Riding Shotgun with Rick

I'm in the middle of a pretty major house refurbishing right now and am making frequent trips to the hardware stores and elsewhere. Today, while asking a Lowes rep a question, I glanced at one of the computer screens and saw Firefox for Lowes on the title bar. I was blown away that a major corporation had the good sense to use Firefox, then as I scanned the monitor, there was no sign of a start button. Instead, I immediately recognized a Linux like Start button that looked similar to the Xfce desktop that Xubuntu uses.

Lately, I've run across many printer problems so I'm going to share with you my formula for approaching a printer problem.

1. Shut off computer
2. Shut off printer
3. Check cable from printer to computer and make sure it is securely plugged in on both sides
4. Check cable from printer to power source and make they plugged in well.
5. Turn the printer on and wait for it to go through all of its startup activities (wait until it is quiet)
• If the printer happens to be a HP printer, I will sometimes unplug the power cable from the back of the printer, then
  

It's been awhile since I recorded answers to your email, but I plan to start doing this at least twice per week. So, keep sending your questions, and I'll keep answering them.

Microsoft released the 3rd service pack for Windows XP about three months ago. Microsoft packages many operating system updates and fixes into one large package and then releases it as a service pack. Because these are extremely large files that apply many updates and changes to our systems, they can sometimes have trouble.

Since I use Firefox exclusively for my browsing, I haven't seen this problem yet, but today I ran into a computer that could print from anywhere but Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Turns out that, in her case, the upgrade to AVG 8.0 caused the problem. A standard installation of AVG 8 installs a security toolbar in Firefox, if you use it, or Internet Explorer 7. The toolbar is meant to help users from clicking on potentially harmful web links. However, the toolbar, like most toolbars, slows down browsing speeds and in the case of Internet Explorer 7 with Windows Vista, it also disables the ability to print!

I'm always surprised at how many computer users equate the speed of their computer with the speed of their Internet. If you have a brand new computer, it will not make your dial-up connection faster. Likewise, if you have an older computer, a fast cable or DSL connection will not make the computer faster.

Internet speed only makes your Internet experience faster or slower. If you have a high speed connection and your computer slows down or the Internet speed seems slow, the problem is due to the computer not your Internet connection...most of the time. Calling your Internet provider for computer speed problems is like calling the Department of Transportation because you ran out of gas on the highway.

I subscribe to the school of practical and applied knowledge, but I still like to see my acquired knowledge backed up by some scientists every now and then. For years, I have been preaching the laurels of Mozilla Firefox and how it with AVG antivirus can keep your computer extremely safe. Today, an article by Stefanie Hoffman at Channel Web talks about a Swiss study that showed the security effectiveness of Mozilla Firefox. Give it a read and pass it on.

Adobe released version 9 of their PDF (Portable Document Format) Reader program. Once the king and almost sole PDF reader on the market, it, like so many other mainstream programs, has become bloated beyond recognition. This software bloat slows down the performance of even the fastest computers, and for this reason, I firmly stand against software bloat.

I ran into a problem with Microsoft Outlook 2007 that I never seen. When Outlook was running, a small icon in the system tray was working like crazy on synchronizing folders. Synchronizing folders in Outlook 2007 is usually reserved for large office environments where users share calendars, contacts, etc. This particular computer user was on a standalone system.

The little icon itself wasn't the problem, but the fact that it was trying to synchronize folders to nowhere ate up large chunks of computer power slowing down the system to almost unusable. After some web searching and poking around some of the tech web forums (nothing was found on Microsoft's support site), I found that many other people were having the same problem, but no real solution was found.

I want to keep singing the praises of an operating system that I used to make fun of on our show; Linux. In partial defense of myself, Linux traditionally has been known as the geeks operating system, and a user needed to be permanently attached to a forum for help and have an affinity for the command prompt or as its known in Linux, the terminal.