Being a Computer Dummy Ain't Easy!

[Bird]

I can certainly understand that, Frank, and don't blame you a bit.

I told my wife this new computer reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Guns of Navarone, in which the character, Brown, was working on the engine in that old boat, and when asked about it, he said, "She's a bit of a monster, sir, but I think I've got her worried." That's how I feel about this new computer and Windows Vista. Hey, I'm even beginning to like Vista . . . or at least I think I am.

 

[rox]

Bird, do you ahve Micorsoft Office? if so I use microsoft office pictute manager. right mosue click ont he picture then on the next menu select open with, then microsoft office Picture Manager. oce you view it in picture manager ckick ont he edit button. You can re-size pictures really easy plus you can compress them. by compressing them you leave it the same size but make it a smaller, much smaller file size. I like this program but the only way to find it is to right mouse click on the picture I think. i ahve not found how you can jsut launch the program prolly is a way but I never put forth the effort to find it.

In Vista one thing i like is if you go to task manager in the tab processes, there are a lot os svchost.exe showing, I am waiting for my vista laptop to be returned so i am not positive, but I think if you right mouse click on one of the svchost.exe files it shows you what program has opened up a connection to the internet. i like seeign that and there was no easy way in xp to tell. A lot of times i went and closed those processes. lots of programs jsut want to ope up an itnernet connection and say if i a not using Adobe reader, i close it.

how do you like the optical mouse, nice isn't it? Now Bird what you really ought to do is install Skype. We have Skype and our kdis have Skype on their laptops and we all have built in webcams. I will "Skype" my kids which is basically a phone call over the computer an eh internet and we actually see each other in video live and talk and it is FREE!!!!! FREE!!! If you have family, say your brother who is out of state if you both install Skype you really can talk absolutly free. And with your new webcam he cas see you as well as talk with you.
This is so cool. My son recently got a new apartment in washington Dc and we Skyped eah other and he jsut picked up his laptop and carried it around his new apartment and we were able to take a video tour of his new place. We talk to our daughter every Sunday for an hour and it doesn't cost a cent. When you get to feeling comfortable with your new computer try Skype. You can even call people on their regualr land line and cell phones using Skype and it is very cheap. my parents don't ahve Skype so i buy Skype minutes and we pay 2 cents a minute to talk to my parents on their land line phone. So if i talk to my parents for 100 minutes it costs $2 big deal. Skype can really lower your phone costs a lot, well depending if you call out much I suppose.

 

[Bird]

Rox, I don't have Microsoft Office. I have Microsoft Works, which gives me word processing, data base, and spreadsheets, but on the old computer, I had Microsoft Works Suite which included Word and Picture It!

I've never used a webcam and don't really think I have a use for it, although I can certainly understand how others might. I've had the Instant Messenger but only used it with 3 people and only one of those more than just on rare occasions. But as with many people now-a-days we pay one price for our phone service that includes unlimited long distance anywhere in the USA, so my wife can talk on the phone to all her friends and relatives all she wants to; doesn't cost a thing.

I learned just a tiny bit about Windows Photo Gallery today and it'll do the basics, which is usually enough for me.

 

[Soundguy]

Yep.. my first pc had 32kram, and basic on rom, dual floppies, and no HDD, full length cga card. added a ram card to it to get to 640k, and added a 20meg mfm drive.. probably mitsumi.. but can't remember.

What was that banna tossing game in basic? I playe dthat for hours.. but don't remember the name?

I remember picking up a sperry later that year at an auction.. got it for 20$.. had 720k of memory, and a perstor controller card that doubled the size of the mfm drive it held.. had herc graphics... ran a serial network between those 2 pc's ( eznet? )

them were the days.. setting jumpers and hoping everything worked... more hardware lingo than software lingo.. now it's the other way around... no jumpers.. everything is PNP and hardware linge is limited to names of the latest video card you need for a game... and software lingo is the big thing..

soundguy

Soundguy,
I know what you mean. My graphics card alone today has 1000 times more memory than my entire first computer. My first hard drive was 20 meg, or by todays terms .02 gig. It was a lot of fun back then as we spoke a completely different language than anybody else, people would look at you funny when you started talking "computer". My work XP used CPM, and I put a dos partition (dual boot) on it so I could play advanced games like tetris and Pacman. Remember Archie & Veronica(not the comics)? I guess I'm showing my age.

 

[Bird]

What was that banna tossing game in basic? I playe dthat for hours.. but don't remember the name?

My first, and only, portable had dual floppies. And I remember playing a game with the gorillas throwing bananas at each other but I don't remember the name either.

 

[Soundguy]

Yep.. that's the one I remember playing.

soundguy

 

[Bird]

Hey, Chris, I know I'm getting old and slow, but you're a little younger. The name of that game was simply Gorillas.

 

[jinman]

Hey, Chris, I know I'm getting old and slow, but you're a little younger. The name of that game was simply Gorillas.

Nobody should consider themselves old unless they made a living by programming plugboards on the old IBM Accounting Machines. I did it in school, but I never made a living at it. However, we had pre-programmed plugboards at Texas Instruments in the late '60s that we used with some old sorters and interpreters I believe. As I remember, plugboard programming was a true art form.

 

[Bird]

OK, I'll bite; what's a plugboard? But I'll tell you how old I am. I took typing in high school using manual typewriters. And years later, when I was a happy young patrolman patrolling my beat, one night the dispatcher told me to report to the captain's office. The captain had both a secretary and a clerk-typist and they had both been promoted or resigned or something (anyway they were both gone), and someone had gone through personnel records and found I could type 40 words a minute, so I was stuck with that job for most of the month. And the typewriter was an antique, worn out IBM Selectric. I'd never touched an electric typewriter before. Since there were no copy machines, most documents I typed had to have 3 to 5 "onionskins". Do they still make those? No errors allowed, so when there was an error, you just started over with new pages. I sure was one happy camper when the captain hired a new secretary and I could get out of there.

 

[dfkrug]

Ken, my first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer, 32k of memory (they had just come out with it to replace the earlier model with 16k of memory). I had it hooked up to a 13" RCA color TV for a monitor, and a portable cassette player/recorder to save anything you wanted saved when you turned it off. My first hard drive was a re-conditioned Radio Shack, 5 meg. external hard drive that cost me $300 and lasted just about a year. And that hard drive was bigger than the printer I'm using now.

Oh, the old TRS-80 Color Computer (Trash-80 to some)....that brings
back memories. I never owned one but my company back then made
the microprocessor for it, the 6805. Actually Motorola called the IC a
"microcomputer" as it had onboard RAM. I worked as a DRAM device engineer
and we were bit-mapping the onboard RAM to analyze failures.

I don't usually dwell on the old days of Hollerith cards and paper tape.