Skip to content

Riding Shotgun with Adam

When the problem isn’t your mouse

I got a call yesterday that I will call There’s Something Wrong with My Mouse.

As I have mentioned before in previous phone call transcripts. I do not write this to make fun of the caller or exaggerate the particular problem. Once in a while it is just fun to provide a view of what it’s like to be a roving computer guy,

I did not take notes of the actual quotes, but here is a paraphrased version:

Caller: “Hello, Adam, I need your help. There’s something wrong with my mouse.”

Me: “Ok, what are the symptoms?”

Caller: “Huh?”

Me: “What is your mouse doing or not doing?”

Caller: “Nothing”

Me: “You mean the arrow isn’t moving ….or the buttons aren’t clicking?”

Help! My laptop has been stolen – No they didn’t catch the bad guys

Before I get a bunch of comments about the news story on the bad guys who were caught, it doesn’t appear to be the same bad guys at the moment. My stuff was not in the initial find and the dates don’t match up.

Maybe the bad guys know each other, but until the police contact me with a find, I am assuming that my laptops are still out there.

Yes, both my laptops were stolen out of my car last night. One was an Averatec with tons of stickers plastered on the top cover, the other was my Asus Eee PC. There was a lot of other stuff in the bag, but nothing that I can’t replace.

I use a Mac, therefore I am

Ya, don’t ask me to elaborate too much on the title of this post, I didn’t mean anything too deep by it.

I picked up my new/old Mac that a reader gave me. It is an older system, but It does a great job. It’s a dual 867mhz G4 with a gig of RAM, 10GB hard drive and Leopard OS. While it may seem a little dated by Mac standards, it is every bit as fast as my dual core Pentium that I typically run XP on.

I haven’t used it for any digital photography stuff, but I didn’t want it for that. I wanted a mac so I could use it exclusively for a few weeks and learn how to help my Mac clients adapt to “the switch” from Windows.

Surge protectors provide false sense of security

The power went out in part of town last night. Before 10am this morning I had already received two calls from people who were having problems as a result.

This seems to happen every time we have a power outage or severe lightning storm. In most cases the computers were on a surge protector when the power went out. I have even seem a few on expensive battery backup systems.

The only way to protect your computer is to unplug it from the wall. No one can predict when the power will go out or spike but lightning is a different story.

A nice surge protector won’t hurt, but it only adds a little more protection.

I want your old OS X mac

Vista has been the best thing that ever happend to Macintosh. I have setup more Macs in the last six months than I have the entire seven years I am been a computer guy. I love them and they work great.

The downside is that I am beginning to get more Mac problems that I don’t know how to solve and I don’t like learning on my client’s dime. So, I need your help.

I need your previous Mac. I am not looking to buy a used Mac, I am begging. I will gladly pay shipping, but I am hoping that someone has a G4 or G5 (or Intel – sheeya right) mac mini, iMac or PowerPC that they are no longer using. Of course I would take ibooks, powerbooks or MacBooks too.

Here’s where I really get picky…

HelpMeRick.com endorses Blu-ray

As of today we are declaring the HD disk format war as over. Best Buy and Netflix are now backing Blu-ray. This brings the number of big companies that remain exclusive to HD DVD or remain uncommitted to a format down to a handful.

If you are debating over whether to go Blu-ray or HD DVD, there are two schools of thought. You can buy a Blu-ray and prepare for the future or you can buy an HD DVD and buy all of the cheap movies on clearance in a year or so when the format goes obsolete.

Microsoft and Toshiba were the biggest backers of HD DVD, but even Microsoft has said that they will follow the public demand.

What can we teach you today?

Castellini on Computers is so much more than just a website and show, we are men on a mission.

To some degree we even let our mission get in the way of our livelihood.

While Rick and I own and operate two separate businesses, we are united in the common goal of helping the digitally challenged survive in the digital world. Much of what we have done together in the past has been done for free as a public service.

We produce show and newsletter along with an ongoing website. The purpose of these projects is to share what we know so that others may use us as a resource for day-to-day computer solutions.