PC Doc’s Blog

Google has done it again, coming up with something completely different. Google Mail is a completely different way of processing e-mail, and the new Google Chrome is a new way to do web browsing. This morning I downloaded the Beta (still in test) version and installed it. This was a snap and really required little decision-making on my part, and typical of Google, the process was very fast. Chrome has a completely new look and feel, and I am far from figuring it all out, but it’s going to be fun doing just that. I have to say that I like what I have seen so far. If you’d like to install it yourself, you can download it here:

http://www.google.com/chrome 

 Since it is still in Beta testing, the more cautious of you may want to wait until it is available as a production program. I’ll keep you posted on when that is and I will also report back on my experience using it.

Chrome will surely be making a dent in the number of users of Firefox and Internet Explorer, and most likely a rather large dent! 

This is an interesting Computerworld article on telecommuting.

Telecommuting: 6 questions to ask before you say yes

I guess I can’t say enough about this, but be very wary of XP SP3. A friend of mine, when coming out of Church on Sunday, asked me if I had heard anything about problems with XP SP3. He said that he installed it and has not been able to reboot his machine since. His plans were to reinstall the operating system from scratch. If only he’d been watching this blog!

His machine was a HP with an AMD microprocessor.

While I do not believe the problem is limited to HP machines, I do believe it is limited to AMD processors. I believe Intel microprocessors are not affected by the problem.

My position, and my advice to you all, is to simply avoid SP3, and instructions on how to do this are included in an earlier post, for a few more months. There are no good reasons to install it now.

In the late Fall I will do complete research on the issue and then install SP3 on my machines. After that I will post here how that all went. Questions about your situation? Please write.

This article appears on the ComputerWorld web site today.

I have both Vista and XP machines and am holding off on both until later in this year.

Vista users rush for SP1, XP owners dawdle on SP3

For those of you who have played around with wi-fi for some time now, you may find something useful in this Computerworld article.

Here’s a pdf for you: Wi-Fi Tweaks for Speed Freaks

or for ease of following links within the article, go straight to the Computerworld Article by clicking here.

A customer asked me the other day about SP3. I think it was in my May 29 blog post that I recommenced against installing it and showed you how to block it from being downloaded.

My position on this has not changed. I have not installed it on any of my machines, and have only installed it on one customer’s machine. I am giving it a little more time, and will probably install it on my machines before the end of the year.

There are no new bells and whistles that come with it, and it supposedly contains little more than all of the individual updates you and I have been installing along the way. Given that, and knowing that there were several problems caused by installing it, I will give it some more time.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve been lazy about trying to do a new post each day. It is SUMMER, after all!

I never recommend anything I haven’t at least tried once, so I am not recommending any of the items in this Computerworld article. I just thought that those of you with college-aged kids might be hearing about some of these, so forewarned is forearmed.

15 great gadgets for the back-to-school crowd

I continue to be amazed at how many customers I help out who complain about a sluggish PC and who have 256MB of memory or RAM (Random Access memory) on their machines. 256MB worked for the early versions of Windows XP, but we have come a long way since then. We have had SP1, SP2, and many other security and other improvements since then, and 256MB just does NOT cut it any more.

Some also think that when I bring this up I am talking about the size of the hard drive. I am not. Hard (or disk) drive space is not usually a problem as long as one is careful and runs defragment (for space) and check disk (for health) once in a while.

Nowadays you should be thiking about having 1GB of RAM to run Windows XP and the other programs you run on it. Anti-virus and spyware programs, while free in the sense that there is no charge for them, also take up some valuable RAM.

Memory (RAM) has never been less expensive than it is today. Please revisit my post of April 2, “Thanks for the Memory” to see how you can find out if your machine can support a memory upgrade. Most can.

How much memory or RAM do you have on your machine now? Check my post of March 2 to see how you can find out.

Questions? Write or call me.

In case you missed it, in my blog post of July 12 I recommended migrating to AVG Free Version 8. If you have not yet made the conversion, you have until August 31 when updates to Version 7.5 will cease.

I have found that Version 8 is a fine product. I have it on all of my machines, and I have been installing it on all of my summer customers’ machines.

I was in Costco last week and saw my same Cruzer Micro 8GB thumb drive now sports a price of $37! This is down from the $48 I paid just a short time ago. If you don’t have a thumb drive and have a Costco membership (or know someone who does), this is a terrific buy.

Okay, sometimes I get a little grumpy about some products, like Vista and any fee-based security product (like Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, etc.).

Now I have to admit that I have just about had it with AOL. I do not understand why anyone would still be using it. I’m not just talking about the AOL 9.1 client, but even AOL Webmail.

I recommend giving it up. Get yourself a Google e-mail account and put all the fuss and muss about AOL behind you. Go ahead and write that note you have been putting off writing informing your friends and family that you have a new e-mail address, wait a month or two, and never use AOL again.

In the past week I have had to reinstall AOL 9.1 on a customer’s machine because the current copy had somehow gotten corrupted. The reinstall eliminated the problem.

I have had a customer on satellite who was unable to access her AOL e-mail in any way, could not even access a plain aol.com home page, whether AOL Desktop or webmail. Checking online blogs we found several other AOL users, also on satellite, who had the same problem. This had been going on for about 3 days starting around July 20. I don’t know if the problem is fixed yet, but come on, why satellite users only AOL? She could access her e-mail on another computer not satellite-linked. Weird!

A customer who switched from using the desktop client AOL 9.1 to AOL Webmail discovered that on Webmail she could not (and AOL confirmed this on the phone) access her saved e-mail that was saved on her own PC! Yes, any e-mail saved on AOL could be accessed on webmail. Go figure!

And, hard to believe, but some people are still paying for the privilege of using this bloated, problem-prone, program. It turns out that unless you are a paying customer, you can’t call for help!

So who needs it? Bite the bullet! Cut the cord and experience freedom from AOL!

There is a new version of Spybot, Version 1.6, available now, and compared to V1.5 it is as fast as lightning! They have somehow drastically improved its runtime speed.You can get it (free as always, but they do welcome donations) at download.com.

In a couple of days I will detail here how to set this up to run automatically, including getting updates, immunization, and a check for problems, automatically deleting all of the items it finds.

Okay, some of you (those with Vista) may be a little tired of me bad-mouthing Vista, so I apologize to those who may feel that way. The plain truth is that I do not like Vista. I invested some $800 in a Vista laptop a year and a half ago. I needed it for teaching and for supporting my customers who had Vista, but I never said I liked it!

Years ago I heard of a company investing millions in a system with a name like Corporate Manufacturing Information System, or as it was called, CMIS. Users soon came to call it Corporate Mistake on an Incredible Scale. To me that is what Vista is, and Microsoft has only itself to blame.

So today I see this article on pcworld.com, and I had to smile. I have already made some but not all of the suggested changes. I think they are all fine but you may want to be sure you can return to the original before making any of them if, like me, you yearn for the good old days of XP!

Skin Vista to Look Like Windows XP

I assisted a customer of mine 2 days ago with the online purchase of a new Dell PC that comes with Windows XP loaded and ready to go. We simply went to the Dell web site, clicked on Office (not Home), and then selected Small and Medium Business. We selected the machine we wanted and then customized the configuration. On the Ship To screen, we simply put the person’s name, and when asked for the Company Name, repeated the customer’s name. That’s all there was to it. The new machine will be delivered within 3-5 business days. Oh, forgot to mention that it comes with a Vista installation disk so that should the customer ever want to migrate to Vista that can be done at no additional cost.

Are you in the market for a new PC but concerned about Windows Vista (which you should be!)?

Online today at PCWorld is this article that explains how to get a new PC with Windows XP from any of the major vendors. Those of you in the market for a new PC may try one of the tactics featured in this article. I, for example, should be able to buy one for my business, the PC Doctor. I am sure most people have some sort of in-home business and could probably do the same.

PC World - What Does It Take to get a PC with XP

I migrated from AVG Free V7.5 to V8 yesterday on my desktop. I have done this several times (back and forth) to make sure I got it all right. I have documented this in detail if you want some help, but it really is fairly straightforward. I have also done this on several laptops, both my own and my customers. If you have been a customer of mine this summer, chances are you already have V8. Here’s how to tell. First of all. the icon in your system tray for V8 looks like a patchwork quilt, with the 4 colored pieces forming the quilt. V7 and earlier icons are simple squares containing the 4 colors. Second, if you open up AVG to its Control Panel or User Interface as it’s now called, click on Help up on top, and then About AVG, it will tell you the version. If it says V8, you are all set.

The detailed installation is captured in the attached pdf file. It’s about a 2.7MB file, so give it a few seconds to download (on a high-speed internet connection).

The installation of V8 will also uninstall V7.5, so you do not have to go through that extra uninstall step. Note that the scene in the attached begins with a double click on the install file you downloaded to your desktop per the previous post.

Also, although you can delete the downloaded install file on your desktop, I’d recommend keeping it. Move it to a folder where you can find it if/when needed.

 Time to migrate to AVG V8. Click Here to See How!

Okay, it’s time to move forward. In the past few days I have tried Avast, another free anti-virus program, but have to say that I like AVG much more.

This is meant primarily for those students and customers of mine who may already have AVG Free Anti-virus Version 7.5 installed. However it may work for others who want to stop paying for their anti-virus program, those who may have Norton or McAfee or Trend Micro or other anti-virus programs installed.

The first step you should take is to download AVG Free V8 ( Version 8 ) to your desktop. It’s a good idea to do this again now even if you have done it before, because AVG V8 had its share of early install problems and is already on about its 4th version, so it pays to download the latest.

You can download the program, and remember it’s FREE, from this web site:

Download AVG Free Version 8 here

When you go to the link above, click on Download Now and note that the file is about 46MB in size, so this is really an exercise for high-speed internet users and not dial-up users. (If you are a dial-up user at home, you might consider going to a place that has high-speed internet, like your local library, downloading the file to the desktop there, and then copying it to your own thumb drive so you can take it home with you.)

What you are downloading is AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0.138. If you do this sometime in the future, the version number may well have changed by that time, and that’s okay, just go ahead and download.

When you are finished, you will have the AVG Free V8 install file on your desktop.  Stay tuned for more.

From the AVG Free Forum July 9, 2008:

“AVG 7.5 Free - Support ends 31/08/2008

Posted by: michaelhd - AVG Team (IP Logged)

Date: July 9, 2008 04:07PM

Support for AVG 7.5 Free Edition is planned to end on 31st August 2008.

AVG 7.5 Paid version will be supported until 31/12/08.”

It looks like it is time for us to move on now to AVG FREE Version 8. Over the next few days I will post steps you can follow to install Version 8.

If this article is correct, you have until 1 PM Eastern time TOMORROW to take the action I prescribed in this blog on May 7. That action will let you avoid the download of XP SP3. I still believe XP SP3 needs another few months before I will download it willingly.

Microsoft sets XP SP3 automatic download for Thursday