Where To Buy Computer Parts

I've been pushing TigerDirect, and their predecessor CompUSA, for years. But everything changes: circumstances, opinions, you name it. And from this point on, while I might occasionally buy computer parts and peripherals from TigerDirect, I'm not comfortable advising anyone else to do so. And I'll only use them when all my other sources fail me.

Why the change of heart? Last year, TigerDirect closed nearly all of their stores, becoming primarily a mail-order-only business. And Dec 24, they stopped accepting returns, stopped allowing refunds, FOR ANY REASON. Manufacturers' warranties are still as good (or otherwise) as they ever were, but the minute they ship your goods, TigerDirect has finished with the deal; if your item is DOA, it's between you and the manufacturer. Maybe that's your idea of customer service, but it's certainly not mine.

Read their new policy here:  www.tigerdirect.com/sectors/help/return.asp

So, What Are Your Alternatives?

If you're lucky enough to have an electronics distributor nearby who stocks computer parts, I envy you... they're getting more and more scarce, especially outside the major metropolitan areas. And, as in all else, you'll pay for the convenience, in cash.

As always, I recommend the nearest Dollar Tree for USB connectors, cheap earplugs/headphones, and cheap styluses for tablets and phones. Mice, keyboards, powered speakers, and laptop cool pads, I get at Big Lots. For parts and peripherals, check out www.Newegg.com, eBay, Amazon, and/or Google Shopping.  Best Buy is my store of last resort, though I love that they recycle just about anything you can think of, for free... and if you're in a hurry, it's awfully nice not to have to wait for shipping.

Here's a few considerations when shopping online:

• Read the product descriptions VERY carefully. If you buy the wrong item, even if they take it back, you might still get hit with the return shipping cost.
• Always use Paypal or Paypal Credit to buy online. In case of dispute, the buyer is always right: the seller takes all the risk in every deal. And all Paypal Credit purchases are "6 months Same As Cash."
• Use a tabbed browser, and shop several sites at once for the same item. This is the best way to compare 'apples to apples', so to speak.
• Make sure you include shipping charges when comparing prices. I've seen items sell for a fraction of the nearest competitor's price, but with outrageous shipping costs, while the other guy included free or nearly-free shipping... again, be sure you're comparing apples to apples.
• Don't be afraid of buying an item because it says it will ship from China; if you can stand the increased shipping time, the smaller purchase price will leave you feeling good about the deal. Remember, chances are the item you buy here and the item you buy from China were made in the same Chinese factory; you're paying considerably more for the convenience of getting it in less time from a nearby middle man who already stocked up from the Chinese manufacturer. Again, use Paypal.

There are a couple of additional considerations when using Google Shopping:

• After you've typed in your search term and gotten your first page of results, look at the top of the list, on the right... where it says  Sort: Default, click the downward-pointing arrow, and select  Price - Low to High. You need to do this every time you type in a new search term.
• It's even more crucial that you read the item descriptions thoroughly on Google Shopping. A large number of merchants post a picture of an item, but the description of a component part or accessory for that item: what you see ain't necessarily what you get. Even using Paypal, you could still get burned if you don't read the description.

Hope I've helped... 

Dale

Windows 10 Free Upgrade: To Do, or Not To Do

Wow, I gotta get better at this... 6 YEARS since I posted a blog?... shameful.
I find, figure out, or think up something worth sharing almost every day, I just don't actually do the sharing part.
I'll do better, I swear.

Here's an exchange between me and a friend from my high school days, via Facebook Chat:

Q: Hey Dale. Keep getting requests to update to Windows 10 for free.  What do you think about Windows 10?  I've heard both good and bad reviews.  One friend had a major problem after uploading it and had to take it to the "Geek Squad".  I certainly don't want to mess up my computer.
Thanks... Nancy

A: Like EVERY previous version of Windows...
On a computer built to run it, the new version is usually better than the previous one. But as an upgrade, it suffers.

Because of the free upgrade offer, Win 10 has a special weakness: if you accept the free upgrade, it is barely legal; meaning, if you have a problem after the one-year free upgrade period runs out, you can't reload it, because they never gave you a Windows 10 activation code.  You'll need to save all your personal files to an external drive, reload your previous Windows version (hope you saved the DVDs!), replace all your files, and run it until and unless you decide to BUY Windows 10 for $130.
Don't ask me how I found this out... it still hurts to think about it.

You COULD work around this by creating a disk image once your upgrade was working well.  If you lose your hard drive, you can dump the image back to a new drive in the same PC, and you'll be back in business.  HOWEVER... if you lose your motherboard, and try using the old drive with a new board... see above disaster description.

If you have Windows 7, stick with it. Here's a utility to remove the prompt to upgrade:
I Don't Want Windows 10

Before running the utility, click on Start, All Programs, Windows Update, Change Settings. In the first drop-down box, click the down arrow, choose Never Check for Updates, and click OK.  Leave the Windows Update window open... you may come back to it before rebooting; if not, no big deal.

Run the utility downloaded above; it will probably suggest you extract all files, but it's not necessary... just open the zip file, and run I Don't want Windows 10.exe.  When it's done, if it asks if you want to Restart Nor or Restart Later, select Restart Later.  Go back to Windows Update; if it says there are Important Updates Available, click the notification, look down the list, and see if Update for Windows (KB3035583) is there.  If so, remove its check mark, right-click the update, and select Hide Update, OK.

Reboot. Click on Start, All Programs, Windows Update; the next step depends on what happened just before you rebooted:

If you've already hidden Update KB3035583, click Settings, change the setting back to Install Updates Automatically, and click OK.  Close Windows Update.

If you've not already hidden Update KB3035583, click on Check for Updates... it could take a very long while, maybe even overnight... or it might take less than a minute.  Either way, when it's finished click Important Updates Are Available, then click on the column heading Name.  Look down the list, find Update for Windows (KB3035583), remove its check mark, right-click the update, and select Hide Update, OK.  This will keep it from coming back to annoy you again.  Click OK, Settings, change the setting back to Install Updates Automatically, and click OK.  Close Windows Update.

And if you have Windows 8...

1. you waited WAY too late to ask my advice; I would have talked you into sticking with your previous version of Windows, or waiting till Win 10 was available on new PCs.
2. Though the previous warning about upgrades-vs-new install still applies, Windows 10 is enough better than Win 8 that I recommend you go ahead and do the upgrade... but hold onto your Windows 8 DVDs.  If you don't have them to begin with, check your System Tools menu to see if you can't make a set before upgrading to Win 10.

Till next time... Dale

Where Y'all Been?

Ouch! I just looked at my blog, and see that I haven't been here in almost a year.  Bad Dale!

Where to begin?  I've moved (still in Clearwater, just living solo for a change), changed phone numbers, and taken on a couple of new roles.

I can now be reached at 727-687-0842.  I generally answer the phone between 10A and 10P, but the answering machine works 24/7, so call any time of the day or night.

I took on the editor/writer/web-poster job for Bits 'n' Bytes, the online newsletter of the Tampa Bay Computer Society last August.  I've seen much better sites, but for a solo job it ain't bad.

The SIG leader for TBCS' Novice SIG (Tuesdays, 1P - 3P) is a 'snowbird', so I'm filling in for him this summer, probably till some time in October.  Being the lazy sort, I don't prepare any sort of presentation or class agenda --- it's essentially a live and in-person version of my "free-computer-advice-via-email" service.  If you're in the Clearwater area, come on out and join us at 1510 Barry Road.

Since I last posted, the Conflicker non-event came and went; did you panic like most folks did?  If you were running avast! 4.8, AVG 8.5, avira, MalwareBytes, or any of a number of free anti-virus programs, you needn't have worried.

The number one problem I've seen in the last year is 'rogue' anti-virus programs: pop-up warnings from a program you don't already have installed, claiming that you're infected, and offering to fix the problem for a reasonable fee.  ANY TIME you get a pop-up from a program you haven't already installed, X out of it; don't click on No, or Ignore, or any other button in the pop-up --- for all you know, all the buttons point to the same "Yes" command in the calling program.  The X in the upper right-hand corner of the window is part of Windows, not the pop-up, and should exit cleanly and gracefully. ...And now go check your pop-up blocker settings, and see how come you got the warning in the first place.

I still answer any and all computer-related questions for free.  To send me a comment or question, please click on this link:  www.computerrepairshop.biz/Help.html

Thanks.

Later,

DaLe

Everybody Makes Mistakes

So, yesterday I got several messages from the Tampa Bay Computer Society concerning the complete loss of Internet access by a large number of people. Seems a recent Microsoft update (KB951748) caused Windows XP/2000users who use ZoneAlarm to lose their Internet access if their ZA security level was set higher than Medium. Windows Vista users weren't affected, nor were those folks still limping along on Windows 98 and ME.

Also unaffected was everyone who had previously taken my advice and uninstalled ZoneAlarm. If you're running Windows 2000 and need a firewall, or you're running Windows XP, and want more firewall than the built-in model, you should be running PCTools Firewall Plus. It's a tenth the size of the latest ZA bloatware, and in software terms, smaller almost always translates as faster.

If you absolutely MUST stay with ZoneAlarm (maybe you lost a bet or something), click the link below to see what to do about the latest problem. It's my understanding that they've already released a fix, or a new repaired version, or whatever; to be truthful, I don't care enough to go see which is the case. I'm using PCTools Firewall Plus, and having no connection problems at all, thank you very much. ZoneAlarm SNAFU Correction

 [recent addendum: I've removed PCTools Firewall - it starting blocking access to sites and services I wanted, and I couldn't seem to correct it from within the program. Now using just the Windows firewall. 6-13-09]

So, who do you blame when Microsoft releases an update that breaks a third-party program? Depends... but I tend to blame Redmond for most if not all of my computing woes. It's so seldom that it's not actually their fault, it just isn't worth the time trying to give them the 'benefit of the doubt', so to speak.

Case in point: Windows XP Service Pack 3. Have you loaded it yet? DON'T! I let it load on my laptop during a recent visit to the WindowsUpdate site. Bootup time increased to about 4 minutes. But that ain't the worst of it! Each time I tried to open Internet Explorer 7, it took 4 to 4 1/2 minutes for the first web page to open. After I had a page on-screen, I could click on links to my heart's content, and each popped dutifully open within seconds. It was only opening the application and rendering the first page that was excruciatingly SLOOOOW. Of course, Firefox had no such problem, so I used it for a few days while I tried to fix the problem with IE.

For the record:

1. Service Pack 3 would not uninstall from the Add/Remove Programs module in Control Panel, though it had promised beforehand that it would.

2. System Restore failed every time I tried to revert to the day before SP 3 loaded. Don't know why, it had worked every time I had needed it before.

3. Re-installing Internet Explorer now that SP 3 was installed didn't help.

4. Re-installing SP 2 seemed to complete successfully, despite SP 3 already being installed, but the problem with IE 7 persisted, and now I know I'm not comfortable with how messed up my system files must be. So...

I dumped all my personal files to a 4 GB thumb drive, booted from my Windows XP CD, formatted the hard drive, and reloaded Windows. I made nearly a dozen trips to the WindowsUpdate site, AGAIN! , until Service Pack 3 was the only update listed that I hadn't installed. I dumped the thumb drive back to the hard drive, and all was finally well. No more than 10 or 12 hours of my time wasted.

My recommendation:
Open Control Panel » Automatic Updates.
Click the radio button next to Notify Me But Don't Autmatically Download or Install Them » click OK.
Now, anytime there are critical updates available, a yellow shield will appear in your System Tray. Click it, then click on Custom. Look down the list of available updates; if one of them says Windows XP Service Pack 3 (may be abbreviated to SP3), remove its check mark before clicking on Download.
You'll get asked again once the updates have finished downloading. At this point, since you already excluded SP3 from the download, don't bother llooking down the list --- just allow all downloaded updates to install.

Hope I've helped, or at least not caused any damage.

DaLe

And Yet Another GoodBye

Y'all,

Grisoft has released AVG Free 8.0, and it's pretty. All users of AVG Free 7.5 have till May 31st to download and install the new version --- there will be no more virus definition file updates for v. 7.5 after that. And the only bad news is, users of Win 98 and Win Me can't run the new version. So Win 9x users will essentially be left without virus protection at the end of this month.

But all is not lost. I've been meaning to try avast!, the other big free European anti-virus suite. Since several of my clients stilll use Win 9x, and so do the four old Toshiba laptops I bought at the Hospice Thrift Store, this seemed as good a time as any.

And I like it! It loads easily, it runs quietly in the background, and it's easy to turn off the 'providers' I don't need: Peer2Peer and IM, two things I don't do, so there's no need to protect myself from their vulnerabilities.

Click this link to download the installation file; choose Save, point to your desktop, and click Save again.

Disconnect from the Internet, turn off WinPatrol, and uninstall AVG before double-clicking the downloaded file. (did you notice it was only 20 MB? Cool! The new version of AVG is 45 MB.)

avast! protects from 'rootkit' infections, so it has to reboot the computer to take effect. Connect to the Internet and register the software --- they'll send you a product key and easy instructions on how to apply it, via email. Turn WinPatrol back on.

A couple of things I like about avast!:
1. You can schedule a virus scan to run at reboot, before all the Windows files are loaded --- allows for a more thorough scan of the system.
2. When you receive an updated virus definition file, a voice tells you so. If you find this annoying, turn it off:
Start » (All) Programs » avast! AntiVirus » avast! AntiVirus »Settings » Settings » Sounds » Disable Avast Sounds » OK.

If you're running Win 2000 with Service Pack 4 Rollup, or XP, or Vista, you can go ahead and move up to AVG Free 8.0, if you prefer. As stated above, it's a 45.5 MB download.
Click here to download AVG Free 8.0. It now includes anti-spyware protection, so if it was me, I'd uninstall Spybot S & D. But keep WinPatrol.

Space on my free Utilities CD is at a premium, and I'm trying to keep from making it a 2-CD set. So, I'll be removing AVG from the CD ASAP. I'll probably leave a link to it on my website for a while, subject to change without notice. When I find a utility that covers lots of Windows versions, and a similar program that only works with a sub-set thereof, I tend to favor the program that helps more people. And it doesn't hurt that, in this case, the more broadly useful program is the (much) smaller of the two --- did I mention that I'm out of space on my CD?

Write me if you need a copy of my free Utilities CD. I'll deliver a copy or two for free in the Clearwater, FL vicinity, or mail you one for $4 (or two for $7).

Till Next Time...

DaLe aTchiSon

Say Good-Bye to Ad-Aware

Greetings and salutations to all my friends out in cyberspace. Today, I'd like to say a fond farewell to a friend, not exactly an old friend, but a friend I've known and trusted for the past seven or so years. Ad-Aware, the free anti-spyware client from Lavasoft, is no more. They've decided to stop updating the old version, Ad-Aware Personal SE. It will still run if you open it, but will be hopelessly out-of-date within a few weeks.

To replace Ad-Aware Personal SE, Lavasoft has cobbled together a lumbering monstrosity that (I swear) looks like it could have been written by Microsoft! It's huge, nearly twice the size of the previous version. It only runs on Windows 2000 or XP (and it can be made to run under Windows Vista, but what a hassle! ...besides, Windows Defender is already doing most of the same stuff, however poorly). And it runs so terribly slowly that I can't imagine running it at any time other than bedtime.

Here's a very rough comparison: I downloaded and installed the latest versions of Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2007 and Spybot Search & Destroy. Both install in about the same time. Spybot has several separate updates to download, so it takes nearly twice as long to update as Ad-Aware with its one large definition file. Ad-Aware opens in just a few seconds after being called, compared to times between 1 and 2 minutes to get a splash screen from Spybot (I thought for a while that Spybot was broken, but am now convinced it just always opens slowly, on any computer, regardless of age or speed). But then comes the real bottleneck: Spybot says it will scan in around 17 minutes, and actually takes 19 to 21 minutes to scan the entire hard disk, including the registry and all running processes; Ad-Aware doesn't say how long it will take, and I've never managed to wait to see if it would actually finish --- I tend to shut down any program that's still running an hour after I start the scan, and that's the level of performance I've seen from Ad-Aware. Dreadful, if I must say. And I must.

I've been advising all my clients for the past six or seven years to run Ad-Aware, then run Spybot; each would pick up something the other missed. That's no longer the case. I tried switching the order in which the programs were run; Spybot continued to find 1-3 problems that had been missed by Ad-Aware, but I don't remember the last time Ad-Aware caught something Spybot had missed. And with the new shortcomings imposed by the 'upgrade' to AAW 2007, I don't see any reason to continue running both programs.

Please don't get me wrong, here: Ad-Aware 2007 is a much better program than I could have written. I don't code, period. That having been said, I think the authors, or the folks signing their paychecks, made some bad decisions when they were designing the new version --- I'd have stuck with the old version, making minor tweaks as needed, but keeping most of the speed. As stated much earlier in this rant, this software looks like it was coded at Redmond: "Now that most computers have all this extra RAM, let's use every last bit of it, and need even more for minimum performance."

My free Utilities CD no longer contains any version of Ad-Aware. I don't recommend it; in fact, I recommend that anyone already using it should uninstall it, replacing it with Spybot Search & Destroy and WinPatrol.

I'd like to get this posted, so explicit instructions on installing and using Spybot S & D and Winpatrol will have to wait for a (near-) future blog entry. The default settings will do most of what you need, I just like to 'tweak', then share my tweaks.

Please check out my website at www.ComputerRepairShop.biz, and the list of free programs I recommend at www.ComputerRepairShop.biz/download.html. And please write me at DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz; I answer all computer-related questions for free, via email.

Thanks,
DaLe

Considering Buying a 19" Flat-Screen Monitor?

Hi again.

Today I will discuss and discourse on the difference between a 19" LCD monitor and a 19" 'widescreen' LCD monitor. You may already know this, but it was new to me.

I recently had a bit of trouble getting the icons and screen presentation looking just right on a client's new 19" wide-screen flat-panel monitor. The only resolution we could set it to that left square desktop icons actually looking square was so small that we couldn't read the text under the icons! There just wasn't a resolution setting roughly analogous to 800x600 that allowed for the wider screen aspect ratio.

We finally gave up, left it set as nearly right as his video driver allowed, and I came home to do some math.

Here's the problem: we're all used to having our computer screens displayed like our conventional television sets: an aspect ratio of 4:3, meaning the width is 1/3 greater than the height. Movies (at the theatre, at least) are created with an aspect ratio of 2:1 or 16:9, making them wider than they would be on a TV set. Flat-screen monitors sold primarily as multimedia screens have an aspect ratio of 16:10 --- their width is 1.6 times their height. Older video cards, meaning any card made before the 19" widescreen monitors came out, aren't likely to have a resolution setting intended to work with that aspect ratio. The result: everything on your screen is either too tall or too wide, depending on which compromise setting you choose.

This problem could be alleviated if...
1. the video card manufacturers would release new drivers to accommodate the widescreen format, or
2. the widescreen monitors came with driver disks of their own.

While either or both of these possibilities MAY have occurred in some instances, I haven't been the lucky recipient of either; every widescreen monitor I've been asked to install and set up has been without any hint of a driver CD, and Windows Update hasn't provided any help in the way of updated video drivers. (Manufacturers' sites might have helped in this area, but I just recently figured this all out --- at the time, I didn't think to check the manufacturer sites.)

Here's the results of the crude math I worked out (assuming the bezel doesn't cover any viewing area):

a 17" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio:
width = 13.6" height = 10.2" total viewing area = 138.72 sq. in.

a 19" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio:
width = 15.2" height = 11.4" total viewing area = 173.28 sq. in.

a 19" widescreen (16:10 aspect ratio):
width = 16.112" height = 10.07" total viewing area = 162.248 sq. in.

So, you can see that in moving from a 17" conventional monitor to a 19" widescreen, you lose height (1.27%), you gain width (18.5%), and you gain 17% total viewing area. If your video card can utilize the new screen dimensions properly, you're ahead of the game. Only you can decide if the gain was worth the cost of the new monitor.

But, if you move to a 19" monitor with a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, you gain 11.765% in both width AND height, and you gain 24.9% total viewing area. And your old drivers continue to work just fine --- they were written for an aspect ratio of 4:3 in the first place! Your icons and 'cells' look like you're used to from your old monitor, only bigger (if you keep your old display settings) or in greater quantity (if you increase your resolution setting).

The 4:3 monitors aren't put on sale at prices quite as low as the widescreen versions, but in my opinion, they're the better buy, and worth the difference they cost. Case in point: today, CompUSA had a 19" Envision multimedia widescreen for $139 after $80 in rebates; a comparable 4:3 monitor from Hyundai was $185, no rebates necessary (don't rush to the site --- this monitor was sold out by the time I finished typing this blog entry).

Having thought it out, I've decided I won't buy a 19" widescreen, no matter how cheap the sale price --- when I can spare the cost of a 4:3 19" flat-panel, I'll finally upgrade.

Hope I've helped. Please email questions to DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz.

Later,

DaLe