Saturday, April 12, 2014

New Box II

I'm finding out a lot about my new box as I move along. First off is that any software installed on the old box (32bit) cannot be transferred to the new one (64bit). The fax and filing software that served my HP 5510 printer, for example, was never upgraded beyond Windows Vista. Thus while I can print, I can't scan and file anymore so my all-in-one is now a dumb printer. At least it prints.

Microsoft Photo Editor was also never produced in a 64-bit compatible version. I found references to sites that had such a thing, but none of them actually did. Yes, Picassa is vastly more powerful, but it's also more complicated. Oh well, I can (eventually) learn new tricks.

MozBackup works a treat if you're moving from one box to another and want to bring your Firefox and T-bird over with you. The drawback is that it loses your home page and sets back the last date of opening on some of the websites in your bookmarks. Resetting the home page is easy enough, and in my case I simply ast the comics to go to the last page and click back a couple days. I consider this a minor nuisance. WARNING: The download page will include some adware. When you set up to run the program, it will ask you if you want to try about 5 or 6 other items. hit the "SKIP ALL" button. The adware is not a virus, but acts like one and is about that difficult to remove if you let it get installed. MalwareBytes will remove it if you accidentally get stuck with it.

1 comment:

Brad K. said...

Not for the printer, but for other software it can be useful to right-click the desktop icon, and try the compatibility settings.

Watch the Adobe crap. They all want to force update settings to hide the checks for updates, and hide when it does the update. I like to keep things manual, just in case. They do this with every install and update. Win8 comes with Adobe crap, and forces you to allow Win to let Adobe pimp you to advertisers in order to install the software. And, the flash player (pimps to advertisers) installs, and updates, separately for IE, for FireFox, and for Win. That is three updates each time.

Oh, and if you like to do your Windows updates manually, watch there, to, for each update to try to force the update cycle to "automatic".

Don't forget to hit the Microsoft Live page at microsoft.com, for any free add-ons that should have been there with the OS install.

The fun (free) things still work. TuxPaint. Caliber-ebooks.com. OpenOffice. Scribus. GOM Player. Komodo Edit. FileZilla. Arachnophilia. Izarc. Audacity. Easy Thumbnails. Inkscape. Artweaver. Cygwin (linux emulator). Adobe Digital Editions -- free, and lets you check DRM books out of the local online library.