I wanted to find a way to power on my computer at 7:30am each morning. This was so that my email and various websites I visit can be updated before I sit down at my computer. With mornings being such a rush, I wanted to use some automation to help me out.

There are normally a number of features in the power management component of the BIOS options, which permit all types of triggers to wake a computer up from hibernation or standby modes. However, if the computer is turned off, these will not work.

One of the triggers allows us to set the computer to launch via the real time clock. We can set how frequently the machine will wake up, or what time of the day we want it too wake up.

Every BIOS is a little different so it is impossible to give specific instructions, but it is not too hard to find. Go into the BIOS and find Power Management. In here, ensure S3 is enabled. There should be an option called “Resume by alarm”, or “Wake-up on RTC”. Once this is enabled, you will be able to set the time you want your computer to turn on. That should be all there is to it.

While I had not seen this feature before, I checked the 3 computers I have access to, to see if they also had this option. These machines are of various ages and they all included this feature. Only one time can be set in the BIOS, so using this method will not work if you want it to turn on in the morning and the afternoon. If you want to do this, you will need to use the task scheduler.

If you leave your computer on overnight, you may want to consider setting up a scheduled task to mute your speakers after a predefined time. This will protect you from hearing new email notifications, instant message requests and updates from awaking you from your slumber.

I can also see it of being useful in the workplace. If you have a regular meeting you go to each week, it may be worth having your computer mute the sound of your laptop while you are in the board room.

The process is fairly simple. We need to use a free third party utility to allow the mute to take place. There are many utilities you could use for this such as NirCmd or Wizmo, but today to keep things simple I am going to use a program called Mute.

The next step is to set up a scheduled task to enable and disable these utilities. All of these utilities unload themselves from memory once they have run. This means that unmuting can still be controlled through your normal muting methods.

The setup for Vista and XP are slightly different, but you will find all the instructions after the jump.

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I wish I could give everyone who reads this an easter egg, but it’s just not going to happen. Well not with the kind of easter egg you want anyway.

There are more types of Easter Eggs than just the chocolate variety. They come in many forms. Easter eggs are also the name of hidden features or novelty items found in movies, DVD menus, software, websites and sometimes even hardware.

I have put together a list of some of my favourite software Easter Eggs for your enjoyment. I have tried to select examples from programs that are found on the majority of computers. This way you will be able to try many of them out yourself.

We are going to look at eggs in the following programs:

• Pinball
• Solitaire
• Nullsoft Winamp
• Google.com
• Notepad

Read on for your eggs…

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If you make a complaint to your phone company, you may end up feeling that speaking to customer support is getting you nowhere, and that you are out of options.

What do you do now? There is one more step you can take which not many people know about. Most phone companies find it hard to find new customers and it is very important for them to hold onto existing customers. They will do a lot to keep you with them. That is where retentions come in.

Ask your customer support if you can speak with their retentions staff. Retentions is a seemingly small team of people that have more authority than the general customer support staff. They may not be able to help you with your problem directly, but if they feel that you have a case, they are able to offer you credit, refunds or services to keep you on board.

You will obviously get a bit further if you tell them that you plan to end your business with them, or if your contract is coming to an end. I have had some success with this from previous problems.

If they don’t want to help you, moving on is often the best way to go. You will probably get a better deal elsewhere as plans are constantly changing and offering more for your money as technology grows.

My wife came home from the shops the other day and she told me she spent $AU50 on paper diary inserts for 2008. This way she is able to keep her nice binder in use for another year. She uses her computer calendar for very few scheduled reminders, and I couldn’t understand why she would try to use both at the same time.

I use a computer based calendar (Outlook 2007) and find that it does everything I could want it to do. I asked her why she used both when the computer options are free and come with a number of features a paper diary can’t offer. After listing a few of the advantages, I thought it would be wise to do a bit of a comparison.

This article will look at paper diaries vs computer based calendars. I am strongly leaning towards the computer based diaries as being a better option. The only way a paper diary can win this is to bypass all the benefits and answer “I simply prefer paper diaries!”

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