Views from the Coop On-the-Air 3-28-07

March 28, 2007

First of all, I’d like to make an announcement: Views from the Coop On-the-Air is moving to Saturdays at 8:30-9:00am. For those of you who listen to KTTR regularly, you will have noticed that Roger Creighton has brought PC Primer out of retirement and has returned to the airwaves. His first broadcast was Monday morning and lasted 30 minutes with the promise that KTTR would find a time to expand the show to an hour. Well, I have the hour that belonged to PC Primer for eleven years and am happy to return it to Roger so that I can make a move to the weekend. This gives weekend listeners the opportunity to participate in a live show rather than having to listen to a recorded show. It also frees up my time during the week to concentrate on 2 Smart Chix. After all, that’s what pays the bills! I spend a lot of time preparing for an hour-long show and a lot of time summarizing the show and posting it to the blog and podcast. Having a 30 minute show will not only reduce the amount of prep/follow-up time I spend but the shorter recording will also reduce the upload/download size of the podcast which is an issue for a lot of people. I’m also hoping that Ray Hicks of the Bluegrass Show will agree to be my co-host. Not that I don’t love Lee (because I really do) but having Ray on Views from the Coop will also introduce a Linux user to my listeners. Besides that, he has some really cool Bluegrass chicken songs I can add to my intro rotation!

In the news this week:

• Julie Amero’s sentencing continued to April 26 (the Norwich Bulletin)
  
• The British government claims that Linux systems are greener than Windows systems
• Microsoft reports 20 million copies of Vista sold in the first month after launch

What do YOU think?

We all have to deal with advertising on the web. It’s a fact of cyber-life. Does it matter if advertisers use techniques that irritate the consumer? Well, it does to a lot of folks according to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on useit.com. Even though the reports are out of date, they’re still relevant. Read them for yourself and let me know what YOUR advertising pet peeves are.

• Does User Annoyance Matter? (Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox on useit.com)
  
• The Most Hated Advertising Techniques (Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox on useit.com)
  

Word of the Week: Defragmentation

My special phone-in guest this week was Derek DeVette of Diskeeper. Thanks, Derek, for getting up early on the west coast to talk to our midwest listeners (hope you had your Starbucks close at hand!). Derek took some time to explain how your hard disk gets fragmented and what that means to the speed at which your system operates. He also shared how Diskeeper can reduce fragmentation automatically to keep your PC running at top speed without you ever having to do anything once you’ve installed the software. Of course, the highlight of Derek’s interview was choosing the three winners of Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier (drum roll, please): David in Bixby, Priscilla in Salem and Millie in Rolla. I’ll be dropping the lucky winners an e-mail as soon as I post this blog entry to congratulate them. To everyone else who took the time to post a comment to the blog and enter the drawing, THANK YOU! I’ll be doing another drawing later on, so for those of you who didn’t post, get some practice!

Are you plagued by pop-ups that ask you to take some type of action? If you’re not using an anti-adware/spyware tool now, then you need to get started. There are several good free tools available for download online. How do you choose which tool is best for you? One of the sites I trust for objective reviews is PC Mag. You can get the lowdown on free and subscription based tools by checking out their reviews on features and price comparisons. Another good resource for feature and price comparisons is Eric Howe’s Spyware Warrior site. Eric also lists rogue products that CLAIM to rid your PC of malware but in reality work poorly, not at all and even deposit their own adware/spyware on your computer. Another good site (and more recent) for comparing commercial tools is Adware Reports. Downloads.com has over 200 reviews of anti-adware/spyware tools both free and commercial. What’s my personal favorite? Well, it’s hard to say since I’m a Firefox user AND a discriminating surfer but I’ve found that using a combination of Windows Defender (FREE), Spybot Search and Destroy (FREE) and Webroot’s Spysweeper (free trial available) offer a more than adequate defense. Grisoft is now offering anti-adware/spyware software. I’ve been using Grisoft’s AVG FREE for virus detection/prevention for a number of years. I’ve also heard some great things about Spyware Doctor by PC Tools. The best advice I can give you is DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Visit several sites that review anti-malware tools and make an informed decision. Look for objective reviews by consumers who have used the software and by organizations who have performed testing and can explain how they tested the apps.

The show was great today so if you didn’t hear it, you can listen this weekend on KTTR for the replay (8:30-9:00am on Saturday and 9:00-9:30am on Sunday) OR you can listen to the podcast!

Remember, beginning Saturday, April 7, I’ll be LIVE on KTTR with Views from the Coop so you weekend listeners who never had the chance to participate, well, your time has come!

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