The WHO Radio Wise Guys
Brian Gongol


The WHO Radio Wise Guys airs on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa on 1040 AM or streaming online at WHORadio.com. The show airs from 1 to 2 pm Central Time on Saturday afternoons. A podcast of show highlights is also available. Leave comments and questions on the Wise Guys Facebook page or e-mail them to wiseguys@whoradio.com.


Microsoft is issuing three "critical" updates in its Patch Tuesday release next week. If you're using a Windows machine, you'll need to make sure you get the update.

If you send important documents to other people, make sure you're sending those in PDF format. If you're sending out a file in, for instance, Microsoft Word format, it's easy for the layout to get messed up -- or for the recipient to change whatever you wrote. But if you convert the file to PDF, it's much harder to mess up. You can convert files directly to PDF if you use the free OpenOffice suite for your word-processing and spreadsheet needs. Or you can use PDFCreator to print to a PDF from virtually any program.

If you need a good laugh, check out this 1974 prediction about television of the future. It's actually pretty accurate, given that we now have YouTube, Netflix on Demand, and cell-phone video.

Microsoft has released Windows XP Service Pack 3.

It turns out that your brain makes many decisions before you're consciously aware of them. Seems like a good reason to try to train yourself into good habits.

A text-message service being offered to farmers in India may revolutionize farming there by offering early notice about changes in prices and weather. Proof once again that technology changes life in lots of little ways that accumulate to huge improvements over time.

Microsoft says it's giving up on its plans to buy Yahoo. Realistically, Microsoft should really look at getting into some other line of business.

A caller asked about using AutoRuns for Windows to clean up his startup registry. We haven't used it, but it looks like it's just an upgrade on using the msconfig command to decide what runs on startup and what doesn't. It's best to limit the number of programs that run on startup in order to get the best performance out of the machine. You also ought to run anti-virus and anti-spyware programs regularly. If you don't feel like paying for them, you can download AVG Antivirus and Spybot Search and Destroy for free.

E-mail us anytime at wiseguys@whoradio.com or follow along with Brian's Twitter account.

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