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There are a number of speedtests you could use to document what is going on and when. I don’t think any of them would be able to actually do ‘monitoring’ but perhaps–I haven’t tried that with any of them.

There is a lot of issues related to Internet speeds, including the amount of data being carried by any part of the traffic lines and wi-fi. Early on, with one of the ISPs, I found that things slowed down when kids were out of school and doing homework.

https://fast.com/

https://www.speedtest.net/

https://speedtest.xfinity.com/

https://www.speedcheck.org/

https://www.spectrum.com/internet/speed-test

and more…

 

This is the second time an update to Windows 10 has caused a crash, first Dell consierge, trying to fix a windows thing, crashed the computer and had to put a new board in. $300 spent, restoring files from backups. Secondly, the latest update to win10 deleted both Firefox and addins, and Thunderbird with all folders of saved emails (for reference) and email address books, and lists. Recovery from backups. Two weeks (continuing) and over $200 spent. Currently Thunderbird, with every click, comes up “not responding”. As an editor of two publications I can no longer spend this kind of time or money to fix and recovery from the s***load of problems Microsoft is giving us.

I’m going to move to chromebook as soon as possible. I’m not a computer guru although I’ve been with computers since CP/M Os, MS/Dos on Sequa portables. As someone who was on the Insider Program, perhaps someone, (Woody?) would tell Microsoft, they are criminals when they delete purposefully other’s software. I will not tolerate that kind of activity.

Paul

I always have problems with people using the term “Music Library” when referring to recordings only. Having been professional music librarian where we had books about music, actual scores and sheet music, as well as recordings the misuse of the handle “Music Library” messes up search criteria in most of the search engines and people don’t find what they are really interested in if it is not the recording(s).
A better headline would be: “Apps to build and organize recording collections.”
Naming the Association for Recorded Sound Collections describes what it represents. “Music library” doesn’t describe a recording collection.

Upon installing LibreOffice I was taken by surprise that it does things which some of the graphics programs do. It changes both the icons of your saved documents, as well as decides how it gets opened…opening a document gets opened in LibreOffice instead of MS Office…often changing formating, losing some text and formatting, and possibly changing how the item as an attachment to an email is received and opened.
There seems no way to change this, unless I totally remove LibreOffice. The one I downloaded and installed was ver. 4.0…..xxx.

Having had that experience, I don’t think it would be a good idea for writers in Windows Secrets to be suggesting these freebees without also saying what the operations might change what you have on your machine.

You did mention in your article, not very forcefully, to save your work, back it up, but having those items saved on your computer doesn’t help, since LibreOffice does indeed take doc, and docx files and changes those files when installing the software, giving them a LibreOffice icon and extensions. I didn’t check Excel

I’ve used StarOffice, which became OpenOffice, from time to time in order to open articles sent to me for publishing which MS Office couldn’t. So I find OpenOffice useful and may eventually have to use LibreOffice as other writers convert to it and send me work for our publications.

I’m wondering why a software group would not give one a choice or tell you what it is about to do to your files. I thought we’ve come further than this; creating “do-it-our-way or no way.”

I remember reading many years ago regarding the fact that other than the operating system, Microsoft basically was last in developing applications for users. It seems this is the direction they are continuing to go…including now the OS.
Some above mention that one needed to give it a try…if you read Woody’s article you will note that he’s been using the Win8 since last September, about 5 months. Shouldn’t it be easier to get used to and be able to use quicker than that.
I think maybe Microsoft thinks dumbing down the system will help those kids and adults who still can spell and put sentences together. Then again Microsoft has the proclivity to build into apps those things it thinks we need and want…like the Ribbon in Office 2007-2010, wherein I spend so much time looking for commands, I end up using the quick access bar and ‘Help’ more often than the ribbon; why in the world is the ribbon different in the different Office apps? I’ve had win7 for much too long for having to still look for the !@#$%^&* commands.
It appears Win8 will be the MS Works of operating systems; “you can only do what we think you need you to do.” :confused:
I know MS is looking for researchers, but are the coders even interested in what they might say? It all seems so disappointing and gives me much less confidence in MS products…which I now have to use in my profession.

I’ve been using Office most of its life. Having experienced 2007, I went back to using 2003. Eventually there was a need to move to 2007, then quickly to 2010, and from Vista to Win7.
I suspect I’m getting used to the Ribbon, however the most used things end up on my Quick Access tool bar, so use of the ribbon is limited. Some things I rarely use are difficult to find without going to ‘help’. But as someone said, it’s amazing how many options there are…as Ed McMahn on Johnny Carson would say…’you have everything you could possibly want.’ …not precisely…a Quick access bar instead of the wide ribbon might be nice. As a librarian, I don’t find the placement of items all that intuitive; should have better placement organization.

I’m reading a lot about Firefox going away on this and on other forums because of the possible loss of a Google contract.
I don’t think a lot of people understand the nature of the front end browsers. They are not the ‘search engines’ necessarily and can point to ‘search engines.’
Firefox, Opera, Chrome, IE, etc. [ http://tinyurl.com/qgt4y8 ] find hits from indexed databases. Many in fact, use what Google has indexed and their database. Others use other databases of indexes they or other groups have developed over time…and browsers can use any one of them to get hits and results pages.
It’s possible that Firefox may lose the use of the Google search engine and index, but one can change within Firefox and IE to any other search engine, including those others who may also use the Google index or the Yahoo index, or whatever.
I found the easiest way to do this in Firefox or IE, was to add the Groowe search bar. http://www.groowe.com/ I can change to many search engines (or even program use of others) which I may want or need from the Firefox or IE browser, whether AlltheWeb, Yahoo, Bing, Wikipedia, Yippy!, Twocows, etc., with two clicks. Each of the latter search in different ways with different indexes and will often bring up items not found by the Google algorithms. The Groowe bar is available for IE, but apparently not for those other front end popular browsers; Chrome, and Opera.
Given the nature of Google now applying ‘preference’ filters to the search, one is not likely to find all that one should be finding if a balanced research of available information is to be found. See Pariser’s important book The Filter Bubble.

I may be late to the party but I can’t honestly see any advantage of locating apps on a sliding screen than from the task bar. I’m not sure what this will do for those of us that can type faster than most apps allow…the screen keyboard would most certainly slow writers down…and dumb down people who should know how to keyboard.

I still don’t understand why, if you are using a different browser other than IE exclusively, why, when using CCleaner to get rid of temporary files, IE has tons deleted while Mozilla has none.
p.s…unable to send a screen shot.

Apparently not. The Find command in my version is only available if you are inside or have highlighted a text frame. And there seems no way to do that for this particular object. Even Edit/select All/, then trying to use the Find command, the Find command is not available.

thanks Phil. Things seem to get more & more complicated. While trying to back up the file to the floppy, the system crashed. Then I couldn’t see the file in Recycle. I did find the files in FIND, and backed them up. Then I tried to move them to Favorites. It seems I have several Favorites under a previous version of IE, i.e. ProgramfilesEarthlinkFavorites and ProgramfilesEarthlinkFavoritesMine. Putting the folder in either of these does not work. I find under My Documents, a folder Searchdbdt that wasn’t there before with INDEX.* files. I find in WindowsFavoritesMine which appears to be what I see (updated) in IE, so I’ll try moving the file to that area. Because of all of the patches and updates to Windows and IE that I’ve downloaded and installed, I really am at a loss as to what files and folders are no longer needed that I can get rid of. But thanks to all for the help on this. I’m pretty sure I’ve solved my immediate problem.

Thanks Dave. I did finally find the Search folder in Recycle along with a number of other “search files” not part of Favorites, but of other programs. Now the question is, how do I move these desparate files back where they belong. Actually trying to back up this folder to a disc did not work and I went back to recycle and couldn’t see the files. Doing another Find, I found all of them and tried moving them, but not all were successful from Recycle to their original folders.

I’m using Win98 on the affected machine, WinME on the other. I’ve used FIND before posting and none of the files had the errant folder. What concerns me is that I’ve not deleted anything but downloads on this computer. I have firewall ZoneAlarm 3.0 and CA EZ-trust online virus detection/clean. Yet somehow, within Favorites any folder with the word or string “search” such as research has been deleted. I’ve scanned for viruses and found none. I’ve scanned for Ad-ware with Ad-aware and found none. So something strange is going on that I need to know about. Is my folder to large? or something like that?