Home & Small Office Computer Guide

If you haven’t tried Wikepedia before then before you do perhaps you should take heed of what the co-founder - Jimmy Wales - is now admitting.

He now freely admits that there are real quality problems with the online project.

Well I would have thought that was always going to be a very real and almost unavoidable danger.

If you don’t know about Wikepedia let me give you an analogy so that you can understand the scope of the project and the looming problems.

Think of it as an enormous online encyclopedia - with parts of it written by anyone who wants to. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement for them to have any knowledge of what they are writing about. The general idea is that someone who does know what they’re talking about will come along and correct the misinformation that others have added.

Perhaps I am being a litte unfair but it is only and analogy.

Have you ever wondered just what a map of the Internet would look like?

Well unfortunately you’re going to have to keep on wondering because the Net is now so big and so complex that no one can draw a map of it. No one can draw you an accurate representation of all the paths that each packet of information that makes up this page took to travel from our serer to your computer.

The best that anyone can do is to provide a ‘model’ of the Net and there happen to be two that are going the rounds at the moment. And it should come as no surprise that those two models take opposing views of what the Net is like.

One model suggests that the infrastructure that allows the Net to operate is contracting while the other suggests that the Net is more widely and finely spread than many people realise.

Obviously, without a map it’s hard to tell but the authors of the second model seem to think that the way they see the Net is the way the original designers intended it to look when they began working on the concept back in the 1960’s.

It still appals me just how many people have absolutely no idea about how to protect their computers. I’m not talking about protecting them from theft but about the damage that comes from inadvertently downloading trojans or viruses.

Quite often when we’re down at our friend’s computer shop we see at several peoplen come in with their computer tucked under their arm to have it fixed. It might be running slow or they can no longer connect to the net and sometimes if they can connect they find that their browser has been hijacked and they can’t get to the sites that they want to see.

Invariably a quick scan of the machine turns up some virus or trojan and the owner of the computer is completely mystified as to how it might have got there. They instantly throw up their hands and say that they have never been to a site that might have downloaded something like that to their machine.

It’s quite obvious that they are trying to say that they have never been to an adult site because they are the only ones that could possibly do such terrible things to their machines - or so they think. And sometimes they are genuine, they really haven’t been visiting any naughty sites but that doesn’t matter one little bit.

It’s not just adult sites that can drop those nasty things on your machines. There are quite a few mainstream marketing sites and even just general sites that will do exactly the same thing. Quite often you will pick up garbage like that when you respond to some free offer for smilies or similar things and at other times all you have to do is just click on a link.

Quite often the computer owners will declare that they have Nortons or this or that anti-virus software installed and they just don’t know how something like that could have got through.

Well the fact of the matter is that most anti-virus software is not half as good as you might think it is. There is a lot of hype and hoop-la used to sell anti-virus software and most of it is little more than smoke and mirrors.

Right now the very best anti-virus software that is available is called Kaspersky. You can find it at http://www.kaspersky.com.

You can do a free online scan of your machine (although that does take some time) or you can download a trial version that will last for a month. After that you will have to pay a very reasonable amount for a year’s subscription.

Kaspersky will scan your machine and your incoming email and it will also update itself three times a day so it is far more current and up to date than most of the junk that people think will keep them protected.

We use it on all of our machines and surf a wide variety of sites every day of the week. We have had only one minor problem since we installed it. And at the time we first installed it and it ran its initial scan it found a virus in an attachment that had come in an email three years before and was archived on one of the machines.

Several other anti virus programmes that people often recommend had missed that attachment but not Kaspersky.

A blog like Home and Small Office Computer Info is never going to delve too deeply into anything related to its subject simply because it’s here to give you an overview of a very broad-ranging topic.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t point you in the direction of some blogs that do delve deeply into more narrowly defined topics.

If you are interested in the new Windows operating system that is due for release next year, once known as Longhorn but now known as Vista then there is no better place to start that the Windows Vista Weblog.

Microsoft have huge number of projects set to roll out in the next 18 months and if you want to keep up with all those goodies then keep in touch with the Unnofficial Microsoft Weblog.

Both blogs are run by John Evans, lover of homeless sea gulls and all things related to Windows

It seems that back in June Steve Ballmer - the number 2 at Microsoft and well-known hurler of chairs - was speaking at a meeting in Sydney and made this bold prediction:

“In the next six months, we’ll catch Google in terms of relevancy”

Knowing Microsoft’s ability to keep to deadlines I think we shouldn’t really expect anything like that in the foreseeable future.

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft but just lately I have been slowly moving towards appreciating Microsoft more and more.
This strange transition started not long after I downloaded and installed Firefox as my browser of choice. I have to say that at first I loved Firefox - it has some fantastic features that make life very easy for someone who makes his living from working on the Internet. And those features were missing from IE.

However, it also had one or two quirky little problems that I was learning to live with. For example, if you went to a site to stream a movie Firefox could not do it. The best you could hope for was to download the movie to your own machine and watch it from there.

But that was ok until just recently when I, and others, began to notice that Firefox was becoming even more buggy with each update. For example, when you are looking at this page in IE it will look very different to what you would see in Firefox. In Firefox the text would be bigger and the link colors would be darker.

If I try to make the text bigger for IE viewers then it becomes so big in Firefox that it can display in very bizarre ways that I won’t bore you with here.

And then came this morning. I went to a blog to download a podcast and found that the blog owner had provided several links so that I could either stream the podcast direct from his site or download it - as I wanted to do. So in Firefox I clicked on the download link … and found that it began streaming. And when I clicked on the streaming link … you guessed it. It began to download.

Ok, maybe the blog owner got the links wrong so I checked it in IE and in IE the download link downloaded and the streaming link streamed.

That may not seem like such a big problem but when you have a tool that you use for business then you want that tool to work the way it is supposed to do. It’s a productivity thing - time is money etc. etc.

Internet Explorer may not have all the bells and whistles that Firefox has but at least it works the way it’s supposed to work so maybe it’s time to go back to the tried and tested tools. Just because they carry the Microsoft brand doesn’t mean they don’t work.