GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 22, 6-12-09

Fri Jun 12 17:58:16 PDT 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 22                           

6-12-09

1 Microsoft thins the heard         

2 A friendly teller visit

3 IE8 charity, new iPhone specs, China outrage, Norton and McAfee get their due

4 Secure file scrubbing

6 Browser text size

Microsoft is going out of business.  Not literally, of course, but they are quickly ditching the financial, reference, photo editing and antivirus sides of the business.

Encarta Encyclopedia and OneCare got the axe, as did Digital Image Suite, which included Picture It!  As far as I can tell this product is gone since it’s no longer listed on the Microsoft website.

All those aside, Wednesday (necessitating the delay in the NL) Microsoft announced the demise of MS Money, the financial management software that could never quite match Intuit Quicken in market share.

Sales of the product will cease as of June 30th, although support from Microsoft and financial institutions that currently interact with it will continue through January of 2011.  If you use the online reconciliation and other features you’re still good for another year and a half.

This move actually surprises me since money is widely used.  As earlier noted, it’s not Quicken but it does have a large and loyal following.  I can think of many programs in the MS stable that are far less visible on user’s PCs.

Two that come immediately to mind are Works and Streets & Trips.  

Works is a severely limited office product that is incompatible with nearly every other office productivity package.  It pales in comparison to the ubiquitous MS Office in features and costs more than the open source OpenOffice, which is completely compatible with the MS product as well as completely free.

Streets & Trips is a dinosaur in the Internet age.  I mean c’mon, how quaint do you find maps on CD or DVD in this day and age?  The product touts online updates and integration with GPS devices, but Google Maps and Mapquest along with GPS units in vehicles who needs to purchase software?

Both of those products could be retired without much of a fuss, and likely will be in the near future, but Money offers interaction with participating banks and is causing a bit of a ruckus.

If Microsoft doesn’t rethink the decision and offer a stay of execution take heart.  There is a silver lining, sort of.  Quicken will import Money data, but not all of it.  Things like budgets and loan accounts will all have to be recreated by hand.

Your best bet, if you decide to switch, is to continue to use money but install Quicken to use in tandem.  Import your data and rebuild what you have to.  Keep both programs up to date with your manual entries and bank synchronization until they are completely up to date, and then drop Money.

It will be a lot of work but well worth it if you like the convenience of online bookkeeping.  

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Team member Art Maley sends us the link below for those who have been thinking about downloading Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. The site, sponsored by Microsoft, will donate eight meals to Feeding America for every download of the browser:

 http://www.browserforthebetter.com/index-htm.html#getie8:Jz6lITR6wYl

Specifications for the iPhone 3G S have surfaced, indicating that Apple's latest mobile device has a 600-MHz processor and 256MB RAM on board:

http://tinyurl.com/m4ud4p

China is facing a storm of protest at home and abroad over new regulations requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other “vulgar” content from the Internet:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/world/asia/11censor.html?ref=asia

Antivirus vendors Symantec and McAfee have agreed to pay the New York Attorney General's office US$375,000 in fines to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software subscription renewal fees without their permission:

http://tinyurl.com/nehtlq

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com 
www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

If you're worried that someone might invade your privacy by restoring files you've deleted, give Freeraser a try. It's as simple a program as you'll ever find for killing files so that they stay killed. According to vendor Codyssey, Freeraser uses an algorithm approved by the U.S. Department of Defense. Just drag the file you want to delete to the Freeraser wastebasket icon and it's gone forever.  Get it here:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/Freeraser.shtml 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com 

Download of the Week

If you're worried that someone might invade your privacy by restoring files you've deleted, give Freeraser a try. It's as simple a program as you'll ever find for killing files so that they stay killed. According to vendor Codyssey, Freeraser uses an algorithm approved by the U.S. Department of Defense. Just drag the file you want to delete to the Freeraser wastebasket icon and it's gone forever.  Get it here:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/Freeraser.shtml 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  A few days ago my home page,(YAHOO), opens up at 3-4 times the size it should be.  The letters are huge, and I have to scroll from one side of the page to the other to read it.  This only happened recently after I went into Spybot Search and Destroy and clicked 'undo' on the Immunize icon.  How do I get the screen back to normal size?  By the way, your team is great.  I used to listen to you on WHAS and loved your show.  Hope you get back on some day.  You're a wealth of information.  I greatly appreciate your help.

A:  If you are using Internet Explorer, go to View > Text Size, and set that option to Medium.  In Firefox, go to View > Zoom > Reset.  If neither of those work, try holding down the Ctrl Key on the keyboard and hitting the 0 key.  

Let me know what happens, and thanks for your kind words

Daniel A. Williams
daniel at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

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