Oct 0809
My laptop is being rebuilt, my cell phone has stopped ringing — but all my equipment is new! I’m in technology hell, and if it weren’t for Maki and my senior network administrator, I would lose my mind.
When I ordered a new laptop three months ago, I asked for Vista as my operating system. I figured it was time to get Vista; it’s been out for ages and resistance is futile, it was time to upgrade. Alas, my brand new Sony VAIO laptop with 2 GIG of RAM was slooooow to boot up and slow to shut down, it took 5-10 minutes to recognize an ethernet or wireless connection, it crashed a lot, and hibernating almost never worked.
Maki finally got sick of my whining and asked me to hand over my laptop one day so that the network admins could downgrade my OS to XP. Wow,my laptop is now super speedy and I’m online within seconds after plugging in. I’m still in hell because you know how it goes with a new system: you have to re-install all your favorite plug-ins, you need to set-up your Word templates, you have to re-synch your phone with your Palm desktop, yada, yada. Read the rest of this entry
Sep 0809
Here’s my dilemma: I want to be able to resize images, but I am not a designer, I don’t need to do fancy designer-y things and I don’t want to shell out $650 for Photoshop or even $90 for Photoshop Elements. I feel the same way about Adobe Acrobat: I just want to create PDFs, not manipulate them or optimize them, and I don’t want to pay $280 for Acrobat (the full version, just the reader).
For the not-so-power-users like me, it doesn’t make sense to pay hundreds of dollars for programs that are overkill for my needs. Luckily, I’ve found a host of free (or ridiculously inexpensive) programs that are just right for my needs. Here’s a list of my favorites:
Gimp is an open-source graphics program. It’s a small download, easy to use, and it lets me resize images in three steps (select Scale, type your preferred image size, then press Scale). Since I write and post my own blog posts, Gimp lets me be self-sufficient and not bother the busy designers and webmasters at Matrix Group. Price: $0.
Neevia is a super-easy PDF creator that installs as a print driver. I can make PDFs out of anything, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint files and Web pages. All I do is press Print, select docuprinter, and enter the directory where I want the PDF saved. Price: $19 (less if you buy a site license) Read the rest of this entry
