Ask DACS
January 2010

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Q – I’m planning to buy a new laptop (notebook) computer. Where can I find information about what is available?

A – This is a big topic and brought out a lot of discussion. The first suggestion was to visit local stores that carry notebooks to see what makes and models they offer. These include Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, and Walmart. MicroCenter in Patterson, NJ, was given special mention. While you are there, try the keyboards and look at the screens to see if any are totally unacceptable. For example, I have a strong personal dislike for most Dell notebook keyboards. Dells have the Page Up and Page Down keys at the top right of the keyboard in ½-sized keys. Since I use those keys a lot, I find Dells unusable. The point is that you need to see and touch some notebooks in person to see these things. As you go thru the stores make notes of the models you have seen along with the basic specifications and price so to build up a comparison chart.

Next, I did a web search at the meeting for “hardware reviews” and found many sites. Places I would look include PC Magazine, PC World Magazine, Laptop Magazine and Tom’s Hardware where people in the forums discuss the merits and travails of various machines. One member praised the Dell website where you can custom order a machine by selecting components to meet your needs. Even if you do not want a Dell or do not want to buy online, this process gives insight into the tradeoffs between cost and performance. Another member praised HP/Compaq where the online ordering process offers a similar customization process.

At this point the discussion moved to choosing a make and model for a purpose. Notebooks (laptops) range in price from $300 to over $4000 with the low end being netbooks or low-end closeout models and all out gaming machines at the high end. Obviously there is a range of performance and capabilities between those prices. Screen size, weight, portability, battery life, graphics performance, overall size and thickness, and cost are all tradeoffs. Somewhere in this matrix is an ideal computer for every person and purpose.

Someone asked whether to buy 32- or 64-bit Windows 7. There does not seem to be a short answer to this question. The advantage of 64-bit Windows is the vastly larger memory address space. 32-bit Windows of any flavor is limited to 4GB of RAM. Fifteen years ago as 32-bit Windows first gained steam, 4GB was an unthinkable amount of memory. Today most notebooks can use this much and can hold a maximum of 8GB. In theory 64-bit Windows can address much more than 8GB that but few notebooks have more than two slots for SO-DIMM RAM sticks. The size of the SO-DIMM module and current chip density yields the 8GB limit, although 8GB on a single SO-DIMM is probably available somewhere if you can pay the price. If you can afford the RAM, then get 64-bit Windows. Another consideration is device drivers. Obviously if you buy Windows 7 preinstalled, the machine will come with all the hardware device drivers needed for that machine. Your existing peripherals are another matter. Older printers will not have 64-bit drivers. I guess if you can afford more than 4GB of RAM, a new printer will not be an issue, but add the cost of the printer and any tightly integrated software like your anti-virus program to the total cost of your new machine. All this discussion just shows that it boils down to caveat emptor and “do your homework before you buy”.

Q – Is anyone using Google Chrome?

A – Several people ventured that they are playing with Chrome but as one person put it, “I have not copied my Favorites over to Chrome. In my opinion this is the key to Chrome becoming a competitive browser. So far, the current, stable version of Chrome does not have extensions – the little add-ons that make Firefox so wonderful. I cannot use Chrome as a serious browser until there is an extension like PlainOldFavorites on Firefox.

Q – The questioner then said that she is getting pop ups that say page not found.

A – This is not related to Chrome but is an DNS (Domain Name System) problem. For some reason your computer’s network interface may not be configured correctly.

Q – The same questioner then says that she keeps seeing something about “Bing”. What is Bing?

A – Bing is the new Microsoft search engine that replaces Microsoft Live Search. A member said that Bing organizes results in a more intuitive manner.

Q – I have many toolbars installed in my browser. What can I do?

A – Uninstall them all. Some toolbars are actually spyware. Even the Google and Yahoo toolbars make your searches available to Google or Yahoo whenever you are logged on. The Google, Microsoft Live or Bing Toolbar, and many others can easily be installed by mistake as they often come along for the ride when you install something else that you actually do want. A member suggested the Revo Uninstaller (revouninstaller.com – reviewed in the October DACS.doc) as a good way to remove programs that otherwise refuse to uninstall. Both free and Pro versions are available.

Q – I have a WordPress blog website that uses MySQL as the database. What does it mean to backup my MySQL database?

A – First, good for you for setting up a blog. All of the information contained in the blog, your messages and the comments are stored in a database using the MySQL database engine. Backing up MySQL means to save the database structure together will all the data in such a way that it can be saved and later restored to the same or another MySQL installation. The backup will be a text file, something like myblogname.sql. If you open this file in Notepad, you will find a long stream of text that starts with the SQL commands needed to clean out a database file and then load all of the data into the database. Included in the MySQL database are all the settings and customization you have added to your blog, so if the database were lost, quite literally everything would be gone.

If you are on a typical web hosting service (I’m using Bluehost.com), the tools will be different but still should be one or two clicks in the “control panel” provided for your account on the hosting service.

Q – My computer running 64-bit Windows XP Pro has been very slow. I had the memory increased and saw no discernible improvement. Why would that be?

A – There is no way to give a definitive answer to that question within an AskDACS session as there are too many factors that could be involved. The speed of the processor, the tasks that are running on the computer (this includes all of the applications you have open plus things like browser toolbars, and all the little icons at the bottom right of the screen), the size of the Windows registry, and many more. One member suggested running msconfig.exe (type this program into Run… on the Start menu), a program that comes with Windows to see what programs are loaded when XP first starts up. You can then disable everything except your antivirus; reboot and see if performance improves. The computer should be noticeably faster. Then return to msconfig.exe and re-enable programs until you find the one or combination of programs that is slowing your computer. Make sure that your antivirus program is a 64-bit version. The free version of AVG is not 64-bit and will be like a rowboat dragging a battleship anchor.

Q – Can someone compare the Microsoft Security Essentials versus the other free antivirus programs from AVG or Avast?

A – This is beyond the AskDACS forum. There are many reviews available on the Internet that compare antivirus programs, both free and paid.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!