Entries Tagged 'Computing' ↓

I started working on a new/old laptop (new to me, but was my wife’s before her employer bought her a work-dedicated machine). Yeah, my old laptop was pretty much unusable at this point (like go make a cup of tea while waiting for it to switch from a Firefox window to a Word window). Great! Except for one annoying thing: over in the task bar, the tooltips are partially or fully hidden. Sometimes this is marginally annoying (as in the example below). Sometimes the tool tip is so covered over by the system tray that you can’t even read the message box so if you don’t know which icon you’re looking for, you can’t find it. Uggh! »Details on how to fix hidden tooltips… »

Some stuff is worth paying for. Some stuff isn’t. But some stuff is worth paying for and it’s free anyway! I have to say that “free” is a relative term since

1. I actually do pay for most of this stuff. Not much, but if somebody has a donation button, I pretty much always donate somewhere between $5 and $20. It’s the right thing to do.
2. As they say in the open source world, this is all free as in beer, but only some is free as in speech.

Everybody knows about browsers and email clients, so that stuff comes last. I’m trying to list some stuff that you might not know about, but which will (er.. may) improve your life. Then again it may not. I’ve arranged the list in increasing order of geekiness, so things like MySQL clients are way down the list. Also, I have not bothered to include things like Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp and such that everyone knows about.

So here’s the list. It’s Windows-centric, though some apps are available for other platforms.

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I’ve always wanted to be able to try out Apple’s Safari browser, but I’ve never really had the chance since I own a Windows computer and don’t plan on buying another one anytime soon (though my next computer might be an Apple). So now Apple has released Safari in beta for Windows. Excellent! Or maybe not.
» Read why Safari is not installed on my machine »

I totally messed things up with a botched uninstall of Adobe CS3. Basically, all I was trying to do was get rid of the absurd and unnecessary Version Cue Server, which absolutely should not be installed, and Version Cue, which should not be a default option. I was hoping it might help my group manage collaboration on InDesign documents, but it is not appropriate for what we want (I want real concurrent versioning for Word or InDesign, but I don’t think it’s possible). So anyway, I got stuck in this thing where I had some parts of CS3 removed, which was causing other parts to fail, but I could neither repair the installation nor remove the apps. So I was stuck. What follows is what I did step-by-step to get unstuck. » Fix your bad CS3 install »