The Technology Foibles Of Our Lives

Photo by PPDIGITAL

This past week I’ve bumped into the following issues experienced by people who use computers to get their jobs done. They are not computer experts. They are computer users, a sideline wanna-be geekette who spends too much time on technology to get things done.

One computer user finds a virus on his PC and dumps the whole computer. “I’ll move from Windows XP to Windows Vista and everything will be ok.” Oh really?

I decided to write about using technology in this post to help those folks that encounter the various technical brick walls of life.

Too Munch Time

“I’ve just spent 12 hours trying to erect a new website with Adobe GoLive. It was very frustrating and after 12 hours my new site looks horrible.” This person is someone who is trying to setup a website to sell products online. Now I don’t know about you, but 12 hours to setup an online businees using Adobe GoLive for a technical wanna-be is NOT the best use of time. I know this person and she likes to be self-sufficient. She tries to do a lot of her own technical work, but she would be better off setting her site up somewhere else. She is neither a web designer or a graphics designer.

Here is the main description of Adobe GoLive from their website.

Adobe® GoLive® 9 software allows both web professionals and graphic designers to visually create sophisticated, CSS-based content. Design graphics in other Adobe applications and bring them to the web with ease, using familiar tools and concepts. Then, publish your site to the web with easy-to-use site management tools similar to those found in Adobe Bridge.

I know Adobe GoLive does a great job and allows you to do a bunch of cool stuff, but I don’t see the word “for beginners” in the description. Adobe GoLive is not for the the casual technical person who wants to setup a website that displays products for sale and everything that involves setting up a website that allows you to run a business online.

Site Build It!

I would recommend someone in this situation to check out Site Build It!. Site Build It! does a lot of technical work for you when you setup your website. It costs $299.00 the first year (think of it as $25.00 per month) and provides everything you need to get an online business website up and running. It also allows you to dig a bit deeper and do some of your own technical work on your SBI website if you so desire.

SBI helps you tweak your online business website to help you concentrate on the product and services you want to sell and not 12 hours of technical wizardry that’s already done for you in a lot less time. Visit this link to see some final examples of sites built with SBI. They also have a page that helps you determine if SBI is right for you. Visit this link to find out more.

For an in-depth review of Site Build It!, read Steve Pavlina’s review here.

The Doctor

I was visiting with a doctor recently who stopped using his Windows XP machine because he thought a virus or viruses made it unusable. So he moved from Windows XP to a brand new Windows Vista machine. “Machine” – Technical geek speak for PC or computer. 😉 After unsuccessfully trying to install a medical image viewer on his new Windows Vista PC that previously worked on his Windows XP, he didn’t know what to do.

IrfanView

The image viewer he was using allowed the doctor to view an older image file format that ended in .dcx format. DCX files are multipage PCX bitmap image files. After looking at a few popular and free image viewers, we found the stalwart IrfanView to do the trick. Althought it’s a bit complicated for a lot of non-technical type folks, once you set up a routine to perform a specific task, Irfanview works nicely for your imaging viewing chores.

IrfanView has been around for a long time and works with this older file format that ends in .dcx as well as any of the new image files in use today. You can download IrfanView here.

By the way, another very nice and free image viewer is FastStone Image Viewer. It did NOT read the older .dcx image for me. Anyway, here is an overview description of the FastStone Image Viewer.

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touch the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).

You can download it here. It should be part of your image viewing, converting, editing bag.

The Web Content Keeper

A friend of mine who updates web content for his place of work was trying to unzip a zip file that contained a bunch of files, over 500 files. This person doesn’t know too much about computers as well. Just uses them to get the job done.

He was using the Windows XP built in unzipper. This works great for most zip files but in his particluar case performed extremely slow to where it was unacceptable to use. I told him to download and install the freely available 7-Zip. That should solve your problem assuming everything is running ok on your PC. In other words I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering from bad memory on his PC or spyware, viruses, etc.

7-Zip is an open-source software project. Open-source means that 7-Zip is being developed for free by volunteers. This allows it to be free. Very cool.