Suck It Up

Whether you're clumsy, a pet lover, a parent, or a clumsy parent who loves pets, you'll have an occasional need to lean the carpet in your home. You have 4 options:

• Spray/foam carpet cleaners found with the other cleaners in your local store. Spray the cleaner on the carpet, wait a few minutes, then blot the spill.
• Bissel SpotBot. I haven't used one, but it looks like you fill the thing with cleaner and water, set it on the stain, and let the SpotBot do the work.
• Upright carpet cleaner. Similar in size and shape to a vacuum, but like the SpotBot, requires cleaner and water.
• Professional carpet cleaner. Hire somebody to come with heavy-duty equipment to clean your carpet, or rent the heavy-duty equipment.

You might think that the choice you make will depend on your need; are you cleaning a small spill, or cleaning an entire room? But I'm recommending that one solution - the personal vacuum-size carpet cleaner - is the safest and most economical solution for virtually any need.

I've tried the spray carpet cleaners. At best, they're moderately effective. At worst, they can bleach your carpet, leaving a permanent spot that cannot be easily or inexpensively repaired. Been there, done that. You might think you're saving money by buying a $3 cleaner instead of a machine, but how much will it cost to repair that bleached spot on your carpet?

The SpotBot is a good idea, but it delivers very little flexibility for the price. You can't use it to clean an entire room.

The upright, vacuum-size carpet cleaner doesn't bleach your carpet, is much more effective than the spray carpet cleaners, and is not limited to only cleaning small spots. The reason it's dramatically more effective than the spray cleaners is simple: the brushing and sucking of the machine is a much more effective method than pressing down on wet carpet (which is essentially what you're doing when blotting the spill after the spray cleaner has done its thing).

I've heard good things about professional carpet cleaners and rental equipment, but those both incur per-use costs. At $155 (the price I paid for the Hoover F5914-900 SteamVac), a personal carpet cleaner remains the best value long-term. Admittedly it's a pain to haul out the SteamVac for small spills, but it's worth it considering the alternatives.

It's About Time

If you're fastidious about your timepieces being in sync, this post is for you. If you're normal, it's not.

I love the concept of atomic clocks, atomic watches, and any other timekeeping device that keeps time accurate to the fraction of a second (such as my GPS receiver). At my workplace, we use a technique for keeping our servers and PCs in line with the official U.S. time, and I was delighted to find that I could do the same at home. I'm running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; I'm not sure which Windows version started supporting this feature using the method described below.

• Double-click the clock in your system tray (or open Date and Time in your Control Panel).
• Click the "Internet Time" tab.
• Check the "Automatically synchronize with an Internet time server" checkbox.
• In the Server box, type time-a.nist.gov (time.nist.gov should work too, but as of tonight, it wasn't working; maybe one of NIST's servers is down).

Your computer will now synchronize with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency that keeps the official U.S. time.

Freeware Feature: GridMove

Purpose: Quickly and optimally arranging windows on your screen
Web site: http://jgpaiva.donationcoders.com/gridmove.html
Skill level required: Beginner to Intermediate

Although the efficiency benefits of using multiple monitors are becoming well-known, and although multiple-monitor configurations are more tenable than ever, you might be stuck with a single monitor for one reason or another. I've only recently been able to convince my employer that multiple monitors is a solid investment for power users in particular, but I know it will be years or decades before they let me purchase dual monitors for the majority of the staff.

So if you're stuck with a single monitor, how can you work efficiently? For that matter, perhaps you have dual monitors but still want to make the most of the space you have (after all, even two monitors isn't enough, right power users?). Well, you could resize your windows and arrange them perfectly to maximize the utilization of your screen space. That's time-consuming though, which kinda defeats the purpose of your efficiency attempts.

The solution is a simple program called GridMove. This program is difficult to explain, but this visual helps. GridMove "splits" your monitor into multiple rectangles. Drop a window onto one of these rectangles, and GridMove takes care of the resizing for you. Basically, GridMove lets you predefine a workspace layout, and then it takes away the work of the window resizing. You get the benefits of fastidious window management, without the time-consuming labor that is typically required. I now use this program daily at work, and it became particularly useful once a friend pointed out the keyboard shortcuts.

Here's a bonus for you: whether or not GridMove floats your boat, you may want to try GroupBar from Microsoft. GroupBar is in the same basic category as GridMove; it helps you manage your open windows so you can be more efficient.