Q: My daughter-in-law and a lot of her friends really love Pinterest. I don't really understand the allure. Can you explain it?

A: The allure of Pinterest.com could be its attractive visual style and the ability to share and see pins that friends have posted on their boards. Pinterest is a relatively new social networking site that saves and organizes information you find while surfing the web.

A helpful metaphor to understand Pinterest is that of a physical corkboard next to your desk. Let's say you find an article in a magazine you want to keep for future reference. You might tear out the article and use a tack to pin it to your corkboard.

Pinterest allows users to do the same thing virtually, via the web. If you create a Pinterest account, you will choose themes that you are interested in and will also connect to friends, mostly through Facebook.

Users add to their boards in two different ways. The first way is to re-pin items from your friends' boards while browsing on Pinterest. The second way is to install Pinterest's "Pin It" button to your web browser, enabling you to save a picture and web link from almost any website.

Q: I want to hook up a new computer to my current printer, but I can't find my printer installation disk anywhere. Do I have to contact the manufacturer to mail me a new disk?

A: Downloading your printer driver from the Internet is a much quicker alternative than waiting for the manufacturer to send you a new copy of the disk.


There is nothing inherently magical about having the physical printer driver disk in hand. The printer driver software, downloaded and installed from the Internet, does the same job as the physical disk that came in the box with your printer. Print drivers allow the applications on your computer to communicate with your printer, and thus print your work.

To get started, you will need to gather a few bits of information to have on hand, like the make and model of your printer and the current operating system your computer is running.

Go to the website of the company that made your printer and look for a link that says "downloads" or "print drivers." Search and find your exact printer and download the appropriate software, following the prompts that your computer displays.
