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Once in a while, a rare while nowadays, I’m called upon to help diagnose a Windows XP PC malware and slow performance problem. Maybe it’s rare because I’ve succeeded educating my friends and family on the Defence Against the Black Arts or it may more likely be that these owners of machines have grown up from Primary school kids to being more adult Secondary school individuals with some amount of discernment.

Usually, the Windows XP PC isn’t the main production / family PC any longer – it’s so cheap now to resolve the issue by going to the mall, buy a new Netbook, not so Netbook or an inexpensive Notebook / Laptop with glitzy screen, bigger hard disk, dual core processor. However, owners of old machines don’t like old machines to go to waste so if they can rope in a nerd to fix up their PC, they will – feast of a Chinese dinner at the Hakka Restaurant with some 2002 Loxton Merlot thrown in.

Moving forward in time, disinfection tools vary – the techniques remain similar, but what is free and available are updated. Enumerating the stages in reverse….

Australia’s Next Generation Broadband topic has been in news and politics for some time. We often see old media TV interviews with man-in-the-street persons. Sometimes these seemingly arbitrarily chosen persons say it won’t affect them in their daily activities, sometimes nominated persons say there will be a revolution in school, business and so on. Paradoxically, with this supersized pipe into the Internet, Australian politicians also want to clamp down on the Internet. Put in family filters. Track which sites you have visited, in a parental and policing way. A lot to shock and awe the layman.

But how backward are you? Does the Internet figure in your life at all? Some people love to take out their Nokia phone circa 2000, with numbers and cosmetics rubbed off and tell the world – “Hah! I love being a Luddite – a phone is for the rare phone call, when I deem it necessary. I don’t need the Internet on my phone”  Are you one of those?

Me? I’m having an off day and reflecting on what I do to enjoy my day. I listen to music – a thing I’ve done for many years, pre-Internet. I shoot photos – an activity much invigorated by the Web of interaction with like minded folk. I watch scraps of Old Media TV but really that’s for when I want to dull my brain and go to sleep, Doc Martin and Masterchef not withstanding.  Old favourites like the cop shows, medical and House dramas – too much of the same  is getting quite, quite disinteresting.

But TED on the Web – if you haven’t woken up to a reaching out of minds, hop on and envision with the thought makers. A nice way to use the Internet speed, bandwidth and quota.

We often talk about backing up our documents (documents, spreadsheets, databases, pictures, movies, songs) about we seldom spare a thought for crunch time – Restoring the file.

With documents, it’s easy. If your document has gone missing or is badly corrupted, you can simply restore from backup or from a copy on the ubiquitous USB Flash Drive. A no brainer, actually.

But what happens when a file is a database or a spreadsheet that keeps multiple tables and has a long running lifespan? It can be the case that you end up with one file having table A intact with table B out of date or missing records, another file, the reverse.

Brings to mind to ask the master of the backup job whether the backup is daily, weekly or monthly. And when the old backup media is recycled. Do you really have 30 single days of backup or just one backup, 30 days old?

If you have 30 single days of backup, how do you restore in such a way that you have 30 separate files (or systems) so that you can do a compare to see which ones are worth merging or keeping.

Think about it and make the contingency plans. Before it’s too late.

Ananda

Recently, we had a forum member enquire about whether Charles was still active on the Blog and the Forum. In this week’s Green Guide (15th July 2010), wily Charles must have lurked and read at the forum because Charles says, “I no longer post” here.

Charles has been very kind to the Web community – he funds this blog and the forum and he has often noted that the forum gives free advice and discussion to those who seek it. We have very valued voluntary administrators who write with a clarity, patience and persistence. For the blog, he has allowed myself, Stephen to blog from time to time and we try to do that when our time allows. I am sure Charles will write once in a while when he has time too.

To all our faithful, thanks for your support and attention. Keep the faith.

Ananda

I’ve had a beta of Microsoft Office 2010 for some time. Microsoft has now released Office 2010 to the MSDN and Technet web distribution channels and subscribers have been able to use the product for a little while.

So, here I am, looking at the 2010 programs and wondering what the thrust of this 2010 Suite will be. Certainly, the 2010 Movie gives us an old chuckle.

But then you have to watch a geek explain the Developer roadmap in another video for the lack of clarity to sink in.

What’s coming through is:

Image via Wikipedia

I facilitate a fair number of public classes as well more private, focussed sessions. One topic that inevitably turns up is “When do I Right Click?”

Sometimes, it’s brought up surreptitiously. Sometimes it’s brought up with some trepidation and a whisper. But sooner or later, there it is.

What can be worse is, if the participant / old friend / colleague looks exasperated and annoyed-like, with puzzlement. When they double click on something, what next happens isn’t what they intend or want. They proceed pin me down.

It takes a while to explain. I try:

• You Right Click to Inspect / View the Properties of an Object – then I have to explain what’s an Object and what are Properties
• You Right Click to take a different action to one that is caused by a Double Click
• Some of my favourite things are on the Right Click menu

The enormity and significance of the Right Click slowly dawns and everyone smiles happily. Until. I get the next question. The next question is:

Stephen gave us the heads up at the forum on Opera 10.50 – I used to get my Opera portables from Kejut.com but said fellow seems to have lost interest in them. I already had an old Opera install, so just downloaded ten point five oh to see what’s new. I’ve been on Google Chrome for some time now, running Firefox whenever I feel guilty or Internet Explorer 8 when I need to.

My thoughts on the new Opera?

How have you'all been? I was away visiting family and friends, came back and am picking up the pieces again. Whilst adding an AUD 5 dollar fan to a friend's Pentium 4 machine, I started reading my first Green Guide for the year. Charles was writing about the notebook market - something I had been mulling over.

I've just picked up an Acer 1810TZ (all those model numbers are piling up in a blur). It's an SU 4100 energy saver dual core light weight machine with longish running time on batteries. But there is so much overlap in price, machine size, generation of cpu, corporate model vs consumer model line, if you haven't established a firm bead on what you want, it's like being a child in a candy store - everything looks yummy and sweet.

A recent broadcast email by a notebook retailer notes that some models are indeed 50% off RRP given that they are Vista/XP without free upgrade to Windows 7. Of course, they may not feature the latest generation of CPU chip but they're competent machines nevertheless since mobile CPU chip trends are towards energy vs performance tradeoffs, not sheer speed championship.

Some month ago, one of the staff in a retail chain noted that notebooks were boring as anything, preferring to discuss digital cameras. Not any more. Not only are there different technical specs and CPUs in different machines, the machines themselves are cosmetically diversifying.

With the Apple iPad entering the fray and possibly Microsoft tablets in three different sizes coming soon after, this should be an interesting year.

I’ve been a little pre-occupied the past few days – and promised myself an end of year hello to our our readers. I am sure Charles and Stephen are ensconced in their respective chairs or even beds and convey similar greetings of cheer. I’m listening to the delectable Eliane Ellias as I write this.

Do have a happy and safe holidays.

Commoncraft is a quite a famous resource for concise, direct and simplified training videos. For example, here is one on Cloud Computing.

In training and education, I find it’s more effective to strip away distractions from side issues and focus on the main topic of delivery. All well and good in the training environment. However, re-purposing such videos to other tasks like reconciling customer expectations, ah, it’s NOT such a good idea. Viewers see it as a negative. As a dumbing down. Guess Westpac has to live and learn.