.
http://www.charitynavigator.org
They have a Top 10 list of the 10 charities that most overpay their for-profit fundraisers. Five of the top 10 charities on this list have the words "police" and "firefighters" in their name! These charities spend 85% to 95% of their donations on expenses and fundraising fees, leaving only 5% to 15% to be used for their stated purposes.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten.detail&listid=28
Our advice is simply to be cautious here. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scam organizations that may sound legitimate, but do little or nothing to contribute to the police and firefighters that donors believe they are helping. Make sure your donation is actually making the contribution you want.
4. Prospect Fundraising
Many people first learn of a charity through a telemarketer call. (Charities are not bound by the Do-Not-Call list.) These calls are typically made by for-profit fundraisers hired on behalf of the charity.
Though many charities raise money this way, these for-profit companies may keep anywhere from 25 to 95 cents of every dollar they collect. Charities raising money this way count on repeat donors to offset the first year's fundraising expense.
Action: Don't give as a knee jerk reaction. Instead, research any charity you are considering. Make sure they spend most of the donated funds on their programs and keep advertising and administrative costs below 25 percent.
A well-run charity welcomes questions. For more advice on how to know if a charity is legitimate, you can read our article here.
http://www.scambusters.org/charities.html
Finally, you can find 10 more tips to avoid charity scams here.
http://www.scambusters.org/charity.html
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Tips & Tricks: Rename a File
Question: Can I change the filename of a file?
Answer:
Yes, you can. Right click on the file. Left click on Rename in the resulting menu. You will see the filename turn blue; type the new name, it will replace the previous name. press the Enter key and the name is changed.
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Today's Topic: Vista Time Limit Controls
The following is from worldstart.com
The vista time limit controls feature allows an account with Administrative rights to set time restrictions on a standard (limited) account. This is a really good idea for anyone that can’t always be there to supervise his or her kids (or grandkids) on the PC. This feature doesn’t control the content, but rather, it limits the hours out of the week that a certain user account can log on to the computer. Let’s say, for instance, that you have a young teenage child that is home by themselves for a couple of hours before you get home from work. You don’t really want them on the PC when you're not there, for whatever reasons (for example, homework, grounded, etc.), but you don’t know how to do this unless you start locking the PC in your bedroom. Well, with the Vista timed controls, you can simply set the controls to only allow this user account to log in between certain hours or whatever you need to give your child the time they truly need on the computer.
Before you get started, there is one thing you should do first and that is to password protect any and all accounts that have Administrative rights. It does no good to create a time frame of use if the user can simply log on using another account that is not password protected.
To password protect your Administrative accounts, go to Start, Control Panel and then select Users, Accounts and Family.
From there, click on the option to Change Windows Password and fill in the appropriate password in the field provided.
Now, for the fun stuff! In order to set a time restriction on a user account, the procedure is actually quite simple.
Go to Start, Control Panel, Users and Family.
Under the heading of Parental Control, click on the link labeled “Set up PC for any user.”
Click OK on the Windows pop up warning
You should now be at the Parental Controls window, which has a number of settings. The first one is an option to turn on Parental Controls. Choose "On to enforce current settings” and to enable the other settings.
After you do this, go down toward the bottom of the window and choose Time Limits from the list.
This will take you to a screen with a table that has days down the left side and 24 hours across the top. This table, in case you didn’t guess, represents a week and all the cells within the table represent the hours within that week.
In order to set time limits for a user, all you have to do is figure out what the hours should be that you would like to allow access to the PC and select the hours that correspond on the table. In order to highlight the cells in the table, take your mouse pointer and hover over the squares you want. Then click and drag the mouse pointer over the cells you want. This will turn the cells from white to blue, indicating that the hour is restricted and off limits to this user.
That’s it! Easy, huh?! The time limits will also give the user a 15 minute and a one minute warning to let them know that their available session is about the shut down.
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Question: Sizing Windows
Question: When I work with more than one program on my computer, I would like to make the windows smaller. Can this be done?
Answer:
Yes, it can. You can change the size of a Restored Down window to any specific size you want.
First, make sure the window is restored down. Note the three buttons in the top, right hand corner of the window. The button to the immediate left of the X is the maximize/restore down button. If the icon is two squares, one behind the other, the window is maximized which means it fills the entire computer screen, and the size cannot be changed. To restore down, click once on the button.
If the button already displays one square, it is restored down.
To change the size of the window, point the mouse arrow over one of the windows edges. The arrow will change into a two-headed arrow. As soon as you see that, hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse to drag the edge of the window either outward to make the window bigger or inward to make it smaller. As soon as the window is the size you want, release the mouse button.
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Websites of Interest:
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. Visit our website for links to sites with biographies, photos, his famous speech and much more.
http://computerkindergarten.com/html/mlk.html
History of the American Circus
Visit this site to learn about the history and the pioneers behind the American Circus, including P.T. Barnum and the Ringling Bros.
http://www.circusinamerica.org/public/welcome
Worst Movies Ever
This site has a list of the top 100 worst movies. Take a look; did you see any of them and do you agree?
http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom
Don't Get Sick!!
This useful article from the Readers Digest website, gives you “23 Ways to Prevent Colds and the Flu."
http://tinyurl.com/2xkkvk |
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