Category: Software

Additional software and regular upgrades will keep your system working smoothly.

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Windows 8® Causing Headaches?

windows8-headachesThe following article was originally published in the Danville Advocate’s “Meet the Merchants” insert in July, 2013:

Were you initially excited to get your geekware home and start exploring your cool, new operating system? Did you find yourself confused, dismayed, and unable to access your basic programs within 15 minutes of turning it on the first time? Welcome to the wonderful world of Windows 8®. But, don’t worry, the Danville Computer Doc can help!

What’s WRONG With It?

Fortunately, your computer isn’t sick — but it HAS been “genetically modified.” Like a hybrid strain of corn, it’s edible –but it doesn’t taste as good as the original. The good news? You can improve it — just like adding a little salt and butter to that GMO ear of corn — a little effort can make Windows 8® more palatable.

Where the HECK is My Start Button?

You probably asked this question 30-seconds after booting up the first time. This new interface is designed for touch- screen devices. If your new computer doesn’t have a touch-screen, you may begin to feel the pain of these new changes immediately.

Give It BACK!

Get out in front of this headache and give yourself some relief — in the form of a start button replacement. There are several options, but Danville’s Computer Doc uses open-source solutions whenever possible. He recommends Classic Shell™ available at www.classicshell.net and is free for both personal and commercial use. This program immediately puts the familiar start button back where it belongs, allowing you to access your programs, folders, and power options just like you always have and allows you to choose the start menu you prefer: Classic, Windows XP® or Windows 7®.

But I Don’t WANT To Go Metro!

You may like the “apps” style layout of may not. You may want to avoid stand-alone programs. You may want to the new Windows, called “Metro” — you find your way back to your classic desktop. Classic Shell™ also allows you to boot straight to the familiar windows desktop, avoiding the new Windows 8® Metro user interface altogether.

Is Microsoft Going to FIX This?

Microsoft has publicly admitted their failure with users and will restore the start button and other features in version 8.1. You can preview this release by visiting: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/preview. Please keep in mind that this version is still in beta (testing phase). The final release will arrive later this fall.

DanvilleComputerDoc recommends you try Classic Shell™ until the final release arrives. If you are feeling adventurous, try the current version, but unless you like beta-testing with your data, waiting may avoid additional headaches.

-DanvilleComputerDoc

If you have questions about your new operating system, or need some help upgrading, repairing or learning more about your existing computer, tablet, or smartphone, call DanvilleComputerDoc.com at 859-755-4344 for immediate access to top-rated “Healthcare for Geekware!”

Microsoft Camera Codec Pack

FINALLY!!!! The day has finally arrived!!!! All you Canon users that shoot raw format and use windows 64 bit OS, rejoice! Microsoft has finally released a codec pack that will enable you to view canon raw and some others in windows explorer!!!

Get the file here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26829

Sugar Sync

Sugar sync is a new web-based file repository and sharing service. Files are stored in the cloud and you get 5gb of storage space for free. Files can be shared with others. You can download a desktop application and/or a mobile app and automatically keep files and folders of your choice, in-sync with your files on Sugar Sync. Takes your files with you and access them from the web, on your phone, or on your pc. I suggest giving it a try if you need web-based storage or your files and folders. It is a new service but seems to have tighter security and sharing options than the dropbox service.

–Danville Computer Doc

Internet Explorer 9 final release

Having reviewed the beta release of IE9, I was pleasantly surprised with its performance even though there were some glitches, but it was beta, so all was forgiven. Now after having used the final release, I can say positively, that you should stay as far away from IE9 as possible. It will slow your computer, crash your computer , steal memory from other applications and generally provide terrible performance on even the fastest computers.

Fortunately you can go into windows control panel and uninstall IE9 and roll back to IE8, which while far from perfect, is a much more stable browser and will provide a much more trouble free browsing experience.

Get firefox or google Chrome. You will be much happier!

Internet out of IPv4 Address Space

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/020111-ipv4-apnic.html

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned two of the remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses – each containing 16.7 million addresses – to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) on Tuesday, as predicted.
This action sparks an immediate distribution of the remaining five blocks of IPv4 address space, with one block going to each of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR).
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The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IPv4 addresses to carriers and other network operators in North America, is expected to receive its last allotment of IPv4 addresses today.
Experts say it will take anywhere from three to seven months for the registries to distribute the remaining IPv4 addresses to carriers.
Once the registries hand out all of the IPv4 addresses, network operators must either deploy complex, expensive network address translation technologies to share IPv4 addresses among multiple users or adopt the next-generation of the Internet Protocol called IPv6.
PANIC TIME QUIZ: How prepared are you for IPv6?
The IANA distributions of IPv4 addresses hit a bulls-eye mark on predictions that Internet experts made that the free pool of IPv4 addresses would exhaust on Feb. 1, 2011.
Internet policymakers said they will host a press conference on Thursday to discuss the depletion of the IPv4 address space and what it means for future growth of the Internet.
The press conference, which will be held in Miami, will feature speakers from IANA, an umbrella group of the RIRs known as the Number Resource Organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Society.
Now that IPv4 addresses are gone, Internet policymakers will be ratcheting up the pressure on network operators to migrate quickly to IPv6.
COMPARISON: IPv4 vs. IPv6
Created 30 years ago, IPv4 has a 32-bit addressing scheme and can support approximately 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. The Internet engineering community has known for a decade that IPv4 addresses would eventually run out, and so they created IPv6 as an upgrade to IPv4.
IPv6 features a 128-bit addressing scheme and can support vastly more devices — 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 also includes built-in security with IPsec and easier management through autoconfiguration of devices.

Best to skip wordpress 3.1 release for now.

From WordPress administration, it is better to skip release candidate 3.1 for now, many bugs were implemented and the changes have been rolled back, it you installed it already, you might want to return to a previous backup of your site.

–Danville Computer Doc

WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 3 is now available. After careful evaluation of the 3.1 features in RC2, we recognized the need to make some adjustments. There are some significant differences from previous versions of 3.1, so please review the changes if you have been developing against a beta or RC version.

The biggest change is the removal of AJAX list tables, which had been an effort to move all of our list-style screens to full AJAX for pagination, searches, and column sorts, and to consolidate the list-style screens into a single API that plugins could leverage. Unfortunately, with more testing came realizations that there were too many major bugs and usability issues with how the functionality was implemented, so we’ve spent the last week rolling back the most important portions of the feature.

  • For users: AJAX has been entirely disabled for the list tables. We hope to bring this back again, in a form that is properly and fully implemented, in a future release. Column sorting remains, but everything else has returned to its 3.0 state.
  • For developers: The entire list table API is now marked private. If you attempt to leverage new components of the API, you are pretty much guaranteeing that your plugins will break in a future release, so please don’t do that. :-) We hope to enable all the fun new goodies for public use in a future release.

This is the only way we could prevent any regressions in functionality and usability from WordPress 3.0 to 3.1. That’s right, users and plugin authors can still do everything you used to be able to do (and a little bit more).

Because of the code churn between RC2 and RC3, this release candidate needs a lot of testing. Every list screen needs testing. In particular, the comment moderation screen needs testing, especially with keyboard shortcuts (if you didn’t know about those, now’s your chance to try them out).

Other fixes in RC3 include:

  • Properly display the author dropdown in Quick Edit
  • Various important fixes to numerous taxonomy query variables
  • Fixes to the theme deletion process
  • Fixes to pages used for posts
  • IIS and Multisite: Avoid resetting web.config on permalink save
  • Properly validate post formats and their rewrite rules

Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Run, don’t walk and download the beta version of internet explorer 9! I have been a hater of ie for many years, but I have to admit this version rocks! HTML5 support, CSS3 compliant, hardware rendering of 2d html pages, super clean interface, super fast page renderings… Go get it and see for yourself, you won’t be disappointed.
Oh yeah, and tabbed browsing!!!!!!
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

— Danville Computer Doc

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