Last week’s column generated more questions so today I will hit a few of those.

First, “Why did you say Dell is the best computer maker? I think (fill-in-the-blank) is much better.”  Well, I understand your comment; however, that is not exactly what I said.  I believe when you reread the column you will see that I said, “At this point in time I always suggest Dell.”  I stand by that statement, but they have not always been at the top of my list.  In the past they have been close to the bottom.  My recommendation takes into account quality, price and service.  Many manufacturers have fallen down on customer service.  In my opinion, while Dell is not the best in customer service, they are not the worst.

Many of you appreciated me bringing the AIO computers to the forefront.  Some of you “googled” about them and found that they are quite an interesting concept.  Also, they are currently more expensive than most of us would like to experiment with.  So, thanks!

Now the one where I guess I drew most of the “attacks”…iPad!  I did not include iPads in my comments about computer types, i.e. netbook, notebook, desktop and even AIOs.  The reason being that although it is technically a computer it does not have all of the abilities and features of a standard computer.

The iPad is a computer whose main calling in life is to allow the user to view prepared things online. It is not used much for creation.  For instance, you can view any website, e-book, picture, movie, etc. you wish.  However, it is hard to contribute to those same things from the iPad.  Yes, I could have written this column on an iPad but from what I hear and have experienced it isn’t the most comfortable keyboard to use for longer typing.  Emails yes, documents no.  I could also purchase a keyboard that would connect to the iPad and make typing easier.  If that’s the case why wouldn’t I have just bought a netbook at half the price or less?

They are neat and I think that over time they will affect the e-book readers like Kindle and Nook more than the notebook/netbook markets.  They are perfect for reading books (once they come out with a version that has an antiglare screen) and magazines with much better quality than the e-readers and the page size is a great deal nicer.  Even an Apple lover told me that they are basically an overgrown iTouch.

I would love to own one but not at such a high price for a feature-poor computer.  One of the major drawbacks is the iPad’s small storage space.  The highest end iPad has 64 GB of storage, which is probably OK if you do not want to add many programs and save files. I personally am not for putting all of my files on the cloud as of yet.

I like the concept of the iPad but it needs some increases in functionality before it can fairly be compared to a computer.

Tags: aio, all in one, comparison, desktop, iPad, netbook, notebook

I got an email from a reader in Mt. Crawford over a month ago asking an excellent question.  They wanted to know if there was a way to keep all of their programs up to date, keeping the latest version always on their system.

In talking back and forth with them we came to the conclusion that there should be something on the market that was similar to “Windows Update”.  WU comes with all versions of Microsoft windows as all of my readers should know.  It allows you to check and see if there are any new versions of your MS products that need updating.  If there are, it allows you to update them so that you can stay ahead of the curve.

After a little Googling and searching I found a program called Secunia-PSI.  I have no idea what “Secunia” means but PSI is for “Personal Software Inspector”.  This program does almost everything the reader wanted.  I have been testing it for a little over a month and it seems to work very well.

You can go to secunia.com to read about and download the personal edition of the application.  There are actually three different versions of Secunia.  They are OSI (Online), PSI (Personal) and CSI (Corporate).  I tried the OSI and it was adequate but does not look for as many programs as the PSI and CSI versions.  The CSI version is really for the corporate environment and home users do not need it.  All three are here: bit.ly/bx3f5u.

All versions are free but I recommend downloading/installing the PSI version which seems to  be very thorough.  You will find it in the middle of the three on the page recommended above.

The default setting for Secunia runs in the background all the time checking your computer’s software for updates.  I leave it like that on my desktop since I have loads of memory. However, for my netbook I just run it once a week or so.

I pride myself in always keeping all of my software up to date, so let’s take a look at how my three computers faired after being scanned by Secunia.

My netbook scored 100% as all of my software was up-to-date, yeah!

My notebook didn’t do as well.  There were four applications that weren’t up to standards.  But I still did better than 15% of users in Virginia; Secunia gives you this info if you register the product.  (free)

Now my pride and joy, my desktop computer…oops, I had 11 applications that were not where they should be.  I spent about an hour uninstalling some old versions which Secunia advised me to do, before I updated them.  I also downloaded some of the new versions from the links provided by Secunia.  And I learned a valuable lesson, as the bible says, “Pride goes before destruction.”

Now, let’s look at  a couple of drawbacks.  It indicated that all three browsers on my system were insecure and needed updates.  They are MSIE, Firefox and Google Chrome.  Come on, give me a break!  They were all updated and as secure as possible.  I guess it wanted me to uninstall all three of them. Of course, then my surfing the net time would be cut down considerably.  I decided to ignore those threats.  You can always make rules to ignore certain warnings.

Tags: application, browsers, desktop, netbook, notebook, PSI, Ron Doyle, secunia, software, update