2007 October

I have been using a Google Gmail for about 3 years, ever since it first was in beta form. My main purpose in using a Gmail account was to have a alternate address, in lieu of my two personal email accounts, which I could use to sign onto web sites that I did not trust. [...]

Microsoft has setup a website in which they have on display many of the counterfeit copies of their products for your review. Included in the counterfeits are copies of Vista [all flavors] along with Office 2007. Examples of recently seized counterfeit products are also on display for comparison purposes.
On their site Microsoft also has an [...]

I received a comment from one of readers concerning both Dell and Gateway introducing what can best be described as Mac look-a-likes which stated:
Is this an answer to the rise in iMac popularity? Do you think the price point is going to come out similar for most people choosing between a “One” model like you [...]

The FTC is warning that a fake email is being sent out which appears to be from their agency, but in fact is a virus. Contained in the fake email is an attachment, that if opened, can unleash the viral pest. In a statement released by the FTC it states:
A bogus email is circulating that [...]

Today’s Wall Street Journal is predicting a Google Phone [gPhone] in our future and they gave a potential target date of mid-2008. As previously reported, Google has in fact met with several manufacturers and is developing open software for the new phones. By using open software, developers will be able to easily develop software to [...]

I got a call yesterday from a friend of mine, who had just finished building a home brew system, and was experiencing a few issues with the system. First there was the issue of a boot menu. Seems that at each boot, you had to select which drive you wished to boot from. Than there [...]

I was reading one of those doom and gloom articles about AMD this morning and wondered to myself, wonder if there were no AMD? Give it some thought for a moment. What pricing would Intel be charging for their chips if they were the only player in town? Do you think we would be at [...]

I’ve been using WinPatrol for several years and have found it very effective in preventing unauthorized changes to my system. It is similar to what Windows Vista offers in UAC. WinPatrol will ask you, the user, if you wish to give permission to any changes that are being made to your system. A new feature [...]

Oh the shock of it all! How about the Mom who buys her daughter an iPod for her birthday from Target, only to find ‘rocks’ inside the box when the girl opens her present. Back to the store it goes, another iPod is exchanged but Mom is smarter this time. She opens this iPod box [...]

Disclaimer : XXXxx-XXX does not encourage piracy so please go and buy yourself a copy of Leopard legally rather than being a cheap dumbo.

These were the words on a Web sited I visited this morning in which they have posted two links to pirated versions of Apple’s newest operating system Leopard. There were also links [...]

First it was Comcast who was caught stopping some users from using P2P sites by what is alleged to either bethrottling back download speeds, or deliberately using false packets to thwart the download. Now it seems that Verizon and AT&T may be doing the same thing. The latest is that congress may be taking another [...]

After returning from vacation I participated in beta testing Windows Vista SP1 and also Windows XP SP3 which I have been running on my test system. On or about Wednesday of this week, I received a strange message from the beta team stating some thing to the affect that they didn’t want people downloading the [...]

This past week I must of received this same email at least a dozen times. Doesn’t anyone ever check out the facts before forwarding this junk and gunk? The latest is that the new US $1 coin doesn’t have the words ‘In God We Trust’ engraved on the coin. If one looks on the rim [...]

Make sure your system is up to date and that you have the latest protections in place.

AVG anti-virus: 10/27/07
Norton anti-virus: 10/24/07
McAfee anti-virus: 10/24/07
Lavasoft Ad-Aware: 10/25/07
Spybot Search and Destroy: 10/24/07
Microsoft Windows Defender: 10/24/07
Nod32: 10/25/07

Updates as of October 28, 2007 6:00am CDT.
Tags: avg, norton, mcafee, lavasoft, spybot, defender, nod32

My buddy Charlie in CA. is now having another problem with his Dell laptop which is now about 3 years old. He sent me an email concerning the price of a Dell replacement battery vs an over the counter generic replacement. I advised him to get a Dell replacement battery since his battery now fades [...]

With 88 million copies of Windows Vista being sold, one can only conclude that Vista must be the best Windows yet, or people wouldn’t be buying it. The 88 million figure is what Microsoft is reporting as the number of copies sold since Vista was released. Microsoft also reports an increase of revenues which [...]

It didn’t make any sense to me when I first read it, but one blogger has posted that Wal-Mart would be selling refurbished Dell units as new.  This was supposed to me some type of hot insider information the blogger received.  RichardatDell left a comment to the brief article which stated:
Mark
I read your post this [...]

Over at my day job, I write a series of articles for a local newspaper where I once lived, which basically caters to first time computer users  which we fondly  call ‘newbies’. We usually just take for granted sometimes that some of the terms that we use such as the term ‘router’ is basically understood [...]

If you are using any flavor of Vista, you may notice that the Read/Write may be slower than what you would normally expect from your system. In Microsoft’s knowledge base article # KB 942869 they describe the problem as:
Symptom
loadTOCNode (1, ’symptoms’); On a Windows Vista-based computer, you finish recording an optical disc, such as a [...]

Linux wants to know where are the American desktop users? On October 24th, 2007 I posted information on the Linux survey that was taking place here.But it appears that preliminary reports from  the Linux Foundation seem to indicate that American users are not reporting their Linux useage. According to the story over at DesktopLinux.com it states:
Linux [...]