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.
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.
No, I’m not giving on Ubuntu…I still think it is the best operating system to hit the computer world since Windows 95.
My client that I installed Ubuntu for last weekend, decided that doing her AOL email in a Firefox windows was too slow (she has 256K DSL). Unfortunately, that was her only complaint and she wants to return to AOL’s proprietary browser/email with Windows XP. Curse AOL, they thwarted a potential success story with my first Ubuntu customer!
Adam and I first mentioned this nasty little virus earlier this spring on our radio show. The email that spreads it poses as an electronic greeting card from your friend or relative. Because the email is so poorly constructed, is never from a known address, and the link it displays in the body of the message is a number (NEVER, EVER Click a link that is constructed of a number, ex: http://91.188.176.15/) we didn’t put much credence in how much damage it could do.
Astute listener/visitor, John, uncovered this well written and researched article, The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen, describing why the U.S. ranks only #17 in broadband Internet penetration world wide. You have heard me bemoan this fact many times over the past few years, and the author of this article, Robert X. Cringley, nails the what, why, and how of why we lag so far behind in Internet access.
The article is a worthy read…especially with elections coming up next year.
One huge misconception in the computer community is that computers are obsolete as soon as you buy them…or computers need to be replaced every 3-5 years.
Both of these statements are patently false. I stand by my claim and philosophy that a computer is only outdated when it can no longer perform the functions you need it to OR it mechanically fails. Today I saw a customer that demonstrated this theory well. He had two old computers (486 25mhz) computers with 2 GB Hard drives (they were upgraded in 1997). The original machine is circa about 1991 or 1992. The computers still server their purpose for him, but he needed a new application that won’t run on those machines. And this gentleman runs a multi-million dollar business with these 15 year old computers!
A major fiber optic line was cut in Colorado today knocking out Internet to a vast number of customers all around Colorado. I swear that people get more riled by an Internet outage than a TV or water outage (me included).
Please remember my number one rule when troubleshooting an Internet problem: If you haven’t changed anything on your system and the Internet was working fine a few hours ago or yesterday, assume that the problem is on the providers end of things and DO NOT messs with any settings on your computer. Simply wait it out for a few hours or a day.
As I wrote about on Friday, this was a busy work weekend for me. I think three of the computers I worked on offer an interesting comparison in operating systems.
One laptop was a brand new HP with 2 GB of RAM and Windows Vista, but the owner wanted me to install Windows XP and take off Windows Vista. He uses it primarily for traveling and downloading his digital photos while traveling and just didn’t like the lack of speed with Vista. The install of Windows XP went smoothly, but finding some of the XP drivers for it took quite a bit of looking around. All is running well now, and the with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, the little laptop is very fast. Bootup time is under 70 seconds.
The next laptop was another Vista machine with 1 GB of RAM that a client bought for her mom who is a first time computer user and is 83 years old I believe. She will take the laptop with her to Connecticut next week. I took off all the pre-installed junk and installed AVG anti-virus and configured a Gmail account to work with Windows Mail (Vista’s version of Outlook Express). Because her mom has some sight problems, I bumped up the text size and DPI setting to make it easier to work with for her. Also, I disabled all of Vista’s fancy eye candy and effects. Despite all these tweaks, the computer still