Number 290 - July 2007

UPDATE
Communications    Vinny La Bash tells us how to weed out or ignore useless info inundating us on the Web and make good use of stuff on the web in his article Info, Info Everywhere and Not a Thought to Think. Operating System    In Windows Vista Power Management the challenge of laptop computer's power usage and how you can control it in Windows Vista is discussed.    In Experimenting With Live CD-ROMs the author discusses bootable CD-ROM's that contain the operating system and software you can run on your computer without involving the hard drive. We did an article and library offering on this a while back with Ubuntu Linux. This is another approach but similar. Some related web addresses are given. Hardware    In Build It Yourself Brian Lewis describes the recent experience he had in building a computer for one of his children. He, as well as many of us, had done this exercise before but brings the experience up-to-date.	In What Is PCI Express Brian Lewis discusses some features of the Peripheral Component Interconnect slots used to add equipmet to your computer. Read it to learn how the PCI bus has changed and how you may take advantage of it.    In How I Lost 33% of My Hard Drive and How I Recovered It the author while trying to transfer his hard drive contents to CD's somehow lost access to a third its capacity. Here he tells the story and how he got it back. Spreadsheet    We're not sure how many of you still use spreadsheets. We still do on a daily basis. In case you have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, it was Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc that saved Apple Computer from bancruptcy in the early days by giving its owners something useful to do with their computers besides playing games. In Using Conditional Formatting in Excel the author discusses this feature of the spreadsheet program Excel and shows how to apply it. General Interest    In the article Going 100% Digital With Genealogy or Any Records the author describes his experience with using Xerox 510 as an alternative to typing all the genealogical data into his database.
Number 290 - July 2007