By now many of you have figured out that computers are unruly beasts. They seem to be fine one day and schizophrenic the next. As a person who troubleshoots computers for a living, I’m going to let you in on a little trade secret.
When something on your computer seems to be a little left of center, stop and ask yourself three questions:
Learning to make Windows work for you instead of you working for it can yield many more happy and productive hours using your computer. One highly under utilized feature of Windows is the shortcut icon. Learning to use and manage shortcuts will give you a huge advantage with your computer.
I think that electronics aren’t as well made as they used to be. Correction: I know that electronics aren’t as well made as they used to be.
Not only are products more fragile and flimsy but repair costs are rising. Both of these facts have caused me to reconsider my opinion of extended warranties.
Not all extended warranties are a good deal, but I used to feel that they were almost always a waste of money. Lately though I have had to help people with products that were just barely out of their one year warranty.
Adding an additional year onto most products costs less than $100. A dead hard drive, motherboard, processor or video card in a computer’s second year of life can easily cost more than $100.
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.
I have made no secret of the fact that when it comes to digital SLRs I prefer Canon over all other brands. I have also backed up my argument with a long list of reasons.
Everytime any other company gets close to Canon, Canon announces a new camera that out paces the competition both in features and price.
Canon did it again this week. They have announced two new digital SLRs, both will make any serious photographer drool unless they are blinded by their loyalty to another brand of camera.
Two of the past four weekends I have left every piece of technology behind (except for my camera) and taken my family into the mountains. My cell phone, my laptop, my XBox, my projector, and even the portable DVD players stayed behind.
The drive to where we were camping was less than three hours and we kept the kids busy the old fashioned way. We stopped at overlooks, rest stops, gas stations and told stories. The kids got car sick between yelling “_________’s touching me!”
Once we were at camping the kids kept busy fishing, swimming, playing games, chasing miniature wild life, and eating junk.
My work week isn’t over. I have five computers/hard drives that I’m working on this weekend. My most exciting task is to setup an older XP HP machine with Ubuntu Linux. My customer had a huge XP problem and couldn’t use her restore CD’s to get it going. After some discussion of her options, costs, and time involved, she decided to give Ubuntu a try. This customer is retired, but is writing a book, uses a digital camera, is an AOL user, and emails a bunch. However, she loves here computer and has been using one for many years and has no qualms about trying something new.
When it comes to installing new software programs I have two rules that should get you through the process and keep you out of trouble.
1. When in doubt, click on the affirmative (Next, OK, Finish, I Agree, etc).
2. ALWAYS WATCH FOR CHECK BOXES!
The second rule is becoming more important as search engines and other sites that provide ad-sponsored services promote themselves by partnering up with other software companies. While installing a program like JAVA or Adobe Reader, you may be asked whether you want to install other programs such as Google Desktop or Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition. Simply unchecking these boxes will cut your install time significantly and save from other undesired hassles.
Here is an example:
My list of gimmick features continues to grow. Gimmick features are features that companies add to technology to sell a product but don’t do what they claim to do in the way you expect them to do it.
One of of the first gimmick features I began discussing years ago were gimmick buttons on a scanner. These are buttons that say “email” or “scan and save”, etc. All these buttons do is activate the software the same as if you clicked on the icon. It is usually more work to reach over and hit the buttons than it is to double-click on the appropriate scanner icon.
I can’t believe it has been two weeks already that I’ve used Ubuntu Linux exclusively. If I had to sum up the experience in one word, that word would be “satisfying.” And my regular readers/listeners know that I can’t sum anything up in one word, so I will use this format to provide a complete synopsis of my Ubuntu thoughts.