Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I am aware that emailing and posting while angry is most likely not a good idea. However I am afraid that means I will never be able to post on this since I have exceeded ballistic and volcanic and am well on my way to super nova disgust. It is astounding to me how a “simple” Microsoft upgrade can cause me so many hours of labor. BTW might I suggest that you don’t walk, run to your computer and change your browser to FireFox before MS bites you in the butt. After reading an article about the latest vulnerability of ie7 I decided to finally upgrade my spouse’s computer to ie8. I’ve been using it for awhile and it finally seemed a little less buggy. It hadn’t occurred to me that I don’t use ie8 on my XP machines, I use FireFox. The only machine I use ie8 on is a Vista laptop. I blithely downloaded ie8 and when it rebooted my XP was corrupted. I had no explorer that worked, no screen icons, even task manager locked up when I tried to access programs through it. I tried mu...

I recently had a Microsoft inspired computer debacle. There will be a detailed post regarding those zany pranksters at Microsoft and how they sucked 7 hours out of my life, never to be regained when there innocuous ie8 upgrade blew up my, up until then, stable XP. As usual I digress, this post is about the computers I looked at when I decided I was going to buy a new computer due to my frustration with the ones I have. If you are new to my world, I had a computer business for 25 years. When I sold the business 4 years ago I had several computers I was using there were not part of the sale. I have since used those computers with reasonable satisfaction. When the ie debacle occurred, I realized that I was fighting with a computer and OS that was well over four years old. None of my desktops were new when I sold the business so they are at best 4-5 years old. Now being an economical soul (cheap) I have a whole bunch of used parts that I have been cobbling together for repa...

Once again I create a new use making a noun a verb. I have gone over to FireFox. I felt like a rebel until I read an article that said FireFox just pulled ahead of IE in number of users. So goes my sense of rebellion. I have found that some main stream commercial sites don’t like FireFox. You discover this when you try and fill out a form and it won’t let you do that. So I open IE and the form works fine. One wonders what ostrich has it’s head buried in the sand in these supposed main stream sites that they haven’t noticed that folks are disgruntled with IE. I am not a mindless MS Basher. I just get frustrated when I was automatically updated to IE8 and some of my stuff stopped working. Plus IE8 was slowwww! So even though the linked article above suggests that IE will pull back ahead of FoxFire, I have come to the realization I’m not a rebel, using FireFox just makes sense.

Not long ago Microsoft introduced a plugin to FireFox without asking permission thusly most users of FireFox have this plugin without their knowledge or consent. As the ZDNet article said, ” Well, the code in that add-on has a serious code execution vulnerability that exposes Firefox users to the “browse and you’re owned” attacks that are typically used in drive-by malware downloads.” Due to the normal vulnerability lapses that Microsoft builds into their software I have accepted the need to do automatic updates when they send out the patches for the problem they created in the first place. I admit to a burning rage whenever they do an automatic update that isolates each computer on my network and I have to reconnect everything. I admit to the same rage when one of their updates negatively impacts another vendors software that I use regularly. I found ie8 so astoundingly slow that I finally moved to FireFox just to be able to surf the net without ie8’s plodding behavior. I...