Upgrading to Windows Vista - When?

Windows Vista is shipping soon. Personally, I'm waiting for my upgrade to arrive. What about you?

A lot of people are worried about bugs in Vista. I guess that doesn't really bother me. I don't think the bugs will be that big of a problem. Sure, they'll require automatic updates regularly, but XP already requires that too.

The bigger problem might be if some crucial program doesn't support Vista yet. I could see this might hurt some people, since some users have very specific and important software that they need every day. But for me, I don't really use many other programs, beside Office and Firefox. I guess there are several free or open source programs that I use frequently. Maybe I should check if those will work on Vista.

Other than these two concerns, I don't think I will wait to upgrade from XP to Vista. There is some neat functionality that I want to utilize, and I'm anxious to see how it performs (and looks) on my new Inspiron E1405.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you waiting to upgrade until later, or are you jumping on it now?

Great Firefox Tip for Secure Browsing

I just ran across a great post at Lifehacker. It provides a quick tutorial on how to create and use multiple Firefox profiles, even simultaneously.

So why would you want to do this? Two important reasons: security and privacy.

Say you do online banking and bill paying. But you also do lots of other internet activities. You could keep better control over your passwords and bank web addresses by keeping them all in a separate Firefox profile. If you only use that profile for banking, it would theoretically expose your critical financial information to less of a security risk.

Another example where multiple profiles could be handy is for keeping your identities separate. Perhaps you use Gmail for your personal email, but you have a separate Gmail account that is linked to a Blogger blog. With multiple profiles, you can keep each account logged into Gmail in its own Firefox profile. Handy, right?

What's Up With Standby?

My laptop was doing terrific with the "standby" feature, until today. For some reason, when I press the power button (which is supposed to put it on standby), it actually goes into hibernation. It looks like something might be wrong with my power settings. Poop.

If you're a laptop owner, you should definitely check out the different power features of your machine. These can be vital to getting more battery life out of the machine. For instance, I have a setting configured for maximum battery life. It dims the screen, turns the display off when not in use, etc. Very useful.

Also, you should learn about standby and hibernation. From my understanding, they do almost the same thing. However, standby actually uses more power, but it is quicker to resume from. Basically, they save where you are working "power down" your machine, and let you pick up where you left off. I rarely shut my laptop down. It's almost always just on standby. It saves loads of time.

Dell and Win XP - A Bad Match?

I'm not sure if this falls under a Windows problem or one for Dell, but here goes.

I had my Inspiron E1405 on hibernate. I took it out of the bag, opened the screen, and pressed the power button. Instead of coming back into Windows with my programs where I left them, the machine opened up Dell's MediaDirect program. What?! I then had to exit from MediaDirect, at which point I was finally taken to Windows.

I'm really not sure what happened. Perhaps I accidentally pressed the MediaDirect button on the front of the machine. I really don't think I did, but it's possible.

More than likely, Dell and Windows are having an internal fight somewhere. I'm not sure how MediaDirect works, but it seems to bypass the standard standby and hibernate features. Windows might not appreciate that.

I guess I'll just be more careful next time.

Why No Comprehensive Dictionary?

Windows programs definitely have spell checking features these days. They're handy. I'm personally a fan of Firefox 2.0's inline spell checking. It's cool.

The problem is that Windows doesn't have an integrated, comprehensive, universal dictionary. So when I'm in Firefox and add a word to the dictionary, it doesn't get added to Word. And vice versa.

What's a guy to do about this? Shouldn't we be able to have a a simple dictionary that all our words go into? Perhaps someone can program something to resolve this dilemma. Maybe Vista solves the problem, but I doubt it. In all likelihood, we'll be stuck adding the same word to multiple dictionaries forever. Wasted time.

Error on Startup of New Laptop

You read that right. I got my brand spankin' new Dell Inspiron E1405 two days ago. I started it up, and I got a Windows error. I can't even remember what it was, but it annoyed the heck out of me.

Luckily, I figured out that it was some problem between Internet Explorer and Google Toolbar. Shame on you, Google!

I guess that's just another reason to use Firefox.