This week I have one upgrade and a couple of updates I want to recommend.

The upgrade would be to ask all of my readers, if you use it, to dump Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (MSIE 6).  It is extremely hard to write code for (you can help developers to create better sites for you) and it is old…really old.  MSIE 6 was released to the public on August 27, 2001.  You have to admit that over eight years is prehistoric in the life span of software.

Depending on which report you read in the news over the last week or two about MSIE 6 usage you will find that approximately 30% of browsers used on the net are MSIE 6.  The actual percentage varies since any site is visited by many users with many different types of browsers; therefore, no one of them is absolutely accurate.  The lower end of the range was reported as, “15 to 25 percent” by CNN.

There have been newer versions out since October, 2006, the first being MSIE 7.  The newest is MSIE 8 which premiered March, 2009.  I know that some of you have a slow internet connection and it may take many hours to download something that large.  Hopefully, once you spend that long at it you will get the entire file properly downloaded but that is sometimes iffy with such large files and slow connections.  Therefore, Microsoft also provides a CD ($5.00 to cover shipping) which they snail-mail to you.  You really don’t have much of an excuse not to upgrade.  You can check out your options at Microsoft.

You also do not have to use MSIE as there are many other good browsers out there.  My favorite is Firefox.  Others good ones are Google Chrome, Opera and Safari to name a few.  Search for others if you are interested and keep in mind that they should all be free.

I won’t talk long about this next item, but you need to make sure your operating system is updated often.  Windows pushes the large majority of their system updates on the second or fourth Tuesday of the month.  If you don’t run automatic updates on your system, check them twice a month a day after those Tuesdays.

Next, I recommend you update your antivirus software at least weekly.  If you have the software update itself that is good.   You should occasionally run the update manually to make sure it is getting the latest data files.  There are good paid and free versions of antivirus software but none of them are any good to you if they are not often and consistently updated.

I have mentioned some of this before.   However, with the number of questions I have received from readers recently regarding these types of things I felt I needed to point them out again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.