Windows Tips and Tricks

I’ve taught a lot of classes using one version or the other of the Microsoft Works program. Back in the days of DOS, I even used it as my primary word processor and spreadsheet program. However, in many ways Works became an orphan program, overshadowed by the more powerful Office suite. The great virtue of Works for ordinary home PC users is its relative simplicity. A full-blown Office suite has far more features than most home PC users ever need or even want to know about.

Now it seems that Works, already about to enter its ninth version, is to become a free ad-supported program. Mary Jo Foley gives some details here and writes:

Microsoft’s next version of its small-business/home productivity suite, due imminently, will be free and ad-funded.

Microsoft Works 9.0 — which will be the new product’s name, if Microsoft opts to stick with its current nomenclature — might also debut at some point as Microsoft-hosted low-end productivity service, as many have been speculating. A hosted version of Works would give Microsoft a head-to-head competitor with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other consumer- and small-business focused services, analysts have said.

Some publications like the Wall Street Journal charge a subscription fee for their Web version. Now, however, there is a way to get free access to a number of subscription sites by using something called the Congoo Netpass. You have to create an account but it’s free. The catch is that you only get a limited number of accesses. Still, it sounds like a reasonable way to obtain entry to paid sites that you only want to visit occasionally. A review at PC World says:

Congoo NetPass, a free utility that’s available at their website, allows you to search and read a limited number of stories from 35 popular paid-content sites, including the online homes of Billboard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, New Republic, and the WSJ. You can make between 4 and 15 visits per month, depending on the site. When you exceed the monthly allotment of visits to a particular site, you’re prompted to subscribe to the service, since you’re apparently finding it useful.

Curious about what might be included in service pack 1 (SP1) for Vista? Mary Jo Foley gives her list of what fixes might be included. She garnered the list from a posting that was subsequently pulled. Apparently, a very select group of testers has been given some packages of fixes that might be a sort of beta of SP1. Foley posted about that at this link.

You may not be as anonymous as you think when you send a query to a surf engine. If you allow the search engines to put cookies on your computer, they may have collected a lot of personal information. Even without the cookie, your IP will be noted. I’ve posted about this before but it doesn’t hurt to mention it again. An article at InfoWorld gives a run-down on what goes on when you search:

What if there were a giant database that contained your hidden insecurities, embarrassing medical questions, and the fact that you still think from time to time about your high-school girlfriend? Well, such a data store does exist — if you’ve ever plugged such private topics into a search engine.

The fact is, search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search all record and retain in their vast data banks any term that you query in addition to the date and time your query was processed, the IP address of your computer, and a cookie-based unique ID that — unless you delete it — enables the search engine to continue to know if requests are coming from that particular computer, even if the connection changes.

Law enforcement agencies have used search records in criminal cases and the article points out:

The upshot: If someone were to ask one of these search engine companies to produce a list of IP addresses or cookie values that searched on a particular search term, they conceivably could. Or, conversely, given an IP address or cookie value, the search engine firm could produce a list of terms searched by the user of that address or cookie value.

Although most ISPs rotate your IP over time, the IP records can be used to identify you if the ISP is willing to search its logs:

Even if you didn’t provide any personal information, an IP address alone could be traced back through a reverse DNS lookup to the Internet service provider and city of the IP address, according to Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a blog dedicated to search news. Contacting the ISP could result in a positive identification of the account holder by finding out which account accessed the search engine at the time recorded in the search log.

Last year, reporters at The New York Times didn’t even need an IP address to track down the identity of an AOL user when AOL published anonymous search logs of 500,000 users over a three-month period. The identification was made possible simply based on the specificity of the search terms the user queried, such as real estate searches in the small town where she lived.

For many surfers, simply blocking tracking cookies will probably provide sufficient privacy and that is what I do. Anti-spyware programs will also detect and remove tracking cookies. But for real anonymity, something like a proxy service may be necessary. Do your surfing from a thumb drive with a program like Torpark and you’ll be pretty hidden. It might slow your surfing, however.

Any readers have experience with anonymizers?

Surfing the Web is harder than it could be because of all the differences among browsers. Internet Explorer (IE) often renders CSS differently from other browsers. IE also uses proprietary ActiveX components. Then there are differences in the way Web pages behave among the various versions of IE itself. IE7 is different from IE6 and IE7 on Windows XP is different from IE7 on Vista. Different versions of IE treat Adobe/Macromedia Flash presentations differently from each other and from Firefox. Different versions of IE treat JavaScript differently. Editing this blog online is easier in Firefox than in IE7. And so on.

All of these variations are maddening for someone who creates Web pages and cause problems for surfers. Some Web sites will work in IE but not in Firefox and vice versa. At least, Firefox has an extension called IE Tab that allows you to use the IE engine from within Firefox. Some things will work in IE7 on Windows XP but not in IE7 on Vista. All in all, using the Web is more of a pain than it should be.

Any readers have experience with Opera? How about Linux and Konqueror? Or Macs and Safari?

I read a lot and I am always interested in ways to search the Internet for books. There are a number of sites that specialize in some sort of book search. One that will find books for sale and show price comparisons is isbn.nu. Here is how the site describes itself:

This site provides unbiased price comparisons among over a dozen online stores that are either booksellers, auction sites, used book dealer networks, or a combination of two or three. We retrieve prices that as timely as each bookselling site allows and display them in order of lowest available price to highest price. (You can also view results by fastest overall shipping time.

As I have noted before, searching images is much more of a challenge than searching text. Recently, search engines have been adding some ways to limit image searches to faces.

At Google, advanced image search now includes an option to look for faces only. A search using the name of a particular person may show mostly images containing that person’s face but it will also include images associated with text that contains the name being searched but has someone else’s picture. Sometimes you even get an image that doesn’t contain any faces. Still, it’s progress.

Microsoft Live Search has also just added some new capability to image searches. You can now add a filter to an image search to restrict it to faces.

Over at CNET, Michael Horowitz recommends a place to go for answers to your computer questions. The site is from Leo Notenboom and is called ask-leo.com. Horowitz writes:

Most of us have personal computer questions and it’s not too hard to get answers. What is hard though, is getting an answer from someone qualified, thoughtful and reasoned. And a constant stream of good answers, for free, is too much to hope for.

Unless you know about Leo.

As his ask-leo.com web site, Leo Notenboom answers computer questions from anyone. Each week he answers a handful of questions, and, if you subscribe to his free newsletter, you get a weekly email with the current weeks questions and answers. He can’t answer every question, but he tries his best.

Horowitz is a knowledgeable tech writer and teacher and he vouches for Notenboom:

Computer nerds don’t really have an equivalent of the board certification that doctors do. Still, Mr. Notenboom previously worked for Microsoft, which should count for something. And as they say, it takes one to know one, so trust me, Leo is more than qualified to answer your tech questions.

I haven’t studied the answers from Notenboom in detail but the few that I have looked at are accurate and clear. For an article I wrote on getting help on the Internet go to this link.

Not all Windows hot fixes are part of the monthly update. Some are deemed by Microsoft to apply to a limited group of users and are available only by request. Until recently, that meant a phone call to Microsoft and time spent explaining why you wanted the hot fix. The company has now instituted an email mechanism for obtaining a link for the hot fix. PC World has the details. The request form is at this Microsoft site.

Several weeks ago I received a copy of Vista that my colleague Sol Libes had obtained from a generous Microsoft rep. When I went to open it, I discovered that Microsoft has some new-fangled packaging that had me baffled. Fortunately, I had seen Mary Jo Foley’s piece about how even Microsoft employees were having trouble opening Vista boxes. She wrote:

This is one for all of you readers who’ve had trouble installing Windows Vista. Don’t feel bad. Even some Microsoft developers — who have the Vista team on premise — can’t manage to upgrade to Vista.

A Microsoft developer chronicled his troubles in a blog:

My first issue with Vista was getting the damn thing out of the box. The box is a weirdly shaped plastic thing, and almost impossible to open the first time you see one. After some cursing I discovered a red tag, so I pulled that: no change. After applying physical pressure to the box I began to see the bizarre way it opens, but it would only move a millimeter. I was seriously considering a trip to the garage and to smash the box open with a hammer, when I discovered another transparent sticker that was holding two parts together. With that gone, the box moved a few more millimeters, until I realised the thing opens sideways, and boom: Vista was opened. I’ve installed entire operating systems more quickly and with less stress than opening this box…

It got to the point where Microsoft felt it should put up a tutorial on how to open a Vista box. So if you buy a copy of Vista and can’t get the box open, your first move in learning how to use Vista is to go over to the tutorial and get the instructions for opening the box that contains Vista.