This is my first blog post on my new hardware, so it's a kind of test to see if everything is working, and so far it does.
My old computer had a 30 Gig and a 40 Gig hard drive, and about 6 months ago I upgraded the 40 Gig one to 500 Gig. It was quite difficult to find one, as most of the hard drives being sold now are SATA, and I wanted an EIDE disk to match the other one. Eventually I found one, backed up all the data on the old drive using Acronis disk imaging software, installed it on the new drive, and everything still worked.
This time, however, was more ambitious.
The old computer was getting rickety. I dared not switch it off, because it might not restart. If the power went off, I'd have to sit pushing the power button for half an hour before it would run.
The CPU fan was also getting noisy, and it sounded rather ominous.
So that meant replacing the motherboard, and both hard drives (both now 500 Gig SATA). I'll see if I can use the 500 Gig EIDE drive an an external housing as a backup USB drive - it's only about 6 months old.
It took me a day to get this far -- backing up the 30 Gigs of data on the G: drive took 9 hours, and nearly 2 hours to restore on the new drive. And the C: drive was the critical one, because that had the operating system (Windows XP) -- would it work on the new drive? It did. Everything seems to be working fine.
The only problem is, Windows thinks there have been too many hardware changes, and wants to be revalidated. If that goes as smoothly as the rest of it, all will be well.
Oh, and my printer has a parallel cable, and the new hardware has no parallel port. But perhaps a USB cable will work, or I can nick a parallel card from the old one, if it fits the new motherboard.
Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
28 October 2010
15 May 2010
Too many toolbars
I wish software marketers would learn that if there is one thing that most computer users don't need, it is yet another tool bar.
Yet today I got yet another semi-spam message advising me of a new "must have" toolbar. Do they really think I am desperate to look at a screen full of tool bars, most of them with links to the same search engines, and the same other useless stuff?
Worst of all are the ones that install their toolbars along with their programs, without asking if you want it. And then they don't go away. Firefox asks me if I want to uninstall add-ons that I want and use, but on the junk ones that I'd love to get rid of the "uninstall" option is usually greyed out, and one can just disable it or enable it. And I keep getting notes advising me of updates to the toolbars that I don't want and can't uninstall.
One of the problems with too many toolbars is that some web sites (often those of the people who automatically install unwanted tookbars) have pop-up windows that demand a response, but you can't see what response is needed because the buttons for responding are hidden below the bottom of the screen, and you can't scroll down the window to see them, and you can't move the window up above the numerous toolbars.
Some virus writer is going to make a killing one day by writing a program that claims to be able to remove unwanted toolbars, just like a lot of the anti-spam programs that actually transmit viruses.
That's my pet peeve of the day. I feel better now.
Yet today I got yet another semi-spam message advising me of a new "must have" toolbar. Do they really think I am desperate to look at a screen full of tool bars, most of them with links to the same search engines, and the same other useless stuff?
Worst of all are the ones that install their toolbars along with their programs, without asking if you want it. And then they don't go away. Firefox asks me if I want to uninstall add-ons that I want and use, but on the junk ones that I'd love to get rid of the "uninstall" option is usually greyed out, and one can just disable it or enable it. And I keep getting notes advising me of updates to the toolbars that I don't want and can't uninstall.
One of the problems with too many toolbars is that some web sites (often those of the people who automatically install unwanted tookbars) have pop-up windows that demand a response, but you can't see what response is needed because the buttons for responding are hidden below the bottom of the screen, and you can't scroll down the window to see them, and you can't move the window up above the numerous toolbars.
Some virus writer is going to make a killing one day by writing a program that claims to be able to remove unwanted toolbars, just like a lot of the anti-spam programs that actually transmit viruses.
That's my pet peeve of the day. I feel better now.
03 October 2008
MS Outlook and YahooGroups
Yesterday I got a message in a YahooGroups mailing list from a friend -- let's call him Pete.
Pete's message began
ON BEHALF OF DAVE
I immediately wondered why Pete was writing on behalf of Dave.
Had Dave's computer crashed?
Or, worse, had he been taken ill, had an accident, been kidnapped or arrested?
So I asked Pete why he was writing on Dave's behalf, and was Dave OK, and he said he wasn't writing on Dave's behalf at all -- the computer had put that phrase in automatically. He assumed that it was something done by YahooGroups.
I'm a member of several YahooGroups mailing lists, and I've belonged to some for years, and I've never seen it put in anything that before.
I asked Pete what mail reader he was using, and he said he was using MS Outlook.
I was aware that many Outlook users have problems in participating in mailing lists because of Outlooks deficient quoting system. I know that many of them have solved these problems by using Quotefix
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
and I recommended Quotefix to Pete.
But none of those who have had quoting problems with Outlook have mentioned this particular problem -- of some software, somewhere along the line, inserting text to the effect that the poster of a message was writing on behalf of someone else.
Perhaps some prankster has hacked the YahooGroups list server,
But whatever the cause may be, has anyone else had similar problems when using Outlook as a mailing list reader, whether with the YahooGroups or any other listserv?
Is it a problem with Outlook, or with the server, or with both?
And if you have found a solution, please let me know, so I can tell Pete.
Pete's message began
ON BEHALF OF DAVE
I immediately wondered why Pete was writing on behalf of Dave.
Had Dave's computer crashed?
Or, worse, had he been taken ill, had an accident, been kidnapped or arrested?
So I asked Pete why he was writing on Dave's behalf, and was Dave OK, and he said he wasn't writing on Dave's behalf at all -- the computer had put that phrase in automatically. He assumed that it was something done by YahooGroups.
I'm a member of several YahooGroups mailing lists, and I've belonged to some for years, and I've never seen it put in anything that before.
I asked Pete what mail reader he was using, and he said he was using MS Outlook.
I was aware that many Outlook users have problems in participating in mailing lists because of Outlooks deficient quoting system. I know that many of them have solved these problems by using Quotefix
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
and I recommended Quotefix to Pete.
But none of those who have had quoting problems with Outlook have mentioned this particular problem -- of some software, somewhere along the line, inserting text to the effect that the poster of a message was writing on behalf of someone else.
Perhaps some prankster has hacked the YahooGroups list server,
But whatever the cause may be, has anyone else had similar problems when using Outlook as a mailing list reader, whether with the YahooGroups or any other listserv?
Is it a problem with Outlook, or with the server, or with both?
And if you have found a solution, please let me know, so I can tell Pete.
28 December 2007
askSam 6.1
I've been using the askSam database software for 17 years, and this year my wife bought me an upgrade to the latest version for Christmas, and I've been playing with some of the new features.
If you are doing any kind of research, askSam is one of the best tools for keeping your notes and documents in order. It's a freeform text database that lets you find anything you put into it, and also allows you to have fixed fields for sorting.
I started using it when I persuaded the university departments I was working in to use it for journal abstracts and a terminology database. I'd read reviews of it in computer magazines, and it sounded as though it would be one of the best tools for the job. It was.
Back then it was the DOS version.
It was easy to get started using it -- you simply tossed information in and it would fish it out again. But to get the best out of it required quite a lot of learning, and to learn to use it I tried it out on different kinds of applications -- making notes from books, genealogical research, keeping track of correspondence, keeping a log of various activities. For all of these things, it worked very well.
Back then we also used the XyWrite word processor, and XyWrite's formatting was done using codes similar to HTML markup, so it was easy to produce askSam reports that were fully-formatted XyWrite documents. Reports could be imported into e-mail for sharing information. It worked just as well for exporting data to web pages.
For a long time I resisted the Windows version, but the new version has several features that older ones did not. One of them is the ability to import, link to and attach documents. So you can use it to keep track of word processor documents, PDF files and the like. It handles MS Word documents, pdf files (text only) and RTF files as well. It is somewhat limited in not handling Open Office files, for example, though those can be exported to rtf of pdf format.
If you do any kind of research, especially in the humanities, and want to keep your research notes in order, I definitely recommend askSam. I've found it useful for genealogy research, theological research and articles (keeping notes for my MTh dissertation and DTh thesis) and much more.
If this sounds like the sort of program you could use, you can read more about it (and download a 30-day trial version) at the askSam web site.
If you are doing any kind of research, askSam is one of the best tools for keeping your notes and documents in order. It's a freeform text database that lets you find anything you put into it, and also allows you to have fixed fields for sorting.
I started using it when I persuaded the university departments I was working in to use it for journal abstracts and a terminology database. I'd read reviews of it in computer magazines, and it sounded as though it would be one of the best tools for the job. It was.
Back then it was the DOS version.
It was easy to get started using it -- you simply tossed information in and it would fish it out again. But to get the best out of it required quite a lot of learning, and to learn to use it I tried it out on different kinds of applications -- making notes from books, genealogical research, keeping track of correspondence, keeping a log of various activities. For all of these things, it worked very well.
Back then we also used the XyWrite word processor, and XyWrite's formatting was done using codes similar to HTML markup, so it was easy to produce askSam reports that were fully-formatted XyWrite documents. Reports could be imported into e-mail for sharing information. It worked just as well for exporting data to web pages.
For a long time I resisted the Windows version, but the new version has several features that older ones did not. One of them is the ability to import, link to and attach documents. So you can use it to keep track of word processor documents, PDF files and the like. It handles MS Word documents, pdf files (text only) and RTF files as well. It is somewhat limited in not handling Open Office files, for example, though those can be exported to rtf of pdf format.
If you do any kind of research, especially in the humanities, and want to keep your research notes in order, I definitely recommend askSam. I've found it useful for genealogy research, theological research and articles (keeping notes for my MTh dissertation and DTh thesis) and much more.
If this sounds like the sort of program you could use, you can read more about it (and download a 30-day trial version) at the askSam web site.
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