Entries Tagged 'Computer' ↓

You may have seen this on Digg, but I figured I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here. The title of the post at Digg was a little bit dramatic (“Critical Excel 2007 bug cripples users“), but the problem is real. The bug doesn’t exactly cripple users, but it is a pretty big flaw in Excel 2007.

The problem occurs when you try to multiply 850 and 77.1. A calculator will tell you the answer is 65,535, but Excel reports the answer is 100,000. Go ahead and try it.

In fact, there are other number combinations that should result in 65,535 that wind up incorrectly displaying 100,000.

Anyhow, as I said at the beginning, this has been reported elsewhere. I just wanted to make sure as many people knew about the problem as possible. Hopefully Microsoft will correct this soon.

I’ve recently gone through an upgrade at work to Office 2007. This is obviously a pretty big change for our users (as you’ve probably seen, the interface is totally different), and we’ve heard our fair share of “feedback”. In the end, though, it was decided at the top we were going to upgrade so that’s what we did. Having gone through the process, I thought I’d share some some thoughts here on how to make the upgrade go smoothly. If you’re thinking that Office is junk and everyone should just use open source (I do use Open Office at home), you might want to stop reading here, because that really isn’t relevant to this post.  Anyhow, here is what I’ve found:

1. Don’t just upgrade to Office on the weekend without notifying any of your users about the switch. People got to work on Monday morning expecting to do their jobs, and were met with an entirely new Office interface. Yes, this really happened.
2. Have a few pilot or beta users test the software. Pick a nice mix of users that use each piece of software in the Office suite. Make sure you choose “power users” as well as people who just use the basics of the software. This should generate a representative sample of questions as well as test any code that might break.
3. Schedule a training session with your users before they are upgraded to just go over some of the basics of the software.  If you are completely new to Office 2007 it’s not immediately evident how to, for example, save a document in Word.  The entire File menu is hidden. The more information people have before you upgrade the less problems you will have and the happier everyone will be.
4. Finally, be ready for questions, comments, and complaints.  As with any change, you will have those who insist things were better the old way.  Just be ready for this and help them work through it.

These are just a few things I’ve noticed from our Office upgrade.  I’m sure there are other tips out there and if any of you have any tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.

I saw this on Gizmodo the other day and just thought it was too cool not to mention. Apparently there is a Sony Vaio concept design that look like the picture below:

When the monitor is turned off, the screen goes transparent. They go on to say that this isn’t an official concept, but now that the idea is out there I’m sure someone will find a way to make it happen. I guess there’s isn’t any real function to be gained from a transparent screen, but it looks really cool.

I’d imagine a machine like this would cost a lot of money, but a guy can dream can’t he?

Yesterday, around 7:00 PM Eastern Time, the last known instance of Windows ME was put to rest. At least that’s how it felt to me. You see my parents (two very bright people I’ll have you know) have been running Windows ME for the past seven years, to my horror. Saturday night they finally purchased a new computer and Sunday night I had everything set up for them.

I had begged my parents for years to upgrade to Windows XP, but they never got around to it. In that timespan, they went through three computer monitors, and “the computer is running so slow” phone calls to their loving son. My reply was always, “you need to upgrade”. When Vista launched, I knew they were going to need new hardware as there was no way their old Dell would be able to run Vista. In the end, the computer did my convincing for me, and I didn’t have the heart or free time to resuscitate it one last time.

The Windows ME machine didn’t go down without a fight, however. I hooked up their cable modem up to the new laptop and of course Windows Vista didn’t have any drivers to handle the device. “No problem”, I thought to myself. “I’ll just hop on the Internet and download the driver.” Then I remembered the only internet connection I had was on the ME machine, the same one that took five minutes to download a simple web page. Add to this a toddler who was giving my wife quite a workout, and the situation was stressful to say the least. We decided to hit the pool while the driver downloaded. I cursed at myself for not bringing my laptop.

Sufficiently waterlogged after an hour in the pool, we returned inside and my download was complete. I plugged the USB drive into the ME machine, rebooted (the only way it would recognize the drive) , and copied the driver to the device. Next I installed the driver on the new laptop and it recognized the modem. R.I.P. Windows ME.

Maybe my parents weren’t the last ones to be running Windows ME, but it sure felt like it. It sure feels nice now that they have bought their new computer. Windows Vista isn’t the greatest, but it sure will be easier for me to manage.

I’m not sure what my parents will do with the old computer. If it was mine I’d probably reformat the hard drive and install Linux. At some point we’ll have to get their data off the old machine onto the new one. That’s a project for another day. In the meantime, my Mom and Dad are very grateful to be able to connect to the Internet on their new computer, without have to wait a lifetime. I told them that was one favor I did for them compared to a thousand they have done for me.

Anyone else know of a Windows ME machine still out there in the wild?

The current issue of Popular Science contained an article about a 3D printer, a device that is able to “print” 3-dimensional objects from blueprint files, such as CAD files. This isn’t a new idea. However, the device talked about in the article, The Desktop Factory 3D printer, only costs $5,000 and according to the article the company hopes to eventually sell the device for under $1,000. I honestly never thought such a device would be available to the general public in my lifetime, but I guess I was wrong. For only $400 more than the cost of an iPhone you can theoretically print and object you can imagine? Sign me up.

According to the company, they are saving the amount of money it costs to produce the device by using a halogen lamp for a light source rather than lasers. There is a pretty informative video on their site called Turning Ideas Into 3-D Products, which from what I gather originally aired on CNN. Toys, gaming avatars, and replacement parts for devices at home are some of the objects they think people would want to “print”.

There are a few potential problems that I can forsee with the device. First of all, I wonder how much it costs for replacement printer cartridges. Maybe they won’t be too expensive. I don’t know. Secondly, this thing produces plastic objects. If it really catches on, that means there will be more plastic out there in the world. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Maybe you will be able to recycle you mistakes.

Anyhow, this seems like an amazing piece of technology that may be available to us everyday folks not too long from now. Who would’ve thought that even 10 years ago?

Microsoft released two updates for Windows Vista on August 8th. These updates are currently available from Microsoft’s download site only (not Windows Update).

The first update “improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista” and can be downloaded here: KB938194.

The second update “performance and reliability of Windows Vista” and can be downloaded here: KB938979.

I guess once you install these updated Vista will be twice as reliable

Apparently there were unauthorized versions of these floating around last week before they were yanked by Microsoft.

I’m running Windows Vista on my home computer, but I’m going to wait a bit before I install these updates. I prefer not to be a pioneer when it comes to software, Windows in particular.

Anyone out there install the updates yet? Notice any performance or reliability improvements?

Despite my recent love fest with Linux, I still find myself in Windows quite a bit. I have to use it for work. It is a lot easier to use for games (which I just started dabbling with again). I prefer to use it for blogging because BlogDesk does not work at all for me in Linux (but I’m still working on that).

What I would really like is some way to run both at the same time. I just added memory to the computer so I technically have enough RAM to support both OSes at the same time as long as something could keep track of which memory locations belonged to which OS. I have both OSes on different hard drives so there shouldn’t be any disk read/write problems.

I need some kind of software or program that is launched when the computer is started and whose only purpose in life is to launch the OSes and to keep track of how the resources like memory are being used.

Then each OS can have it’s only little desktop and I could do some Ctrl + Alt + Tab type of command to switch which OS is being displayed on the monitor.

Does anything like that exist yet? Or more importantly, does anything like that exist that people with normal wallets can acquire?

A few months ago, I wandered into my computer room in search of something (I can’t remember what it was since I was not getting much sleep at the time due to my newborn daughter) and I heard the dreaded clicking noise emanating from my trusty P.C. which though a little long in the tooth, had lasted my since college (6 years, wow!) with only a RAM upgrade and a new hard drive. The previous time I had hard drive problems I was able to buy a new drive, use the old one as a secondary drive (slave), and still get at my data. This was my initial hope. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

As I was having these problems, I wrote about it on my other blog. That’s where Mike suggested I try booting Linux directly from a CD. Desperate to try anything, I started researching my options and came across Knoppix Linux.

My experience with Knoppix was a pretty good one. There really isn’t much to using it. First of all, you need to download the ISO Image file from one of the mirror sites. This is, of course, assuming you have access to a high speed Internet connection somewhere (at work, or in a public place somewhere?). Once the .iso file is downloaded, burn the image to a CD with your favorite burning software (the Knoppix Downloading FAQ has some information on how to do this, if you don’t know how).

Now that you have your disk, the next step is to put the disk in the computer with the messed up hard drive and turn it on. Enter your computer’s bios settings (varies from computer to computer) and set the computer to boot from the CD drive. Exit setup and you computer should start booting Knoppix.

The computer may take some time to boot from CD. Mine did (note my CD-ROM was over 6 years old). I doubt it would ever load as fast as it could from the hard drive. This isn’t a big deal, but is something to consider if you are in a hurry or not a patient person.

The moment of truth comes once Knoppix is loaded. Hopefully it was able to detect your hard drive and your hard drive wasn’t too damaged. Unfortunately, mine physically wasn’t able to run long enough for Knoppix to detect it. The disk would spin, the clicking would start, and then the disk would fail. If Knoppix is able to detect your drive I suggest you get your data off of it as fast as possible. You never know how much time you have left on the defective drive. Hopefully you have a nice sized USB drive handy you can copy data to.

My damaged drive sits on my desk in my computer room, waiting for the time when I have enough money to have someone professionally retrieve the data (probably never). I even tried the freezer method which did nothing but make the drive cold.

I am interested in success stories with Knoppix, so if you have been able to recover data using this method please let me know in the comments.

Several months ago I lost my primary hard drive on my P.C. died and of course I had no backup strategy. Some of the data I lost is irreplaceable. Once I got my new computer I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t happen to me again. I needed a backup strategy, one that I could set up and then forget about, with the knowledge that it was taken care of. Oh, and it needed to be free or extremely inexpensive, because I’m cheap like that. The solution I chose was Mozy Online Backup.

The first step is to sign up for an account on Mozy’s web site. You get 2 gb of backup space for free or for $4.95/month you get unlimited backup. The next step is to download and install the Mozy software. Once complete, you are ready to select the files you want to back up.

Here is a look at the dialog used for choosing the files you want Mozy to back up:

As you can see I’m not using a lot of my space at the moment. I am mostly backing up my writing documents and other similar data. I had been backing up my photos, but stopped doing that as the backup took too long (the only drawback I have seen). I’m running the lowest bandwidth DSL and my upload speeds aren’t that great. I have backed up my images to CD and that will have to do for now. Without the images, the backup is extremely fast.

The first time your backup runs, Mozy will copy all of your files to your storage space on their server. After that, Mozy only copies those files that have change or those that are new, greatly speeding up the backup process.

On the scheduling side, there are several different options with Mozy. You can specify a certain time or day to have your files backed up, or as I have configured my system you can have Mozy do an automatic backup if your system has been idle for a certain period of time. Again, Mozy only backs up data that has changed or that is new.

Overall, I am very happy with Mozy. It is free, it is reliable, and I don’t have to think about it. I would like to test it out on a higher speed connection, just to see how it would perform with larger amounts of data.

As most of you know, Microsoft introduced a new feature with the release of Windows Vista - the Windows Sidebar.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty cool feature; the ability to have a lot of different information right there on the desktop. Well, I’ve been running Vista for about five months now and I would have to say I have mixed emotions, at best, about Windows Vista Sidebar.  To the right I have posted my current Windows Sidebar.

The Positives

• Information right there at you fingertips. I really like the CPU/RAM meter that lets me know how my system is performing.
• Customization. Anyone can develop gadgets and these can be added to anyone’s sidebar.
• Looks. I have to admit, the Windows Sidebar just looks cool.

The Negatives

• Windows Sidebar takes up a good deal of memory. I’m not really sure how much memory the Sidebar is eating, but you don’t get an image rotator, an rss feed ticker, etc. for free.
• Lack of cool widgets to add to the sidebar. Other than the few that came with windows, I really haven’t seen any widgets that make me want to download them. Microsoft has a Gallery site where users can upload their widgets, and rate those available, but I just haven’t found anything of much use there. Most of the widgets there are weather related, ticker related, or some type of skin for the clock. Maybe as the technology is out there and matures there will be some more cool stuff, but right now I’m not blown away.
• I really don’t look at the desktop that much. The only times I really look at my desktop is when I startup my computer, when I shut it down, or when I launch an application (and that’s usually from the quick launch). I really just don’t spend much time perusing my desktop.

Prognosis

Though I like the Windows Sidebar and think it will gain usefulness as more and more people use Vista, I certainly don’t

think anyone should upgrade to Vista just for this feature. Right now Windows Sidebar is just eye candy for me, though it’s eye candy with potential.