Friday, March 16, 2012

New iPad: A Polishing of the Old - All I need to know about the new iPad

I have said many times - on this blog - how much I like, admire, and respect David Pogue's opinions on technical matters. Today he has a very succinct statement that is used as the intro to his article on the new iPad. It is this:

"The new iPad’s technical improvements keep it at the forefront of desirability — just ahead of the snapping jaws of its Android competition — but don’t take it in any new directions."

Hmm, That settles it for me. Save my money for maybe a new Android competitor - if for a tablet at all!

If you'd like to read David's article on the NY Times website, you will find it here,

Thursday, March 15, 2012

gasbuddy.com

I suppose I could assume that you all know about gasbuddy.com, but then even if I enlighten only one or two of you I think it's worthwhile to post this info.

I am not really sure how large their database is, but I can tell you that for my area it is quite large (number of gas stations) and amazingly current - largely because of their technique of deleting items after something like only 24 or 48 hours.

So I encourage you to try it out and, if so inclined, sign up and do some reporting of gas prices in your local area. The more people who do this, the better the chance that, at least at a local level, we can make the providers more competitive. Go to gasbuddy.com and key in your zip code to see what kind of database they have for your local area.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Windows XP Updates

Last night I downloaded and installed 4 Windows XP updates from Microsoft. Now that's a slow month! One of these was Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool. As I write this, I have that tool running a full scan in the background. It's just a little, no-cost insurance against invasion by the bad guys. It sure does take a long time to do the full scan!

As a reminder if you need it, make sure your machine has all updates applied, and then click on START/RUN key in MRT and click OK. That is it!


Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Security Troubleshooting Techniques

From pcmag.com:

"The humor site GraphJam.com offers a chart showing the likelihood a computer issue will be solved by "Reconfiguring something, reimaging, antivirus-software…" or by "Turning it off and on again." Naturally the first bar is tiny, the second huge.

Joking aside, when your computer is acting weird and you can't find any reason for it, turning it off and on again really is the first thing you should try. Here are a few other techniques for tracking down problems that may or may not represent malware activity."