Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I opted into ie9 the other day.  When, oh when will I learn?   I installed it.  It has a slightly different interface which I can live with but don’t much like.   What I can’t deal with it the fact that it periodically blanks the screen.   I don’t know why and frankly I don’t care why.   My screen wasn’t doing that in ie8 so why would it in ie9.   It doesn’t do it in any other program. I booted up FireFox and SURPRISE,  it runs smoothly and no screen blanking out.   Somehow I suspect that Microsoft’s pockets are a bit deeper than Mozillas.   Why, oh why can’t I ever upgrade a MS product without wondering why I ever used it in the first place?

I just finished reading an article about Office 2010. It has some new features and lots of polish. Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report is the article. I’ve read his stuff before and he does a nice job. He claims to be a Microsoft skeptic but feels Office 2010 is worth purchasing. This article is the first of a series in which he apparently will defend his feeling that “why wouldn’t you want to upgrade?”. My contention is that if what your using works for you, whether it is Office 2003, 2007, Works or Open Office, why change? Office is always expensive. Follow Bott’s blog and if he points out a feature that will make your life easier, better or just more fun, by all means run out and upgrade. However if this is just one more layer of sweet, sticky icing on an already enormous cake, who needs it? If there is no emotional satisfaction, increased productivity or cost justification, why would you want to upgrade? Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion. This is ...

After having ie8 upgrade trashing my wife’s XP, I decided to get two new computers. I got Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on mine. So far the only programs that have gone on seamlessly are my MS Office programs and not all of those went on well. My first issue that has not been resolved yet was that if I put my printer on the Win7 machine, my Vista machine could see it and print but none of my XP machines could access the printer. I moved the printer to one of my XP machines and my Vista machine and my XP machines can print but my Win 7 machine will not address the printer. It sees it, it just won’t use it. I thought I found a fix with Windows Virtual PC that will you allow you to run XP compatible programs on Windows 7.(supposedly) However Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit can not run Virtual PC. My assumption is that they could give a rat’s ass if it works for home computers but that their bread and butter corporate clients would go bananas if th...

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.