Windows

The entire technology world is preparing to descend on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, but many of those in the San Francisco Bay Area are finding it slow going.

The entire Beyond Binary staff (yes, that is just me), is among those who have been hanging out at San Francisco International Airport amid weather-related flight delays. My flight is now running three hours late, but, like all good CES-goers. I have plenty of gadgets to keep me occupied.

My laptop and Sprint EV-DO card are letting me blog, while a video iPod has a season of Weeds and … Read more

Microsoft has largely succeeded in getting a PC into the home, but its effort to put a server there will be an uphill battle.

Bill Gates announced the product to much fanfare at last year's Consumer Electronics Show. However, even folks who are bullish on the concept, such as Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder, say it's destined to be a niche product for years to come.

In a soon-to-be-published research report, Gownder figures that home servers (not just those running Microsoft's home server product) will reach 4.5 million households by 2012. That's up from … Read more

Although it has it's annoyances, in general, I like NOD32 antivirus vesion 2, from ESET. But a new version was recently released and new software scares me. As I wrote about in November, I hold this truth to be self-evident:

All new software contains bugs and design mistakes.

I recently worked on a Windows XP computer whose copy of NOD32 version 2 had expired the day before. If it's possible to renew a copy of NOD32 v2, then finding out how eluded me. After clicking around everywhere in the user interface, and not being able to learn anything … Read more

Once upon a time I sat down to write a blog posting. While waiting for Windows XP to boot up, the System Restore icon on the desktop caught my eye.

I suggested making a desktop icon for System Restore back in July when I offered Four tips to using System Restore on Windows XP. In this case, the icon served as a visual reminder that I hadn't checked up on System Restore in a while.

System Restore is a feature of Windows XP* that periodically backs up the registry and other system files that Microsoft considers critical. Each backup … Read more

On December 14th, I wrote that IBM recommends Windows XP. Unbeknownst to me, on the very same day a Lenovo blogger was griping about Windows Vista.

I don't have any Vista gripes. That's because, as I blogged about in September* I think XP is a better choice for Windows users. Personally, I've been avoiding Vista.

Matt Kohut has instead been fighting with Vista. Mr. Kohut works for Lenovo, which to some measure, makes their living selling Vista.

To me, his gripes are particularly significant. For one thing, he is not talking about a test drive or a … Read more

Yet again, a bug fix created a new problem. This time it occurred with Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Vista.

The problem is that Internet Explorer crashes after viewing a web page. Not all web pages though, I was able to successfully view about half of those I tested with IE6. One site that crashes it pretty quickly is Microsoft's own msn.com (they offered it as an example).

It wasn't hard to find information online about this problem which was introduced in the December 11th round of bug fixes to Windows.

According to Computerworld, … Read more

Installing a new version of software should be trivial thing--especially for popular software such as the Adobe Systems' Flash player, which is used by millions of people every day. But no.

For one, the Flash player does not play well with the other kids in the sandbox. That is, trying to remove the currently installed version via the Windows XP Control Panel Add/Remove applet is a waste of time. The first three machines I tried this on resulted in three different outcomes, and the software was not removed on any of the machines. Instead, Adobe has an uninstaller for the Flash player.… Read more

On December 18, give or take,* Adobe Systems released a security bulletin that basically says old versions of the Flash player are buggy as heck (see Flash Player update available to address security vulnerabilities). Specifically, versions 9.0.48.0 and earlier contain nine different bugs that Adobe calls critical. Simply viewing a Web page is all it takes for a bad guy to take control of your computer. This is true on Macs and Linux too. The only way to be safe is to upgrade to the newest version, 9.0.115.0.

These bugs in the Flash player … Read more

When I described how to replace Microsoft Word's smart quotes with straight quotes to keep the HTML versions of documents from breaking, several people objected, claiming that straight quotes make the docs more difficult to read. I agree completely, which is why I decided to tell you about the quickest way I know to convert from one quote style to the other. In just a few seconds you can optimize a document for the Web, or for readability in print or onscreen.

Suppose you want to put a Word document that's full of smart quotes--both the double quotation-mark … Read more