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Where to buy a book manual for your computer

“Why didn’t my computer come with a manual?”

One of the most common complaints we hear is about how new computers don’t come with manuals. I am here to explain why this is the case.

The sad answer is that if the computer company came with a manual, it would weigh more than the computer.

“But my old computers used to come with manuals…,” Is the next comment.

Back in the old days of computers there weren’t many uses. You would use computers for word processing, finances, Internet and email. In each case there were only a handful of options.

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.

Stop the Photoshop Elements Browser Popup – VIDEO TIP

Adobe Photoshop Elements has a built-in program that searches for all of the photos on your computer and catalogs them. It then displays thumbnails of all of the photos it finds so that you can get to photos faster.

This seems great, but Adobe did a pretty terrible job with the program. It is slow and way to difficult to use for a basic program. Picasa is free and it works much better.

The worst part of the Photoshop Elements browser program is that it takes over. After installing Photoshop Elements version 3 on up to the current version 5, the browser program pops up whenever you plug in a digital camera or memory card. This is very annoying since the program is slow to load and difficult to understand, especially when you aren't expecting it.

Here is a quick video tip. That demonstrates how to turn off the browser popup feature.

Photoshop Elements 6 is out – Yawn.

Adobe released a new version of Photoshop Elements this week. I haven’t read everything about it, but looking over the "What’s New" section on the website it appears that there is little to get excited about.

The new features and upgrades fall in four main catagories, organize, edit, create and share. These four catagories can be narrowed to two, useful and arts-and-craftsy.

Updated gimmick feature list 2007

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.

All Q&A Session – July 2007

I don’t do it too often, but this month I decided to hold an all Q&A (2 hours) user group meeting. It truly is amazing how many questions 30 or 40 ravenous computer users can generate. Sometimes one question leads to another, and an entire “topic” can take up a half hour. You have to be at one of the meetings to truly experience the type of knowledge and information that gets shared and explored. Some of today’s topics included:

Ubuntu on the road

I continue to experiment with the Ubuntu operating system. This past weekend, my family and I made a quick trip to the South Dakota Black Hills and I took my Ubuntu laptop along for the ride. My Ubuntu laptop is an older Compaq (almost six years old) that was destined for the trash heap by its previous owner. It no longer performed well for them and required reformatting and upgrading to run Windows XP and other software at any appreciable speed. I rescued it, installed Ubuntu Linux on it, bought the cheapest wireless card I could find, and now I have a completely functional and quick second laptop.

Is this a test?

Today I had an appointment that spanned almost every area of what I do on a daily basis. The appointment lasted roughly three hours.

In that time I…

Helped setup a new iMac. She is making the switch from Windows and wanted some of the features that she was used to in her PC. I set her computer to ask for her password whenever it was turned on or came out of sleep mode so her kids couldn't get online without her permission. I also setup a gmail account and a POP3 email program that worked like Outlook Express.

  • Consulted her on ways of getting better range from her wireless network.
  • Tuned up her kids' computer and removed lots of

Photoshop Elements 5

Adobe Photoshop Elements is the standard photo editing software for consumers and many professionals. The latest edition offers many new features, but are those features worth upgrading from previous versions of the program?

First, there is no upgrade version but since the program can easily be found online for under $70, it won't hurt too bad if you do want to upgrade.

Photoshop Elements has been a solid program since its introduction. Previous consumer photo editing programs only allowed you to make alterations in steps, any fine tuning was out of the question. Elements changed all of that by offering so many professional level tools that many professionals made the switch.