Jim's Column from 1/15/05
It’s a new year and people are still mailing me like mad. I need to focus at first on an apology. There was a time when I could focus my energy on answering every question but with thousands of questions coming in I simply can’t get them all. I try to get the common ones here and some specific ones online but don’t take it personally if I simply can’t get to it.Q. Can you explain what is important about speed of routers and wireless routers? I am confused about 802.11B and G and SuperG and Speedbooster and all of this other stuff. Does brand matter?
A. The various manufacturers are engaged in a speed war of sorts but for the average consumer it is a bit of a non-event. Consider this: the typical high-speed cable modem Internet provider is providing content to the home at about 1 megabit to 4 megabit. So if you are just interested in distributing Internet content around your house, anything above 4 is overkill at this point. Where the routers that offer 50 meg transfer and all that come in handy is internal transfers, that is, within the network, from one PC in your house to another one. (Maybe to serve video from a server to a TV, or pipe audio to different rooms.)
So when it comes to routers, buy a decent brand. I tend to buy by price, trying to ignore the stupid rebate wars that drive everyone nuts. Keep in mind if your laptop has wireless already built in, you need to match your router to that. (If your laptop has “B” wireless it will connect to a “G” router; but if your laptop has “G” it will not connect to a “B.”) If you are looking for the most universal, at this point that is G.
Q. I heard Microsoft is releasing a new Spyware killer software. Does that mean the end of all of this junk?
A. Hardly. Microsoft has released Beta 1 of a nice tool (it had bought a small spyware-fighting company a while back) free onto its web page at www.microsoft.com last week. I have played with it and found it pretty nice. But if you consider it the nuclear bomb that will win the war on spyware you’re sadly mistaken. These cretins are getting more and more clever in their attempts to take over our PCs and it takes a dozen tools, often used together in a certain order, to get things even remotely back to normal on badly infected machines. (I got one laptop in our shop last week that didn’t need a repairman; it needed a priest and Holy water.) So it’s another tool in the belt, but not a solution.
Q. Is there a decent, cheap photo editing application out there? Which one do you recommend? I just have some family pictures I need to crop and adjust, remove some red-eye and basics.
A. If you download the new Adobe Acrobat 7 Reader for free, they are tossing in a basic version of a nice Adobe photo composition and editing tool for nothing, so that’s worth a try. Get it at www.adobe.com/acrobat/
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: I still love CRAYON, the great, original site where you can build your own newspaper and have it ready every day. See it at www.crayon.net.
James Derk is co-owner of Cyberdads, a computer repair company, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
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