Microsoft makes it easier to "fix it"

One of the ironies of the internet is that one of the worst-designed websites is Microsoft's. Trying to find anything there is not easy. And it often assumes a fairly high technical knowledge, for instance when you visit the Knowledge Base section, which is a repository of sometimes helpful information regarding common hardware and software problems, if you can work out what it says. Recognising this, Microsoft has created the Fix It Solution Center, which is home to over 100 automated problem-solvers. Instead of manually attempting to follow the Knowledge Base instructions for a given issue ("download patch A, reformat drive B, stand on head C," etc.), you can sit back and let a Fix-It fix it for you. The tools are divided into eight categories, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, and Outlook/Outlook Express. Just mouse over any of them to see the available choices, then click the one you want for a full description. If it sounds like your problem, scroll down a bit until you find the Fix It button. A wizard will take you the rest of the way. How well does it work? Let's put it this way: There's already a Fix It for broken Fix-Its.

Free websites

A small sports club of which I am a committee member wants a club website, but has no spare cash to pay for one. Fortunately, there are many options available.
For instance, a very good service is provided by Tripod, and I actually operate two sites using them. (If you like romantic stories, you can visit one of them here.) A similar service is offered by Yahoo via its Geocities project. In each case, the site will automatically place adverts on your pages, but you can specify within certain limits what kind of adverts you would prefer (or not, as the case may be). Apart from the advertising, two downsides are that to build satisfactory pages, you really need some knowledge of web authoring, and there is not much scope for others to contribute to the site.
A club website really needs to have the ability for people to interact, which led me to look at what are called Wikis, Wikipedia being the best-known example. I have settled on Wetpaint as the system for our club site. It was very easy to set up (you can choose from a range of templates for the design), the web address has our club name first, and there is lots of flexibility to add material. Of several systems I checked out, Wetpaint came out on top for ease of set-up and general user-friendliness. You can set up a site literally in minutes, with absolutely no knowledge of html or web authoring.
Google also offers a website option, called Google Sites, but although I looked at this, I decided it was not flexible enough, and too limited.

Hackers 4, YouTube 0

The hackers are managing to keep ahead of YouTube, despite its attempts to block visitors from downloading videos to their hard drives. (Why YouTube should want to block the downloads, I can't fathom. It presumably can't be to protect advertising, because the pages containing the videos don't carry advertising. And it can't be to protect copyright, because YouTube doesn't own the copyright anyway.) Anyway, I noticed yesterday that my previous incarnation of the Firefox extension DownloadHelper was no longer working. Mild panic, until I downloaded the latest version, 4.3, and all is back in action again. When will YouTube wake up that this is a futile battle it can't win.

Optical Character Reading (OCR)

I have a rather large document that I wanted to send to a North Island colleague. As it is many years old, and I had no electronic version of it, I had to photocopy and post. Unfortunately, the envelope has vanished into the bowels of NZ Post, and is yet to emerge nearly two weeks later. With a deadline rapidly approaching, my solution was to turn to Optical Character Reading, which turns a scan of a page into editable text. I found a freeware OCR progam at simpleocr.com, and while it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some of the more sophisticated paid programs, it has done the job fine, with a high accuracy rate on the text conversion. It's biggest deficiency was being unable to handle tables or multiple columns, but as there were few of those in my document, it was no big deal to just retype them.

160gb Flash drive

My son-in-law has ordered a 160gb (that's gigabytes, not megabytes) flash drive, which he claims he can get for around $90. That's bigger than the hard drive in my two-year-old computer. I have yet to see the item, but if it's what he claims, it could solve my back-up problems. I did a back-up of just the data on my computer this week, and it took six DVDs to hold it all. It makes one reluctant to backup too frequently, which is a Bad Thing. From what I can read, no-one is too sure of the life-span of a flash drive, but it's probably no worse than your average hard drive. The two biggest dangers are damaging the pins, and losing the small device. But the latter is also a plus, as a small device is much easier to hide from thieving eyes.

Disk defragging causes slowdown

Rick Broida of PC World started having problems with unexplained slowdowns of his computer. Eventually he nailed it to the disk defragging feature of Vista. This really helpful article explains what's going on and what to do.

AVG blues

A computer tech friend tells me that recent updates of the anti-virus program AVG are causing some computers to crash, or restart unexpectedly. I can vouch that it is true because it's happened to me (I use AVG on my work computer, but not at home.) There are two solutions: Use the Windows System Restore feature to roll your operating system back to a date before the last automatic update of AVG, or uninstall the program completely. I am going to opt for the latter, as there are plenty of alternatives to protect against viruses, and every update of AVG chews up even more system resources than the previous, it is becoming so bloated.

The missing week

I was unexpectedly called out of town for all of last week, which means that with the Easter break there have been no posts for 10 days or so. Now that I am back at the desk, normal service should resume forthwith. Apologies if you came looking and nothing was happening.