My Web Log

My Web Log (Blog)

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A 'Blog' is just a web log of one's own activities. This will be updated regularly and will cover a few months in the life of this 75 year old net-head.

April 08 Not much of a blog, I know. My main news is that I have had a cochlear implant. For anyone who wants the details I am updating it on my Deafness page. I have yet to have it turned on, so do not know yet how much benefit it will be to me. But I had got to the stage where, even with two powerful digital aids I was having difficulty making out what people say. But it is not something you undertake lightly. There is some risk and the amount of benefit varies. Speech is said to sound like a Dalek. But all the people I have been in touch with who have had one are very enthusiastic. Altogether it tooabout six years from my first application for my name to float to the top of the list fr an NHS funded operation. It IS expensive. The operation is microsurgery and takes 3 hours. But before that I attended the hospital at least a doxen times for various assessments and a scan. And I will have to attend the centre again every week for a year while I relearn the sound of speech. So, all in all, it is a very labour intensive operation. Far more so than open heart surgery.

March 09 We were fortunate to get a break in South Africa late Feb and early March. The weather is just right at that time (their Autumn) All went well until the return journey when a BA plane from Port Elizabeth was delayed, thus missing our connection in Johannesburg. This entailed an overnight stop in the city then a full day wasted in the VIP lounge. The baggage was lost for a day and somehow I don't think we will get compensated for the costs involved. Ah well ! It is the first hiccup in any of our holidays, so can't grumble (too much) At least we don#t have to survive in a South African township. Se HERE

The website proceeds steadily with Page Hits amounting to between 500 and 750 per day during the winter. This drops a little in Spring as people find more interesting things to do ! I am sure, if I did a graph I could point out the sunniest days. From my point of view it is wonderful to be able to 'meet' so many nice people, especially being deaf. I now have contact with many more people than I ever did previously, in 40 years living in the same house. Recently was able to introduce someone to Skype video. They wanted to keep in touch with children and grandchildren. The whole set up from getting a webcam to hearing and seeing each other only took a week.

January 2008 January has continued with the flow of enquiries. Nothing terrible serious except my daughter's PC crashed because of a power supply problem. Got a new, and more powerful one in Cambridge, slipped it in and things were back to normal. Other problems have included Broadband slowdown, using Picasa, finding insurance for older folk, a PC losing its date, Scandisk failing to finish, lack of memory causing slowness and error messages. On my own PC I have had some success with speech recogntiton software and a new webcam. On a personal level I have heard that I am to have an operation to improve my hearing.

December 07 Recovered from my Vista/NTL/Virgin nightmare after a lot of calls (reimbursed, as it was their fault)
I have been fielding many different sorts of question such as Exporting OE adds and messages; Debug errors; Lost photos after XP reinstall; Zone Alarm asking about Postupdate; Animated Gifs not showing in OE ;Faulty Speedtouch modem; Slow Gmail (use Firefox); Gmail problems with Internet Explorer; What to clear in disk cleanup; Firefox access through a proxy server. Quite difficult ones but mostly solved in the end.

October 30th Has turned out to be a nightmare for me. I just wanted to take advantge of NTL/Virgin Media's kind offer to give me loads of free TV and ordered a set top box. The technician was here and gone withing 45 minutes and all looked fine. I had been sending emails while he was here and went to send some more after he left. They wouldn't go ! At the price moment he had connected the set top box my e-mail address had been eliminated !! I couldn't even access my account. It said you don't have any address here. It couldn't send me details, password etc because they no longer have a record of me. Despite this I can still get on the net so I am using my Gmail account. But all mail to my normal address is probably bouncing down the hall.

Sept 17th The transfer of all my programs and data to my new Vista Premium machine has been long and arduous and still not confident to strip out material from the old one, so they are still sitting side by side, both connected to the net via a router and BB modem. I used all of my skills to set up the new one satisfactorily and have just found that Internet explorer is locking up when I try to do Google searches so have installed Firefox in its place. My recently bought Dragon Naturally Speaking software would not work with Vista and I am trying to obtain a Vista version from them. A recent survey by Comet showed that many people would throw away a PC than sort out one with problems; that 8 out of 10 could not fix simple problems such as retrieving lost files or upgrading memory. 46% were said to be unable to transfer data from one machine to another. I can foresee a lot of difficulties arising as people finally decide to upgrade. It is all very well getting a new PC but if nearly half cannot transfer their stuff they will have to pay someone to do it or just lose it. Note to self: Develop a section of the Vista page specifically on the thorny question of transfers: See Here.

Sept 1st Finally took the plunge and got a Windows Vista Premium PC (another Medion), so will be able to comment on Vista with more confidence. I also purchased a cheap laptop for a friend with the Home Basic version installed. I was quite impressed, especially when it installed her HP printer with no effort on my part. Outlook Express had been replaced by a similar program (Windows Mail) but in setting up her e-mail I was surprised not to be asked for her dialup number. The mystery was solved when I found the dialup number entry was only required in Internet Explorer Connection, under Settings, Properties. I transferred her e-mail addresses via a memory key using Export and Import (CSV). No problem. The smart under-£300 HP laptop (Ebuyer) came with no disks at all. On boot up it went through a lengthy process of creating a new partition and copying the rescue files to it but it also recommended making external rescue disks in case of boot failure. No icons on the desktop but shortcuts can be created by dragging things such as Internet Explorer from the Start Menu onto the Desktop page.

August. Page impressions on this website held up at 21,600 but advertising revenue down compared with earlier months to just under $300 . But I very pleased to get that for my efforts - and it doesn't cost visitors a penny (or a red cent)

My change over story. I didn't get a cable to connect the two machines and used one DVD and a number or copies to my 1Gb memory key. Vista has an Easy Transfer Wizard which collects specified information into a file on the old machine. You can then put that on the new machine and click it to install all the data onto it. In my case, when I copied all the available options the whole thing failed. So I copied all my My Documents, Pictures and Videos onto a DVD, then deleted all of those into the Recycler. I then did another Easy (?) Transfer of what remained. This fit onto my memory key in one go and seems to have copied most of the settings and things over. However, I finished up with the two and three copies of every email address ! It was easier to clear that lot and start from scratch, exporting the addresses on the old PC to a CSV file, copying them onto the new machine using the'key' and importing them. I also exported my favourites but so far haven't imported them. Easy File Transfer didn't do it either. The one buggy program I have found is Windows Mail, which replaces Outlook Express. When I went to empty the Deleted mail folder I got an error message and a suggestion to link to a discussion group about it. There I found dozens of people suffering the same fate with no reasonable cure. I decided to use the Mozilla email client, Thunderbird. It worked fine but only allowed importation from Outlook (not Outlook Express) address books. I therefore had to resort to the same export import game from Outlook Express as I had done with Windows Mail itself.

July. Getting over 700 page hits on the site some days but advertising clicks are a little down. It is difficult to understand these figures, which come from Google I have a Google Page Ranking of 4/10, which is said to be quite good. .Haven't done much with the speech recognition software since installing it but must really see if it will work with someone else's voice, without training.

1st June. I will check the April and May figures for hits on my webpages and weed out those pages that are the least frequently visited.

14th May. Well I finally got my laptop and desktop wi-fi'd together and, at last can update the securlity on the laptop without leaving it on all night on dialup ! Don't ask me how it was done. Sill a mystery to me. But it works a treat.
I have also just installed Dragon Naturally Speaking software on the desktop and I must say I am impressed, especially as the training took just over 5 minutes. Which means that it really could be used by someone giving a talk to deaf people ( having the words projected on a screen) The accuracy was good and will get better as it learns from me and I get used to the phrases such as "New Paragraph" or "Scratch that". My other, rather more basic 'hearing aid' only costs a couple of quid and is a small erasable whiteboard that I can take with me. I think they could really catch on at discos to help youngsters communicate even BEFORE they go deaf (which will be earlier than me!).

21st April. Well, the flurry of activity died down as soon as the weeds started to grow and people found other things to do than sitting at a computer. The site was also off line for two and a half days, so April's Page hit total will probably be down to a more normal 20,000. Adsense income will also fall due to this but also because of the strong pound. They pay in dollars.
Friend JP told me about a nice program called Easy Cleaner, which really does seem to be very useful at cleaning the register and lots of other things like inspecting the Startup. But watch out for the duplicate file finder. It will shock you with the number of duplicates it finds (gigabytes) but JP warns against deleting them in case it affects your PC badly.

A funny thing happened on the way home. My on board Satellite Navigation System told me the best way to go from Newmarket to Buckingham was via Lincoln ! Eventually I took it to the Ford Garage and now it says, whatever I do I have to start from Brussels ! They are ordering a new one - fortunately under warranty.

21st Mar. Emails have been quiet lately. Either everyone has fully working computers or they are off line altogether ! But I am pleased to say that the site has been getting even more hits - and usually things get quieter when the weeds start to grow. Yesterday registered the highest number of 'page hits' ever at 1,141. At this rate my Page Hit rate will top 30,000 a month, which is way above the norm. I must be doing something right. In the run up to the end of the ISA financial year my Financial page has been popular. The Pensioners page still remains popular but with fewer advertisement clicks. But the new links down to major sections should be helping and the analysis of Travel Insurance for older people (which took quite a while to prepare) should be useful at this time of the year.

15th Feb. I didn't get my Medion PC, largely due to the lack of organisation at Aldi. I got there half an hour before they opened. There was already a small queue and by the time it had opened this had doubled. We all trouped in and most went to the far till. The PC boxes were duly brought out and people started buying. Then suddenly more boxes were put by the exit to tills three and five and the tills opened. The tail end of the queue took their chance and got in there ! After waiting patiently while people proferred their Visa cards my checkout girl said "Sorry that is all we have" and suggested I might try another store fifty miles away ! So much for orderly queueing. I ought to get in training at Harrod's Sale next time.

9th Feb I expect to get a new PC shortly, replacing my excellent Medion with another. It will have a dual core processor and all the bells and whistles and will cost half what I paid for mine 4 years ago. The chip retails at £198 (Novatech). The Vista Home Premium retails at £219 (Pcworld) and I get the whole machine for £399. You won't catch me building my own.

4th Feb I was pleased to see that my NTL Boadband download speed has increased to 2 Meg, without an increase in cost. But that is only catching up to what the others have been doing for some time. My January Adsense advert income from clicks made a gratifying leap to $530. But I cannot expect this to continue as Spring arrives and people come out of computer assisted hibernation. But I will gladly trade dollars for more sunshine. But thanks, folks, for all those clicks. I hope at least some of the adverts proved useful.

24th Jan I seem to be having more queries with an international flavour and have been dealing with one from Newfoundland, another from Bombay and a third from Istanbul. Not complaining but I find it amazing that they are ending up on my site, presumably via Google searches.

16th Jan Internet Explorer 7 is still causing some problems. The major speed-sapper turns out to be the much vaunted Phishing Filter. Once I turned it off, pages load at the normal speed again. Microsoft has recognized the slowdowns that the Phishing Filter is causing. The company released on Dec. 12 a fix for Windows XP SP2. You can download the patch for free by visiting Knowledge Base article 928089.

11th Jan Cost of new PCs continues to fall, slightly. For instance Staples are advertising a respectable E-Machines one without a monitor for a mere £199. For £399 you get one with 17" TFT screen, XP Media Centre Edition and a promise of a free upgrade to Vista, which should arrive in the UK sometime soon. It has the speed and hard disk capacity, lots of memory and even memory card slots.

13th Dec I made the mistake of using Outlook Express to send a superb Powerpoint file to ALL my readers. It was a 4.7Mb file and I think Outlook Express got indigestion. Many people received the file but for some what they got was four email with a stream of gobbledegook charcters which I believe to be the PPS file split into four. Apologies. I have been answering mail all day trying to put this right.

I have just done a cost comparison with a Dell Dimension E520, which is advertised (Dec 06) as having a Celeron D 3Ghz chip, 512Mb RAM, 250Mb HD and 17" monitor. It is £378 delivered. I then went to the Misco site and priced up the pieces individually. It would be at least £100 more and that was without the Windows Vista Premium upgrade being offered by Dell. No contest.

9th Dec A number of people have been asking me about slow machines and suddenly I mine is afflicted. Really slow. Taking time for anything to happen, even for text to come up on page when I type. I did a precautionary virus check. Nothing. So I started to exit things from the Startup line. MSN. No difference. Skype. No difference, Pest Patrol. No difference. Lastly, Google's colourful Desktop icon. Ah! Back to normal speed. I may love Google but that one has to go.

6th Dec Wherever I go I find insecure PCs with many people not downloading Microsoft's security updates. Some do not even have the basics of anti virus and firewalls. No wonder the rougues out there have no difficulty in seeding PCs with Trojans, which enable them to access the computer, and can turn them into 'zombies', which they use to distribute Spam and viruses. Recently I had to update a laptop with 42 security updates (on pay-as-you-go dialup !) It took hours and that did not include the essential Service Pack 2, which I loaded from a disk. If I had downloaded it I would have to let it run all night. No-one should be on Pay-as-you-go dialup any more. Not with the cheap broadband packages on offer.

30th Nov I am pleased to be able to report that my Adsense adverts are really being useful. They are also paying dividends, rising every month - well over $300 this month. And it doesn't cost anyone just to click on them. So I win and you don't lose, which is the way I like things to be.

18th Nov When I first tried the new Internet Explorer (IE 7) it was only in the trial (Beta) format and I soon took it off again. By now I thought all the bugs must be laid low so I had another go. One of the NTL files didn't like it at all so I am back to V 6 again.

Had a call out from a friend (on dialup) who couldn't get any emails. I tried and it certainly was trying. Half an hour later it finally downloaded the Yorkshire Airways video. Very funny but it cost her half an hour on line. I wish people wouldn't send dialup folk these massive files.

10th Nov I try to avoid buying from the big shops. A USB printer cable from our local cheap shop is 99p. Even the Post Office sells one for under £2. I think PCworld will sell you a Belkin version with gold plating for £14.99 ! And you can't even show off the gold plate. On a recent survey by Computing Which? they doctored PCs by deleting a file (preventing startup) and dislodged a hard disk cable. The PCworld quotes at various branches ranged from £20 to £260 for the software job and £10 to £139 for the cable fix. Worse still, one London branch misdiagnosed the software problem as a corrupted hard disk and quoted £350 or suggested a new PC at £500. Another branch said the cable problem was a corrupted hard disk and quoted £300.

October 06 Just back from great holiday in Turkey. Was able to keep in touch from the remotest spots and fast, too !

Internet Turkish style

I now feel that no-one should be paying for Anytime dialup access as broadband is about the same price. It is not just the speed of access to the net which is so much better but the size of these security downloads (M'soft and Antivirus) must put off an awful lot of people when they go on for so long on dialup.

Also on my return from holiday (Oct 06) I had continuous notes from my ISP (NTL) telling me that my inbox was full, so they couldn't send me mail. Fortunately all my NTL mail is forwarded to my Gmail account even before NTL stuck their nose in ! Despite following their instructions to the letter I was unable to clear my inbox to their satisfaction. Eventually I went to their website and found mail (half of it spam) going back to July. A cleared the lot. Sent a furious note to NTL advising them to clarify their instructions on how to clear one's inbox.

August 06 Vnunet has reported a HUGE number of phishing emails has been sent out. The subject lines of the emails invariably refer to either NatWest or Bank of Scotland. Examples include: Official Information To Client Of NatWest bank Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:58:33 -0800 Bank of Scotland: Urgent Security Notification For All Clients Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:49:13 -0100 NatWest bank: Important Fraud Alert Verify Your Data With NatWest bank NatWest bank: urgent security notification [Tue, 01 Aug 2006 03:57:17 +0300] Verify Your DetaiIs With NatWest bank Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:59:35 -0800 PROTECT YOUR NatWest bank ACCOUNT Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:56:07 -0800 NatWest bank: URGENT SECURITY NOTIFICATION FOR CLIENT. The phishing emails contain an inline image and if recipients click on the image, they are directed to a website where they are instructed to input their personal information. Once entered, the information can then be used by the cyber criminals behind the attack to siphon cash from victims’ bank accounts.

July 06. Had a report about a persistent program called Winsoftware. Investigation show that it is one of that growing family of programs emanating from clever but dubious software writers based in Kiev. The technique is to scare you to death with warnings in the hope that you will buy their software. In all likelihood it will infect your machine with a Trojan, giving them access as well. In this category I would include Winfixer, Winantivirus, Errorsafe and Stop-Sign. They appear at the top of a Google search and look legitimate. People fall for them as they sound like normal Windows software. All you need (to catch one) is click on a web link. They are not easy to get rid of. If you get one get in touch but be prepared for the long haul. If you use Internet explorer and have the excellent Mcafee Site Advisor software you will see they all have a warning red cross against them http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ie.htm.

July 06. Despite this warm weather my 'Page Hit Rate' is holding up at 20,000 per month. I get these stats via the Google Adsense program. Even at a 2% advert click rate it pays me well and enables me to justify the work keeping my pages up to date. So, if you see an advert that might be useful to you, click away. And if you spot any out-of-date info, drop me a line.

I have gone back to Zone Alarm Firewall as the Sygate one I installed seemed to letting everything through. I will have to see how I go on with other programs as, last time I installed ZA I had problems. At least ZA is blocking interference at an amazing rate.

Just been tearing my hair about Avast, my anti virus program reporting something infected called Pav.sig. It turns out to be the Panda virus signature file which Avast was jealous about. It had been downloaded when I used the Trendmicro Housecall program.

1st April (Significant) Had another go at wireless networking and got a kit called TP-Link. Looks pretty good. Except that it obviously only connects via the ethernet port on the PC. Never used it for Broadband, though NTL supplied an ethernet cable plus the USB one. Shoved the ethernet cable in the PC and the BB modem - and BB no longer worked, despite getting NTLs Broadband Medic software on the job. Anyway I reckon I will need an additional ethernet cable - not supplied by the "No1 Market Share holder in China". Now NTL have announce there will be a few days gap before their on line help will be much use. Back to the drawing board. Will I ever get over this style ?

20th March My old hobby-horse about the need for speech recognition software on a handheld computer to help deaf people : I SIMPLY DO NOT ACCEPT what the RNID say about speech recognition software. i.e that the software and the technology is still incapable of being used in an 'untrained' way (Most PC software can only be used after it has been trained to recognise a voice). The problem is that speech recognition software is designed to help bosses who can't type to produce a word processed document at least 95% correct. But subtitling on TV appears 'on the fly' even when strangers are being interviewed (see Teletext 888). And I SIMPLY DO NOT ACCEPT that some little girl is typing away furiously as he speaks (although they DO make corrections). The mistakes or 'funnies' that appear would never be made by a typist. But subtitles (funnies included) are essential to my TV watching, as I am deaf. Who cares if what appears is not absolutely correct? I can fill in the details from the context. No problem ! Even if the software interpreted all words phonetically I could understand it. "Imeen,Icanunderstandthiswithowitbeingtipedcorectly,carntyou?" So, what I need is a programmer or company which has the courage to develop software that interprets sound as text regardless of their spelling and then 'ports' it to a hand-held device such as an iPod or mobile phone. Hurry up. I am 74 !

***Averatec.com are to sell a UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) for around £350. It will contain XP Home edition, a small keyboard, a ULU Celeron M processor, 512Mb memory, 30gb hard disk, 56k modem and WIFI. Sounds good for my idea.

March. In a vain attempt to miss the English winter climate we booked a couple of weeks in Agadir, Morocco from the 24th February. I say a vain attempt because when we returned in mid March we were greeted, not by daffodils and Spring but with a still wintry scene and a biting wind. But Morocco again turned out to be as good as last year with daytime temperatures of between 24 and 30 C, though you still needed a jumper in the evenings. Apart from one day there was sunshine a-plenty and a lot of pink, North European, bodies in evidence. The flights were good. Three and a half hours and in the same time zone. No jet lag and a superb landing both ways. Maybe pilots are getting better at that these days ! You can't do much better that the Odyssee Park Hotel , Agadir all-in deal. Good food and limitless drink and a level of service that would be hard to find in the most expensive London hotels. The only thing I had to pay for was the Internet connection (and I even had to clear up the viruses on their three computers! - Busman's holiday !) Dratted porn seeking teenagers again ! For the travelogue click...Morocco

February. It is becoming obvious that the latest 'scam' is to infect your computer with software which points out how much spyware you have on your machine - and we all have some - and then suggests you buy their program to clear it. These programs may be very difficult to clear as they get into the Startup and also make changes to your register. My technique is the (careful) search the net to find out how others are dealing with the problem and advise accordingly.

29th Jan. I had been cursing NTL for not letting me upload big files but when I really looked around at my Outlook Express Account I found that it was set to drop the connection to the server if an attempt took too long. So, when I upped that to maximum I was able to, at least, send someone a 1.5Mb pps file. It seemed pretty slow though. And it might have been an idea if NTL had suggested where I should look, when I asked them.

24th Jan. Though I am very pleased, I cannot quite understand why my Google advert payments have suddenly increased. It seems that the specific advertisements are paying more per click The number of 'page clicks' per day ( 850 -1000 ) has risen slightly, throughout the Autumn, back to the April level, as expected. Clicks on the index page now stand at 205,000 since commencement. The next prize will be at the quarter million mark.

I have been saying it for years : there ought to be a facility for the automatic conversion of telephone conversations to text. The people who have done this are at www.spinvox.com. For a fee of 25p per message they will convert Voicemail (messages left on your mobile phone number) to text. And I thought the RNID said this was not possible with today's technology ! This not only helps deaf people but also business users and people in noisy pubs etc.

Microsoft say that support for XP Home will end at the end of this year, whereas the Pro version will be supported until 2011. In view of the fact that the XP replacement has still not been issued I think that we can expect that XP Home support will be considerably extended but, if you are getting a new Windows version, it is as well to keep this in mind. However there will be no more patches for Windows 98 beyond June this year

Jan 06. Prices of IT goods seem to to continue ever downwards. My first (Amstrad) PC cost me £800 twenty years ago. Over Christmas I bought a 250Mb MP3 player/memory stick in Tesco for under £10. They were in one of those baskets in the aisles. Went back to get another and they were all gone. Maybe they got the price wrong !

10/12/05 I was surprised to find that I was down to the last 30 "Hints and Tips for Silver Surfers" Second Edition. Over 750 have been sold altogether and I haven't got the strength to revise it again, though little has changed. It is not worth getting less than 300 at a time - self publishing is expensive. I will just have to gauge the demand.

If you haven't tried Google Earth since it was first brought out it may be worth having another look to see if your area is clearer

I was again having difficulty getting my NTL mail, although my Outlook Express connection was downloading my AOL mail and there was no problem with Gmail. In addition, my Avast anti virus was showing an error message that it could not download the latest updates, even though I could get onto the Avast.com site. All very strange. I did a restore back to 1st December but there was no improvement until I UNINSTALLED ZONE ALARM. Immediately all was well. So I am now using Sygate in addition to the basic XP firewall. I have been getting reports from one or two others about Zone Alarm problems. I was prompted to investigate Firewall difficulties by Google Earth, which was another program that would not work. So, bye bye old ZA until further notice

Apologies for a slow response to questions last week (and book requests). I normally reply within a day. I was away and, for some reason, was unable to get to my NTL e-mail, though I was able to use Gmail and my old AOL account.

A contact reports "My PC is behaving itself - at last. I isolated the problem to a piece of software called Ad-Watch which I had running from start-up (Ad-Watch is a feature of Ad-Aware SE Plus. Sadly, Ad-Watch was not up to the task and was messing up a lot of other programs thus, in the end, I switched it off and all my problems, including switching off my PC, went away and my PC has been behaving itself ever since" Sounds like my problem with Zone Alarm.

November 05 A contact is troubled with a program from Syserrors.com. It has a very scary anti spyware page which had replaced MY page as her HOME PAGE - the first one she sees when she goes on the net. We can't have that ! It warned her that people are able to get into her computer, that her PC was infected and would she kindly pay them to stop it happening. Sounds almost like blackmail. She couldn't get rid of this home page even if she changes it back to mine. It had been hijacked. I have told her to get Spybot and Adaware and to send me a Hijackthis log.
Nov 6th. We are getting there. See article http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/hijacked/#removal on this very problem.
Another contact has reported a similar problem with the Errorsafe company. It is claiming she has thousands of errors..

Nov 10th : In the end the main problem turned out to be an item which showed up in section 02 of the Hijackthis log. It was nestling in a thing called a BHO (Browser Help Object) These often include innocent things like Google Search. This one was clever as it referred to a TMP file beginning with HP. As she had an HP printer there were many items beginning with HP. But this one was hijacking her Home Page. I was able to search the net for the code that was displayed and this clearly indicated the problem (Called Smit). The use of a removal program called Smitrem is advised, but removal of the Hijackthis line was what actually stopped this horror in its tracks.

Oct 05 As I intended to get an All-in-One printer I sold my Canon iP1000 (nothing wrong with it) and ordered a Canon Scanner, printer, copier from Amazon. Two weeks later I have received an e-mail from Amazon saying they cannot supply it. Great ! So. for now I will carry on with my old laser and the expensive-to-run Photosmart.

Sept 05 I am enjoying finding fascinating places with the Google Earth program. They have just issued a second version which is even more detailed. Unfortunately the specification for using this is quite high with a minimum Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP CPU speed: Intel Pentium PIII 500 MHz System memory (RAM): 128MB, 200MB hard-disk space 3D graphics card with 16MB VRAM 1024x768, 32-bit true color screen Network speed: 128 kbps (Broadband/Cable Internet), although it will work with a dialup connection but more slowly.

Sept 05 I decided it was time to link my PC and laptop with a wireless network. I have always been wary of networks since watching an 'expert' spend a week setting up one. Got the bits from a local store and had a go. It didn't work, so called in the expert from the store. He couldn't make the blamed thing work either, so my feeling about networks remains the same.

Sept 05 Bought a car on the net. I must say I was a bit nervous, not having seen it but it had a full Ford warranty. Someone must have lost about £6,000 in as many months I just preferred that it wasn't me.

Aug 05 NTL finally persuaded me to join their Broadband with an offer I couldn't refuse. I will be keeping it running alongside a cut down AOL for a while but then AOL will get its just deserts when I finally pull the plug. If they had just said "sorry"............ BT and Wanadoo have increased their broadband speeds to 2 meg without increasing their charges. This will make it very difficult for the likes of AOL, who are no longer competitive.

June 05 The AOL debacle : AOL overcharged me (a great deal) by reckoning that I had moved to a 'Light User' account after years on Flat Rate. Unaware, I was clocking up hundreds of pounds of on line time. After receiving no help from AOL I went to the Internet Services Adjudication Scheme run by the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (recommended). They awarded me £300 and rapped AOL over the knuckles for telling a deaf person that the only way to go was by telephone. AOL grudgingly paid up. Goodwill ? They don't know the meaning of the word, so I am leaving them after 10 years. I have now reduced my connection to AOL to Light User. This time my password and mother's middle name were required and I received an e-mail notifying me of the change. Perhaps they have learnt something. Next time I tried to change my AOL account on line I was asked for my Great Aunt's maiden name - or something like it.

May 05 Bought a new printer, a Canon iP1000. It is lightly built but fast and produces good text and colour photos and best of all it was cheap to buy and cheap to run. It is Canon's replacement for the i250, which was very similar but a lot slower. Just got fed up with spending £40 on ink for the HP Photosmart, when I could get a whole printer for less and save ever after. The latest version is the IP5000 and that is still around the £40 mark from www.savastore.com, or the IP1000 at even less from www.ebuyer.co.uk.

May 05 Finally managed to put some video on the PC. All I needed was a Firewire cable from the video camera to a firewire port on the Medion. Never used it before. Good old XP recognised the camera as soon as it was turned on and set up the relevant driver. From then on it was (fairly) plain sailing. Dixons tried to sell me the wrong cable but the local computer shop knew better.

May 05 I struggled to find an answer to one correspondent's spyware problems. She has managed to clear the first one, using a combination of anti Adware software and a program I happened to have but the second one, DMVLITE stubbornly hung on in her Add/Remove programs list. I asked her for a Hijackthis log but it revealed nothing untoward . Later she reported that DMVLITE was just some installer software (not malware) and she got rid of it by going onto their site. Notified Castle Cops, whose site is full of weird attempts and lengthy Hijackthis logs all trying to get rid of the same thing. Later another contact asked me about this and I recommended going to www.dmvlite.com and hitting Uninstall. It appeared to work.

My list of subscribers grows steadily and is now over 100 Just a one-off subscription of a fiver. Some folks really get their money's worth but I am always glad to help.

May 05 Experimenting with various Conferencing software to see if any work better with my old Dialup connection. AOL9 now allows video and sound chat but it is no better than Msnmessenger. Yahoo might be slightly better. But a someone urged me to load Skype, which is a free telephone program and I used it to talk to friends in Brisbane. It was clearer than a normal phone, even using dialup.

May 05 When trying to book flights to Riga (Latvia) for June I went to Ryanair. The advertised £3.99 each way finished up with a total of £85 per person. One really has to search around for days when the flights are cheap. If they would let you see a list of dates when the cheap rates are available they might fill some of their half empty planes. Perpignan is advertised at £1.99. I actually did find some dates when that was available. Mind you when you add on the fuel supplement, a ??wheelchair surcharge?? and landing charges it was considerably more than £1.99. Perhaps, if you take parachutes you can avoid the landing charge !

Silverhairs is nearing the 200,000 hit mark and is racing along at over 100 hits a day at present (in fact Page hits run at between 400 and 1000). My book " Hints and Tips for Silver Surfers" see Book.htm continues to sell and am now more than half way through the second print run. Altogether, about 650 have been sold .

April 05 I gave up on AVG anti virus as it would not automatically download the update. I even got the Pro version to no avail. In the absence of a solution I now use AVAST! anti virus, from www.avast.com, which has become popular, but no way could I get a reimbursement for AVG Pro. I have now put Avast on numerous other PC's. It usually picks up viruses that others have missed.

I have been very troubled by a problem (yes, I get them, too) which did not allow me to download any programs, although my Avast! anti virus seems to update itself. I had been onto various forums and AOL but could not cure it. I even thought I would have to reformat my PC, then ...wonders... it cured itself. Maybe it was an update to my AOL that did it.

Have finally succumbed to commercialism and let Google put adverts all over my site. I get paid a small amount each time someone click on an advert. Some of the adverts are quite useful and most are appropriate to the page they appear on. I hope they are not too annoying for readers. I have never previously made a red cent out of 'affiliation' but this one seems to work. Shame the dollar is so weak. What amazed me was that their analysis showed that, in the Spring, my site was getting over 800 'page clicks' a day, sometimes over 1000, though this slowed in the summer. Google are now paying up regularly.

At long last decided to install a USB2 card (faster). At under £6 it is worth doing and with XP it practically installed itself. I have so many USB bits hanging off this machine I needed more. The card has five USB2 ports. Unfortunately it does not convert my existing four port adapter into USB2 ports but, as they are more accessible at the front, I will keep it. My 3 year old Medion PC was so advanced at the time I think I will hang onto it for a bit despite the fact that their latest offering is theoretically twice as fast.

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