Keep Your Internet Email Safe
More and more people are having their Facebook, or Email account hacked recently. I use a few weak passwords myself, but I know many people who use pathetically weak passwords and I think it is well past time to strongly encourage everyone to strengthen their passwords.
“Why,” you say, “would anyone want to get into my email?” Well, its not for the latest political rant, the reward for helping a Nigerian Man collect his family fortune or a new place to buy pharmaceuticals. Access to your email means access to your personal information, gives a spammer the ability to send spam to all of your contacts, and often people store personal passwords for banking or other personal information in their email and or contacts.
Brian Haines recommends Windows 7
I knew we would all move to Windows 7 eventually, but I didn’t know that I would be this happy about it. Really.
Not only has Windows 7 performed well on my 2 year old laptop with only 2GB of RAM, I have enjoyed using it and find that some of the new features are welcomed improvements.
I was very critical of Windows Vista because of the very poor performance, more than glitches and bugs, of which there were some. The vast majority of computers that were sold with Windows Vista performed horridly mainly because they lacked the memory capacity needed to run the operating system effectively. Computers like my HP Pavilion dv6000 came with the memory maxed out at 2GB, but even those with 3GB or 4GB were barely able to run Vista and still have enough memory to run larger applications like Photoshop, and forget it if you needed to run more than a few applications at a time.
Internet Explorer is really slow
Internet Explorer 8 is really slow on Windows 7. Microsoft is aware of the issue and blames it on add-ons. I’m sorry, but it is your browser that allows the add-ons in the first place. Firefox seems to work fine even with dozens of add-ons. My installation has Java and Flash only and it is still slow enough that I don’t feel I can use it.
Windows 7 forgets more than you know
There is an expression you may be familiar with that goes something like ”I have forgotten more about <insert subject> than you will ever know.” I am sure I heard it in a movie or something. Well, it might be true of Windows 7, at least for now.
I have been running 7 for several days now and these are things I had to setup more than once:
- Network Printer
- Wireless Internet Connection
- Internet Explorer 8 Setup
These are things that usually only have to be setup once and then Windows just remembers the settings and allows you so connect to the Internet, surf with IE and print when needed. I don’t know of another version of Windows that didn’t remember the settings like Windows 7.
Windows 7, Day 1
If you have been paying attention to my blog then you know I don’t recommend Windows 7. I am sure it is an improvement over Vista, but I also suspect it still won’t perform as well as Windows XP.
If you know me at all you also know that I had to try it. So here goes… I loaded Windows 7 Professional on my Laptop today and am in the midst of loading all my software and files etc…
Here is the preliminary boot after some updates – basically fresh after install.
Once I have everything I need running on my laptop again then I will report on my experience and let you know how it performed. Since Windows XP is still loaded on my other drive I can always compare.
Brian Haines recommends Windows XP
I have always been an early adopter of new Microsoft Operating Systems (OS) including Windows Vista. With Windows Millennium (Me) being the obvious exception each OS prior to Vista has been an improvement over the last. I was an early Windows 2000 convert, so I never had to use Windows Me, and Windows 2000 was a major improvement over Windows 98 and Windows Me. Windows XP even better and then Vista, not so much.
I finally removed Windows Vista from my desktop computer and reverted to Windows XP. I would ordinarily suffer through the temporary troubles until Microsoft released updates that cured it’s ails. The main reason for removing Windows Vista was simply poor performance. Oh, I had issues, like always having to print twice to get one print, and not being able to print 100 pages, but rather have to send 100 individual pages to the queue – very frustrating! All-in-all though I expected those issues to get resolved, and they did. Vista is simply slow. Much slower than XP on the same hardware and with no major improvement to make the slower system worth it.
