RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

I started today in a coffee and computer-induced massive ADD state. One item led me to a side-trip, which led me to another side trip and another… until I had lost sight of what I started out to do first. Once I awoke  from my ADD coma, three and half hours later, I pondered if this is the natural state of modern Homo sapiens, which is only going to get worse as technology expands its reach into every facet of our lives.

I may be more at risk to this disease than most because I am a technology generalist, pulled at every moment in several different directions in an attempt to keep up. A sample inventory:

I support all different types of computer systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2003, Windows Home Server,  Mac OS X, both Tiger and Leopard client versions, Mac OS X Leopard Server, Linux. And Windows 7 is soon to be released.

I need to keep up on networking and the various vendors’ equipment. These vendors have names like Linksys from Cisco, D-Link, Netgear, TRENDnet, Apple, and Belkin. Each vendor implements the same general networking protocols and features similarly but not identically.

I need to know all different forms of standard desktop applications, e.g. Word XP, Word 2003, Word 2007, and the Mac versions Word 2004 and 2008. Similarly, I need to know this for Excel and PowerPoint. On the Mac, I need to understand iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, iWeb, Keynote, Pages and Numbers. I need to keep up my web development skills in both Dreamweaver and RapidWeaver (Mac only). Beyond this is the need to know what is happening with web developments and services.

If I did not enjoy technology this would be an impossible task. It may be anyway.

The main point of the above is to highlight those things that induce my daily ADD. I am certain you have your own list. Perhaps the change in the news cycle from once or twice a day—the morning newspaper and the evening TV news—to the Internet’s constant and overwhelming news stream. Add to this the distraction of Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging and it is no wonder that we are distracted.

Is this necessary? I should consider this question further but I have other things I need to attend to now!

This past week UPS delivered both machines, first the Eee PC and then two days later the Kindle 2. Both are extremely well designed.

The 1000HE has been stellar in its initial paces. It is a netbook, weighs a bit over 3 lbs, and has a very usable keyboard and screen. The default operating system is Windows XP Home. I have temporarily replaced this with Windows 7 Ultimate beta build 7000. I am both pleased and surprised by how well the combination of the 1000HE and W7 perform, beyond my expectations. I had some trouble getting W7 to install working drivers for the built-in Bluetooth capability. Perseverance won the day and now every hardware device works under W7. I was also surprised that W7’s Aero interface works on this lightweight a machine with a low-end video chip. Battery life is between 6 and 9 hours depending upon what applications are in use. As you would expect, playing audio runs the battery down faster than surfing the web.

 I now intend to take this machine, as configured, with me when I leave the office, replacing my MacBook Pro. BTW, the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE cost $374 at Amazon.com

The Kindle 2 is also a surprise. I did not like the original Kindle and returned it to Amazon within a week or two (see Amazon’s Kindle a device I wanted to love). It was more like a proto-type than a usable reader. The Kindle 2 changes my opinion. It is a well-designed, functional text reader and audio device. The wireless integration with Amazon.com makes this device like having a bookstore in your hand. Surprisingly, it works very well with Audible books, unlike my BlackBerry. Its text-to-speech feature is also a winner.

The form factor is a big improvement over the original Kindle. The screen is easy to read. The buttons are well laid out and quickly become “intuitive”, by which I mean you remember which button to push without thinking about it.

If you buy the Kindle for yourself, it arrives setup for you with your Amazon.com account. This means you can instantly shop the Amazon Kindle bookstore and spend money. It is money well spent. If it you receive it as a gift, and it makes a nice gift, the donee needs to go through setup.

A Kindle 2 negative is that the rechargeable battery is not user replaceable. When it needs to be changed the device must be sent back to Amazon.

[Update: 2009-03-14] Battery life is poor if the wireless is turned on and there is no quick way I know of to turn on/off the wireless. I have to click the Menu button, navigate to the Turn Wireless On/Off menu item, press the joy stick and then click the Menu button again. This is poor design. A keyboard shortcut would be welcomed.

I had a brief education in Cablevision’s Optimium Boost service issues yesterday from a Cablevision tech support person, Kimball, who was checking out my buried cable. The cable needs to be replaced but that won’t happen until the spring when the ground is not frozen.

I am a Boost subscriber. Optimum Boost is a high speed service that ramps download speeds up to 30Mbs and uploads to 5+Mbs.

Kimball said that a continuing issue they have with Boost is that some subscriber’s setup can back feed into the system and disrupt their neighbors’ service. He said this was not uncommon and they need to fix it one-by-one because they first have to identify the “offending” subscriber and change the equipment.

I know of a few Optonline customers who experienced an outage yesterday in Norwalk, Westport and south Weston. My own outage was due to Kimball disconnecting my service to test the buried line and not connected to system-wide problems. However, last night I was having lots of troubles with connection so I turned off the computers and read on my new Kindle 2 which UPS had delivered earlier in the day.

I am liking the new Kindle because it fixes the issues that turned me off to the original.

Today, Optonline Boost seems to be back to its wonderful, fast self.

This note was composed on the 1000HE.

The PC/netbook is small, light weight and quite usable. It has Windows XP Home installed by default.

Setup is straightforward, like setting up any typical XP machine.

The hard drive (~150GB) was divided into 4 partitions

• C drive about 85GB
• D drive about 60GB
• Hidden partitions of about 5GB and something less than 40MB.

Will be upgrading the 1GB memory to 2GB tomorrow but the machine is quite perky as configured.

The keyboard is surprising good, especially compared to older Eee models. I have no trouble typing other than my normal keyboard problems brought about by typing on 5 to 10 different keyboards a day.

I installed:

• Avast Home free anti-virus
• Windows Defender
• Windows XP updates
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and updates
• Firefox (Adblock Plus, Foxmarks, Delicious Bookmarks, Toolbar Buttons, Textarea Cache, and IE Tab)
• Dropbox
• Windows Live Mesh
• Windows Live Sync
• Logmein
• Acronis True Image Home 11
• Acronis Disk Director Suite 10

I cleaned up and accessorized the All Programs menus

Deleted the D drive partition and re-sized the C drive to ~145GB.

Successfully tested attaching a DVD player via a USB connection (do not know if I can boot from it – will test this tomorrow) [Edit - yes it does boot from the USB connected DVD]
The screen is great except that the native resolution is 1024×600 so it has a wide screen that is a bit short (1.71 vs a standard 1.6 widescreen ratio) Office 2007 applications with their excessively large Ribbons look awful. This screen highlights the foolishness of the Ribbon.

Still have to test the SD card reader, camera, microphone, battery life and then the fun begins—

I will test Vista and Windows 7 and I am toying with testing a Hackintosh installation.

I have to broadcast the Weston Board of Education meeting tonight and plan on taking this little netbook with me to see how it does away from home and only on the battery.

A constant of technology is that it always changes. You need not try every “innovation”, that’s my job! But you should keep abreast of significant trends. The migration from Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) to other browsers is a significant and ongoing change. Two years ago IE accounted for 80% of the market. Today it has about 67% and its share is sinking. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox are gaining share daily.

Firefox works on all personal computers—Windows, Mac and Linux. It has over 21% of the total market today and this share is growing. This is significant in absolute numbers and because users, other than on Linux computers, have to download, install and learn to use it. Mozilla’s market share is actually much larger than 21% if one takes into account that probably one-half of the computers in use are attached to corporate and government domains. In these locations, the system administrators lock the machines and do not let users install applications. Sysadmins are conservative by nature, for good reason. If is not broken they will not fix it. Changing from IE to Firefox is a substantial commitment for a sysadmin who has other demands on his limited time. If we eliminate these computers from our calculation, Firefox’s adjusted market share is between 40-50% where a user has a choice.

Safari, with about a 9% share, comes standard with Macs. It is understandable that Safari’s share has risen, since Apple’s share of computer sales has been growing. Many users use the applications that come with their machines. Windows users are likely to use IE and Mac users are likely to use Safari. Safari is available for Windows but is little used.

Firefox is my browser of choice because it has thousands of free add-ons, AKA extensions, which allow you to customize the browser to the way you want. This open-source community of add-on developers is a big reason why Firefox will continue to make IE and Safari second choice browsers for those in the know.

My favorite extensions are Adblock Plus, IE Tab (Windows only), Toolbar Buttons, Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer, and Delicious Bookmarks.

Adblock Plus stops distracting banner advertisement images from downloading and displaying on your computer. This enhances your view of web pages and speeds up their display. There is a filter set you can subscribe to, which keeps the Adblock Plus database up-to-date. This is automatically shown to you after you install Adblock Plus.

IE Tab lets you switch the underlying browser engine for a web page on Windows machines from Firefox to IE. This means you do not have to open Internet Explorer to view those few non-standard web pages that are improperly coded to display on anything besides IE.

Toolbar Buttons adds buttons that a user can add to Firefox’s toolbar. I add the three zoom-related buttons to my installations so that I can zoom in, out or reset my page display with a single click. Firefox is smart about zooming. It remembers the last setting for a page when you return to it.

Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer is useful if you use more than one computer as many of us do. Foxmarks works in the background to keep your bookmarks and, optionally, your passwords both backed up and synchronized.

Delicious Bookmarks integrates Yahoo’s Delicious web site service with Firefox. Delicious lets you keep your bookmarks in the cloud so that you can access them from any operating system or computer. Delicious Bookmarks lets you quickly bookmark a page to the Delicious server.

I also change the Firefox Tools > Options… > Tabs menu to: Always show the tab bar and When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately. I recommend selecting the Options Advanced tab Search for text when I start typing feature. This allows you to quickly find text or hyperlinks in a web page.