PC Memory or RAM or DRAM

If you see any of those 3 terms used in a list of features of a PC, they are all the same, and what they are NOT is the amount of space available on a hard drive or disk drive.

I can't say this enough: for Windows XP you really should try to upgrade, if you are not already there, to 1GB (one gigabyte) of memory. Windows XP has grown, anti-virus and spyware programs have grown and need to do more and consequently use more of your computer's available memory. Windows XP runs very well with 1GB of RAM. Less than that and you are probably one of the people calling me and complaining about how your computer is running slower.

With Windows Vista, you need to have at least 2GB of RAM. I recently serviced a very nice new laptop running Vista which had only 1GB of RAM and was running Vista Home Premium. Best Buy should be sued for selling such a machine! Get at least 2GB and, if you can afford to go to 3GB or 4GB, do it!

So many people get confused about the difference between RAM and the size of their hard disk drive (HDD). Most HDDs on newer machines are at least 120GB for a laptop and maybe 250GB or more on a desktop. Either of these is fine, but do yourself a favor and get the model with the largest HDD you can afford.

I have upgraded my desktop to a 250GB internal HDD with a 1TB (one terabyte) external hard drive. Photos, music, and videos take up a lot of space, and it's very nice to have an external drive on which I can save quarterly copies of all of My Documents.

One bonus of having an external hard drive which connects via a USB port is that the drive can be used as a portable device, meaning one day you can plug it into your desktop, back up all of your data, and the next day plug it into your laptop and back up all of its data. You can use it on as many machines as you have.

Simplify using your mouse: change double-click to single-click

And here's one for you folks using Windows XP.

I haven't tried this, but it looks easy, and knowing the trouble some of us more senior users (like me!) have double-clicking, it might be useful! :-)

 Simplify using your mouse: change double-click to single-click

19-essential-get-started-tips-for-windows-vista

If you have read this blog or otherwise know me, you know that I am not a big fan of Windows Vista. For those of you who like me have managed to avoid making a commitment to Vista, hang in there. Windows XP will be supported through 2014 by Microsoft, and well before that we will see the introduction of the replacement for Vista, so we may be able to avoid it all together.

However, I also realize many of you who have bought new machines lately have had (or felt you had) no choice and now have Vista as your primary operating system. I too have a Vista laptop I bought just so that I could offer you all the support you need getting to know, understand, and efficiently use Vista.

Here is a posting from Microsoft that may help some of you with your Vista environment:

19-essential-get-started-tips-for-windows-vista

Symantec has a change of heart?

Symantec, makers of the Norton security product line, must have lost untold millions of dollars in the past few years as users like me and you replaced our fee security products, like Norton, with free products. It'll be a long time before I pay for a security product again, but Symantec is doing what it can to woo back lost customers and keep existing customers.

Walter S. Mossberg reviews Norton Internet Security 2009 on the All Things Digital web site at the following link:

Mossberg's review of NIS 2009

It appears from his review that Symantec has addressed performance and pricing as well, but it's still far from being a freebie! I assume he is addressing a brand new, and probably not yet available product, so it'll be a long time before this doubting Thomas believes it.

On a related subject, a customer asked me to download and install the newest version of Norton Antivirus for him this week. I did so, dutifully paid the $39.99 fee, which is an ANNUAL fee, and finished a very long and painful installation process. After this was done, and it seemed that I came to a nice clean end of the process, I was informed that the license had expired! I tried everything but could not get past this. I finally found Symantec online chat support and signed in. I was number 52 in the queue of people waiting to chat with an expert. Fortunately I was watching a baseball game on TV so I just kept an eye on the screen from time to time, and when my number came up, I entered a chat room with Suresh something. He/she took the time to understand my problem, and then indicated that he/she could help, and went ahead by taking control of the computer I was working on, worked his/her magic, and got the product going.

This was a HORRIBLE, but typical, and very time-consuming Symantec experience. It's like adding insult to injury after you pay your forty bucks. No thank you.

 

Google Chrome Follow-up

I knew I was jumping into Chrome early. It's only a Beta (test) version after all. As reported earlier, it is quite different as browsers we know go. I had a major issue right from the start. I was willing to try something new, but wanted a comfortable feeling of "well, this isn't so different after all", but I didn't get that. One example is that I wanted to display all of my Bookmarks/Favorites on the left side of the window as one normally does in IE or Firefox, but Chrome can't do that! I posted my desire on a chat forum, thinking I was overlooking something simple, but apparently I wasn't.

See the forum chatter about this

I'm holding off on any more investigating until the first official version comes along. If you want to try Chrome now, and you really have nothing to lose other than your time, you can download it here:

Download Google Chrome

 

Miscellaneous

I have been installing Windows XP SP3 on customers' machines in greater numbers now, and am not experiencing any problems. So far I am only doing this on Intel microprocessor machines, and avoiding it on AMD machines. Check your System Properties (see March 7 post) to see which microprocessor you have.

AVG Free Version 8 continues to run smoothly on my machines. I have a full scan scheduled every night at 10:30 PM.

If you leave your machine on most of the time, as I do, remember that it's very important to do a restart at least twice a week.

Spybot (now version 1.60) continues to be the most valuable player among the tools in my kit for ridding systems of the malware (malicious software) that so many of you seem to acquire along the way. It has regular updates so manages to keep up with the bad guys. I recommend running it once a week. Be sure to update and immunize before running the Search & Destroy program. Because there are so many bad guys out there intent on infecting our systems, Spybot S&D will run a little longer than it used to. It is now checking for the presence of nearly 300,000 items.

Spybot is so effective, I find I am running AdAware much less frequently these days, and again because Spybot is so good, AdAware rarely finds anything of any significance. As a result, I have stopped installing AdAware on my customers' machines. Also, have you installed AdAware recently? It ain't pretty!

Not very far behind Spybot in effectivenss for what it does is CCleaner. This small, fast-running tool will rid your system of all of the junk that accumulates on our systems just from daily normal use. This results in faster-running machines. I recommend running it weekly. If you do, it will only take a minute or two to do its job. As a warning, if you have not yet run CCleaner and have a system that is in need of a cleaning, the first run of CCleaner may take a while (15 minutes, possibly more). I always delete everything CCleaner identifies.

I continue to install Microsoft's Windows Defender, a free realtime spyware monitor, on all Windows XP customer machines. Windows Defender is an integral part of Vista. It gets updated through the regular Microsoft Automatic Updates process.

Questions or comments? Please write. I will respond.

Google Chrome

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! 

Telecommuting

This is an interesting Computerworld article on telecommuting.

Telecommuting: 6 questions to ask before you say yes

XP SP3

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.

Vista users rush for SP1, XP owners dawdle on SP3

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

Wi-Fi Tweaks for Speed Freaks

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.

Windows XP Service Pack 3

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.

15 great gadgets for the back-to-school crowd

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

Memory

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.

AVG Free Version 8

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.

Thumb Drives

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.

AOL

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!

Spybot 1.6

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.

Skin Vista to Look Like Windows XP

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

Buying a new Dell PC with 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.