Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Rather than loading up on beer and snacks for the Super Bowl football game this past weekend and watching all those pre-game shows filled with video clips and conjecture, Your Faithful Blogger was occupied with the project of acquiring and setting up a new computer.

My wife had an ancient (10 years-old? 12?) Sony Vaio computer whose key software had long since been abandoned by Microsoft's support staff. It was more than time to upgrade, and so she finally decided it was time to do so. Therefore, Saturday was Best Buy day.

I was pumping for a entry-level box. This was because all she does is check email, surf the Web a tiny bit and write up minutes for her college sorority alumni group.

To no avail. She spied a Gateway all-in-one machine with a fancy touch-screen she probably (wisely) won't track up with sticky/oily/greasy or whatever fingers. More expensive than that basic box, yet about half the price of a comparable Mac. So she bought it.

Sunday afternoon it fell to me to disconnect the old computer and set up the new one (and the new printer). Three or four hours later, I finished the deed. Now I'm puzzling over some Windows 7 (the newest Microsoft operating system / user interface) features, but haven't yet read more than a snippet of documentation. Reader help will be greatly appreciated.

I missed out on Windows Vista, so my point of reference is Windows XP, which I find easy to deal with. One feature of 7 that I immediately noticed is that I can't seem to find those clearly laid-out presentations of directories (or "folders" as Microsoft so rudely renamed them) that used to appear when I got into Windows Explorer. Now all I find under the C disk drive is two or three folder icons. What happened to all the rest? Must I go to My Documents or some other sissy location and start populating these on my own? I dearly miss Program Files, Windows and all those other really handy directories.

Windows 7 seems not to have an email program; the folks at Best Buy told us to download something from the Microsoft site that would do the job. So I did, but the software doesn't seem to have an address book. Question: Is there a decent (and easy to use -- for Nancy's sake) email program with all the expected features that I can download?

Also, I'll probably download the Firefox browser unless someone can convince me that Internet Explorer has now risen to Cat's Meow status.

Any other tips?

Later,

Donald

You could try Thunderbird (from the Mozilla folks) for the mail program. http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/ is the site; it does include an address book. I can't speak to ease of use, necessarily (my scale is miscalibrated) but it seems approximately equivalent to other full-featured GUI mail clients I've used or seen used.

Posted by: Boris on February 8, 2010 2:26 AM

Bring up your Folders view in WinEXplorer. Left click on Organize (the left-most button); then select Folder and View Options. Pick whatever seems appropriate. I suggest asking Windows to show everything that it can show.

Then bring up the Folders view, and left click on the little icon that looks like an outline, third from the right on the same toolbar. Change the style of view to Detail or Icon or whatever else you are happy with.

Posted by: mike shupp on February 8, 2010 7:11 PM

Eudora is another easy-to-use email program. As for browsers, I am happy with Firefox, which is free and easy to use.

Posted by: Richard S. Wheeler on February 8, 2010 7:15 PM

Email.

You want (or are about to receive) Windows Live Email and Windows Contacts. Likely in your startup folder list in Iinternet Explorer you have a url for downloading these. If not, just go to the search window (2nd top taskbar on the far right) and enter Window 7 email, and click on the little magnifying glass to be taken to a Microsoft site that is eager to satisfy you.

As for why this doesn't occur with the stock installation, I think we thank the Europeans who sought to restrain M$'s monopolistic tendencies by insisting that third party utility purveyers (Netscape, etc) be given an equal chance to compete with M$ offerings.

As for a browser, IE8 (standard with Win 7) is generally regarded by reviewers as superior to IE7 (standard with Vista). I dunno about being the Cat's Meow. I've stuck with IE because I used IE4-6 with Win 98 and have a biased set of reflexes; if you're more flexible, you might want to try Google Chrome or Opera.

One more note: IE8 during setup will ask if you want M$'s BING as a search engine. I let this happen when I installed my system, but I'm thinking seriously about going back to Google (ingrained reflexes again).

Quibbles aside, Win 7 was amazing easy to install and setup -- much more so than Vista. OTOH, it didn't set up a backup disk partition to allow recovery-from-disaster as Vista did, so arguably it's missing a potentialy useful safety feature (let's admit, I routinely wiped out that backup partition when I installed Win Vista....)

Also, FWIW, I installed an OEM version of Vista Home Premium after putting together my desktop PC, and switched to an OEM version of Win 7 Ultimate.

Posted by: mike shupp on February 8, 2010 7:38 PM

I use the Chrome browser. Super fast, lighter footprint, and since your wife just needs it for email and browsing, the lack of extensions found in Firefox won't be missed. Although Chrome is quickly building up a nice extensions library.

And I second Boris' recommendation for Thunderbird.

Posted by: JV on February 8, 2010 7:45 PM

Lifehacker on best email clients.

FWIW Gmail won.

Posted by: dzot on February 8, 2010 9:21 PM

For email, Thunderbird is currently a better choice than Eudora--Eudora's interface is, politely, idiosyncratic, and it's very old; the new version, whenever it comes out, will just be Thunderbird with a different skin.

The one huge advantage of Firefox over IEx, for any x so far: Firefox has the absolutely essential Adblock Plus extension--(almost) no more annoying pop-up/pop-under/whatever ads on your favorite news site. I don't know whether there's an equivalent for Chrome.

Posted by: Tim Anderson on February 8, 2010 9:31 PM

I'm a non-techo who likes Opera (with Mozilla in reserve), T-bird, Open Office (Go-OO version), Foxit, Jarte, Avira and AIMP2 for a juke box. These programs do what I want and cost nothing.

A bit O/T. Because I hate any kind of IT fuss, I buy a slightly out of date box every few years, and keep the previous box right next to it, all settings and programs in place, ready to go if the newer box blows up.

I never buy software, never upgrade, never visit computer shops, never repair anything. With this system, my total costs, excluding internet, are not much above 100 dollars a year. I stick to this system and it works well for me. Not for everyone of course.

Posted by: Robert Townshend on February 9, 2010 4:18 AM

All -- Thank you for all those tips. Very helpful.

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on February 9, 2010 11:29 AM






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