Show Notes:
Why did the schedule change?
Regular listeners may notice that for the past several months we have been taking calls on the second Thursday of each month. This month we made a change and took calls on Monday, October 9th. We are going to swap around the schedule a bit now until the end of the year and then we will have a new schedule in January. The dates of the live technology call-in segment for the 2006 are:
- November 20
- December 14
- and possibly December 20.
Sometime soon I will post the new (and I think improved) regular schedule for 2007.
Windows Vista RC2 released!
Release Candidate 2 is out for Windows. We mentioned it on the show. The bad news is that by the time we hit the air you could no longer download it . You can still download Release Candidate 1, however.
First call - Mary wants to upgrade the security on her computer
Here is the recipe we offered her for getting her machine up to date:
- Go to Windows Update and get all of the updates for your Windows XP.
- We suggested Windows Defender as a spyware defense although she may want to continue to use Spybot Search and Destroy and supplement it with Lavasoft's Ad Aware.
- We went with the free crowd and recommended AVG as a free anti-virus solution if she chooses not to update her McAfee anti-virus software.
Alice wants to know how to keep her teenager from accessing naughty websites.
- We recommended SafeKids.com as a place for some family guidelines. We like the idea of the family guidelines offered on the website.
- I briefly mentioned Net Nanny as a solution for making web surfing safe, but nothing will stop a really enterprising teenager so the guidelines seem like a better solution.
Abby has a slow computer. She may be doubling up on her anti-virus.
- We suggest she stay the course for the moment with her Norton and make sure she isn't running more than one real time monitoring program. A good way to check for this is to look in the system tray for scanning software.
- While we didn't mention it, she may be ready for a re-install. It is a pain in the neck, but it is amazing how much faster your computer will run after a good cleaning and re-install. The real check is to make sure you don't re-install stuff you don't need.
- Eric says "defrag your hard drive!"
Claudia has more than one computer, but only one monitor, keyboard and mouse.
- She needs a KVM (Keyboard, Video, and Mouse) switch .
- She also asked about a printer switch, but we suggested either using a USB hub with parallel ports or that she networks her computer and then attach one printer to each of her two computers and allow the networking to give her access to the printers as she needs them.
- It turns out that she is running Windows 98 so we went back to a USB parallel converter solution that we know Belkin offers. .
Bruce lost his AOL sign-on.
- Bruce called us on a speaker-phone. That doesn't really work -- especially if you leave your radio on. We'd advise against calling us on a speaker phone.
- Since Bruce hung up on himself (really, we didn't do it.) We suggested he re-install the AOL dialer software.
Carrol called us on a really bad cell phone connection. His Javascript doesn't work.
- We suggested that he check his settings in Internet Explorer, but as he continued laying out his problem it turned out that his IE was probably broken. We also suggested that he use FireFox as a test case to see if they work inside Firefox when IE is crashing.
- Carroll's cell phone transmission got better during the call...
Jaime wants to know which drive should be the master.
- He asked when we are next on the air -- We gave him the wrong answer. We are next on the air on November 20, 2006.
- If we were building a computer and had two drives, we would always choose the fastest performing drive to be the master and therefore the boot drive. The operating system uses the hard drive a lot, so giving it the fastest drive will deliver the best overall performance for your computer.
- We also advised Jaime to not change the settings
Through the magic of editing, the above includes bonus calls that didn't actually make the air. If you were listening closely, you'll notice that there is a bit of music in the middle of Claudia's call. The first part of her call was on the air the last half we took off the air. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next month (or maybe before...)
Tags: podcast, radio, WEPR, Microsoft, Vista
