Software

Another strange thing happened when I upgraded from MS Office 2003 to 2007. When I compose an email, paragraph marks show up all over the page. I find them very distracting and not particularly useful. (I used to use them back when WordPerfect was the dominant word processor, but that...

I upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2007 at my office today and the first thing I noticed was that the autocomplete function is missing from Word 2007. This is rather annoying because there are certain phrases (like the name of my company and other organizations that we often work...

I highly recommend Good Sync for backing up your data to an external drive. The program lets you compare two locations (e.g. your internal hard disk and your external disk) and then decide the direction of the backup. I usually do a one-way backup from my hard disk to the...

New computers often come with a whole bunch of extra crap installed. It can be hard to figure out what programs you should keep and what you should delete. And I imagine that a lot of computer owners are not likely to delete anything, thinking that the software must be...

The Local Cooling website wants us to contribute to the prevention of further climate change by monitoring the power settings on our computers: More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we...

Some versions of Microsoft Word come with a very annoying “bug” that causes the following error message to show up almost every time you try to save a document. “The document was saved, but data for speech recognition was lost because there was not enough space to store it. Be...

I happened upon Microsoft Power Toys in my wanderings today. These applications will give you control of some small things on your computer that may make a big difference to your working experience. I recommend testing out the ClearType Tuner, the Tweak UI application (UI means user interface), and the...