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Technology Today - December 2010 I survived Black Friday by not leaving the house. Yes, I used the computer but did not buy a thing and my next online purchase will probably be from LL Bean. Paula was out shopping by 4: am and my friend Bob texted me from Fry’s to see if I wanted anything. One of the things I love about the internet is that it is such a huge resource for research and one thing always leads to another. One morning, I happened to be up at 4:30, too much something the night before, and one of the things I remembered trying to do was to capture some of the maps from Microsoft and Google maps. Of course, for my own personal use. But what really irritated me was my inability to use the “PrtScn” key on the keyboard that I had used in my Windows XP days. Whenever I tried to capture an image and then open a paint program to save it, it would not. So, time to troll the web and look for an answer and come to find out, it was already on my Vista and Windows 7 computers all the time in the Snipping Tool. You have to dig for it sometimes but it works like a charm. Get the image on the screen you want to capture, start up the Snipping Tool and then simply crop what part of that image you want and save it to your computer. If you don’t find it, click on Start and in the Search Box, just type Snipping Tool and you will get it. What prompted all of this is that I wanted to see where a friend was building a house and see what it looked like. I have to say, the Google Maps, http://maps.google.com/ and the Microsoft Bing Maps, http://www.bing.com/maps are great, and the more you look, the more you will see different from the maps as well and what I am talking about is the bird’s eye view or satellite image views that you can get on each site. One thing I discovered quite quickly was the lag there is on some of the images. For instance, I looked at Downtown Indianapolis and on Google, it shows the Lucas Oil Stadium (completed mid 2008) but Bing shows construction just starting. Another example was of my uncle’s house in South Carolina and Bing shows the house and Google shows an empty field and the house has been there for at least three years. These maps are a terrific way of not only finding your way around, but seeing what it looks like before you get there. Technology Update I went to an Intel road show the other day and the statistics they were throwing around were mind boggling. This year, there are over 1 million computers being shipped every day. And there are 5 billion devices now connected to the internet, nearly half of those being phones. In the USA, 70% of the computers out there are now notebooks. According to IDC, in 10 years, there should be 31 billion devices connected to the internet. Microsoft officially discontinued Windows XP in October meaning that it was available for sale on computers for nine years and in fact, there are still more computers running Windows XP than any other operating system. I also read that Microsoft will still issue security patches and the like for XP for the next several years. According to NetMarketShare.com, XP has 60% of all computers, and Windows 7 is a surprising 2nd with 17%, Vista is third with 13% and the Mac is fourth with 4%. Linux is still off the chart. Been helping a bunch of people upgrade to new computers lately and found some interesting things. For the most part, they like the new Windows 7 and the transfer of files goes pretty well if you use something like PC Mover from Laplink Software. The only problem is that it still seems like it misses some things and if you tell it to grab everything, you still have a lot of excess baggage coming along that probably doesn’t need to. So, take a look at the software you have installed on your old computer and ask yourself, do you really need it ? My preference is to just move your documents over and then make sure you go looking for those out of the way places that some of the older software likes to stash your files. Quicken, Lotus, Word Perfect, and some of the genealogy software are among a number of the programs that tend to stash the data files in places you don’t think of. Another good one for that would be email programs like Outlook or Outlook Express. This is where PC Mover comes in handy sometime in that if you tell it to move your office, it might pick them up but you have to watch it closely. Another problem of new hardware as you know is that you have to go chasing around sometimes for the Windows 7 drivers for the devices but one of the gotchas is that that old printer might use a parallel printing cable and your new computer doesn’t come with one. Oops. I have had mixed success with the USB to Parallel adapters. Modern Technology Three years ago, I went to an Intel Technology road show and they made us a deal we couldn’t refuse. A really fast Core 2 Duo 3 gigahertz processor, mainboard, memory, the works, all housed in a very neat and compact small desktop case that featured BTX technology. That stands for “Balanced Technology eXtended” and was to be a forerunner and competitor for the currently favored Micro-ATX mainboards now used everywhere. Well, it wasn’t, it didn’t, and it fizzled. You had to buy a unique mainboard, a unique processor, and often the case was unique as well. Kind of like buying one of those old Compaq proprietary systems. They looked cool but getting parts is not easy. So what happened was the power supply died and because it was a BTX power supply, finding one took days. The good news was that NewEgg had one in stock and it was reasonably priced. When a power supply dies in a computer, I am always worried that something else went with it and in this case, I had to reinstall drivers for the USB ports and a few other things but got it up and running. So, as I was looking around the mainboard for any other signs of damage, what I did notice was that some of the capacitors, shiny little silver tube like device all over the computer mainboard, looked like they had burst through the tops. But so far, the computer still works just fine. Now because this was a BTX mainboard, getting a replacement for this computer is not an easy thing to do, and because it is my main work machine, I am worried. Do I have minutes, days, weeks, or months left with this machine? Guess I better make sure the backups are working. Backup Systems The good news is that more and more people are buying those USB personal backup drives for their computers. The bad news is that more and more of them are failing. And worse of all, they still aren’t all that easy to figure out. Not good enough that you have one, you need to go into it every once in a while to make sure it is still working. One thing I found that with USB drives, if you switch the USB port that the drive is using, it sometimes really confuses it and the software will think it isn’t installed. The other thing to do is to go to the drive manufacturer’s website and download the disk diagnostic tools they have and check your drive to make sure it is still working ok. If you are looking to back up your office, then you have many more choices but unfortunately, the waters there get even more murky. I have gone through two network backup storage devices for my own home office from Intel and Iomega and have to say, I am really unhappy with them. I helped a friend install Seagate’s Black Armor unit and that was not much fun either and I do wish I had seen Steve’s comments about it before starting that road but we got it working and hope that nothing goes wrong. The best one I had seen in a long time was the Mirra box that was sold out to Seagate and then discontinued. That was a model of how to do the backups, how to tell if it is working, and how to restore a past version of a document. Wish Seagate hadn’t killed it. So, back to the research windows to see if I can find something that works well, and of course, is very reliable. I expect I will spend a bunch of time at the Consumer Electronics Show looking for something.
Robert Sanborn
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