Dust Kills Cleaning the Unit Fan is Essential Computer Care Between taking care of the household, the kids, the pets, and the district PTA, computer care is probably one of the last things that you think of doing on a regular basis. Without a regular maintenance schedule however, you could find out (the hard way) that a neglected computer is an energy hog - one that works harder than it needs to and one that could be a financial burden to replace. Open Source Software If you've spent any lengthy amount of time on the Internet, you've probably heard of open source software but might not have fully understood what it is and why it even exists. This article will describe this recent phenomenon and describe some of its benefits for the software using community. Let's say that every day we need to load up the Yahoo web browser, Microsoft Word, and then the calculator that comes with Windows. Instead of doing this by hand, we could write a batch file to do it for us. First, we'd load up Notepad and type in the following: START "http://www.yahoo.com" START "c:/program files/microsoft office/office/winword. Conditions allow a program to perform an action based on the outcome of a previous command.3 Using this type of instruction, we could instruct a program to do one thing if the "x" variable in our latter example turned out to be 7 days, and then do different thing if the variable turned out to be 3 days. Within Windows, you can set up a home network similar to the way that you set up an Internet connection. Only this time, you'll set up a LAN (Local Area Network) connection. Windows should walk you through setting up a LAN after starting the computer and once complete, you can begin to connect one of your machines to the network. Surprisingly, you may even get a helping hand from the salespersons at your local computer store. We don't recommend that you make this your first pit stop when you experience a problem, but we don't recommend that you rule this option out altogether either. Computer salespersons are hired for a reason - and that's their knowledge.