BRUCEB NEWS
Is Your Computer Slowing Down?
I think our computers are slowing down. I can’t prove it. I don’t have any benchmarks. But I have a long memory of other versions of Windows that slowed down as the years went by. Windows 10 is engineered to prevent that from happening, but I get the same vibe from...
BLACKBERRY MANIA
Blackberry smartphones are mindbogglingly popular. I'm being asked about them more often than iPhones. That shouldn't be a surprise - almost half the smartphones sold in the...
RIPPING DVDS
I've tried to figure out how video works on computers, really I have. Maybe you've tried Vista's Windows Movie Maker, or burned a DVD with Windows Photo Gallery, or found a way...
A TOOL FOR UPGRADE OVERLOAD
I wrote a few months ago about the difficulty of dealing with the endless flood of software updates that is slowly draining our will to live. Microsoft's system of delivering...
WINDOWS LIVE NAMING CONFUSION
Microsoft has done a terrible job of branding things in the last few years. "Microsoft Network" morphed into "MSN," which has at various times been a software package, a...
OUTLOOK 2007 TROUBLESHOOTING
Microsoft has a support document that was updated recently with helpful information to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007. For my clients Outlook 2007 has been...
WINDOWS SEARCH 4.0 – FINAL
Microsoft released Windows Search 4.0 today in final form. It is a free upgrade to the search features built into Windows Vista. It adds indexed searching to Windows XP; this...
ACROBAT ONLINE
Adobe has launched an online suite of software and services, along with announcing the July release of Acrobat 9. It's all interesting but I have a sense of overload already, and...
IE HOME PAGE
The battle for your home page has been raging for years, and it shows no sign of dying down. The home page is the first page that's displayed when you open Internet Explorer. Big...
GETTING RID OF AN IE ANNOYANCE
When I'm online with Internet Explorer, I frequently see this warning before a page is displayed: Some security measures - like Vista's UAC - are momentary pauses for a second...
LITTLE BROTHER
Cory Doctorow is one of the most interesting science fiction authors working today, as well as an editor and frequent contributor to Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs in...
FLASH PLAYER SECURITY WARNING
Adobe Flash Player is installed as an add-on to Internet Explorer on almost everyone's computer. It's become the ubiquitous way to display online videos from YouTube and all the...
AT&T DSL & MAIL WOES
AT&T has a special place in my heart. One of my clients is a small business with its own domain name and several users receiving POP3 mail addressed to that domain name -...
VISTA vs. XP
I'm starting to get annoyed when I sit down at a Windows XP computer because it's missing so many things that I take for granted in Vista. I just reformatted a hard drive and...
DELL LAPTOPS & POWER MANAGEMENT
On a Dell laptop, it is crucial to DISABLE one "power-saving" feature guaranteed to drive you mad. In Vista's "Power Options" panel, the bottom item on the left is "Dell Internal...
VISTA POWER MANAGEMENT
Vista is very smart about power management! Use the default settings, you might be pleasantly surprised. As always, the goal is to make a computer more like other appliances -...