In today’s episode, I answer a lot of AVG and Firefox questions. An Ubuntu question slipped in as did some AOL questions, HTML questions and others. Here you go…thanks for writing and keep those questions coming!
I’m almost caught up with the email in the Questions Inbox here at HelpMeRick.com. Keep them coming by clicking the link above that says “Email Us”.
In today’s episode, I answer questions from users about converting from Vista to XP, many Firefox questions, and some others I don’t remember, but you will find out shortly when you click the Play button on the video.
I’m in the middle of a pretty major house refurbishing right now and am making frequent trips to the hardware stores and elsewhere. Today, while asking a Lowes rep a question, I glanced at one of the computer screens and saw Firefox for Lowes on the title bar. I was blown away that a major corporation had the good sense to use Firefox, then as I scanned the monitor, there was no sign of a start button. Instead, I immediately recognized a Linux like Start button that looked similar to the Xfce desktop that Xubuntu uses.
Since I use Firefox exclusively for my browsing, I haven’t seen this problem yet, but today I ran into a computer that could print from anywhere but Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Turns out that, in her case, the upgrade to AVG 8.0 caused the problem. A standard installation of AVG 8 installs a security toolbar in Firefox, if you use it, or Internet Explorer 7. The toolbar is meant to help users from clicking on potentially harmful web links. However, the toolbar, like most toolbars, slows down browsing speeds and in the case of Internet Explorer 7 with Windows Vista, it also disables the ability to print!
Adobe released version 9 of their PDF (Portable Document Format) Reader program. Once the king and almost sole PDF reader on the market, it, like so many other mainstream programs, has become bloated beyond recognition. This software bloat slows down the performance of even the fastest computers, and for this reason, I firmly stand against software bloat.
Firefox 3.0 is now available for full download for the masses.
It is reported to be the fastest version of firefox yet, and possibly one of the fastest browsers period.
We have tested it for a while and it appears to be ready for use. Be careful if you run a lot of extensions, you will want to research and make sure that your extensions are compatible with 3.0.
There are several new features to Firefox 3.0 which we will write about later and talk about on the show.
This statement was uttered by an imbecile. A customer of mine told me last week that he heard this quote from a tech person from some company after a discussion of AVG Free.
The week before this customer’s computer was almost crippling slow primarily because it had one of the newer versions of Norton Internet Security installed. After taking Norton off the system (approximately 20-25 minutes to do so) and adding AVG, the system sped up by at least 50%.
You all know that story, however, I want to instead focus on the “free is inferior” statement. My first rebuttal is Google. Google is free and arguably one of the most useful offerings to mankind in the last 30 years. Is Google inferior?
Get used to me writing more articles about Web 2.0 applications…applications that run in your web browser. I’ve written many already, but today I’m writing about the CNET people’s choice awards for best Web 2.0 applications in ten categories ranging from productivity to entertainment. This is CNET’s second year compiling the awards. This year almost 2 million votes were cast for over 300 Web 2.0 applications.
Many of my own favorites won awards including Zoho, Netflix, LogMeIn, Wikipedia, Gmail, Woot, Firefox, and Pandora. Click over to the article and read about some of these amazing applications.
Computing power is truly leaving the desktop and moving to the Internet. I personally think web computing makes perfect sense for a majority of computer users. Let me know what you think of Web 2.0 or what online applications are your favorites by leaving a comment below!
Last week I wrote a tip called 7 Habits of highly inefficient Internet Users. The very first habit I wrote about was the use of old browsers. Literally, the next day PayPal (the leading online payment source for eBay and person-to-person payments) announced that it would stop supporting old browsers and users who did not upgrade to more modern and safer browsers would not be able to use the service. This will not be an isolated incident. Some banks also require the use of at least Internet Explorer 6 with all its updates or Firefox 2.0.
We love the Mozilla Firefox browser, but out-of-the-box it doesn’t show the print button. Also, some people like to have the Bookmark and History buttons available as well. This tip shows you how to add any or all of these buttons as well as others you might want.
To see this tip in action, watch the short demo below!