Free Alternative Operating Systems

Linux offers a free Windows alternative

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED April 2, 2010 6:56 p.m.

Free is good, especially when it refers to computing. I think just about everyone would agree to that statement.

In computing there is trialware, which is software that is free to try; freeware, which is no-cost software to keep, and open source software, which is somewhat different still.

The open source programs follow the rules of FOSS, Free Open Source Software, and the GNU Project, a free software, mass collaboration project that began in 1983 at MIT. They state the programs are to be free of cost but also free to implement change.

The source code that was used to write the software is to be included with the program.

The philosophy leans more toward the concept of free speech, rather than free beer.

If you download Program 2.0 from the Internet and know of a way to improve on it, you do. Then you send it back from where you got it, making note of the changes and rename it version 2.1.

We’ll get to software in a minute, but on a grander scale, there are free operating systems. Early in the last decade of the last century, Linus Torvalds, a then 21-year-old University of Helsinki computer programmer, wrote some Unix-like code that was to be a free operating system, one he didn’t think would catch on.

Today, Linux, as it has come to be known, is available in dozens of languages as well as in dozens of “distros,” or distributions, in both 32- and 64-bit. The most well known is perhaps Red Hat, but there is also Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Knoppix, Xandros, Mandriva and many more.

Linux began in the DOS age as a command prompt operating system, eventually morphing into a GUI, or Graphical User Interface, as Windows is now. It still helps if you know some of the old commands, but you don’t have to.

Some distros you don’t even have to install. These are called “live” versions and are generally a bit smaller in content than their big brothers.

Look at zenwalk.org for a good one. They run at boot from the system memory. You put the CD in, boot your computer and in three minutes you are running a version of Linux, a turn-key, free operating system. When you reboot, you’re back in Windows. It is that easy. I’m not making this up.

If you have a large enough hard drive, you can install Linux next to Windows. Have a dual-boot computer. When you turn it on, you’ll have the option of booting into the OS of your choice.

All versions come loaded with applications, utilities and games. You can write a document or scan one, use a calculator, send e-mail, connect to the Internet, chat online, edit photos, listen to music, watch videos or create one, create a Web site, burn CDs, play solitaire or Sudoku and more — all for free.

The equivalent of Office, Visio, Ghost, Paint, Roxio and Movie Maker are respectively: Open Office, Dia, Cineluna, Clonezilla, Gimp and Infra Recorder.

Go to www.openoffice.org for the free version of that nice Office-like suite.

Just as with the distros, there are many more free apps available for download. A couple of good places to start are at www.linux.org and www.linuxfreedom.com/distros. You’ll find links to the distros, applications from anti-spam programs to MP3 players and fun things like Alien Arena and Astro Menace.

You may find fees at some of the sites. That is only if you want an actual CD with Linux on it. It also covers support. But if you find the download button, there will be no charge. Download the iso file, burn it to a CD or DVD and you’re good to go. There are also many good tutorials on the sites if you need help. Linux users also have lots of online forums you can join or browse for answers.

It needs saying that Linux computers don’t catch viruses or get infected with malware. Not like Windows PCs do, anyway. I don’t believe it’s because the system is immune though. I think it’s more due to the fact there are simply not enough Linux users that warrant the writing of nuisance viruses by the netcompoops that do. As Linux systems become more mainstream, they, too, will most likely also succumb to viruses.

Even though you are a Windows user, whether XP, Vista or Win 7, you should still consider trying Linux. Install it to a large hard drive or just run it from RAM. Either way, you’ll be impressed with its versatility and stability.

Not only will you have a new OS to explore with new apps and games to try, but Linux proves to be a valuable tool as well. Should you experience trouble with your Windows installation as many of us do, Linux gives you a back door to your files.

From the Linux file manager you can access Windows files and either invoke a repair or save them to an alternative destination.

So although there may be no such thing as free beer, an investment in Linux is worthwhile and won’t cost a dime.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Email Alternatives

Computer Care: Many options for e-mail are often free, too

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED March 19, 2010 7:58 p.m.

Not everyone checks their e-mail the same way. There are basically two types of e-mail: Web or cloud-based and client-based. Web mail includes Yahoo, MSN, Gmail and Hotmail. Client e-mail uses programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Thunderbird and Eudora.

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. Most Web mails are free, as are some of the client-based programs. Some are sponsored with banners or taglines. With many of the Web mail offerings, you are limited to the amount of storage space and attachment size. Fast Mail, for example, has an ad-laden free version that limits you to 10 MB of mail storage. Once you start with a pay plan, the ads disappear and the storage space increases.

Gmail from Google is a free Web-based program; you access it from your Web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox). It gives you 7 GB of storage and also has ads. It incorporates a good spam blocker and will check your other accounts as well.

Thunderbird from Mozilla is a free client that has tabs like its cousin Firefox. It is highly customizable and has many skins and other add-ons free to download.

The main difference between the two types is that programs like Outlook (client mail) create folders on your computer where the mail is stored. You can download it and read it later offline, but the program needs to be installed on the computer.

With Gmail and other Web-based programs, your mail is stored on their servers and you need to be online to access it. But the upside is that you can read it via a browser on any computer with Internet access.

Web mail controls the storage capacity since it is on their computers; client mail storage is dictated only by the size of your hard drive.

Web e-mail is left on mail servers until you delete it. If you don’t, eventually your senders will get a message saying your mailbox is full. The same could happen with client-based mail, but by default, its mail is usually only kept on servers for two to three months.

These options are usually dealt with by the protocols assigned to different types of e-mail programs. There is POP (3) mail, Post Office Protocol, which receives most client-based mail. Web mail uses IMAP, Internet Message Access Protocol, to receive. They both use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send the mail.

Many Windows 7 users have noticed that Microsoft failed to put an e-mail client in their latest operating system. XP users had Outlook Express, Vista had Windows Mail. (Outlook, by the way, is part of Office and is not free.) The folks in Redmond were only trying to cut down on the clutter. They made it an a-la-carte offering.

If you want an e-mail client, you can download it for free from their Web site. Navigate to Windows Live Mail here.

Not to go on a rant here, but I need to mention some things concerning e-mail etiquette.

Just because your buddy suggests a certain e-mail needs to be forwarded 10 times to ensure good luck doesn’t mean you have to do it. A “must read” from Aunt Tilly may be of no interest to the rest of your contacts. Please consider that.

When a supposed expert sends something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is so. I can sign an e-mail with NASA after my name, claiming Mars will explode in May. Check out anything suspicious at www.snopes.com before you forward it. They debunk many online urban myths.

One last piece of advice about e-mail accounts: Get yourself a free one. No matter what type of account you have, a free one can’t hurt. It can actually help. Use it as a throw-away account just to sign up for things. You’ll never even check it.

When you sign up for newsletters, online forums or contests, that’s where much of the spam comes from. You just gave out your e-mail address and it could have been sold to solicitors. So why use your real address?

Get a free one from Hotmail or Yahoo. When they tell you the box is full, toss it and get another.

Tell 10 of your friends about this column or your computer will get a virus tomorrow.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

The Cost of Ink

Computer Care: Don't let printers soak you for high cost of ink

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED March 6, 2010 1 a.m.

Not all printers are created equal. Nor are the inks they use. The main thing to consider when you buy a printer is what the cost would be for replacement cartridges. And not all of them are the same.

I recommend buying a printer with more than a black and a tri-color cartridge. With them, if you run out of yellow, the whole cartridge is trash. My Epson Photo Stylus has six cartridges, each at a (retail) cost of about $15. When yellow runs out, that's what I replace.

I also have a Lexmark wireless All-in One that I failed to research properly prior to buying it. I now know that when the color runs out, it will not print at all, not even in black. It's a good question to ask at the store.

Some printers cost less than $50. They come with a starter cartridge that is usually less than half full. But to get a refill for it could cost the same as the printer itself. It's like the razors at the drug store. They give you the handle and a blade and then charge $20 for four more blades.

Most of us use either ink jet or laser printers; some businesses still use dot matrix. There are photo printers, wide formats, all-in-ones and wireless. You can now purchase a printer, scanner, fax, copier combo with wireless for just more than $100. Again, the replacement ink is where they get you. But don't be intimidated by the manufacturers telling you that you need to use costly OEM (original equipment manufacture) ink only. You don't.

There are after-market cartridges that are fine. You can also use kits to refill them yourself. A $20 kit from the supermarket will fill 10 cartridges. Considering most ink jet replacements cost $20-$30, that's quite a savings.

The stores that sell the new expensive OEM products also offer alternatives. Office Depot for example, will give you a $3 credit per used cartridge that you bring in and then offer a 10 percent discount on new purchases. You can bring in five per day.

Walgreens will refill your cartridge for $12.99 and Cartridge World will sell you a pre-used refilled cartridge, refill yours or provide an OEM for you.

Another alternative is bulk ink systems. Instead of have three to six cartridges with 20 ML of ink each, you could have tubes running to bottles adjacent to your printer, each holding 60 ML (or more). You can get more than three times the ink for less than a quarter of the price. Again, that's a good savings.

There are a few more things you should know about ink and cartridges. When your printer tells you that you need ink, you don't. Not yet, anyway. I can use mine for two weeks after I get the initial warning. I keep using it until the printout has white spaces in it.

Remember, HP, Canon, Lexmark, Kodak and Epson make money from ink, not from printers. So don't be a hurry to toss a cartridge that may be 20 percent full. But if you let it run completely dry, you could damage the printer. Monitor the ink levels carefully.

When you do replace a cartridge, do it soon after it is used up. The residual ink will dry on both the print head and the cartridge if you don't swap them out as soon as they are empty. They can be cleaned and some kits will even provide a solvent to use for just that. But it's extra work that can be avoided.

Most cartridges can be refilled at least three or four times, often times even more than that. There are certain types that can't be refilled at all.

The Internet is another place to find deals on ink. A good online resource is inkguides.com, an independent site full of useful information about ink for your printer. It will direct you to sites like 123refills.net, 4inkjets.com, inkcartridges.com and others. Some even offer free shipping along with heavy discounts.

A great piece of related software is Ink Saver from inksaver.com. It is better than using draft mode for reducing ink costs. For each document you are about to print, you'll get a pop-up with a slider, asking what percent of ink you want to save on that document. The last I saw, it was about $30, with a trial available.

The manufacturers all make $49 printers as well as $849 models. Some may use ink that is better for photos or that is quicker drying. Some may include bells and whistles that others don't have. Some have a fax incorporated in it, while others are wireless.

Just like Internet Explorer and Firefox, both get you to the Internet; all printers will get the job done. Some may do it better or cheaper than others. Some last longer or have more gadgets.

The bottom line is, get what you need and what you can afford. But don't be bullied into buying expensive ink.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Storage in the Cloud

Computer Care: Cloud storage an easy way to back up your data

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Feb. 20, 2010 1 a.m.

Hard drives fail. It's not a question of if, but rather when. I've had them last eight years; one failed in less than eight months. If you place value on your data, you should find a secondary storage device for it.

Everybody has photos, spreadsheets, documents and other forms of digital matter that they would prefer not to lose. I back up my images to DVDs, my programs to an external hard drives and ghost my operating systems. There are various ways to back things up using different types of media.

Programs exist that will help, from Acronis True Image to Norton Ghost. Even within the programs you have choices. Do you want to make copies of your documents or only your system files? Would you prefer to clone your entire hard drive?

After you make these decisions, you need to have a place to keep them. For obvious reasons, you don't want your backup on the same drive as the source.

There are optical discs such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray. Then there are secondary internal hard drives. Most desktops have sufficient room for at least one additional drive, sometimes more. These would show up under My Computer (or Computer) next to the "C" drive, as the "D" drive, moving your CD drive down one, to perhaps the "E" drive.

Next are the external devices, whether portable or not. These include the small keychain-sized thumb drives to the pocket flash drives and the desk drives.

The price of these devices has dropped incredibly in the past year or so. You can get a 500 GB drive for just over $100 now. That's a lot of pictures of the grandkids. Why stop there? Terabyte drives are now all the rage. That is 1,000 gigabytes.

The next wave of storage (and computing) though, is not in your pocket or on your desk. It's on the Internet and is called cloud storage (and cloud computing). This comes from the cloud image that represents the Internet on flow charts.

You may have seen ads for Internet-based products like Mozi or Carbonite in magazines or on TV. This is the new wave. Most offer a gigabyte or two of free storage space in their cloud. For additional fees you can get more storage.

I have a free Mozi account and for less than $5 they offer unlimited storage. Both Mozi and Carbonite offer pricing for home and business accounts.

There are some advantages to cloud storage. You don't have to purchase and maintain a physical device, so there is nothing to wear down, break or lose. It is generally less expensive; it grows with your needs; it is more efficient and more secure than the way you are storing your data now.

Just as with the Acronis or Norton products, the off-site storage arena offers scheduled uploads to their clouds. All data is also encrypted so nobody can see what you are storing.

What I like is the fact that you are not tethered to a box and a cable. Wherever you are, you have access, 24/7 to you data. All you need is a computer and your password.

In a case as this, I suggest a strong password. This is a prime example why you shouldn't use the same term for all of your accounts. If someone hacks your e-mail account, then now they can enter your storage area as well. Choose an eight-character, alpha-numeric password, not your dog's name.

But just as with any product or service, caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Research the cloud service that you are about to send your valuable information up to. I would stick with one of the better known, big guys. Should you go for say, Carl's Cloud, it may turn out to be Carl's Con and you‘ve lost everything.

You might inquire if they have redundant servers. Do they have more than one copy of your data, should disaster strike them?

Remember, hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing. Generally, they last anywhere from three to five years. Even new ones can stop working. Sure, you'll get a replacement, but your data will still be gone.

I extract data from crashed drives on a regular basis. Often, though, it's not possible. Some drives are too far gone to get anything out of them. I can tell by the look on clients' faces that they have no other copies of what is on the drive.

Backing up data is not difficult, time-consuming, nor does it have to be expensive. Simply choose a method and a device and as they say, just do it!

Next time you decide to back up your data, consider the cloud. The sky is the limit.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Internet Wars

Computer Care: The right ISP, browser can make Web surfing faster

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Feb. 6, 2010 4:16 p.m.

How do you connect to the Internet? You use a browser connected to an Internet service provider, your ISP. In Gainesville, that usually means most of you use either Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers with AT&T’s DSL (digital subscriber line) or Charter’s cable, both considered to be broadband connections.

If you still have a dial-up connection, stop reading now and call one of those ISPs to upgrade. It’s the second decade of the 21st century. There is no reason to be on a slow dial-up connection anymore. Your browser should show images instantly, not load them line by line.

So which is faster, DSL or cable? It’s like the current cell phone ads. They each claim to be the best.
Actually cable is faster than DSL, but there is a caveat. There is a bottleneck with cable; the more users online in your neighborhood, the slower the connection. DSL, on the other hand connects at a slower, albeit constant speed. If you check your e-mail just before dinner, DSL will probably be faster. But wait until after midnight when there are fewer folks online and cable should prove to be faster.

They are both fast, fast enough and way faster than dial-up, including optimized dial-up.

No matter which service you subscribe to, your modem will fail to forward a signal every now and then. When that happens, it is time to reset the modem. This may occur in bad weather or when local construction or maintenance crews are in your neighborhood causing service to become intermittent.

To reset your modem (cable or DSL), just unplug the power cord from the back of the box for about half a minute. Plug it back in and refresh your browser. You should be good to go.

If you have a wireless router, unplug it for 30 seconds as well. After the time is up, first plug in the modem and wait for the lights to settle down, about 15 seconds. Then plug the router back in. When its lights settle down, refresh your browser and try to get online again.

You could of course, call your ISP’s tech support and wait on hold for 40 minutes only to eventually get an agent. They will tell you what I just did. Why the ISPs don’t make this fix general knowledge, I’ll never know.
Unplug the modem and router if you have one. Wait 30 seconds on each before plugging them back in, and then refresh your browser. It is that simple.

Speaking of browsers, I prefer Mozilla’s Firefox to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It is faster, more secure and highly customizable. It has a Google search bar built in and it is even customizable. There is a plethora of add-ons and themes for Firefox, all free to download. It will even save your passwords if you want it to.

For those of you who just use vanilla-flavored browsers, add-ons allow you to customize page appearance, your connection speed, the tabs, your bookmarks, not just making things look pretty but making practical improvements while enhancing your browsing experience.

Internet Explorer just recently jumped on the tabbed bandwagon with its new versions. Other browsers like, Opera, Safari and Google’s newcomer, Chrome, are also good options. The latter claims ease of use and efficiency with movable tabs. So if you’re stuck with Explorer just because it came with Windows, take one of the others for a test drive. You may be pleasantly surprised.

The Google search bar is not just for searches. You can convert times, weights, currency, languages and more. If you want to look up a word, simply type in the box “define: your word” and hit Enter. It is very useful.

However wonderful a search engine Google is, Dogpile is better for research. It combines the resources of Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing, offering a thoroughly comprehensive response to your query.

Whichever service you use to search the Internet, you can fine tune it by using a Boolean search. Click on the advanced link to find it. With a Boolean search, you can add search terms like “and,” “or” and “not.” This drastically cuts down superfluous page hits.

If you’re looking at Greece for example, to search for an upcoming vacation, by adding Boolean terms it can save you from scrolling through dozens of useless hits. Use “Greece not history” or “Greece and tourism” to save time.

For now there is only one Internet. Eventually, the folks who made it will make another and keep it to themselves, leaving the likes of us out of it. They built the information superhighway and are now working on the HOV lane with restricted access.

Could you blame them? They are trying to communicate about particle theories and avoiding cosmic collisions. We clutter it up with You Tube videos and spam.

So whichever search engine, browser or ISP you use, it’s all good. It will all get you there. It will also be a lot faster than it was a few short years ago in the last millennium.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Speed Up Your PC

Computer Care: Steps to help clean out and speed up PCs

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Jan. 26, 2010 12:24 p.m.

So you bought your spouse a new computer last month and now you realize just how slow yours really is. Or maybe you already knew it wasn’t as fast as it used to be. Even that brand new laptop may be bogged down with unnecessary enhancements. We’ve gone over some of this before, but talking about making your computer faster is worth repeating.

To make some basic adjustments, you don’t need a technician. With a few mouse clicks, your system could be more responsive. There are some trade-offs though. You may have to do without a menu fade or a transparent window. It sure is cool to see your folders spin by on your desktop like a Rolodex, but you sacrifice speed to do it.

What Microsoft calls visual enhancements, I call smoke and mirrors. All it really does in the end is leave you with less system resources to do what you need to do: compute.

Let’s start with XP. Go to My Computer and right-click on it. Go to Properties and choose the Advanced tab and then Settings. Choose Best Performance from there. Then add checks in the boxes with shadow options, leaving the rest unchecked. It just makes it easier to see the pointer and icons with shadows.

Click Apply and then OK. While you are there, look at the General tab to see how much system memory you have installed. About midway you’ll see something like 512 MB or 2 GB RAM. Make a note of it and go back to the Advanced tab where you can adjust the virtual memory.

Click on Change in the center of the box and set both values to 1.5 times what your RAM is, that figure you just wrote down. Click on Set, Apply, OK and close that box. It will then tell you that you need to reboot for it to take effect.

In Vista, right-click the desktop and choose Personalize and then go to Appearance, then Effects. Keep only the shadow option checked.

In Windows 7, right-click on Computer, go to Properties and then Advanced system settings, then first settings option.

A huge resource hog is the Sidebar. If you don’t really need it, you’ll reclaim much lost speed by turning it off. In Vista, click Start and type sidebar and then click on sidebar properties. Uncheck the top box to disable it.

In Windows 7, gadgets are independent of a sidebar. To customize or terminate gadgets, right-click on the desktop and then choose Gadgets.

Some techs don’t believe in defragmenting the hard drive anymore or using registry utilities. The arguments are that with the huge size of today’s drives, it just isn’t necessary to defrag like we used to.

I would agree if you have a 500 GB drive that is only 10 percent full. But there are still 60 GB drives out there and users with huge music and photo collections. They fill up a drive quickly. A hard drive likes contiguous free disk space to operate efficiently and that’s what defragging does. So unless you’ve got scads of empty space, I’d keep doing it.

Speaking of full hard drives; your system won’t run properly if your drive is almost full. Windows needs 15 percent of the disk to create virtual memory or a swap file in order to operate efficiently.

As far as the registry goes, it is indeed a dangerous place to go if you don’t know what you’re doing. In a few clicks of the mouse you can turn a new computer into a doorstop.

But if you use a registry utility cautiously, you can delete unneeded values and reduce the overall size of the registry by defragging it. But know what you are deleting as there is no undo button in the registry.

Consolidate your icons. If you have lots of addresses, docs or pdf icons all over your desktop, create folders for them. Right-click on the desktop, choose New, and then Folder. Name it and just drag the icons into it.

Remember to empty your Recycle Bin regularly and dump your temp files and system caches. There are many utilities that will do it for you.

A bloated system will also slow down to a crawl. If you have programs installed on it that you don’t use, get rid of them. Go to Control Panel and remove them from there.

The best way to speed up your system is to add more physical memory to it. It is inexpensive and (relatively) easy to do. If you’re not comfortable with popping the cover off and looking for your RAM modules, go to crucial.com or memory.com. Those sites will tell you how much memory you currently have, how much your computer can handle and what it would cost to upgrade. In many cases you could double your RAM for $50.

Even if you don’t add RAM, these few adjustments will add responsiveness to your computer. There are more tweaks as well as services to turn off, but like your computer, this column has reached capacity.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly and on gainesvilletimes.com. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

A Technology Retrospective

Computer Care: High-technology use has exploded in the last decade

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

UPDATED Jan. 2, 2010 1 a.m.

The first 10 years of life goes by the slowest. Think about it. You’re a child and you go to school. Every day is pretty much the same as the last. The monotony seems to go on forever. Every decade thereafter though, seems to quicken the pace somewhat.

In contrast, this past decade flew by. It seems like we were just anticipating the new millennium and here we are looking at 2010. But look back on what technology has given us in the last decade.

The cell phone grew up, along with personal computers and Internet use. We put iPods in our pockets, Bluetooth to our ears and plasma in our televisions. We love them and can’t live without them. Although it seems we’ve had this technology forever, it hasn’t been very long at all.

Consider looking back even further for a moment. We have come a long way. Post-World War II, we still had black-and-white televisions with rabbit ears and dial telephones with cords. We listened to monaural records and loved them. There were no cell phones, microwaves or space shuttles. Blackberries grew wild and computers were giant things that the government used. We are advancing at an incredible rate.

At the turn of the previous century, we were still getting used to the ideas of automobiles and light bulbs. Look how far we have come in that relatively short period of time from Edison and Ford to Jobs and Gates.

In the past year alone, our computers got smaller, faster and cheaper. We got a new version of Windows, perhaps not totally new, but a whole lot better than Vista. Google gave us the Chrome browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Cell phones matured and got smarter over the last 10 years. Mobile computing has grown to the point that there are now laws against driving while texting (DWT?)

Gmail and the iPhone both grew up and grew in popularity. Facebook took off like nothing before. As of November, it reached more than a quarter-billion users. Consider it has only been around since 2003. To put that in perspective, ponder the following: Radio was around for 38 years before it had a mere 50 million listeners. It took television 13 years to gain that much of an audience. The Internet took only four years, in the U.S. alone, to reach 50 million users.

Computer use is said to reach the 2 billion mark this coming year. It hit 1 billion worldwide in 2002. The iPod sold 20 million units late this year. Facebook surpassed 300 million users in seven short years. The personal computer itself did not initially see that kind of growth.

Not everyone uses Gmail or has an iPhone, but it seems like everyone does have a Facebook account and at least one computer. We do love our technology.

So what will it have in store for us in the future? Well in the next year anyway, there will be some advancements.

Intel and AMD say we will see more cores added to our computer processors next year. We currently have dual and some quad cores. USB 3.0 will be out this spring, supposedly. It will be lots faster than its predecessors. Although backward compatible, the new hardware will come with a new plug. Just what I need; more cables.

Windows 7 will probably have its initial service pack, SP1 in 2010. All the "suites" will have their 2010 versions. I foresee Tune-Up 2010, Comodo 2010, Kaspersky, McAfee and Norton 2010, but I’m just speculating. Office 2010 will be there for certain, as it is already out in beta now.

I imagine touch screens will make more of a presence this coming year. Mobile computing will continue to grow as the ubiquitous cell phone matures.

We will undoubtedly be taking more to the road in coming years. The mobile office is the new wave.

Faster Wi-Fi and Ethernet is just around the corner. More municipalities will offer free Wi-Fi. Currently you may only find it in a few cities or coffee shops. New York City has a handful of free hot spots with more on the way. So does Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver and Cincinnati.

Even locally, until recently places like Starbucks offered Wi-Fi at a fee. But now it is free there, as well as at Panera’s, Atlanta Bread Company, Cici’s Pizza and a few other places around Gainesville.

The new multi-core Star Trek-like products will supposedly enhance our home office and home lifestyles. Many things will be tied together or networked – and not just our computers, either.

Ten years ago we couldn’t imagine hanging our TVs on the wall or communicating like Capt. Kirk. Today it’s a reality. It appears that Scotty is indeed getting ready to beam us aboard.

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to knowing what future technology lies around the corner in the coming decade. I only hope this one goes by more slowly.

Mr. Scott — Energize!

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly.