CyberCoyote — October 29, 2009

NEWS and NOTES
Installing Windows 7

We had a nice group of members for the second meeting this season. George first related his experiences in upgrading three computers to Windows 7. One of them failed to upgrade until he reformatted the hard drive. I suspect it was because the manufacturer of that particular PC had done something cute with the boot sector of the hard drive to make their restore partition work. [selected articles]

Office 2007

We also saw part of a video from Microsoft on how the "ribbon" in the latest versions of Office came about. Word and Excel have grown to include so many tools and options that most users didn't even know they were there. The "ribbon" is Microsoft's way to make them more "discoverable" and quicker to access. However, it does require a couple of hours of patience to learn what is a whole new way of working. [getting started]

Clickfree automatic backup

Finally, George demonstrated told us about the Clickfree automated backup system that does all the heavy lifting for you.

TECH TOPICS
Representation of digital camera sensor.
RAW bits

Bob Atkins at Photo.net has a short, simple explanation of RAW vs TIFF vs JPEG image formats. Even if your camera only offers JPEG, it's a good place to learn what's really going on inside your camera.

Firefox

If it's been a while since you've tried Firefox, you might want to try it again: Mozilla has significantly improved the speed, security and versatility of Firefox over the last couple of years. SmartComputing has more on the details.

Twitter logo.
SECURITY

Over 20% of web-based computer attacks are now launched from websites that have been seeded with poisoned content. Cybercriminals hide it in blog comments, videos, enticing links, etc. It's primarily a problem on YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, other social networking sites and in sponsored results and ads on search pages. If you engage in wide-ranging Web travels, that's one good reason to put a proactive defense in place. [more on the problem]

ODDS and ENDS
Cartling Lane...

home to London's only remaining sewer-powered street lamp.
[via A Welsh View]

Autumn Leaves

http://xkcd.com/648/

A senior citizen said...

http://www.forwardedfunnies.com/...

That's all, folks.