Tag Archives: Windows 7

June 28, 2012 · 8:41 pm

Customer Service Star- Microsoft of all companies…

Spent last Wednesday night at the Microsoft Store getting some one on one training on One Note, Microsoft’s super sweet note taking software that I fine extraordinarily useful. I bought the extended support package when I bought the PC and I’ve been saving up my questions so I could make the most out of the hour of one on one consulting I had.

Stupid me. More on that later.

On arriving at the store I was greeted at the front door and escorted back to where they do the training. As the greeter dropped me off he offered me a bottle of cold water, nice touch. My trainer, an older lady, Pat, was a fantastic. Pat was informative, a little funny and very personable, and after an hour I’d learned a ton OneNote and some cool stuff about how to better use SkyDrive, their webserver that I’ve been trying to use to manage documents for the Lodge.

I also came away with OneNote and SkyDrive apps on my iPhone meaning all my work on the PC is synced with the phone and visa versa. Worth my hour RIGHT THERE.

And, when the hour was up I felt pretty good . Well worth the time. N0w, I didn’t quite get through all the things on my list but you know, goes like that sometimes.

As I was packing up Pat said to me “So, we’ll see you next week.”

“Next week?” Well turns out I didn’t read the small print on my purchase agreement. As it turns out I get an hour a week of one one support, for 52 weeks.

While that’s waaay more than I’ll need I already have a short list of things I want some help with, Access work, some advanced PowerPoint stuff.. things I use every day. I’d also like to finally have someone help me with Publisher.

After the hour Pat handed me three 4 books for my reference, OneNote, Windows 7, PowerPoint and Explorer/SkyDrive. And these weren’t crappy pamphlets, these were the Microsoft Press full on books I’d pay $30.00 for at Barnes and Nobel.

Finally I booked my next appointment, she tool some notes about what I wanted to talk about and the appointment was on my iPhone via email before I got to my car.

For a company that used to be the evil face of Computing, they’ve sure turned things around. This whole experience, from start to finish was outstand. They’d planned the experience, made me feel great about my time and I left that much more of loyal Microsoft customer. A feeling not lost on me as I walked past the Apple Store, packed to the gills with people lining up for proprietary expense hardware solutions.

Well done Microsoft Store!

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April 17, 2010 · 7:30 pm

Mac v. PC- A Dumbasses Assessment

I’m not expert on computers, I’m not even all that smart, but I have used both now and I have some thoughts. Enjoy

OK, the advantage that Windows Live Writer, and the Publish button on MS Word for Windows are a serious advantage for the blogger over the Mac. Ironic because you’d think that Apple would be all over this as blogging sort off  feels like a big Apple thing. You know, all that free expression and all. I’m also going to call Windows LIve Writer, which is free BTW, the best piece of software a blogger could own. It’s that good.

Fact is, now that I’m using both, Windows at work and some at home, like when I need to actually do work, and a Mac for personal stuff, writing, photo management etc. I feel like I can offer an opinion. Remember, I’m just a dumb user.

For the total package; mail, calendar, etc, Mac wins hands down. All the creature comfort sort of stuff seems to just work. On the windows machine Outlook is a graet program, and you can get a version, Entorage, works for the Mac.. but it does have a nasty habit of corrupting your mail files over time. At least it’s done it us twice.

For an office suite- if you like to write letters to Grandma, make slick brochures and share pics of the kids, Mac wins. iWork is a decent enough application. Word for Mac is excellent too and a natural for Office users. If you want to create spreadsheets, look at data, report results, make a presentation to a group, Windows. Excel, Visio and yes, even Access are killer aps that have no equal on the Mac. Even Excel for the Mac, is more about making pretty pictures than actually crunching data. To make it worse for Mac..

I’m hearing rumors about a re-launch of the Office Suite this year that’s going to be a game changer.  Something about Excel being able to handle massive tables, and pivot table functionality that will make Access unnecessary, all heard under breath. Now this all rumor from trade rags and whispers. 

Still for today, Windows Office suite still wins and Visio and Access, not being available for the Mac limit the business productivity for the platform.

Making media.. between Movie Maker and Garage Band the Mac platform dominates this space. This is, after all the Apple Sweet Spot. I’ve messed with Windows Live Movie Maker and not found it very easy to use. Matter of fact, it’s sort of temperamental about file format and this alone makes it clugey.

Windows Live Photo- excellent. Apples iPhoto from the iLife pack is pretty slick, and can directly update Facebook and Flickr, nice feature, but lacks the ability to do wholesale album updates. Unless, of course you want to pay $100.00 a year for MobileMe. MobileMe is another posting probably, bottom line, don’t. Even the Apple biased bloggers pan it for it’s cost and lack of function. At least lack of good function that can get elsewhere.

Lastly, networking and peripherals. Here I have to hand to Apple. Now I hand it to them as long as you play in the sand box that Steve Jobs has created. If you do, the rewards my children and considerable. Turn on the machine and it prints from the printer attached to the other Mac. Hook up the iPod, instant success. On the Windows iTunes has had issues and syncing.. works most of the time, but every once in while I’d get what I would term a “bad sync” and we’d be rebuild libraries for the next three days. This may come on the Mac too, but I don’t think so. The “handshake” between the devices is much slicker than it’s been in the past.

So what would I recommend if you were to ask me? Frankly, it’s a harder question today than I think it’s ever been. The lines between Mac and PC aren’t nearly as hard as they were at one time. PC’s are much better at doing the creative stuff these days, picture editing.. heck there’s even better free programs to do it. Picassa for example.

And while the work thing is still a Windows win.. it feels like, with the Office for Mac that the gap here is closing. So what’s a dude to do? For a PC to use at home, and if you have family members sharing the computer and enjoy movies and music, editing etc.. Mac. No question. easy to use and stable.

If you blog, look at data, do number crunching or write a lot.. PC. No question. Windows 7 is everything that they promised us Vista would be.. and more. Slick interface, stable as can be, works. One thing to keep in mind, the you can get a PC that does a ton of stuff much cheaper, but when you look at the specs of the machine, you can’t compare a $500.00 laptop and a $1,000 MacBook, the MacBook is a better machine, better processor, and better hardware. That being said, the day when you only spent more for the Mac of ease of use, not so much. Now it’s much more of a personal preference decision. 

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March 21, 2010 · 2:44 pm

Coffee Talk

Once again, Sunday morning finds me at the coffee shop where, with some free time to sit and think, I have some things I want to share.

Microsoft- I’ve got a love/hate thing going with Microsoft. I have a love/hate thing going with most everything in my life to be honest. Here’s the dilemma. I’m still searching for the perfect site for email, calendar etc. Google has a great calendar, but their email interface sucks. Yahoo has the great interface for email, but calendar is worthless. Microsoft gets better and better and I like hotmail on the PC.. on the phone however.. terrible.

Windows Live Writer, my single most favorite application bar none. At least based on usage. The ability to type away, add photos, do what ever, and then just hit that magic “publish” button.  Useful beyond expectations. Oh, and having a publish button in Word.. goes straight to the blog.. again, home run.

Finally, and this ends my Microsoft lovefest, Windows 7. I bitched incessantly about the experience I had upgrading to 7, and it was painful, I’m not going to lie. However..  What I realized recently, my computer hasn’t crashed in like 3 months, or roughly about the time I upgraded. Funny how you don’t think much about stuff when it just works.

Rioting in the streets?

The Neighbors broke out of the house rioting last night. Those Northern Iowa fans are CRAZYYY.. We have a few neighbors who are grads. They came streaming out of their houses, high fived each other and got in their cars and went to Target. They’re nothing if not practical those Ioweegians.

So far this weekend I was able to squeeze in about 12 hours of hoops on TV. Mrs S, not so excited about all that.  She goes a little meshuga when she sees me doing nothing. Double standard frankly but I’ll keep that to myself. But that first weekend of the NCAA’s could be one of my favorite weekends of the year.

Pet Sitting

We’re sitting a neighbors dog while they’re away in Europe this week. This beast is 6lb Chihuahua. I’ve never really about dogs like this. Actually I’m not entirely sure that this thing is a dog. I’m afraid I’m going to break it somehow. I’m also concerned that it’s little legs are going to atrophy because it doesn’t walk anywhere. It gets carried where ever it wants to go.

My daughter loves this thing. She’s got it covered in blankets, she’s painted it’s toenails, she’s sleeping with it.. Yeah.. I don’t think this thing thinks it’s a dog. My dog, the crabby corgi doesn’t even think of this thing as a dog. 

I just hope it survives the week.

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November 25, 2009 · 10:54 am

Windows 7- The Answer?

Upgraded to Windows 7 a few weeks ago. I wanted to wake bit before writing about to make sure that I’d had a chance to use it for a while and see how it worked.

Now, I’m no techie.. I’m a user. My interaction with the software is based on being a power user if you will, I use a lot of social networking stuff.. obviously. I use Microsoft Office extensively, lots of Visio, Excel and Access. I’m a reputed “power user” in these applications. Sort of the office resource for support and for producing reports, building databases, that sort of stuff. Other than that, the odd entertainment package, music applications, photo stuff, lots of photo stuff, and that about wraps up what I do.

I’m also a Mac and PC user. My wife and kids have Macs, and given the choice would use the Mac. Personally since I actually work with my computer, and the Mac has neither Visio OR Access, it’s not all that helpful. I’m also a big fan of the Windows Live stuff, not which works on a Mac. I’m not big fan of Apples closed proprietary architecture, which BTW is why Mac will never be business platform, but then again I don’t think they care.

All that aside, I was not one of those who was offended by Vista. Matter of fact, once I got used to the interfaces on the office suite I sort of liked it. I didn’t experience instability with Vista, I wasn’t doing anything that really stretched to operating system, I really didn’t have any complaints.

Why upgrade? I’m a sucker for new technology, early adopter if you will. I made it to a Windows 7 house party, saw some cool things, liked the interface a lot, but to be honest things like shaking windows and running two windows at once side by side.. not something that I’m too excited about, my learning curve on stuff like is reallllly long,

I dove into the 7 pool two weeks ago Friday. Inserted the 7 Ultimate DVD into the PC and followed  instructions. After answering the right questions and inputting the correct serial numbers the process started. Since I was upgrading Vista a complete harddrive reformat was not required; desirable, but not required.  I had backed up my media and personal data just incase, but I did it in a way that was neither efficient or easy to get back,  more later.

After watching the thing clock away and warn me not to turn off the PC for over an hour I went to bed. The next morning I was a bit distressed to see that the PC was still clocking. It had completed file loads and rebooting processes, but the final completion was hanging it up. I waited  a couple hours and when nothing had happened, against advice I turned off the PC and rebooted from the disc drive with a complete reformat. Thanks goodness I’d saved.

The second install went better than the first and actually completed. I logged on, created my account and started installing my office suite. Unfortunately  I had no keyboard, no mouse, no sound and no HP Hot Buttons.. None of the HP drivers were installed. This made the computer a bit of brick to be honest. I hooked up an old external keyboard and for some reason that worked. I made it out the HP website and found the 7 drivers, installed them and was back in business.

Sound card was fixed with Microsofts “FixIt” which to my pleasant surprise actually did fix it. I had sound.. Bad news is, my sound doesn’t last..

iTunes took a couple tries to get installed, and once installed imported my library incorrectly, giving me 4 files for every song I owned, which in my case is a lot of songs. The idea of manually removing them.. not realistic. That problem was corrected with a bit of freeware http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/index.php, an easy to use duplicate file remover that can go after media files only if desired. Thank goodness it worked.. hand selecting 12,000 files would have taken a while.

My photo back up regimen did NOT include my nested folders for some reason,, user error and that mistake cost me all of my summer of 2009 at the lake pics. My fault, but incredibly annoying none the less.

Other that Mrs Lincoln, the play was fine.

Now that I’ve been using the software, I’d give it a pretty glowing review. It’s certainly easy to understand. The snip it feature alone is cool, like that. Windows Media Player is better than iTunes.. but alas doesn’t sync with an iPod.. so the great functionality is of limited usefulness, since I’m not going open it very often.

The machine certainly boots and shuts down much faster than it did on Vista.. thanks goodness. My only continuing complaint is the sound driver still doesn’t work correctly. About once a day I lose sound and have to reboot to get it back.

My virus software, Kaspersky doesn’t seem to like Win 7. Added to the trouble Kaspersky the company doesn’t seem to like me. They have no record of the 3 year deal I bought to keep my software current and since I lost the emails with the codes.. I’m screwed. BUT, I’m using Microsoft’s new Security Essentials, free software that’s getting pretty good reviews. So far I’ve been very happy with it. It’s certainly not the resource hog that Norton or McAffee was.

I’ve had zero compatibility issues with Windows 7. Everything I run or have run in the past seems to work great.. no problems there. So all in all, I think Microsoft has a winner on the operating system.. now they need to get more from their mail and browsers to really get the home market nailed.

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