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14 Feb 2020 - Podcast #680 - (22:16)
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Not everyone likes change and a substantial number of people detest software as a service from companies like Adobe and Microsoft. That may explain why older versions of Microsoft’s office suite are still in use, even the decade-old Office 2010.
There’s a small irony here: TechByter Worldwide articles begin on a Windows computer in either UltraEdit Studio (a text editor) or Microsoft Word 365 (a word processor) and are then ported to Adobe Dreamweaver CC. UltraEdit Studio has a perpetual license that provides updates at no cost forever. Both Microsoft and Adobe products are provided as a service. The irony is that I wrote this article on a Mac using the open-source Atom text editor instead of Office 365, which is also installed on the Mac.
Microsoft will end support for Office 2010 on 13 October 2020 and that means users will no longer receive security patches, program updates, or support. If you plan to stick with Microsoft, some reasonably priced options exist. Other organizations offer office suites. Or you might decide to just stick with Office 2010 no matter what.
Let’s consider the options.
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The Office 365 subscription seems to be the best option for those who depend on Office applications and who have family members who also need those programs. Office 365 Home costs $100 per year and Office 365 Personal is $70 per year.
Office 365 Personal is intended for one person who wants to install the office suite on all of their devices (PC, Mac, Android, and IOS). It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. Publisher and Access can be installed only on Windows computers.
Those who have family members who also need access to the applications on their own devices will be served better by Office 365 Home because it offers the same applications on the same devices, but allows up to six people to install the applications on all of their devices. So a family of four would pay the equivalent of $25 per year per person.
Microsoft’s free cloud-based Office 365 Online will be an option for some. It includes web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note. One Note isn’t included the Office 365 or Office 365 Personal, but Outlook, Publisher, and Access are omitted from Office 365 Online.
The web-based Office apps are about on par with those provided by Google, Zoho, and others: They’re adequate for basic needs but are unlikely to suit those who need more powerful functions, and the lack of Outlook might be a deal killer.
One Note isn’t included in Office 365 or Office 365 Personal because the desktop application has been discontinued. Instead, Microsoft steers those who want the application to the free online One Note app. Microsoft’s developers continue to improve the app, but it’s far from being comparable to the desktop version. The good news is that, at least for now, Microsoft offers a free One Note download for Windows and MacOS users. So the full story here is that One Note isn’t included in the Office 365 suites, but you can get it for free.
Upgrading to Office 2019 might also be an option. This seems like a bad deal to me because of the price and the expectation that the 2019 version will be the last version sold with a perpetual license.
Office 2019 was released in October 2018, cannot be installed on any version of Windows lower than Windows 10, and it not being updated at all. If that’s not enough to discourage you, consider the price: Home & Business Digital costs $250 and Office Professional sells for $440.
WPS Office Premium looks a lot like Microsoft’s applications for Windows, MacOS, Android, and IOS, but there’s no email client, publisher application, or database manager. The free version displays ads, and a premium version that adds useful features and eliminates ads is available for $30 per year per user.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides offer powerful collaboration features, but they lack many popular capabilities that are included in Microsoft Office, and they are provided as an online service, which is some people prefer to avoid.
The LibreOffice suite is useful even if you stick with Microsoft products. That’s because LibreOffice can almost always open corrupted Microsoft Office files that Microsoft’s applications can’t open. When a file causes Word or Excel to crash, opening the file in LibreOffice Writer or Calc and then saving the file in Microsoft’s format might recover the file and eliminate the need to reconstruct work. Also, unlike some of the other competitors, LibreOffice includes a database manager.
There's also the do nothing option. If the Office 2010 feature set meets your needs and you're not concerned about security issues that out-of-date applications might cause, continue to use the existing applications. The security issue is troublesome. Scammers target obsolete versions of software because they know those versions are still in use and that it's commonplace for outdated applications to be running without even the latest security updates provided by the publisher.
So if you choose that option, be sure to download the last updates before the 13th of October and then take extra cautions with any files that you download or receive via email.
Lady Macbeth had a problem with a spot she could not remove. Those of us who use computers can sympathize because sometimes it seems impossible to delete a file that we no longer want.
This is an unusual condition, but there’s an easy solution. The traditional way to get rid of a file that just won’t go because some process is locking it involves rebooting the computer and trying the process again. If that fails because whatever process had locked the file locks it again following a system restart, the next step is another reboot to Safe Mode. This may allow you to remove the file.
LockHunter is a handy utility that’s been around for more than a decade. The developers released an update version last year to enhance the interface and add some features. It’s an application that I always install on my computers even though it’s one that I rarely need to use.
WARNING: Never delete a file unless you know what it is, what it does, and why you want to remove it from the computer. There’s an old story dating back to the early days of Windows 3, and likely apocryphal, that involves some guy who discovered a bunch of huge DLL files or one called winword.exe. He needed disk space and these files were consuming a lot of space, so he deleted them. The computer no longer worked. You don’t want to be that guy.
You do, however, want to be able to delete a file you know is no longer necessary. It’s a problem, though, when the file is locked and you don’t know what’s locking it.
Sometimes the problem is trivial. You’ve created the file “Out Damned Spot.docx” in Word and decide that you no longer need it. Deleting the file returns an error message because you forgot to close the file in Word and it’s still locked. To delete the file, just close Word and repeat the process.
The message from Windows is clear when the file is locked by Word, so then you can close Word and delete the file. Sometimes, though, Windows may not be able to tell what’s locking the file or multiple processes may have locked the file. This happens when the file is locked by a process the user didn’t initiate.
LockHunter can be installed so it appears in the Explorer’s context menu. Right-click a file and choose “What’s locking this file?” or “What’s locking this folder?” if you’ve right-clicked a folder. This opens LockHunter and displays the name of the file or folder, a list of all locking processes, and your options.
The primary options are to unlock the file or delete it. Selecting one of those options will display a reminder about the possbility of losing data if the file hasn’t been saved. After you accept the warning, LockHunter will forcibly unlock the file.
A drop-down menu offers the ability to delete the file when the computer is restarted, unlock the file or folder and rename it, unlock the file or folder and copy it, end the locking process, or delete the locking process.
The option to delete the file on system restart is provided for those times when LockHunter cannot unlock the file. Selecting this option, sets a run-once action that loads and executes during system startup so it will occur before the locking application can take over.
That last option sounds dangerous. Not only will it break the lock, but it will also delete the application that has locked the file. There are few reasons to do this, but I can think of a good one: The process that has locked the file is a malicious application.
This little utility application is provided without cost. You won’t need it often, but it certainly is a handy application to have at your fingertips when you do need it.
Download LockHunter from the Crystal Rich website.
It's a good idea to check your computer's system files every now and then. System files are protected files that are used by the system. You probably never would have guess that, right? But if there's no problem, why should you bother?
It's a good idea to check these files occasionally because Windows can continue operating even when something is wrong. When enough problems exist, the computer will crash or you'll begin to see intermitted quirks. Prevention is better. Windows keeps a cached copy of the system files on the computer. The System File Checker can scan Windows and restore any files that are missing or damaged.
Start the process by running the Command Prompt (CMD) as an Administrator. Before moving on to the System File Checker (SFC), those with Windows 8, 8.1, or 10 systems should first use the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool. Both SFC and DISM are installed, so there's nothing to download.
The first command is DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth. This process takes around five minutes on most computers and it will attempt to repair any problems it finds with the local system cache files. When the process ends, type sfc /scannow.
The second command examines all protected system files and replaces corrupted system files with a cached copy of the file. Be sure not to close the CMD window until the process is complete. Four responses are possible:
Sharing information that's on your computer can sometimes be a problem. Common programs such as word processors and spreadsheets create files that can be shared directly because all operating systems on all computer types have programs that can open these files. Difficulties arise with less common applications.
Sharing information from a time-billing system won't be easy unless the person who needs the file has the same application you do. The same is true if you need to send a sample document from a publishing application. If you use InDesign, you'll have direct access to Adobe's Acrobat application, but you may need to share information from an application that doesn't offer an easy way.
Creating a portable document format (PDF) file is often the best way to share a file because Adobe's Reader application is free and nearly every operating system can display a PDF file because Adobe created the format and then made the specifications public. Many email programs have PDF previews, too.
By the way, "PDF file" isn't redundant like "DMZ zone" (demilitarized zone zone), "PIN number" (personal identification number number), and "The La Brea Tar Pits" (the tar tar pits). PDF is an initialism for "portable document format", so "PDF file" is "portable document format file" — not redundant at all. Aren't you glad that we got that straightened out?
I've recommended PDF Creator from the German company PDF Forge, but that changed recently. The newly released version 4 generated frequent errors, even with simple files, and created no output. Uninstalling the application was difficult because it had included some unwanted applications even though I explicitly rejected them during the installation process. Although I could have re-installed version 3, I didn't.
So if you're using PDF Creator and you like it, I recommend not updating to the new version 4. If you would like to be able to create a PDF document occasionally but don't have an application like PDF Creator (and don't want to install one), guess what! If you have Windows 10, you have a way to create PDF documents. It's built in to Windows.
The utility makes it possible to create a PDF document from any application that can print. Start by using the print function from the application. The example shows the Microsoft Outlook print dialog. You'll be shown a list of all printers that Windows knows about. In this example, the choices include Microsoft XPS, Microsoft Print to PDF, Fax, two separate versions of a Canon printer, and Adobe PDF.
Select Microsoft Print to PDF, then use the properties dialog to set basic print information such as whether the page is portrait or landscape, and click the Print button. You'll be asked to specify a location for the PDF document, and the finished file will be ready for your use in a few moments.
An international group of Russian and Japanese scientists has developed a material they say will increase the recording density in data storage devices such as SSDs and flash drives, but there's an added benefit: They claim that the new materials will eliminate the rewrite limit, which has kept solid-state devices from being used in situations were values are frequently written to media.
Small, reliable memory devices are needed, but files may not be recorded correctly or the computer may lose its connection with a flash drive.
The developers say "spintronics" is a promising new technology. In spintronics, devices operate on the principle of magnetoresistance: There are three layers, the first and third are ferromagnetic, and the second is nonmagnetic. When electrons pass through such a "sandwich" structure, they are arranged in the media in a way that depends on their spin.
Scientists from National University of Science and Technology MISIS (Russia) and National Institute for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (Japan) developed a material that can increase the capacity of magnetic memory by increasing the recording density.
Previously, graphene has not been used in magnetic memory devices as carbon atoms reacted with the magnetic layer, which led to changes in its properties. The scientists say they have created a thinner sample that will increase the capacity of magnetic memory devices without increasing their physical size.
There's still a lot of work to do before the technology becomes commercially viable. Next, scientists plan to scale the experimental sample and modify the structure.
If you pay a lot of money for transportation, lodging, and tickets for the Super Bowl, you allow nothing to come between you and the game, right?
Apparently not right. Extreme Networks, the Wi-Fi provider for the stadium, says its analytics reveal a record-breaking 26 TB of data was transferred over in-stadium Wi-Fi during NFL's biggest game of the year. That's an increase of just under 10% from last year's game even though the 2020 Super Bowl was held at a smaller-capacity stadium with nearly 10,000 fewer fans.
Instagram was the top driver of Wi-Fi usage, and each user consumed an average of 595.6 megabytes of data. That's an increase of 21% per user over last year's Super Bowl.
Maybe the average Super Bowl fan would have gotten a better value by staying home and watching the game on television.
Corel previewed Photo-paint for Linux and Draw for Linux at Seybold Seminars in Boston. They were showing "alpha" code in an attempt to let graphics users see where Corel was headed. Corel planned to release the graphics suite for Linux during the summer. That didn't work out quite as Corel had hoped.
The first East Coast Linux World Conference attracted some 20,000 people and 185 exhibitors. That's about what PC Expo attracted 10 or 12 years ago, both in terms of visitors and exhibitors. The June 2000 PC Expo pulled in 150,000 visitors to see more than 1000 vendors.
Both PC Expo and the Linux World Conference are gone now. Renamed Open Source World, the Linux event continued through one final gasp in 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Improved online conferencing tools, the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent annoyances of airline travel put an end to the show in the early 2000s.