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7726. arkymalarky - 6/3/2009 10:14:45 PM Haha! Mose is about to buy a macbook. Her bf has one and loves it, but he takes better care of stuff than she does. I'm fine with my xp computers and I'll use them as long as I'm able. When xp's no longer viable I'll probably switch to mac or see if I can operate a pc with linux. But by then I'll be retired and doing independent work and/or fun stuff. 7727. wabbit - 6/4/2009 12:49:29 AM Linux has come a very long way in the last 5-10 years. I'm a fan of Ubuntu, myself. If you can use Open Office instead of MS Office, short of the Adobe programs there is no reason not to switch. The GUI isn't exactly the same, but it's close enough that you won't have any problem figuring out what's what.
If you want to stick with Microsoft, hold off until November at the earliest. Windows 7 should be available by then - of course, as always, it will still be buggy...
And if you don't need a computer for heavy lifting, there's Acer's upcoming Netbook release of Android. 7728. vonKreedon - 6/4/2009 3:12:15 PM Just to put in a contrarian experience, Vista has worked great for me, other than the "I need your approval to do the the thing you just told me to do" dialogues, on several machines for several years now. I understand from some colleagues running Win7 that it is really nice. 7729. alistairconnor - 6/4/2009 5:36:01 PM hmmm. Apparently the phone makers are going to be releasing netbook-like devices soon, with free OS... They will be plenty of computer for most needs, and will undercut Acer and Asus handsomely on price. 7730. arkymalarky - 6/4/2009 5:49:21 PM The ball and chain contract and the outrageous monthly fee are the kickers. You can get the small computers for under $400 as it is and by the time you pay $60 a month minimum for two years you really didn't end up with a bargain at all imo. It's less convenient to use hotspots, but I think the cell phone companies are charging far too much for portability through their cards. And if you have the $30 unlimited data package necessary for making an iphone or blackberry worth anything, you still have to pay the $60 a month to get unlimited access on your netbook, and $90 a month is a ridiculous price to pay for mobile internet access. 7731. arkymalarky - 6/4/2009 5:55:22 PM Things I hate about Vista:
1) What vk said
2) I've had blue screens a few times and it doesn't seem to run programs as smoothly as xp
3) Most annoying of all, it is difficult, at least for me, to use the search function. I don't want a system that looks pretty. I want it clean and clear and that's why I like xp and ms office 2003 over vista and mso 2007. I've heard people say they like office 2007 for all the neat stuff it does and it's more streamlined, and I haven't given it much effort, but like vista it seems to set up roadblocks rather than just letting me get straight to what I want to do. 7732. arkymalarky - 6/4/2009 6:00:44 PM Disclaimer on the above (aside from the fact that I really don't know jack about this sort of thing): I'm a creature of habit and tradition who likes cozy, simple and comfortable and I'm not patient about getting past changes of features I like in order to give the new ones a chance and see if I like them better. But after all, if it ain't broke.... 7733. wabbit - 6/4/2009 7:08:36 PM VK and arky, that's the UAC (User Account Control). Feel free to turn it off. In the system tray down by the clock, you should see a little shield shape. Mine is red with an X, because I have UAC turned off, so yours may be yellow or green. Double-click the shield to open the Windows Security Center. Expand "Other security settings" and turn that sucker off. No more annoying "do you want to do this?" and "are you really sure?" windows.
Mind you, MS put that stuff in because so many people griped about how easy it is to screw things up. But if you don't need handholding, shutting UAC off is not a problem. 7734. robertjayb - 6/10/2009 5:27:25 PM OhMiGod! We're running out of wind!
WASHINGTON (AP) - The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming the very problem wind power seeks to address.
The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.
Its a very large effect, said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.
7735. alistairconnor - 6/10/2009 5:40:06 PM Yeah that means the wind's shifting elsewhere. There is just as much, distributed differently. Hard to model. 7736. alistairconnor - 6/11/2009 7:42:01 PM My faithful old HP laptop (must be going on 7 years old) has been blue-screening a lot with disk errors... Tried to clean up the disk and now I get the dreaded "Non-system disk or disk error"...
I haven't actually got time to deal with it, because I've got three hours and twenty minutes left to file my income tax on line... under pain of a 10% penalty. 7737. iiibbb - 6/12/2009 2:33:24 PM Message # 7721
Wabbit, since you regularly back up, you might want to make it part of your routine to preemptively mirror your profile files in a secondary account you've already set up. I had a friend who used to have profile crashes on his machine all the time and always had a second profile he could log into to "fix" things.
If it doesn't stop the crashes, it might as least spare you the hassle of putting the brakes on something you're in the middle of.
7738. iiibbb - 6/12/2009 2:38:07 PM Yesterday MS Excel just quit working on me. No reason at all, but when I try to start it, the installer wants the original disks. I got office pre-installed on this machine, so all I ever had was a recovery disk, and with the past 2 moves I don't really know where it is at the moment. I'm certain that it wasn't acceptable as a installation disk a while ago. So I'm going to have to re-install a pirate copy.
This quashes any guilt I ever had about pirating MS software. I'm pretty sure I've paid for office 2 or 3 times in my life now. There is no reason for software to just conk out, and if they're not going to provide a means to help their users, then screw them. 7739. wabbit - 6/12/2009 10:47:19 PM iiibbb,
I've always got a backup profile, but it is never a dupe of another. If something in the profile is causing a problem, having a mirror with a different name won't necessarily be any help. Replacing things like the Dreamweaver configuration files, or fonts, email programs, address books, etc. are easy enough to do, you just have to remember to back them up.
I don't worry much about losing something I'm working on, I figure if I did it once, I can do it again. It's time lost, but not the end of the world. I once had a computer hard drive die on me just as I was finishing up the bibliography for a paper that was due the next morning. Fifteen pages or so, all gone. The prof found me in the library typing furiously shortly before class and came over to say hello, and I gave him the two sentence explanation without even looking at him. He headed off to the class and amazingly enough, I actually got that sucker done and printed in time. Thank god for memory and index cards. And did I learn not to leave writing to the last minute? Well, sort of...
I'm still having computer problems, though not as bad. Windows boots up and quits after a minute or so. I shut down, log into safe mode w/ networking, check my email, then restart and log into Windows in normal mode. For whatever reason, that is working so far.
Are the other MS Office programs working for you? I've heard of problems with SP2. 7740. iiibbb - 6/13/2009 5:40:21 AM Everything else was working. My laptop is 5 or 6 yrs old. It was Office'93.
P's work had a disk... I reinstalled it, and it's working now. Might've been a sector going bad on the hard drive... I don't know.
If there's anything in this world that could turn me into a Luddite it's Microsoft's products. 7741. wabbit - 6/13/2009 1:45:04 PM It never ceases to amaze me how often Microsoft screws up their own software. 7742. wabbit - 7/10/2009 3:46:44 PM In the fwiw ymmv category - if anyone is thinking about Windows 7, let me say I've been running the beta with 1.5gb RAM and it runs fine. Not nearly the resource hog that Vista is, cleaner interface, faster, not as annoying - and half price for another day or so. 7743. alistairConnor - 7/10/2009 11:12:20 PM well, every second OS from MS is good. Or something. I was worried about buying a new laptop because of Vista, I think I'll hold out for W7 (or go with a Google netbook!) I honestly have never used a Vista machine (though I do run some Windows 2008 servers, which is the same guts without the annoying extra features). 7744. iiibbb - 7/14/2009 4:05:49 PM 
7745. wabbit - 7/15/2009 3:55:40 PM Sad, but true.
It reminds me of the game we played as kids, was it called Telephone? One person whispered something to someone, who repeated it to the next person, and so on until it reached the last person who said out loud what they heard - and it was never what the original speaker had said.
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