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?

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...

First of all what were the wizards at MS thinking when they brought out ie8. Ok, I am not about to go into all of the issues that are making me wish I had never moved from IE7 to IE8, there are plenty of other blogs writing about that. I am just going to express surprise that once more Microsoft has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. MS has a captive market, a huge number of users and they continue to do their best to drive them away. One hand is bringing out new stuff like Bing while the other is driving away droves of existing clients by pushing out buggy revisions. I will hazard an unscientific guess that I have seen at least twice as many “not responding” messages with ie8 and I saw with ie7. The cute feature of “your session has expired unexpectedly would you like to reopen” will continue to reopen to whatever problem shut it down in the first place. Plus it is slow, very slow to use. Don’t get me started on the “this script yada yada” messages that pop up so frequently. Fi...

This is a task that many of you know how to do and some of you don’t have a clue as to what I am talking about. Temporary Internet Files in Microsoft Internet Explorer cache (or keep) pages you visit frequently. This enables those pages to load faster. Theoretically they enable you to browse faster. They also tend to accumulate if you do a lot of surfing. The negative aspect is that they also show everywhere you have been. If you are in a relationship that is shaky in the trust area and don’t want your significant other to see you have been visiting findahotdate.net, you may want to clear your Temporary Internet Files periodically. Nepotism being what it is, here is a link to a video that my brother has on his site with instructions on how to clean up those pesky Temporary files, Memory Helper . Brother John (fraternal as opposed to monkish) has been a dyed in the wool geek for well over 20 years. He has a consulting business that is noted on his site at http://www.bentrim.net/ . Qui...