Pssst! 101 hot tips

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1998 by Bonny L. Georgia

12 Size it up. When shopping for backup hardware, the best option is a device that can store your entire hard disk on one tape or cartridge with a bit of wiggle room left. Alternatively, partition your hard disk into multiple drives or organize data into chunks that will comfortably fit onto your favorite removable media.

Harness the Internet

The Web offers an overwhelming wealth of information for home-based workers--sometimes too much. Here are some suggestions to make your future Internet experiences more streamlined and successful.

13 Find the perfect provider. Internet service providers (ISPs) are a dime a dozen, but they aren't created equally. The List (www.thelist.com) is the perfect way to see all your local providers, compare their offerings (do they have a sufficient number of modems? do they have toll-free support?), and decide which one offers you the best value.

14 Increase your speed. The current high-speed modem standard is V. 90, which is compatible with both K56Flex and X2. Depending on your modem and your ISP, you may get a performance boost if you update your 56Kbps modem to V. 90. The information-laden 56k.com site (www.56k.com) will point you in the direction of nearly every V. 90 upgrade available.

15 Turbocharge your searches. Single-engine search sites such as www.altavista.digital.com or www.lycos.com used to be the best way to find information on the Web. Not any more. Your best bet these days is a meta-search tool like Copernic 98 (www.copernic.com; $29.95), which takes information from all the top search engines and feeds you the best results, or MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler. com), which does it for free.

16 Focus your queries. Regardless of the search engine you use, your results are only as good as the query you make. Most engines let you conduct an advanced search by stringing together phrases using AND, OR, and NOT (often referred to as Boolean operators). Check your search engine's help area to see if it supports these, and learn how to use them.

17 Speed in the FastLane. Waiting for graphics to load is a huge waste of time. Spectrum's new FastLane proxy service (www.Spectruminfo.com; $4.95/month) lets you set up your browser to receive all graphics from the Web compressed to one-third of their original size, resulting in significantly faster page loading.

18 Stay connected. Hate getting tossed offline by your ISP for being idle? Don't let your provider think you've stepped away--keep your Internet connection running by playing audio over the Internet via Real-Audio (www.real.com; free) or music via Imagine Radio (www.Imagineradio.com; free).

19 Track a package. An AWOL FedEx shipment can damage any working relationship. But the carrier's home page (www.fedex.com) can help you find it in a flash. Better yet, sign up for FedEx interNetShip service so you can ship online to more than 160 countries without having to hand write airbills, call for a pickup, or install additional software.

20 Promote your Web site. The Submit It! Resource Center (www.submit-it.com) offers dozens of free tips for marketing your home page. If you want to skip the do-it-yourself route, send two URLs to more than 400 search engines, directories, what's new sites, and award sites using the Submit It! service ($60 one-time fee).