Ricky Says

Just traded in your Blackberry for a shiny new iPhone? Wise choice.

Here's how to transfer contacts from your old Blackberry to your new iPhone, and without buying anything extra along the way (completely free solution).

We'll do this in two main steps:

1. Transfer contacts from the Blackberry address book to Outlook on your computer (or Windows Mail).

2. Sync your iPhone with your computer using iTunes, which will transfer the contacts from Outlook to your iPhone.

Make sure that both the Blackberry Desktop Manager and iTunes are installed on your system, and that your Blackberry is connected to your computer with a usb data cable.

Transfer contacts from a Blackberry to Outlook

Run the Blackberry Desktop Manager program and click "Synchronize" from the main menu screen. Select "Synchronization" below the Configuration menu option to get to the Synchronization Configuration screen.

There you'll click the "Synchronization" button to configure the synchronization settings.

(that was a mouthfull of synch-related words wasn't it? Hang in there)

You'll be asked to choose the device applications to synchronize. Choose "Address Book", and then choose "Outlook".

If you don't have Outlook on your system, then you can choose "Windows Mail" instead.

Next you'll configure how you want to sync your contacts, either bi-directionally or just from your blackberry to Outlook (which is the option I chose):

Click "Next" and then "Finish" to complete the synchronization settings. This will take you back to the synchronization screen.

Question: I have an idea for a new website, but how do I get the web site name, and how much will it cost?

Answer: The website name is called a domain name and it can end with .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, .tv and a few others.

You'll first need to check with a web hosting provider to see if the domain name is available. Once you find one that's available, then you'll need to reserve it.

Reserving a domain name gives you the rights to create web pages that people can view on the internet when they enter your domain name, but you'll also need to purchase web hosting service to actually make those pages visible on the internet.

Checking if your domain name is available is completely free, and doesn't obligate you to actually buy it.

I use HostMonster for this site, and you can check if your domain name is available by visiting their site and clicking "Domain Check":

You can enter any domain name and it will check if it's not already being used by someone else.

If your domain name is available, then you can purchase it from HostMonster, which reserves it for a year or however long you choose.

HostMonster also gives you the domain name for free when you sign up for a year of web hosting, which you'll want to do anyway because you'll get the lowest monthly rates that way.

Web hosting is very affordable, and you shouldn't have to pay more than $6 or $7 a month. This will give you plenty of data storage, bandwidth, email addresses, and even databases for installing things like Wordpress for your own blog.

I love all the free applications that you can download for the iPhone through the App Store, and was looking for something to let me use the iPhone as a storage drive - like what I can do with my iPod. In particular, I wanted to be able to copy pdf files from my PC to my iPhone, to read them later on the bus ride home from work.

After looking at a few different file browser applications (all of which actually used an online service to store and retrieve files from an iPhone) I discovered a free service called Box.net. It gives you a free 1 GB online file repository that you can upload files to from your PC or Mac.

With the Box.net service, you can store and access your files through your iphone and through any web browser, and without taking up any additional space on your iphone.

It's basically a secure online hard-drive. No need to carry a flash drive around any longer, and no need to sync your iPhone with your computer to view these files.

Do a search in the App Store for "box.net" and you can download the free iPhone application that let's you access your online files.

Once you download and install the box.net iPhone application, then you'll be able to log into your online Box account and view the files that are stored there:

I'm a big fan of free stuff, especially when it works as well as this service does! The 1 GB account is completely free, and you can upgrade to 5 gigs or more for a nominal monthly storage cost.

Question: I have a computer with a 20GB drive and would like to install a 80GB drive that I have, as the 20GB drive has under 1GB remaining. Can I use imagining software to copy all Programs, files, and folders (including system files) from the old drive to this bigger drive, and make it be the startup drive? What would be the best software for me to use?

Answer: Yes, you can copy the contents of one hard drive to another, as long as the drive you're copying to is as large or larger than the old drive, and as long as you have the right software. You can even copy installed programs and the operating system over to the new drive, so you don't need to spend money on another Windows license or worry about re-installing programs.

Both hard drives will need to be connected to your motherboard using a standard IDE cable. Two hard drives can be connected with the same IDE cable - just make sure that the old drive (master) is connected to the first available connector slot, and the new drive (slave) is connected to the middle slot on the cable.

You'll need a software program to copy over the old hard drive's contents to the new hard drive, also known as "ghosting" or "disk imaging".

I'll discuss 2 disk imaging programs in this article - one that's both a ghosting program and a backup program, and another lighter-weight solution that only handles disk copying (and is more affordable too).

Norton Ghost

Norton Ghost is a well known and trusted program that will duplicate your old drive directly to another drive.

Norton's step-by-step wizards make it easy to copy the contents of your old drive to your new hard drive, even if you're not super technical or very good with computers.

I recently went to Zurich for a week-long business trip (training developers on Jive Clearspace). I knew I'd need to use my iPhone for a variety of reasons, such as email, web access, chat, and google maps.

So like any responsible employee I went into the AT&T office and spoke directly with a rep about what international data plans I'd need to purchase, and how much it would cost me.

I bought a 100 MB data package for $129.99, and paid a $5 international plan that brought phone calls down to $.99 a minute (otherwise they'd cost me $1.29 a minute). I reset my iPhone usage before boarding the plane, and watched it like a hawk the whole time I was there.

Here's what it looked like as I stepped off the plane at the Chicago airport for my connecting flight, on October 25th:

Figured I couldn't have cut it any closer, but was only about 5 megs over the limit, give or take a few megs that might not have been reported by then (although it was a 10 hour flight, so it should have been pretty accurate by then).

That next day, AT&T calls me to let me know I had a bill of $2350 from my data usage! I calmly explained that I had purchased the data plan and after a little digging and keyboard clicking on their end they were able to find that I had indeed bought the plan and only owed for the 14 MB of overages and owed about $54 extra for those kilobytes.

I wasn't sure where they came up with 14 megs, but the $54 didn't sound to outrageous and so I let it go.

Fast forward a week to November 1st. I go online to check my bill and find that they've tacked on $460 of data roaming charges. They're calling them mobile-to-web "calls" and told me I must have been in an area where roaming charges applied.