Vista Service Pack 1 Leaked Out

Microsoft has accidentally leaked out Vista SP1. Some Vista users have found Vista SP1 in Windows update this week, even though Vista SP1 is not supposed to be officially released until next month.

Microsoft acknowledged the error: "Yesterday, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC," Microsoft said in a statement. It also reiterated plans to make SP1 broadly available in mid-March.

Some users reported that they successfully downloaded SP1 from Windows Update, but most others said that the download didn't work for them.

You can read the full article here.

Watch out for Valentines Day E-Cards

Watch out for those E-cards that are going to be going around today. It is Valentines day, and attached to some of these e cards are viruses called the “Storm Virus”. It allows your computer to work for computer hackers. Hackers will be able to control your machine, doing things including: Spam, Identity Theft, denial of service attacks and a lot more.

My policy is that I will not open any E-cards, no matter what the sender or subject line says. If you do not have any virus protection, now is the time to install and scan for viruses and Trojans. But you don't have to pay for good protection. Grisoft AVG offers a great virus scanner. I use it every day, it does a great job at detecting and dealing with viruses. And best of all, it's free! You can get it here.
Look toward the middle of the page, where it gives a list of products. Click the download button under the word that says “Free”.

New Microsoft Updates Today

Time to update your computers! Eleven security updates are released today that fix a number of critical flaws in Microsoft products, including Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Read the full article here. Click here to go to the Microsoft update site.

Yahoo has declined Microsofts offer to 44.6 billion dollars for the Yahoo company

Yahoo has declined Microsoft's bid of 44.6 Billion dollars for the Yahoo company. They said that it was Yahoo says the offer undervalues company. Yahoo said that its board would continue to evaluate other "strategic options."

Does "Restoration" work on a Mac?

In a previous post, I explained how to recover deleted files. Someone posted the comment "Is Restoration compatible with Macs. The answer is no, "Restoration" is not compatible with Macs. However, there are other restoration programs out there that are compatible with Macs. I will look into it and report back.

Valentines Hearts

Here are some Valentines Hearts for Valentines video or card projects. They are in the .ai format for Illustrator or After Effects. Everything is transparent except for the heart. They're are several colors to chose from. Feel free to use these for commercial and personal use. Right-Click on the photo you want to use, and click "Save as" and select the destination to save the file to.

My favorite picture

This is my one of the best pictures I have taken.
Black and White:



They both are 5 picture panoramas.

Please do not sell or claim ownership of photos.

The Importance of Backup

Everyone should learn the importance of backup. Because without backup you can lose your data any time due to any virus, power failure and hard disk problem. This has happened to many people. In extreme cases, it has put companies out of business. Computers are becoming more and more reliable. This creates a false sense of security - we begin to think all our data are safe and secure and will never go away. It's not true - and never will be. If you don't back up your computer system regularly.

Backups are really a necessity, and you are responsible for making backups of your files. I have had many cases where the persons computer just so suddenly fails. Sometimes, they are able to get some of the data back, but other time, if the problem is due to a hard drive failure, none of the data can be retrieved.

I backup regularly to DVDs, but perhaps the most cost effective way is to buy a mini external hard drive, (not a flash or jump drive) and tell your computer to backup your data at night. You can tell the program that you use to backup to overwrite the previous backup, so that if you delete a file on your computer, it is not taking up space on the hard drive after it is deleted. Let me know if you want
more info on how to do all this.

Remove Unused Programs

If you no longer use a program, uninstall it. Go to “Start>Control Panel”. Click “Add or Remove Programs”. A list will populate and you can remove unneeded programs at will.

Computer Questions

If you have any computer questions, I would be happy to answer them. But, if you would loke to get help from numerous people, go to www.computing.net. it is a great place to get answers to your questions. And if you are a pro, you can even answer other peoples questions.

Data Recovery

Have you ever deleted a file accidentally, and then felt sick after you did it? Well, there is a way to get the file back, Free! I use a program called Restoration to recover my files. Restoration is best done as soon as you find out that the file is deleted. Restoration can be used to recover files deleted from your computer(Recycle Bin), a digital camera, or your USB flash drive, (thumb drive). Just open the software, and tell it where to look for deleted files. It will start searching, and give you a long list of files. Select the file you want to restore, and copy the file over to a different drive. Restoration is available for free here.

Photo Editing

Here are a couple of tips for photo editing. There are a lot of free options that you can use for photo editing. One of them is Picasa. Picasa is available free from Google, and has a lot of neat features. You can search photos by date, instantly, which is really handy. Picasa also lets you organize and name your photos for easy searching. For instance, you could name a photo Hawaii vacation 2007, and when you go to search for "Hawaii" vacation 2007, you can find that special photo easily.

There are other photo editing programs out there to. I am not a huge fan of Kodak, but I have used the software before. For the pros, there is Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3. I currently have the CS2 version, but I want to upgrade soon. Adobe Photoshop CS3 gives you a wealth of options, including DVD menu editing for Adobe DVD maker 2.0. It may look intimidating at first look, but once you get used to the software, it is well worth it. But don't go spend $650.00 to $1000.00 on software just to edit family photos.

A couple of Photoshop alternatives are Paint.Net and The Gimp, which is free software. If any of you out there have any favorite photo editing software, post a comment and let us know. I would be happy to answer any questions you have.

Video Editing

If you own a video camera and still don't have all of those tapes on your commuter or a DVD, then now is the time to do it. The most popular recording medium now is Mini-DV. Mini_DV allows you to transfer video to your computer for editing via FireWire. FireWire is also referred to as Ilink or IEEE 1993. Firewire makes transferring video easy: connect the camera to the computer, turn the camera on, and then use your favorite editing software to edit the video. If you do not have video editing software, you can use the built in Windows Movie maker. But in my opinion, it was not the best video editing software ever made. There is lots of software out there that give you more advanced options. I personally use Adobe Premiere 2.0 Pro, although Adobe has come out with a new CS3 version. If you have the 2.0 version of the software, it is a lot cheaper to upgrade. You can check the program out here.
But, if you do not want to pay $800.00 for editing software, there are plenty other options that will work. A lot of people have their favorites, so please comment if you have any suggestions.

Here are a couple of suggestions as to software that you might consider for video editing.

Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus

Vegas Movie Studio+DVD Platinum Edition

Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 Suite

Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0

A lot of the pro use two monitors, (screens) when video editing. This is so that you can have more space when working with video. Not any computer can do this though. Your graphics card has to be capable of two monitors. If you card can support the feature, there will be two spots to plug monitors in at the back of the computer. Some cards, will have one VGA output and one DVI output. New monitors give you the option of using DVI or VGA. My graphics card has one VGA and one DVI. I have two VGA monitors so I could not use the dual monitor feature. But if you search on Ebay, you can find little adapters that will convert DVI to VGA. They are real cheap too. Just search on Ebay for "DVI to VGA". In order to take full advantage of dual monitors, I had to update the graphics card Drivers.
Here are some pictures of my setup in my computer room.

How to defragment your hard drive

De-fragmenting a hard drive is a good thing to do on a regular basis. If you install programs on your computer, and then go to delete a program or file, it takes that section out of the hard drive. And then when you add a program or save a file to your computer, it sticks that program/file to wherever it can find a place. So, one program could be scattered over different places on a hard drive. In order to defragment, go to "Start>My Computer" right click on the hard drive you want to defragement, usually the "C:" Hard drive, and select "Properties". Go to the tools tab, and click the button that says "Defragment Now". A new window will come up, and then just click the button that says "Defragment".

Looking for the latest comuter news?

If you are looking for the latest computer news, surf on over to http://www.pcworld.com/news/ it is the best place I have found to get the latest and greatest on computer and relating news.

Nikon Coolscan V ED (LS-5) Review

The Nikon Coolscan V ED (LS-5) scanner has done wonders for me. It scans 35mm film and 2x2" slides. It scans at really high quality, up to 4000DPI. One thing I have noticed to, is that no matter what resolution you scan at, it does not affect the scan duration. The 35mm film adapter that comes with it auto feeds the film. which makes it very easy to use. You can also change the settings for the scanner so that when you insert film, it will automatically preview the film. It scans at pretty good speed to. I used to scan film and slides with my photo scanner, an Epson V100, which had a transparency adapter. But it took forever, just to scan one-four frame strip of film. The 35mm adapter can scan up to 6 frames per batch. When scanning 2x2" slides, you can only do them one at a time with the supplied adapter, which is OK. Overall, the scanner has good scanning speeds and nice features and is easy to use, after you get the hang of it. It has some really nice photo restoration and enhancing features. I think that the scanner is running at about $700.00 now.

My first blog entry

This is my first blog entry. I am a real computer fanatic, and I love electronics. I love working with with the Adobe creative Suite, it is very versatile, and has lots of options. I love tinkering with my computer, and helping other people with their computers as well. In my blog I will write reviews about the new electronics I get, and some stuff about me.

I just bought the Logitech MX610 wireless laser mouse, I am very glad I bought it. One thing you have to remember though, is that the email button is not very compatible with email programs. I have Mozilla Firefox and it would not work, even though Mozilla Firefox show up as the default mail client for my computer. The IM button only works with Windows Love IM. The volume and Back/forth internet buttons work really work really well, I use them all the time. Overall, it is a very comfortable mouse with lots of features and functions.

I also have the Microsoft LifeCam VX-3000 webcam. It gives pretty nice quality video and can take still photos up to 1.3MP. I use it for IM and I sometimes use it for video recording. It has a built in microphone, which is really convenient and has good sound. It can clip onto a laptop screen, or flat panel desktop computer screen, and can sit on any surface or large CRT computer screen. There is a power toy that Microsoft offers for free that lets you turn your webcam into sort of a securety camera. You can tell the software to take a picture however often you want. I point it at my door before I leave for a trip, and use remote access software for my PC to view a live picture of what is going on in my room.

I will be adding more posts often; I have a lot of things I could comment on. I will upload videos and pictures of my latest projects soon.