My dad gave me a call tonight needing some help with his computer. That’s not such a new concept, but what he needed help with was new. He purchased a new Magellan GPS device and needed help getting the software installed on his computer.
 
He’s familiar with installing software on his machine, trust me, I regularly have to delete stuff that he’s installed for no reason. But tonight he was worried because of the convoluted install instructions and warnings he was being told.
Basically, here were the steps that specifically stated:

Turn-off all firewalls and anti-virus
Turn-off all power saving features
Make …read more

Tonight I’m working on installing Windows 7 on my wife’s laptop. I’d originally thought that I’d have to do a completely clean install. Although I was willing to do that, I didn’t want to take the time to find all of her files and settings and back those up on an external drive so they wouldn’t be lost.

First I downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor just so I’d be aware of anything that might be important before I started. No real major issues to report. A warning about RAM size. RAM available was listed at just under 2GB, Microsoft recommends …read more

Installing Cygwin is straightforward, but those who haven’t installed any UNIX-based OSs before may be lost at the last step. So here are the steps:
1. Download the Cygwin setup file, if you haven’t already.
2. Choose the installation type: Install from Internet or Install from Local Directory or Download without Installing. When installing Cygwin for the first time, you’ll have to choose either the first or the last option unless you already have the packages through some other means. I tend to choose the last for two reasons. One, network issues while downloading are preferrable to network issues while installing. Two, a …read more

Why, even the big dogs (read: companies) still have very “small” IT departments. No, I don’t mean they have little people or even a small number of people — they do have a small-group feeling, though. Having recently switched from a company of a few thousand to one of tens of thousands of people, I’ve learned something very quickly…
Every company out there has to run about the same way. Sure, a publicly traded company has rules and regulations they must follow but when it comes down to the real work, it takes small teams of people to …read more