Nobrainer’s Think Tank

I’ve definitely not upgraded my PC to Vista; I have little need to. Although I have been, and remain, curious about Vista given that I simply haven’t used it. The commentary about it has been overwhelmingly negative, but I’ve always had a sense that people were saying bad things about it because other people said bad things about it. Herd mentality strikes again! But Microsoft may have come up with a clever way to work around and start changing those impressions:

Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a “new” operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that “Mojave” was actually Windows Vista.

“Oh wow,” said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches.

Good luck to them.

This may be right up Doug’s alley, but I figured I’d post to get additional responses.

I’m wondering if there is a good reason to get a battery backup for my cable modem and wireless router. I would like to think that if the power were to go out, my battery-powered laptop would be able to connect to the internet through my battery-backed-up router and modem. However it looks as though there’s a good chance that my cable will go out if the power goes out. If that’s true, it means that the backup is probably unnecessary. And it probably also means that I don’t need to think any more about getting battery backups for my TV.

Anyway, does anyone have input or experience with this kind of thing?

The problems with my desktop seem to be resolved. After trying to single out any particular problem that was either reasonable or suggested, I gave up. Days later I noticed a strange phenomenon. The “link” light on my USB wireless networking adapter was lit even though the computer had been shut down for days. I removed it from the system and everything seemed hunky dory. So I plugged it back in and things went batty again.

I blame the NSA who obviously replaced my old adapter with a new one.

The computer gods have frowned up on me. My hand-me-down desktop is on the fritz and the underlying problem(s) and solutions(s) are non-obvious.

Earlier in the week, the computer was booting and starting to boot Windows before suddenly restarting.

So I repaired the WindowsXP installation using the install disk. Afterwards, things started fine, but for some reason Windows updates couldn’t install.

Last night the computer either turned itself off at some point, or turned off because of a power outage. Either way, as of this morning the initial problem had returned in a worse form. About 10 seconds into booting the whole system restarts itself. It doesn’t even boot far enough to allow a boot-from-cd option.

I’m guessing bad RAM and/or motherboard. Your thoughts?

The FoxIt reader is good to have around, but is not ready to be the star of the PDF world. It is light and agile. Unfortunately the find feature is unreliable and some characters don’t get printed correctly. It’s probably a good default PDF reader as long as you aren’t reading a lot of scientific papers.

FastStone Capture can be used to do screen captures of almost anything: windows, window contents, any user-defined shape, the full screen, or even a scrolling window. It’s got some other neat bits as well. The bad news is that FastStone recently removed it from the freeware category. I have version 5.3 which was free. Now, if you want the new version 5.5, you have to pay.

Pidgin 2.0 is what used to be GAIM. With the new name comes a new logo and much less confusion for me when I’m trying to open the correct program (GAIM or AIM) when the icons look virtually identical. I haven’t used the new Pidgin much yet, but it seems to be the old GAIM with mostly (needed) cosmetic changes.

Safari for Windows. I’ve seen various reviews and saw little reason to feel inspired, but I figured I would give it a try since I generally keep around just about every available browser.

My current browser rankings are as follows:
1 - Firefox 2.0.0.4
T2 - IE7
T2 - SeaMonkey 1.1.2
4 - K-Meleon 1.02
5 - Opera 9.10
6 - Maxthon

Having used Safari for a little while, I’m not exactly sure where to rank it. It does seem to render pages faster. The in-page find function is nice. And I like that I can re-size a text box (although it seems to allow this to an obscene and detrimental degree as I was able to drag this textbox under other page elements). But in most other regards, it seems a bit clunky. Bookmarks are hard to handle. It uses a ton of RAM (230MB right now). Windows are difficult to re-size. And what may be the worst thing of all, the keyboard shortcut for switching tabs is Ctrl-{. In reality, that is Ctrl-Shift-[. What the fuck were they thinking? And why on Earth are the dialog boxes animated? How do you brag about having the fastest page-rendering speeds and claim to have a browser that “gets out of your way” and then go and program in a piddly-shit animation that slows people down?

And of course it doesn’t have any of the handy extensions that have made Firefox so valuable. And it has something that says “check spelling while typing” but it doesn’t pick up anee speling missteaks. On the upside, it is perhaps the best piece of Apple software that is on my computer, not that it says very much. I think it may see some additional action on my computers, but probably less than IE7 and SeaMonkey.

Months ago I complained, “in the process of opening a page, Firefox just kinda quits. It’s like it stops to think and forgets to start again.” In the mean time I have disabled add-ons or uninstalled them to no avail. Plus I have numerous other browsers to considerable avail. And just after I switched default browsers this weekend, I realized how to fix Firefox.

Way back in the day when I first got Firefox and read all the tips about how to customize it, I followed the instructions for speeding it up by changing the connections and pipelining settings. Well guess what, they were all still set to my custom levels. It turns out that some servers really don’t like those settings. So after quickly returning those values to the default, I am good to go.