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.


Obama's Twitter page. Barack Obama's Twitter account has just come out of hibernation, and it makes me wonder: Is this going to be the President-elect's personal Twitter account, or does it belong to his 2012 reelection campaign? It's always been used as if the messages are coming straight from Obama himself, but there's also an official White House Twitter page, so it would be nice to have some clarity as to where we're going to get the official word from the President himself and where we're just getting campaign buzz. You can always get the official word on Twitter from WHO Radio and from Brian Gongol.

Instant news. Speaking of Twitter, it played a part in delivering news on the New York City plane crash. An iPhone photo of the plane in the water hit the Internet well before any newspaper editors knew the event had taken place. It should also be noted, though, that the guy who took the photo became an instant celebrity, which makes his other public photos seem suddenly more public, too.

Did a dam cause the Sichuan quake? Did the weight of water behind a man-made dam cause the Sichuan earthquake last year? Good question. I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figure the weight of the water in question was somewhere around 2.4 or 2.5 trillion pounds, which certainly sounds like it could've displaced some tectonic plates.

Will newspapers survive? These are tough times for the newspaper business, and here's a question: If the only people willing to come through to rescue newspapers are foreign countries and their investing arms? Would it be better to have a newspaper owned by a branch of the government of Kuwait, or no newspaper at all?

A ban on plasma TVs. The EU is working on a plan to ban big-screen plasma TVs. Really.

Windows 7. If you're daring and have a spare computer, you might consider trying a beta test of Windows 7. It's not recommended for most users, but we've heard some positive feedback about it, so if you want to get some thrills trying out something new, a beta test might be just the thing.

E-mail question of the week.
Hi Guys,

Enjoy the show. My XP SP2 has started to lock up on a regular basis. I have to do a hard reboot every time to get back into it. I use Norton Internet Security 2008 and current updates. No viruses or spyware detected.

Any suggestions?

Thanks - Alan
Alan's in a weird predicament, and it's hard to isolate the problem from the studio without boring everyone to tears in the process. Here's a set of steps that might help to narrow down what's causing the problem. No guarantees it'll work, but here's where we'd start:
  1. Make a complete backup of everything valuable
  2. Check to make sure the OS (operating system) is completely updated. You can do this by going to Microsoft Update.
  3. Update your antivirus software and run a complete scan
  4. Update your anti-spyware software and run a complete scan
  5. Update as many other programs as you can. We have a list of popular programs that you can use to help make sure you're using the current versions of them all.
  6. Clean up your hard drive. Get rid of programs you never use and clean up the other data you don't use.
  7. Defragment your hard drive. You can use the built-in "Disk Defragmenter" in your System Tools directory to do this.
  8. Clean up your list of programs that start automatically with your computer. You can do this by using the "Run" option in your Start menu and typing "msconfig" in the window. That'll take you to the System Configuration Utility, which has a tab labeled "Startup". You'll probably find a handful of programs that are starting themselves even when you don't need them; turning them off can make better use of your processor.
These are just some ideas for you to try -- no guarantees are made that they'll work. But if the computer is locking up, there's a good chance you might catch the cause by going through all of the steps above.

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