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Showing posts from April, 2009

Vintage Computer Ads and Photos

Check out 141 vintage computer ads and photos on flickr by SA_Steve. While you're there, you might also want to view Signs of All Kinds from Sa_Steve, too.

Copy a Formula down all the rows

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When working with large spreadsheets in Excel, it's very inefficient to copy the same formula down all the rows. Many of us already know that once we have our formula in our first row, we can drag the handle down to populate the remaining rows. But when we have 100s or even 1000s of rows, even this is not efficient. To allow Excel to do this for you, instead of dragging the handle, just double-click the handle. Here's the steps: Create formula in top cell Move cursor top lower-right corner of cell -- cursor should change to a plus (+) sign Double-click

Time Warner wants to put restrictive usage caps on your Internet access

The cable providers are scared of losing their cash cow by people watching TV over the Internet. In the latest volley from the cable companies, Time Warner is rolling out restrictive caps that are high priced, and extremely high if you go over. Sure, $15 a month for Internet sounds good, until you realize it's for 1 GB of data and an additional $2 for each gig you go over . As Wired points out (in "Congressman Wants to Ban Download Caps"), that's 3 hours of Hulu video or half a standard definition movie delivered online. For a mere (cough, cough) $75 per month, you can get 100 GB per month, and only pay $1 penalty for each gig over. It sure makes Comcasts 250 MB cap at $50 - $55 per month look good. I've heard some folks defend the caps, claiming we don't need that much bandwidth, but each argument has been based on 1 user. The typical claim has been from 50 to 90 GB average usage. Multiply that by a family of 4 and now you're at 200 to 360 GBs. And if t

Word 2003 slowly launches

I had experienced problems with Word 2003 taking a long time to launch. I'm not sure when it occurred, though I suspect it was when I tested it as the email editing client for Outlook. Even though I disabled Outlook from using Word 2003, Word continued to launch slowly. I searched Google, but couldn't find much that would help. I resorted to using the Detect and Repair feature contained in the Help menu. After some processing, the Detect and Repair process asked me for my install disk. Since this is a company computer, Office was installed from a shared drive that I don't have access to, so I canceled the process. When I returned to Word, it acted as though it was the first time launching, and it now seems to open faster. Unfortunately, when I opened Outlook, it also acted like it was the first time launching. My profile was gone with my settings to access my email and the pointer to my email archives. Fortunately I keep all most of my email on the server, so I can access i

CorelDRAW X4 Crash on Startup

I had a fresh install of CorelDRAW X4, and each time I tried to start it, it would crash. After some searching through Google, I found the following fix. Open the folder C:\Program Files\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4\Programs\UIConfig\CorelDRAW Edit DrawUI.xml Find the line <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="true" selected="true"> Change visible="false" and remove selected="true" <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="false"> Save and close DrawUI.xml Fold down F8 and restart CorelDRAW X4 When prompted to update settings, select OK That did the trick for me. Apparently it is caused by a conflict with MFC dlls that are installed (version 1833) with SQL2008.