If I was independently wealthy, I would give discounts to customers with Windows Vista. Alas, I am not independently wealthy and my business supports my family, so I charge for time I spend in a client’s office or home. One customer , today, could have saved 30-40% off their bill had they bought one of the few remaining laptops with Windows XP.
I ran across this site today while searching for alternative screen magnification programs. Whether you use Mac, Linux or Windows, this site lists screen magnifiers for every platform. While you are here, click on the HOME link. This site is full of great information and product reviews for all computer users with impaired vision.
Strange as it may sound, one of the most common complaints we hear comes from solitaire users. “The cards are too small!” Well, if this is your biggest complaint about your computer, moving to Vista may be the right move. Of course everything else on your computer will be crippled, but Solitaire and the other games on Vista are wonderful for those with poorer eye sight.
Here is a screenshot of Windows solitaire on a 22″ wide screen!!
Amazing isn’t it. These cards are over three inches tall.
I setup my third iPhone today. I like them (especially now that they are $200 cheaper), but I still prefer the Treo. The web experience on an iPhone is superior to any phone I’ve used to date and some useful and fun web based applications are starting to develop specifically for iPhone users. This site links up their Top 25 iPhone Web Applications.
Create a custom home page that updates with the latest bargains on your favorite shopping sites like Woot!, eBay, and Craigslist.
I worked with three customers today who all used floppy disks as their main backup. All three users had Windows XP machines, but felt that floppy disks fit their needs the best. The picture I took here was from a consultant’s desk…there must be 20 floppies in that box. I explained to all these folks how simple, efficient and spacious a USB Flash drive could be for them. Whether they ‘bite’ or not only time will tell.
In my humble opinion, there is no good use for floppy disk any longer unless you happen to be using a DOS or Windows 95 machine. Flash drives are too inexpensive, reliable and easy to use not be using them. This weekend, I saw 2 GB (that’s nearly 2000 floppy disks worth of space) USB Flash Drives on sale for less than $20!
USB Flash Drives work best for backing up data that changes often. Data like Quicken, Quickbooks, email files, address books, bookmarks/favorites, word processing or spreadsheet documents all are perfect candidates. I don’t recommend using them to backup static data like pictuers and music. As cheap as USB Flash Drives are getting, they still aren’t anywhere near as cheap as DVD and CD media.
Looking for a car? A dog? A house? A treadmill? Looking for anything someone else is selling? Check out Oodle.com The site says that it searches more than 75,000 online classified ad databases covering more than 20 million items. Check it out. It’s fun, fast and yet another V8 moment on the Internet.
Thank goodness that high speed connections are reaching more and more areas of the country. And I am thrilled to see that more and more people are taking advantage of the faster connections. Two customers I visited today brought to light for me two important tips to keep in mind if you use DSL (Digital Subscriber Line … layman’s terms: fast Internet over a phone line) or plan to sign up for DSL service.
1. You MUST install a DSL filter on all phone lines in your house EXCEPT the one you use to hook the DSL modem too.
For every Apple device that becomes a standard there is a Sony technology that becomes obsolete. Apple and Sony both got off to a great start in the early 80s. Apple introduced the Mac and Sony gave us the Walkman.
From that point on, Apple has had only a handful of market failures and Sony has had nothing but. Sony announced their latest casualty this week by discontinuing their proprietary ATRAC audio compression file format.
While the rest of the world committed to MP3 and WMA or Apple’s music format for iTunes, Sony made up their own format only supported by their devices. Sony saw Apple succeeding with their own format and device and figured they could do the same.
Today I ran into a problem that I hadn’t seen before. A customer’s MSN and Internet Explorer browser (including MSN email and web mail) would only print the HTML coding of a web page or email.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the programming that is used to present web pages to us and the coding behind text color, bold, etc. in email. We had cleaned some spyware from this users computer earlier in the day, and even printed out some pictures, but a few hours later I received a call about this strange symptom. At first, I thought it was just a forwarded email gone awry, but after arriving on the scene and seeing that word processing documents, test pages, pictures, and spreadsheets all printed fine, the culprit was definitely in Internet Explorer 7.