Air Display – cost:$10 – Air Display turns your iPad into a second monitor on your computer. It works with both Mac and Windows computers.
Catalog Spree– cost:Free – Catalog Spree shrinks over 350 catalogs into digital form.
iTunes U– cost:Free – Apple’s iTunes U app features over half a million lectures, videos and books from some of the top learning institutions around the world.
Tip of the month
Microsoft Clip Art is going away!!
According to a Microsoft support page, the company is retiring its Office Clip website. If you are currently using Word 2013, you can still add images from the “Insert menu”, then “Online Pictures”. If they are available in 2013, I’m sure you still have access in earlier versions of Word, but they will be retired, so go get all the free images you want now as they may not be available at all in the future. Microsoft’s plan is to suggest using Bing images- their own search engine – for visuals that are free to use under a Creative Commons license.
Helping your old computer run faster!
The first thing you should do is check your startup. Lots of programs sneak into the startup and you periodically need to check for those programs.
In Windows 7 or 8:
Clean up your startup by opening the Startup tab of Windows 8’s Task Manager, or typing “msconfig”—minus the quotation marks—in Windows 7 and opening its Startup tab. In Windows 8 you can get to your Task Manager easily by right clicking on the bottom “Task” bar on your monitor and then left clicking on Task Manager.
While you don’t want to disable Windows processes or processes related to your hardware, eliminate anything else that you can identify if at all possible. You wouldn’t want to prevent your antivirus from launching at startup, but there’s no reason for Steam or Adobe Reader (for example) to hog your system resources except for when you explicitly need them. If you aren’t sure what the program is, Google it!