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Hewie's Views and Reviews Welcome to this issue of Hewie's Views & Reviews. Be sure to visit Hewie's Favorites at http://www.hewie.net/ . ++++ Part 1 of my Vista Experience ++++ Part 1 of my Vista Experience I decided to bite the bullet and bought a new desktop computer with Vista Home Premium. I looked for the right system for me and settled on an HP with a Dual Core AMD chip and 3 Gigabytes of memory. I bought in on the last day of a weekly sale on Saturday evening and waited for the Sunday ads to come out before opening the box. I have been installing software and testing it since. I did try a program that my friend Stan suggested , PC Decrapifier ( http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ ). I cleaned out all of Norton anti-virus, Office 2007 Student edition, and several other items, before installing anything. I also made a copy of the Restore Disks (2 DVDs) and a Boot disk (1 CD) as suggested by HP. It would have taken 15 CD disks for the restore if I used CDs. I had a problem with the Office 2007 installation. The DVD player couldn't read the disks, but they worked fine in my XP machines with DVD drives. So I got to test the tech support. The technician, Amit, did a great job. We determined that it was the disk, as everything else worked in the drive. He spent almost an hour with me, and did ask if I could understand him. I called Microsoft and they sent me a replacement disk. In the mean time, I shared a DVD drive from my current XP machine and copied it to the new system's hard drive. I then saved a new DVD on the new machine as a back-up. Then I installed Office 2007. I exported the 1.7 GB Outlook .pst file to the new HP and then imported it to the new version. That worked great. All of my messages since the early 2000's were there, as well as the calendar, etc. I did have to setup all 30 of my e-mail accounts manually. I have a backup & restore program, ABF's Outlook Backup, but it doesn't yet work with Vista and/or Office 07. It backs up the accounts, favorites and the pst file (which contains the calendar, contacts, messages, and memos) and restores them in the new environment. I used it when I upgraded to my Intel Pentium IV 3.06mhz machine. I have installed several programs without many problems. I have Mailwasher ( http://www.mailwasher.com/ )., Paint Shop Pro XI (http://www.corel.com/ ), Quick Photo Resizer (http://www.dzsoft.com/ ), and updated to a new version of eWallet (http://www.iliumsoft.com/ ). I use eWallet to keep all of my passwords and have done so for years. I was using version 2.1, as it worked on my Palm 3C and I could sync it with the PC version. It used 128-bit encryption. The latest version, 5.0.2 uses 256-bit encryption and works on my Palm LifeDrive, as well as Vista. For the $17 upgrade ($30 for the full version) I also got a U3 version. The new HP is extremely quiet. My current Pentium 4 main machine makes a lot of noise from the fans. The 3GB of Ram and the fast processor makes the machine extremely fast. Vista searching is great and searching in Outlook is almost instant. I think that it's a combination of Vista and Outlook07, as Outlook03 on my XP laptop is not that fast. I will continue this next month. Until then, my personal advice is to only get Vista on a new machine and not to attempt an upgrade on an existing machine. Be sure to research all of your current hardware peripherals and software for version and model compatibility, before making the commitment. ++++ New additions to Hewie's Favorites Pownce Spyware Warrior Windows Live SkyDrive Beta Spock BuiltWith.com Best Windows Vista Software Downloads thecoolhunter.net Farecast Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites Very Funny Ads Download YouTube Videos Display Calibration Online Monitor test PortableApps.com makeuseof.com |
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