Microsoft

I’m not a Mac^® user. I do think they’re wonderful computers but like anyone who likes a challenge, I live in a Microsoft^® Windows^® world. I’ve always wondered how Mac users who travel get along in a predominately Windows world? After all, most hotel business centers usually have low-end, Windows-based desktop computers (to keep costs down). What happens to Mac users? Do they have to be bilingual and speak two computing languages? Or, is this Windows predominance what forces them to carry an Apple^® laptop with them every time they leave home (like one of our CLNC^® Mentors who carries her slick Mac with her on every road trip we make)?

The Hyatt Regency Hotel in Deerfield, Illinois, the site of our May 2010 and 2011 CLNC^® 6-Day Certification Seminars, finally got things right for those who are computer-impaired. Instead of requiring you to haul your Mac along, they put higher-end, dual-boot Macs in the business center allowing them to cater to almost every computer user (except for the Linux geeks). They’ve given their guests the best of both computing worlds.

This is a terrific idea that should be the business model for the future (or until Microsoft finally buys and dismantles Apple). I’ve always said “Can’t we just all get along?” Finally somebody took me up on it, at least in the computing world. The world would be a better place (and require less rebooting) if only more business centers were this progressive.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Windows^® XP comes with a nifty indexing service that was designed to help speed up your searches for documents, folders and other files. Unfortunately it doesn’t work as well or as fast as it was designed. It actually slows your computer’s performance. Microsoft^® fixed the issue in Windows Vista^® but for those Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and people like me who are still using XP, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands to nix the index.

Here’s how you do it. First, open up your Control Panel and once it populates (geek-speak for the process of displaying all the icons) double-click Administrative Tools. Once that’s open double-click Services. It will open a new window called Services (Local). Expand that window to full screen so you can locate Indexing Services and double-click it. Change the drop-down next to Startup type from Automatic or Manual to Disabled. Click OK and then close all the windows. You might not notice it, but there will be an increase in your computer’s speed which means you’ll get more legal nurse consulting work product done faster – trust me on this one.

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

From the beginning – let me disclose a conflict of interest, I’m a Firefox user. I’ve flirted with Apple’s Safari but find it is too slow to render its pages, and it’s got the worst search function ever designed for looking for text on a web page (although it does tell you how many matches there are on a page). I’ve customized my Firefox browser to include my favorite blogs, news and RSS feeds and, even though it’s a little slow to open the first time you fire it up each day, I love the fact that I’m tuned in to the world every time I jump on the Net. It’s great the way I can do tabbed browsing, with a simple right-click opening pages from my Yahoo! searches in a new tab so I’m not clicking forward and back to get to my search results after a page pans out. It’s also cool to be able to look up forgotten passwords for websites that deleted my “cookies.”

With my built-in bias, I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer (IE) 8. I’ve had IE7 installed for some time and have always found it a little clumsy. In fact, the only reason I have used it is to access the Windows^® Update website and keep my Windows XP OS and Office programs patched up. I didn’t like IE for general web surfing and had a latent fear of all its vulnerabilities I’m always reading about. Firefox seemed like the best way to practice “safe surfing.”

Now that Microsoft^® has released IE8, a number of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have asked me whether or not they should upgrade. My answer is an unqualified “yes.” IE8 is probably the best version of the IE browser that Microsoft has released. It’s supposedly safer than ever and when you open a new tab, instead of seeing a blank page, you can choose to open previously closed tabs as well as other options. It offers a so-called smart address bar feature (that I’ve turned off in Firefox and dislike in Safari) that offers sites from your browser’s history as you type in an address. It also has better options within the “delete browsing history” function that gives you better control over what data (even website-specific data) you want to keep or delete.

When you click on the “x” to close an individual page, it asks you if you want to close all tabs or just one. There’s a new filtering service you can select which will display a warning page prior to visiting any site that is deemed to contain malware or that might be a phishing site (security risks). Something really cool is that IE8 highlights the core domain name of the website you’re visiting to help you avoid sound-a-like or typosquatting sites. To help make this a safer browser than previous versions of IE some other security improvements have been added. On the negative side, IE8 may not display all websites the way they’ve been designed to be viewed – not everyone will catch this – but it offers a “compatibility mode” that will allow you to see a website to view the “broken” site correctly and it will remember those sites for you, switching in and out of compatibility mode automatically.

In short, any legal nurse consultant that uses IE on a regular basis should upgrade to IE8 and then keep an eye out for upcoming patches. I also recommend that you make sure you have all the current high-priority Windows updates installed prior to moving to IE8. The upgrade process is easy to download and install. It kept almost all the customizations to my iGoogle homepage (including my cool theme), RSS feeds, etc. This is a definite upgrade that I’m sure I’ll come to appreciate the more I use it and so will you.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

In my “PC to the Cleaners” thread, I’ve dusted you off, cleaned out your private data and today I’ll speed up your computer (at least infinitesimally). My final topic on cleaning is how to clean up (and out) your hard drive.

When you first buy a computer for your legal nurse consulting business, it runs so fast that we wonder why we struggled to live with our old computer. But what happens? The longer we use the “new” computer, the slower it gets. Why? The answer is simple – the more you work, the more data you store on the computer. The more data you store, the longer it takes to find the data you need.

First of all, think of an old vinyl record – 45, 33 or 78 rpm – whatever you grew up with. On a vinyl record, all of the data (the music) is in concentric tracks and you can immediately find a song by dropping the needle onto the correct track (anyone born after 1980 is probably lost by this point). At the risk of oversimplifying, think of your hard drive the same way. Your hard drive begins with its data in localized, easy-to-find places. As you use the computer and the hard drive spins, data is opened and saved into different spaces on the hard drive. Some portions of the data go into vacant spaces and some overwrites older data. At some point the “tracks of your data” are no longer in nice easy-to-find areas – they are spread out all over your hard drive. The more data on the drive, the longer it takes the computer to find and pull together the data when you open a file, photo or document.

What makes up these large quantities of data? First of all there are all those legal nurse consulting reports, LOLcats, photos, slide shows of flowers, movies of people doing stupid things and other attachments stuck onto your old sent and received email (if you use Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, etc. where copies of email are kept locally). There are also all sorts of old photos, files, file fragments, unused or partially uninstalled programs and other debris that have collected on your hard drive over time.

By cleaning out the junk or no longer needed files, you will free up hard drive or disk space you can then use to store new data. This speeds up the rate at which your computer accesses data (well not really, but it makes it easier for your computer to find so it seems quicker).

Simple things first: Go into your “sent” folder in your email program and delete any email more than 60 days old for personal email and 1 year for your CLNC^® business (or pick dates that work for you). Do the same for your received email and file attachments and dump anything you don’t need. If you can sort email by size (usually with a Size bar at the top of your email program’s window) go into the “sent” folder and click the Size bar until the largest email files are displayed first. Then delete any email with a large attachment (anything over 300 KB that you do not wish to save). If you want to keep an attachment, save it into the proper file on your hard drive (you’ve probably already done this and have a duplicate copy still attached to an email anyway).

Next, delete any unused or duplicate photographs, music, drawings, images or other files you have accumulated over the years. If you don’t feel comfortable deleting those photos from your 2001 summer vacation in Poughkeepsie (the photos you haven’t looked at since you came home) you can burn them to a CD/DVD or move them to a network storage device or portable hard drive, if you wish.

As you surf the Internet for information you need for your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting business, copies of all the web pages you visit are stored (cached) on your hard drive to make subsequent viewings faster. There’s no reason to keep these so you can set your web browser to clear the “cache” files on your web browser after every session and free up that disk space. Internet Explorer 6.0 and later can be set to do this automatically. Go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced Tab, under Security. Select the box next to Empty Temporary Internet Files Folder when browser is closed and click OK. If you are using the Firefox browser you can look under Tools, Options, Privacy and Private Data Settings.

When a Windows^® user deletes a file, photo, etc., it goes into the Recycle Bin on your desktop to give you a chance to recover it, in case you have second thoughts. On a regular basis you should empty those “trash” files from your Recycle Bin. This maximizes your hard drive free space by freeing Windows to overwrite those files and the space they used to occupy. The files aren’t really deleted – Windows just pretends it can’t see them so it shows them as “free” space and eventually overwrites them.

To speed up file access you can consolidate your files into the My Documents folder. Here you’ll find subfolders such as My Music and My Pictures and you can create additional folders for word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc. By consolidating, you’ll make files easier to find, and you may only need to back up the one folder rather than having to hunt all over your computer for files to back up. (You can then set your Microsoft^® Office programs to open into the correct “default” folder so you won’t have to fish around.)

To gain back even more hard drive space, delete the “shovelware” from your computer. This is what I call the preloaded, “limited time only,” or preview software the manufacturer dumps onto computers due to licensing deals. It also includes the stuff you’ll never use. To get rid of it, open the Control Panel, go to Add and Remove Programs and remove any program you’re not using and don’t plan to use. Be careful though – just because you don’t recognize a program doesn’t mean you don’t need it (or won’t need it).

As I said earlier as you continue to create and save your reports for your attorney-clients, and delete files, Windows fills the “deleted” spaces with newer files, often scattering files across your hard drive? This causes Windows to run slower as it searches your hard drive for those fragments and pulls them together into your file. If you run a defragmenting program on a regular basis it will reconsolidate your files and programs so Windows doesn’t have to look for them. It’s kind of like putting the record tracks I talked about above back into the correct order for each song. After you delete no longer needed programs and data, you should run a defragmenter.

Windows^® XP has a good built-in defragmenting program. Before you run it though, you should empty your Recycle Bin. Then run the defragger from the menu bar by clicking Start, then Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, then Disk Defragmenter and finally click Defragment. The program will start up, run and you will need to close it when complete.

I recommend defragging at least once a week. Any more often than that is simply compulsive. Any less than once a month is criminal. The key to keeping your computer running fast and smoothly is regular maintenance.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

My last tech tip for your legal nurse consulting business was to clean it up, and my recommendation was to blow it out – your keyboard and air vents, that is. Today we’ll look at some different aspects of cleaning up for your CLNC^® business. This time it’s your data, not your dust.

Every document, PowerPoint^® presentation and photograph you create or edit personally or as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant contains what is known as “metadata.” Metadata, or hidden data in Microsoft^®-speak, may include information about the file in which the metadata is included – in other words it’s data about data and may contain information about the quality, creator and/or characteristics of the data it’s contained in. Try this: open Word, click “Open” like you’re opening a file. Then single left click on any file followed by a single right click. In the menu that pops up scroll to the bottom and left click “Properties.” That shows you the underlying metadata telling you when the file was created, edited, who authored the document and when the file was last accessed.

Let’s say you use a legal nurse consulting file template created by someone else to create a document. Are you the author? Not according to the metadata. The author, should we look into the document properties, is the person who created the template – not you. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if an attorney-client asked you who really wrote your report and someone else’s name showed in the Properties as author?

There are ways to avoid this. If you’re using Office 2007 you can inspect the metadata included in any document, clear it out and edit in the “correct” information (or you can choose to delete it). Simply open a Word document. Click the “Office Button” in the upper left corner then click “Properties” to see the simplest metadata. You can edit this to include your correct information. If you really want to get advanced, click “Document Properties” above the display of properties to see all the editable types of metadata you can store on a document. Another way to see the metadata is to close the document, navigate to the document in your Windows^® Explorer (not Internet Explorer^®) then right click on the document and left click on “Properties.” Now, left click on “Summary” in the “Properties” tab and then, click on “Advanced.”

Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has also given us a couple of ways to remove the metadata when you finalize a document. If you’re using Vista, it allows you to do it simply by bringing up the Properties box and the metadata can be cleared from there. In Office 2007, to clear out the metadata, open the Word document you wish to take to the cleaner. Click the “Office Button,” click “Prepare,” then click “Inspect Document” (if it asks you to save the document, do so) then click “Inspect.” The results box will show the different types of information stored in your document. You can then click the “Remove All” button by each type of information to remove that info. Reinspect the document and you’re ready to send it – without the metadata.

Almost every Microsoft Office 2007 document, PowerPoint and Excel document can be purged in this manner. If you’re using Office 2003/XP, there is a plug-in available from Microsoft to remove metadata just like Office 2007.

Beside Word documents, CLNC^® consultants routinely send out contracts as Adobe^® PDF documents rather than Word documents so as to be sure that the party receiving them cannot edit them. Adobe PDF documents also contain metadata that can be removed or edited prior to sending. Simply open the document with Acrobat, click File, then click “Properties” and you can edit the data. You’ll need Adobe Acrobat^® 8.0 or higher to do this (or a third-party application).

If you’re not scared enough by your legal nurse consulting documents, wait until you see what’s hidden in your digital photos! Try this. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to any photo stored on your hard drive. Right click on the photo to select it and in the menu that pops up, scroll to the bottom and left click “Properties.” Now, left click “Summary” in the “Properties” tab and then, here it is, left click “Advanced.” You may see the date the photo was taken, the type of camera, whether a flash was used and more information. Some of the newer digital cameras can even add GPS data to tell where a photo was taken. Think about that next time you snap a vacation pic – if you like the spot you can always use your GPS to navigate back to the exact spot the photo was taken (and so can anyone who you share that photo with via email or on the Internet).

Luckily there’s a simple application named JPEG & PNG Stripper that you can download and install on your computer. It does exactly what its name implies and strips the metadata from your photos. This is mandatory before posting them on the Internet or sharing them with friends/family (because they can be shared ad infinitum).

Metadata isn’t as persistent as you’d think but if you’re not aware of it you may be giving away more information than you wish to when you give away your documents and photos. Time to take steps to stop the sharing.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

In line with our talk about the wonders of the Windows^® operating system, I’ve got a mixed bag of news. On April 14 of this year, Microsoft^® will end support for Windows^® XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. For the majority of the Certified Legal Nurse Consultants out there, it’s the support for XP and Office 2003 that will hurt.

What does this mean to a busy CLNC^® consultant? Well, the endless stream of bug fixes and service packs that flow from Microsoft will finally cease – for the two products you’re likely to be using (Office 2003 and Windows XP). Microsoft will still issue security updates for these products, but only updates that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, deems to be critical.

Should you be scared? No. Both programs will still run just like they do today (and tomorrow and the next day) and you’ll have plenty of time to consider your next move – upgrading to a new computer that runs Windows Vista (or Windows 7 if you wait long enough) and Office 2007. The older programs are still good and will remain in service for some time. I know a number of major law firms that haven’t upgraded to Office 2007 due to compatibility issues with their legacy software, computer hardware and Vista. A lot of small businesses and consumers (that’s us) will just ride it out until our next (scheduled) upgrade (i.e., when our computer craps out). If you’ve got the cash, you can buy an extended support agreement from Microsoft, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you do decide to panic and upgrade, or simply to upgrade, make sure your new computer has 2GB or more of RAM (memory), a fast 2.4+ GHZ dual-core processor and a big ‘ole hard drive to hold all those medical-related case reports for your CLNC^® business. Conversely, you could always just buy a Mac^® and only have to worry about upgrading every 3-4 years.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

If you’ve moved to Microsoft^® Office 2007 with its suite of upgrades, enhancements and head-banging, you’ve probably noticed the so-called “Ribbon.” This replaced all the good, old-fashioned, easy-to-use command buttons in Office 2003. I’ve been using this suite for about 10 months now and still misplace commands and I never remember where the darn “advanced options” can be found. If a techie is flummoxed, what’s a legal nurse consultant to do?

Well, fire up your favorite web browser and head on over to Microsoft’s excellent Get Started web page and check out the tutorials created for people just like us. Trust me – when it comes to software, you’re more like me than I am myself.

Look at Basic Ribbon Training. It will help you track down the commands that you can’t or won’t find on the new Ribbon. These are two terrific links and I keep them both bookmarked in my IE7 browser. I usually use the Firefox browser but found that for some strange reason Microsoft’s websites work best when using the Microsoft IE browser (something funny about that).

While I’m on the topic of Word 2007, do you ever use the little (?) help symbol up in the top right hand corner of your Office 2007 programs? This replaced the “Help” button and the “Type a question for help” box that was found in Word and some of the other Office 2003 programs. It’s a pretty good tool, but as many times as I’ve used this to search for a solution, I don’t always find what I want right away.

Here’s an example. When I insert a headshot of Vickie into a Word 2007 document, all I see is an empty box (in Windows-speak a “placeholder”) – not the photo.

Now, I’d really like to see this photo of Vickie so I can figure out how to wrap the text around it to make best use of the space on the page. When all I see is an empty box, it’s not much help. I can’t use any of the cool feathering tools, etc. on this darn box.

So I did an online search by typing in “I can’t see my inserted photos in Word 2007″ and I got some good leads, one of which told me to “Open the advanced tab under Images and un-click show placeholders.” The perfect answer right? Except in 2007 there is no “advanced tab” under the Image tab!

Giving up on that, I decided to use the built-in Windows help function. I clicked the little (?) and typed “show placeholders.” I got nothing. I typed “view placeholders” – got nothing, typed “view images” – got nothing. I finally remembered the Windows bar doesn’t say “images,” it says “pictures.” I typed “show picture placeholders” and I got the answer to “Go into advanced options and remove the checkmark for ‘view picture placeholders.’” Gadzooks! That’s the answer. Now all I need to do is find the “advanced options” and I can fix my problem. It’s simple. Click “tools,” click “options” and darn. There are no “tools” or “options” in Word 2007. So it’s back to the online “Basic Ribbon Training” page to use the Find Word 2003 commands in Word 2007 link to find my “options” and “advanced options” (they’re at the bottom of the Ribbon under “Word Options”). Now I see how to play with my inserted headshot of Vickie (not image of Vickie, duh!).

You can download a free “Get Started” tab from Microsoft that you can install right onto the tool bar of your Office 2007 versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. When you encounter a bump in the road or can’t find a command simply click the “Get Started” tab and you’re on your way!

The moral of this story isn’t to buy a Mac^® for your legal nurse consulting business – it’s if you’re searching for something in the Windows Help function, you should use Windows-speak to find it. The more you use the language of the software the more likely you will be to actually find a useful help answer! Something cool about the new online help function is that people can comment and add answers that truly help other people like me who are challenged by help.

So, like I said in the title – don’t be afraid to ask for help, just be careful how you do it.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

P.S. Please comment on your wild experiences riding the Ribbon.

A couple of Thursdays ago, I posted a blog about my birthday (thanx again everyone). Then Vickie had a birthday and today I’d like to remind everyone of two more birthdays – both are about half my age and both are almost as important as mine. They’re the birthdays of whats, not whos. You either love or hate (or both at once) these whats.

On November 10th of last year, Microsoft^® Windows^® turned 25! Happy belated birthday, Windows. I’m sorry I didn’t send a card but I forgot while waiting to reboot (again). This year, coincidentally on my birthday (January 22 in case you want to mark your calendar), Apple, Inc.’s Macintosh^® computer, turned 25 too! Happy belated birthday, Mac^®, I’m sorry I didn’t send a card but I was loading the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack onto my iPod^®.

Windows was really created in 1983, it wasn’t until 1985 that Windows 1.0 came around as a new product. My first experience was Windows 3.1, back in the early 90s. I remember moving very reluctantly from my trusty DOS version of Automenu to the scary Windows GUI (graphical user interface). It was so traumatic that I needed a techie friend to come over, install it on Vickie’s and my computers and teach us to use it.

Next we graduated to Windows 95, then moved up to the popular blue screen of death known as Windows 98. Believe it or not, I still have two laptops running Windows 98! I keep them to run some older programs I just can’t live without (no, one is not Pong). We passed through a couple of server versions and I advanced the users in Vickie’s growing company right past Windows 2000 to the best OS I’ve ever used, Windows XP. Now we have the SP2 version of Vista out (which shows it really is a good OS if you have enough computer power) and Microsoft is set to release Windows 7. All the reviews I’ve seen of Windows 7 say it will (eventually) knock our socks off (even though it’s really just SP3 of Vista).

Although Apple was started way back in the ‘70s, 1984 was the public introduction of the first Macintosh computer (which was the first computer to use a GUI as well as a mouse). Remember the cool “1984″ commercial that ran during Super Bowl^® XVIII? Most of you know I’m not a Mac user (although I did check my email on a Macbook Pro^® in the Apple store in Tokyo last year) so I have no history with them. I will tell you that I believe they’re some of the best computers built and have the best operating system on the market.

Today, technology has given Certified Legal Nurse Consultants many more choices than we had in the 80s and 90s. There are advantages to both systems and with the vast array of software available (like Windows for Mac) there’s nothing stopping you from using a Mac in your legal nurse consulting business. You won’t find Macs in too many big law firms but you’ll probably find them with solo practitioners and possibly small firms. Whichever OS you choose for your business or next computer upgrade, you’ll be in good shape tech-wise. Things will just continue to get better. You can look as cool as you want in Starbucks^® or for your kids – there’s nothing holding you back! One last thing – there are Mac viruses out there (contrary to popular belief), if you’re a Mac user check out this article.

A lot of things have come and gone since 1983/1984, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Cabbage Patch Kids included. We’ve experienced the frustration and fun (hah) of Windows and Macs for over 25 years. Can you think of many other products, especially in the personal computing field, that have lasted that long while improving themselves? If you do, let me know.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Much of the software out there is so ridiculously expensive that it makes it nearly impossible for most people to get started with even basic computer tasks. Take for example an RN starting a part-time business as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. Purchasing MS Office, antivirus software and basic graphic editing tools can easily exceed a $1,000 price tag.

I’m going to show you how you can get by on a zero dollar budget and still have access to amazingly powerful tools.

Office Suite

The most popular suite is Microsoft^® Office and not surprisingly it is also the most expensive. We have several free alternatives here. The most powerful in my opinion are the free online office tools from Google^TM known as Google Documents. Google Doc’s gives you access to word processing, spreadsheets and presentations (in essence replacing Word, Excel^® and PowerPoint^®). My next favorite office suite of applications is another freebie known as OpenOffice. It completely replaces Microsoft^® Office and will save you hundreds of dollars.

Email

Email is a big one. I hate seeing people use the email addresses their web service providers give them. Surely most don’t know better but the reason they are given those addresses is so that they cannot cancel their Internet service (or change it) without losing that email address. Anyone who has changed their phone number or email address in the past knows how big a hassle this is. So go to Gmail^TM and get an account. They usually have better spam filtering and antivirus tools than your Internet provider. You can also incorporate Google Calendar to manage your schedule.

To manage your emails, you should download Thunderbird. This will act like MS Outlook^® and let you download and manage your emails when not connected to the Internet (like when on a flight or out of a wireless network range).

AntiVirus

Norton and McAfee^® are very expensive but unfortunately, there is no way to avoid anti-virus software. Fortunately there is a free alternative known as AVGFree from a company called GriSoft. I have no problems with it and it runs just as well as Norton and McAfee^® in my opinion.

Graphic Editor

Checkout a free online piece of software called SplashUp. It is a highly stripped down version of Photoshop^® (and based on flash) but it allows for some fairly advanced photo manipulation including blending effects, layering and filters. It even ties into some of the online photo storage databases like Flickr^® and Picasa^TM. You can also find free stock images to use for your website or other marketing materials at Bad Neighborhood.

Pretty cool, right? Well…at least to the people who haven’t already shelled out $1,000 for the software they now know how to get for free.

Guest Blogger Profile

Brian Horn is an Internet marketing consultant who specializes in search engine marketing, site optimization, social media marketing, link building and web data analytics. Brian has consulted with Vickie Milazzo Institute for over three years.

Brian also speaks at seminars and conferences throughout the U.S. and Canada on how to use the Internet to improve business.

Windows^® Vista never quite caught on in the corporate setting. XP has continued to rule the corporate roost. Home and small business users, like legal nurse consultants, however, have adopted a mix of XP and different versions of Vista that were foisted on them by retailers when they bought new computers. If you’re still running XP and haven’t yet upgraded to Vista, should you? Or should you wait and go directly to the next version of Windows^®, currently known as Windows^® 7?

The last I read, the rumored target is late 2009 for Windows^® 7. That probably means 2010. Then it will be even later for the service packs that fix the bugs to come out. If you’re buying a new computer now and you’re buying a pretty powerful system, I recommend going with Vista (Home Premium or Business edition) now.

Why? Because you’re going to be buying newer, Vista-compatible versions of software that should also be Windows^® 7 compatible. Lots of the problems encountered with Vista come from people trying to use older software that is not fully compatible. This is what keeps many corporate users, such as large and even small law firms (and their mixes of software versions and computing power), from adopting Vista. Vista is a perfectly good operating system. If you upgrade your printer and scanner at the same time, make sure you get drivers for them. If you keep your old printer/scanner, look for driver information online.

If you just have to have XP, Microsoft^® is allowing some computer manufacturers to order XP through the end of January 2009 for delivery in early 2009. That means move quickly. Remember, the longer you use (or hold onto) XP, the harder it will be to upgrade later. You may as well bite the bullet and get on the Vista bandwagon with your next computer purchase.

Keep on techin’,

Tom