GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 6, 2-12-09

Thu Feb 12 21:27:25 EST 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 6                   

2-12-09

1 VoIP, Part 3       

2 Oh please, not AGAIN!

3 Twitter, another Swiss Army Knife phone, Google goes green, Vista netbooks

4 Paper hanger       

5 Love, sweet love

6 Registry scams 

Upon further study I've found that wiring your entire house to use VoIP is simple but setting it up for dual line use with one VoIP and one local line requires a little more work and some money.

To cover the easy one first, here's how to use a Magic Jack or Vonage system throughout the house:

Find the gray phone box (NID) mounted outside your house and unhook the POTS line.  In the following photo (which is a quad line NID) the POTS line is the phone jack on the left of the four terminals in the right hand section.

The compartment on the left holds the terminals coming in from the pole and that inner half door you see is secured with a special fastener that you can't open.  The right hand compartment is called the customer area and is secured with either a slotted or Phillips screw.  In most cases there will be just one set of terminals, not two.  Just unplugging that little one-inch phone cable closes the circuit and will spread a dial tone throughout the house from a VoIP connection.  Just plug your Magic Jack or Vonage unit to a wall jack instead of a phone and you're done.

If you want to maintain a basic local phone connection and use VoIP it gets more complicated and expensive, but how complicated and expensive is up to you.

To help explain phone wiring, the following is a standard phone jack you can find all over your house.

In a standard phone system the red and green wires at the top carry the phone signal, the black and yellow wires are dead.  The red and green wires go to the two center contacts in the jack and most phone cords only carry those two wires.  The outer contacts aren't used.

Here comes the money or rewiring.  Most single line phones and VoIP adapters are only set up for Line 1 (the center contacts).  In order to utilize both lines you have to get the red/green signal to the black/yellow pair and your phones will have to reverse that to get black/yellow to red/green.

The inexpensive way that involves wiring would be to get a duplex adapter (like this one from CTG:  http://tinyurl.com/cpavmg) to plug into the incoming jack for VoIP.  Check the jack wiring to make sure all four wires are attached to the terminals first since some contractors (mostly just the "friend doing you a favor" type) are a little shoddy and only wire one pair.

This adapter will direct the red/green signal to the black/yellow pair internally.  You can do it without the adapter by rewiring that jack at the NID but it takes the right equipment and/or a lot of patience.

Then you'll have to go to each jack you want to use for the line 2 VoIP and rewire the black wire to the red terminal and the yellow wire to the green terminal.  This moves the signal to the center pair of contacts and every phone will use those.

Spend a little more money and buy one of those CTG splitters or something similar for each jack.  Just plug the phone into the proper jack and call away, no rewiring needed.

Spend even more money and buy standard or cordless two line phones.  These will come with a 4-wire cable and allow you to switch between pairs with the push of a button without the need for an adapter.  This is the most convenient but will cost from $40-100 for a cordless phone.

So there you have it, hopefully it wasn't as bad as it appears to me.  It all seemed so simple at first ;)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

What is Twitter? Is it a publishing medium, like a blog? Is it a
marketplace? Or is it more of a club? Judging by the bizarre mix of
attendees to the first ever Shorty Awards, held on Feb. 11 in
Brooklyn, New York, Twitter is all these things and much, much more:

http://tinyurl.com/burhzd

The world got its first look earlier this week at Nokia's XpressMusic
phone, a music-focused handset with loads of media-sharing and
social-networking features including Facebook:

http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10162438-12.html

Google is trying to impact electrical energy consumption by developing
a Web service that will let users track electricity usage in a very
detailed way:

http://tinyurl.com/balg7j

The netbook genre of portable devices is getting ready to make the
jump to Vista---if the public is willing to pay $100 more:

http://tinyurl.com/aq82nf

Copy us on the good stuff

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com 
www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

John's Background Switcher (aka-JBS) collects images from Web sites like Flickr, Picasa, and more--or pictures from your own folders--and displays them as desktop wallpaper at intervals that you define. You can even subscribe to image sites that use RSS feeds.  This is a very nice little application and its free here: 

http://www.johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher/ 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com  

Threat of the Week

Holidays are always a fertile time for malware-laden email and Valentine's Day is no different.

This year's most prolific threat is from a Storm-like Trojan called Waledac.  It's spreading via links in emails with such smarmy subjects as "I love being in love with you", "Deeply in love with you" and "I knew I loved you".

Needless to say, stay away from emails pertaining to Valentine's Day.  For that matter it's a good idea to avoid holiday themed emails all year long, ESPECIALLY those annoying E-Cards.  Just make a pact with your friends to only send standard holiday cards via snail mail.

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Email Question of the Week

Q:  Do registry scan and performance-enhancing programs help to improve
performance? What are the best programs? I looked back thru some of
the PC Gurus E-mails but can;t find any recent ones that have this
information.

A:  The short answer is no.  Registry scans can find errors and "dead"
keys, but they can also render your PC unbootable under the right
conditions.  The performance-enhancing software sold by various
companies is, in my opinion, a giant fraud perpetrated on people who
understandably want to breathe new life into their old machine.

There are a few things you can do to speed up your PC.  First, you can
buy more RAM. Second, you can turn off some of the programs and
utilities that start when Windows loads. Finally, (this is a lot more
involved and requires either some experience or some help), I reload
Windows on my PC about twice a year.  A clean install of Windows will
speed up most PCs.

Hope this helps.  If you'd like more details on any of the suggestions
above, please let us know.

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com

Contact info and legal stuff

If you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click on the "Email the Team" icon. 

Copyright 2001-2009 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved.  Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.

Information provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied.  Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL systems.  Make use of any information supplied at your own risk.

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