Advanced Computer Repair

Netbooks

August 22nd, 2010

The third generation of netbooks is upon us. Netbooks—minicomputers/subnotebooks that run the normal Windows operating system—have evolved into a fairly standard configuration. The first generation, popularized by the Asus Eee PC, ran Linux, had all solid-state storage, and a 7-inch screen. For a year or two there was a rush to market from other brands and configurations varied widely.

Today’s netbook most commonly sports:
An Intel Atom or AMD Athlon Neo low-wattage processor
A 10.1”, 11.6”, or 12.6” diagonal screen
1 GB of RAM
A 160GB or 250GB hard drive
Built-in Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth on more expensive models)
External monitor connector
Keyboards that are 92% the size of a normal keyboard (key-to-key spacing)
Windows XP Home or Windows 7 Starter operating system
A slot for removable flash card memory storage (but no built-in optical drive)
Battery life of 4.5 to 15 hours (averaging about 8 )
Weight of less than 3 pounds.
Prices starting at $299

The new Atom processors run slightly faster than the old (1.66GHz vs. 1.60GHz), but the boost in speed is less important than the fact that the new processors talk to the rest of the computer at an appreciably faster speed (667MHz vs. 533MHz bus speed). The AMD Athlon Neo uses slightly more power than the Atom, but it is considerably zippier even at similar processor speeds. Atom-based netbooks run slightly longer on a battery charge than Neos, however.

The 10.1” screen is by far the most common, and gives you 1024×600 pixel resolution. That’s the horizontal resolution of an old 17” CRT monitor, but not as tall, since netbooks all have wide screens. Our website is 980 pixels wide, designed to fit comfortably in a 1024 pixel-width monitor with the browser’s scrollbar and framing (called the chrome) and a little of the green background showing on each side. This is the most common width for modern websites. On a standard netbook screen you’d be able to see the whole width of the site and down to just below the Subject window in the Contact Us form on the left. There are some netbooks, new to the market, that have higher-resolution screens (1366 x 768 pixels). These give you the pixel height of an old 17” monitor (down to the Dell logo on the left here), and quite a bit more width. These new screens are usually 11.6” or 12.6”, although there are rare 10.1” versions. The text will be proportionally smaller, however.

The last major consideration is operating system. Microsoft has kept the hoary, old Windows XP Home alive just for netbooks. Their low-power processors and limited graphics abilities won’t run the flashier graphics of Vista, but Microsoft kept netbooks in mind when working on Windows 7. The Starter Edition has fewer graphics effects than other Win 7 versions, and runs well on the netbooks. If it’s a toss-up, go with the Windows 7 OS.

All the keyboards on netbooks with 10.1” screens will be a similar size. Your main consideration is how the navigation keys (Home, End, arrows, etc.) are laid out. In order to save space, some of them may be half-height and placed in odd configurations. Look the keyboard over to see if it makes sense to you. If not, you can always plug in an external keyboard to one of the USB slots (generally 3 available).

For standard office productivity apps (Word, Excel, etc.), web surfing, and e-mail, most of the netbooks on the market should serve you well. They’ll even play videos, but online gaming is out of their ballpark.

Posted in Business, New Technology, Residential

Office 2010

August 16th, 2010

Microsoft released Office 2010 to the public last month. It’s been available to business users who have a multi-license agreement since mid-May. The question is, if you didn’t upgrade to Office 2007, should you switch? And, if you have Office 2007, is the upgrade worth it?

To the first question, the answer is possibly, verging on probably. To the second, it’s a coin toss. If all you do is write letters and e-mail, you won’t get much benefit from the features.

The format of documents created by Office applications changed with the 2007 version. That’s why the extension is now docx and xlsx, etc. It’s also why you had to download the converters to read the new formats if you are still using older versions. The new formats offer some real benefits for users who take advantage of them (especially large corporations), they are more universally usable, and they provide a pathway for easier interoperability with Web applications. As more businesses install Office 2007/2010, it will be increasingly difficult not to upgrade if you share documents and files.

The applications themselves have increased capabilities over previous versions. Earlier versions of Excel, for instance, were limited to 255 columns in each spreadsheet and 65,535 rows. Excel 2007 blew that out of the water, with 16,000 columns and 1 million rows in each sheet. No, you’ll probably never need that many cells, but the 255 column limit was a real headache for some. Even something as simple as tracking daily sales was limited; you could not hold a year of days in the columns—they had to be in the rows, no matter that the other way might have made more sense for you.

So, what’s new? Well, to hit just a few—the Ribbon is now universal across all applications (The Ribbon is the most prominent feature of what MS calls the Fluent User Interface). You can create your own custom tab on the Ribbon (unfortunately, not all functions are available to be placed on this tab). Excel has a new feature called Sparklines—you can embed mini-charts in single cells anywhere in your spreadsheet. Since some people apparently missed the File choice on the old menus—and didn’t click on the Office logo (the “Pearl”), Microsoft has made the file management feature of the programs more obvious, with a feature called Backstage. Office is designed to ease collaboration and to integrate better with the Office apps on the Web. It’s available in both 32- and 64-bit versions and will run on all versions of Windows back to Windows XP SP3. The programs have much improved graphical capabilities, both in their drawing features and photo editing/manipulation; you can even edit video within PowerPoint.

Backstage is an effort to bring all of the features and document properties in front of you when you go to open or save or print a document. No longer do you have to go to one menu item for Print Preview, another for Print Setup, yet another for Page Setup and still another for Print itself. That’s all now in Backstage, along with a display of the document’s properties and a preview of it.

The retail prices have been set, and in a departure from past practice, there is no upgrade pricing discount. But the Home and Student version comes in a Family Pack that includes 3 licenses; the other versions include 2 licenses, so the per-user price is lower, if you need more than one. You could also opt for the Key Card, which is cheaper, but gives you only one license and only activates the Office that comes pre-installed on a new computer—you do not get a boxed version of the product. There is a fourth version of Office, the Professional Academic version, which is only available to students and educators (at a deep discount—$99).

Three other non-retail versions of Office are available—two will be sold only to businesses with volume licensing. One is Office Standard (it’s Home & Business plus Publisher—a good choice for small businesses); the other is Professional Plus (that’s Professional plus SharePoint Workspace and InfoPath). Finally, the last version is free; Office Starter comes only on new PCs, includes reduced-functionality versions of Word and Excel, and is ad-supported.

If you feel like playing errrrr, experimenting with Office 2010, you can download a trial version—fully functional—that will work until October of this year. You can install it alongside your existing version of Office. However—you cannot run two versions of Outlook on the computer. During installation, it should warn you. If you currently use Outlook, do not install Outlook 2010. Since this is a late Beta version of Office, it’s probably best not to put your important e-mail at risk. Use this to test and experiment, not for important work.

Posted in Business, Kids & Computers, New Technology, Residential

Book ‘em!

August 9th, 2010

As the number of e-book readers on the market continues to grow, and as the prices continue to drop, electronic books are flying off the shelf. No, that’s not right…flying off the server. That’s better. Sales really are quite strong; Amazon reports selling 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books. In a further encouraging note, the sales of hardbacks is growing, not shrinking, even at Amazon.

So it seems that e-books aren’t siphoning off paper book sales. The paper book will be with us for a long time; there are very real benefits to it for many purposes. It’s much faster to skim through, any illustrations are sharper and clearer (and can be in color), it’s far easier to reference indexes and end notes, and it just looks better sitting on a shelf.

While the iPad can display e-books, its battery life is limited by the fact that its screen is backlit, just like any other computer display we’re used to. Except the e-book. E-ink makes the e-books more practical for this use. Their screens require no backlight, and once the page is drawn on the screen, it needs no further power to keep the image there. Battery life is measured in days rather than hours.

How does e-ink work? The screen is a sandwich; just below the clear top layer is a layer of microspheres, each about the diameter of a human hair. Within those tiny spheres are black and white pigments with opposite charges floating in a transparent oil. When the right charge is applied, the black or white pigments move either up to the glass reading surface or down toward the back plate. The movement through oil is what gives e-books their leisurely screen re-draws.

Juggling currents carefully between electrodes, e-books can display up to 16 levels of gray. But even at their best, e-books have a grayish cast to them; their contrast is not very good, on par only with a newspaper page. This month, E-ink announced that it is releasing its newest improvement in the technology, dubbed Pearl. It’s not color, but with a greatly improved contrast ratio, more akin to reading a paperback than a newspaper. It should appear in retail units soon. And with e- and paper books sales strong (hardbacks are up 22% this year), could this be an indicator that we are becoming a nation of readers again? Could be.

Posted in Business, New Technology, Residential

Two is Better Than One

August 9th, 2010

I have a nice 20” LCD monitor on my desk. Looks great. But, a 20” monitor is slightly smaller than two pieces of letter-sized paper. That’s my workspace; two sheets of paper. And a 22” monitor, while larger, only displays the same number of pixels; everything’s just a little bigger. You don’t get to see any more of your work.

The fix? Dual monitors. Seven years ago Microsoft did some research that showed that dual monitors can increase productivity from 9% to 50%, depending on the task. For me, doing web design, dual monitors has made a huge difference. Web design involves pulling together material from lots of sources. It also involves editing graphics and other files in different applications and previewing the work in progress in multiple browsers. It’s not uncommon to have seven or eight programs running and using three pretty heavily at any given time. And some stuff you can’t just squish down to make it share a screen with other apps. So being able to edit a photo on one monitor and then place it in a web page in the other one is incredibly handy.

Your work might benefit from dual monitors too. You could leave e-mail open on one while working in Word or Excel in another. Or you might have two Word documents open or two spreadsheets, referencing one while working on another. Or maybe even dragging text or data from one to the other on a different screen. It really is easier than Alt-tabbing between open documents (you do use the Alt-tab key combination, don’t you?).

What’s involved in going to dual monitors? Very little, actually. You’ll need a second graphics card if your computer doesn’t have dual video outputs and a second monitor. Your second monitor doesn’t have to be identical to the other. It looks slick that way, but it’s not necessary. You could even press your old CRT monitor into service as the secondary display.

If you are using the computer for work, the video card doesn’t have to be anything special. Business apps don’t place any real demands on the video system. The card has to fit the appropriate slot in our computer and has to have connectors that match the kinds your monitors use. Have a laptop? That’s even easier. Most laptops will handle the task easily, with only a second monitor hooked up—no need for another video card. There are only a very few laptops that won’t display two images this way.

So, think about how much work you do on the computer, how often you are minimizing or switching back and forth between open programs, or how you have to squint to read the material on too many apps sharing too little space. Dual monitors could save you a lot of time and frustration for a very small investment.

Posted in Business, How To, New Technology

Spring Cleaning

August 9th, 2010

Modern hard drives (hmmm…can a 5-year old hard drive not be “modern”) are generally large enough that we no longer think much about conserving space on them. But it’s still not a bad idea to clean some of the junk out every once in a while.

The easy place to start? Temporary Internet files—the browser’s cache (it’s pronounced cash, not cash-ay). Browsers keep a cache of the content of the pages you visit in order to speed up browsing. When you visit a website such as CNN and hop from page to page, there’s really no reason to download a new copy of the CNN logo when you change pages. It’s faster to pull an identical copy off your hard drive. Saves time for you, saves network traffic, saves server resources; everybody wins.

Problems can develop, though if your cache file is too large. Internet Explorer used to default to taking 10% of your hard drive for its cache. As hard drive capacities grew, that became excessive. IE8 now limits it to 1GB. But even 1GB is probably excessive too. After all, if it takes the program longer to find the file in a huge local cache than it would to download a new copy, that kind of defeats the purpose.

So let’s give the caches a spring cleaning and set them to a useful size. What is a useful size? Well, the average web page is 3 times larger (file size) than it was just 7 years ago. Many browsers use 50MB as a default setting (which might be a little small these days), but if you typically browse feature-rich websites or have a slow Internet connection, you’ll probably want to bump that up some. The range of 50–100MB is good for most people on fast connections, and you’d probably never need more than about 200MB no matter what speed connection you have.

How do you cleanup? Just empty the cache; do NOT clean out the cookies, history, favorites or any other similar files; they help improve your browsing experience and consume very little space. Then reset the cache size, if needed. In Internet Explorer, click Tools, Internet Options, the General tab, and then Delete… in the Browsing History section. Delete only the Temporary Internet files. In Opera, click Tools, Preferences…, Advanced tab, History, and click the Empty Now button. In Firefox, click Tools, Options, Advanced tab, and click the Clear Now button. In Chrome, click the wrench icon (Tools—get it?), Options, the Under the Hood tab, the Clear browsing data… button, choose only Empty the cache, them the Clear browsing data button.

If you use a different browser, notice the pattern above; the cache maintenance is generally in a Tools/Preferences/Options/Advanced area. Poke around carefully. As you cleared the data, you probably noticed where to set the cache size. Do that after emptying the cache.

Posted in Business, How To, Residential

Easter Eggs

August 5th, 2010

Brightly colored ovoid symbols of fertility? Secret little features hidden in software? Both? All of the above.

Back when people were having fun writing software, they would sometimes hide little useless features in the programs as a kind of inside joke. Because they were hidden, they became nicknamed Easter Eggs. But programmers grow up, bean-counters rule the world, and such frivolity is frowned upon by the management. That may explain the dearth of these clever little gimmicks in recent releases of software.

Gone are the days of the flight simulator in Excel, the pinball game in Word, the bear that introduced the developer credits in Window 3.1, and others. In order to be considered a true Easter Egg, the feature must have no use in the program and must be undocumented. So an obscure feature like the random sentence generator in Word =rand(X,Y) (X=number of paragraphs you want and Y=the number of sentences in each) isn’t a true Easter Egg, since it serves a purpose in helping people lay out publications.

But there are still some diehards out there. In Google Earth (version 4.2 and later), click on the globe, then hold down Ctrl and Alt buttons simultaneously and tap the letter A. You’ll get a flight simulator that works with keyboard commands or a joystick. Don’t pick the F-16 Viper for your first few outings; you’ll just crash horribly. Promise. Although it was originally inserted as an Easter Egg, apparently Google has adopted it as a feature in the program.

In the excellent free photo editor Picasa (version 2 and later), hold down Ctrl and Shift buttons and tap Y. If ever there were a pointless Easter Egg, this is it. Does the fact that both Google Earth and Picasa come from Google mean anything? Is this the last place where people are having fun programming? Hope not.

Posted in How To, New Technology, Uncategorized

How Many is Enough?

August 5th, 2010

So, what processor is powering your computer? AMD or Intel? Single core? Dual core? Quad core? The choice is about to get broader. Intel has introduced a 6-core mainstream processor (Core i7-980x) and AMD’s is about to hit the market—the Phenom II X6.

How many cores does one need? Probably not six for the work you do. Intel’s new chip not only has six cores, but they are also multithreading, which means that they can each handle two operations at the same time. Details of AMD’s X6 are unclear at the moment.

We do know this much: AMD’s hexacore chip will cost less than $300 in its fastest version, while Intel’s will be $999. That’s just for the processor. Ouch! Intel’s chip will have over 1.1 billion transistors on it; no word yet on AMD’s. And although the Phenom will be built on the larger 45nm process (vs 32nm for Intel’s), it will use slightly less power—125 watts.

Do you need either of those processors? Probably not. The problem is that few applications can use more than one core at a time. If you have 6 programs actively doing something (not just idling in the taskbar), the processors might come in handy, but who works like that? Where they can be useful is in running multimedia and graphics content creation programs or some games, which have been written to take advantage of multiple processor cores.

These processors will make their debuts in workstation-class computers, so their effect on the desktop market will be minimal in the near term. But the day will probably come when we look back and wonder how we got along with “only” four cores.

Posted in New Technology

Just Browsing

August 5th, 2010

How’s your security setup? Anti Virus up to date? Firewall active? E-mail filtered? Good. There’s one more way you can protect yourself as you browse the Web. Like over 50 or 60% of web users, you probably use Internet Explorer. If you aren’t using IE8, upgrade; it’s much more secure than earlier versions (look in the Help section of IE’s menu for upgrading options). And it renders pages more accurately, too.

Or, do as many others have and download one of the other major popular browsers: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

Anti-virus programs are like deadbolts on your home’s doors—really good protection. But browsing with something other than IE is like camouflaging the door so that it’s invisible—and deadbolting it too. Internet Explorer, with its broad user base, is a natural target for exploits. Other browsers, while not inherently any more secure than IE8, just don’t attract the hackers due to their smaller (though significant) market share. Don’t be afraid to use another browser; the days of websites that only work with IE (or Netscape Navigator) are generally behind us. All browsers support modern Web standards and various interactive technologies. The web, once fragmented, is increasingly standardized. You may still find the odd site that needs IE for interactivity, but those are disappearing quickly.

As you install a new browser, let it use its default settings, but watch carefully for pre-checked options that offer to install features or activate options that you don’t want or need (like setting itself as your default browser or installing a search bar, etc.).

Posted in Business, How To, New Technology, Residential

Spyware! Beware!

August 5th, 2010

Antivirus Live, Windows Security Center, Antivirus 2009, Malware Defense, Personal Antivirus. They all sound like wonderful programs to help your computer, don’t they? But they actually are various forms of malware, aka spyware. Over the past few years, spyware has become the new virus.

Spyware is a form of computer software that is installed on your computer without your permission with the intention to take control of your computer. In many instances, spyware comes simply from the websites that you visit on the web. Just going to a certain site can secretly install this software on your computer where it begins to do its dirty work. Other times, spyware will use a “lure” to get you to click on it and then it will install itself and never let go. Be careful when you see warnings about your computer being unprotected. This is almost always a spyware program waiting for you to click and allow it in.

When our techs at Advanced Computer Repair take a look at your computer, feel confident that it is in good hands. Our most common computer service performed here is a virus and spyware cleanout. We’re familiar with all types of spyware and viruses and are skilled at removing them all. Please give us a call any time you see a suspicious message or alert on your computer. We are always available to discuss your options and let you know if you have a potential spyware infiltration on your computer.

Posted in Business, How To, Kids & Computers, Residential

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