I was at my father-in-law’s last night. While initially there to help with a new flat panel tv setup, I eventually found out that his internet service (which he gets thru Verizon DSL) is appalingly slow: using the java speed test on this website, I measured 18 Kbs downloads (oddly enough, I also measured > [...]

I noticed a dramtic slowing down with my DSL connection, I started to run Verizon speed test: http://infospeed.verizon.net/index.asp everyday monitoring my connection. The service I supposed to get is 3MB, however, during the days, my connection, according the the speed test, dropped down to something like 56K/126k/256k in variations. I started to spend large amount [...]

Vista just plain drives me crazy. It seems like each time I walk away from my computer it automatically disconnects from the internet. For some reason I can never log back onto the net unless I restart my computer. This does not happen with my other systems that have XP on them so I know [...]

My dear wife finally relented in her opposition to video games and ordered my son a Wii for Christmas. Really it is for our family but he will be the one to open it. We also got a Wii Fit as part of the package. I was caught in the act of trying to open [...]

On one of the forums I frequent there was a very long discussion of anti-virus software. I had never considered anti-virus software to be a “resource hog” but apparently some people are very opposed so certain programs because of this. Several people felt very strongly that unless you have ample computer memory that programs like [...]

A couple of months ago I invested in a great new ergonomic keyboard. It was wonderful until one day it just stopped working. After trying everything I knew of to fix it I decided to take it apart. This is when I discovered a sticky mess. Apparently someone in my house spilled a drink onto [...]

Last week I finally broke down and upgraded our desktop computer. It didn’t seem like it but when I looked through my records I realized that this one is 6 years old. For the most part it does the job but we are now reaching the point where there simply isn’t enough memory. The new [...]

A friend of mine has been debating about going back to school for a computer degree. He has been asking me to offer an opinion about whether this is a good decision. On a very basic level I think that working in IT is a good field to be in. When you think about it [...]