Microsoft had a weasel word response denying it. The gist of the response was that Microsoft "watched" what it's users searched for, and the pages they went to and from that, gleaned what their search results should be to a particular query. That means Microsoft had to keep track of billions of search queries continually, and the pages users clicked on to that query, and then recall it when the same query came up again. I'm not sure I believe this. It's much easier to just copy Google. That all happen in February.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, and we have Microsoft, through a "security update," inserting the Bing search bar into every new browser page in Firefox. It was annoying, and a pain to remove.

This week, we had yet another more serious Microsoft intrusion into our computers, again, through a "security update," they "inadvertently" removed Google's Chrome web browser from user's computers. Not only did they remove it, but you could not re-install it because Microsoft called it a virus.

Microsoft said that about 3000 users had Chrome removed from their computers. They issued a patch to fix the problem, but users would have to manually reload Chrome. Come on, Microsoft, why was it just Chrome.

It's a good thing, we can trust Microsoft, that Microsoft always has good intentions, that they always have just our best interest at heart, and that they would not blow away another competitors software intentionally. We can trust Microsoft, can't we?

When Microsoft issued Service Pack 3 for Window's XP, they started actively communicating back and forth to your computer, unbeknownst to most users. They got more blatant about this when they released Vista, in that, if you didn't verify your license on-line within 30 days, your computer would gradually degrade. You also had to maintain an Internet connection for them to verify periodically that your license was valid.

Now, you can't download any Microsoft software until they check your computer, with their "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" license checker software, to see that all their software on your computer has a valid license .

I love the names they use to intrude into your computer and your life, "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" and "security update."

Why is Microsoft doing this? Well, back in April, Chrome passed Microsoft Internet Explorer in browser usage, and is now the second most used browser behind Firefox.

Apple has passed Microsoft in total revenue. It's quarterly revenue was $28B, Microsoft's was $20B, and Google's was $9B. These three giants are at war.

It seems, war brings out the worse in people and companies. Microsoft, however, is in a unique position, in that, it controls your computer. I have said before Microsoft's power resides in its security updates. They have brainwashed user's to believe that they have to load the security updates, even though the user has no clue as to what is in the update.

It seems to me that the real malware going into your computer comes from Microsoft, not from hacker's. Hacker's for the most part have been gradually neutralized with sustained vigilance, and international computer laws.

Both Microsoft and Apple have architected a proprietary cocoon around their products. If you use their products, they force you to do it their way to exclude competitors, and keep you locked into only using their products. You can see from the above that Microsoft is far worse, than Apple.

For the life of me though, I don't understand why people stay with these two companies. What's the alternative?

The alternative is you can have a free operating system, Linux, that runs better than Microsoft's operating system, with a nice desktop, just like the Window's desktop, with all the applications you're use to, that are just as good and sometimes better than Microsoft's applications, for free. And there is no need for anti-virus, or anti-malware software, or for security updates.

You can try out the operating system by loading a DVD, without altering your Windows system, in case you don't like it. I don't understand why people don't give one of the Linux distros a try.

People are creatures of habit. They would rather put up with Chrome being removed from their computer, then try something new. They like Microsoft's tit. They like that Microsoft, with its security updates, takes care of them. They like being forced to use the Internet Explorer browser, the worse browser on the planet. In the end, Window's user's get just the milk that Microsoft wants to give them.

I don't know how many times I've hit the Caps Lock key by mistake, and didn't know it for a a bit.  Most of the time this is an annoyance, as you have to back track and re-type something you've just typed.  When your coding, upper or lower case is important and may give you an unexpected bug to track down.  Windows in its infinite wisdom has made it possible for you to turn off the Caps Lock key, if it bothers you, like it bothers me.

How NOT to Turn Off your Cap Lock Key

What Microsoft has done is put the keyboard in the Registry.  You can change the Registry, and change any key to do something else, but before you say forget it, I'm not messing with the Registry, that's too complicated, hang with me a little bit.

If you search on "How to turn off the Caps Lock Key" on the Internet, you'll find quite a few articles on how to go into the Registry's Keyboard Layout, and change a number like this:

00000000 00000000 02000000 00003A00 00000000

with detailed information as to the location of the number, and what numbers in the above string need to be changed.

Well, I can do that, and it would not have been the first time I've mucked in the Registry with Regedit, but if you're like me, I recoiled at going in there, and doing this manually.   With a long number like this, it's too easy to mess up, and I would feel quesy if I told a reader to do this, and they messed up the process, or hosed their keyboard.  So I went in search of a tool that would automate the process and take care of updating the Registry for me.

Micorsoft has a utility that does this, but you have to download a whole suite of tools, instead of just one.   I found one that I liked called, KeyTweak, that did the job quickly and easily.  You can download it here.  Don't let the bare window scare you, if you click on the .exe,  you'll find your download window will open for you to save the program to your computer.  I recommend you also open and save the short eight page KeyTweak pdf manual, you'll also find on the download page.

If you don't want to read the eight pages, follow along and I'll walk you through how to change your Caps Lock key to Left Shift.

Download and click on KeyTweak.exe in the download window.  This will install KeyTweak on your system.  Go to START>All Programs>Key Tweak and the program will start.  It looks like the image below.  The CapLocks key is key 30 on the keyboard map, click on it, and it will be selected.  You'll notice in the Keyboard Control area it shows up.  Click on the "Choose New Remapping" drop down and select "Left Shift".  Click on "Remap Key" and  you'll see it in the Pending Changes box.  The other change that will happen is your Apply button will become active.  Click on the Apply button, and your Registry will be updated.  You're almost done.

The KeyTweak screen

Since you changed your Registry, and Windows reads the Registry on start up, the next time you start your computer, or restart your computer, you'll find your Caps Lock key is now a Left Shift key.  KeyTweak is a niffty little program that will allow you to map any key to anything you want.   A word of caution though, DO NOT go crazy and remap keys that the operating system uses, like the Windows key, the Ctrl key, the Alt key, and especially the Enter key.  If you do something like this you may find on reboot that you may have to reload the entire operating system to get your system back to normal.

If you'd like to make something happen, like start a program, or open a browser and go to a particular web site, when you press a key combination, I highly recommend the AutoHotKey program.   See my article on AutoHotKey here.  This program has become a favorite of mine. Enjoy.

The next thing that happened is Microsoft came out with a new Windows Update (KB982217) to Windows 7.   What I found was Micrsoft hijacked my normal search engine, Google, and substituted Bing.  When you first load your browser, if you have the home page set for your search engine, Google for example, it will load and everything seems OK.   However, if you open another tab, you get the Bing search engine.   Pretty sneaky.  If any one else would have done this it would have been called malware, but since Microsoft did it, everything is OK, NOT!

The Bing Search Bar in the New Tab Window

The normal way to get rid of browser hijackers is to go to, in the case of Firefox 6, the upper left Firefox icon, and click on the options menu in the right sidebar, and change your Home page back to the correct URL.  In this case that's not going to work.

Another way to get rid of a toolbar is to right click on the upper tool bars in the browser window, and un-check it, but this also does not get rid of the Bing Search bar from your tab window, hmm.

The culprit is the "StartNow" toolbar, which Microsoft, in its attempt to push the Bing search engine, installed as part of its update.  Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.  You do remember that Microsoft got caught with its hand in the cookie jar by Google, because they used Google search results for Bing search results.  Can you hear I'm irritated that Microsoft did this.  It's taking time out of my day to  put my browser back the way I want it.

In Firefox 6, go to the upper left Firefox icon (this will only appear if your Menu Bar is turned off, if your menu bar is turned-on, go to Tools > Add-ons).  Go to the Add-ons in the right menu, click Extensions and remove the StartNow toolbar.  Close your browser and reopen it.  Presto, Bing goes away on new tab pages.  But there is a lingering problem, and that is, you get a blank page when you open a new tab window.

If you want your tab page to be your home page, you'll need to download an add-on to Firefox 6, the "NewTabURL" plugin.  Click on "Add to Firefox."

After it downloads, go to the upper-left Firefox icon > Add-ons > Extensions.  Enable the plugin, you'll see the add-on will start automatically when you restart Firefox.

You need to configure the plug-in,  click on "More" and then "Options" in the Plug-in Description.  When the options menu opens, click on "Home Page," then "Save", and your all set.  Close Firefox, re-start it, and open a new tab window.  WahLah! Your home page now opens in each new tab page.

With Microsoft's move into the cloud computing, this seems like a smart move on their part, and will enhance Microsoft's cloud products. This should help their Lync enterprise instant messaging, which has experienced a 30% growth in revenue over last year.

One of Microsoft's games seems to be to expand their office offering to instantly communicate with anyone else in a company, with video, messaging, and voice over the Internet. They will have cloud computing office applications, so that anyone will be able to get to their work from anywhere in the world, and instantly communicate with their colleagues. Ah yes, let's sailboat around the world with a Netbook.

Microsoft revenue stars lately has been their Office products and their Xbox 360 with their motion sensor technology. The big loser has been their Windows 7 offering, because of the sudden surge in tablet sales, and a corresponding falling off of PC sales. Intel announced this week that PC sales would not be as strong as expected next year. Netbook sales are also off as tablet sales increase.

Bear in mind that 39.7% of Windows user are still running XP, while 37.8% have moved to Windows 7. Microsoft's latest strategy has their new Internet Explorer 9 browser not running on XP, to boost Windows 7 sales. And there is a gradual move toward Windows 7, maybe because of this, with a corresponding decline in XP.

The tablet market does not use the Microsoft operating system. Tablet computers are based either on Apple's iPad IOS4.3 operating system, or the Android operating system. Both of these are Linux based operating system. So every tablet sale is one less PC sale, and one less sale for Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system.

Apple iPad

As to tablets, Apple nearly tripled its iPad sales from the same quarter a year ago. Apple, initially, had complete dominance in the tablet market, now Android is coming on strong, and making major in roads. A year ago, Apple had 94% of the market, now they only own 61%. The beauty of Android is that you're not locked into the product's manufacturer, like you are with Apple and Microsoft.

Android Samsung Galaxy

Windows is also under attack from both Apple and Linux for the PC operating system space with each gaining gradually in their market share. Let's not get too excited yet, according to W3Schools stats, Microsoft still owns about 86% of the market, Apple about 8.1%, and Linux about 5.2%. The point is the numbers for Apple and Linux are gradually increasing, while Microsoft's are declining.

The rest of the market is owned by mobile technology. According to the Gartner Group, Microsoft is a big loser in this market, even though they have a mobile solution, no one's using it. They occupy a measly 3.6% of the market and declining. The rest of the market is Symbian, 27.4%, and the Rim, 21.9%, operating systems declining rapidly; Apple's iPad and iPhone are steady at 16.8%; while the Android market is at 36% and rising rapidly. This market is starting to emerge, both the mobile and tablet market now account for 8% of Internet browsing in the US.

Despite the lagging Windows sales, Microsoft had a good quarter and beat estimates. They posted a profit of $5.87B up from $4.52B in the previous quarter a year ago. This came from Office sales and XBox sales, and an unusually low tax rate of 7%, which cut its taxes over $1B from the previous quarter a year ago. The tax break was from an increase in sales done through its offices outside the US.

As an aside, wake up Congress and start giving these corporations some tax breaks to stay in country. It's better to have some revenue, than none at all.

Given that most of Microsoft profits came from the tax breaks gotten from overseas sales, one has to look at Microsoft as a giant who is struggling to find areas to increase their revenue. One of Microsoft's bets is that the acquisition of Skype will increase their revenue by giving them new products to add to their Office portfolio.

One has to wonder if the ultimate computing product that everyone will want is an Android-based, eReader, Internet browsing, color, touch-sensitive, visible-in-sunlight tablet. If that's the case, Microsoft may end up like IBM, a has-been that has passed its prime.

It takes a good 12 hours or more to recover, reformatting or replacing disk drives, reloading the operating system, the drivers, your application software, and hopefully, your backed up data. Most folks, chuck it all, and buy a new computer, but even that takes time to shop, and you still need to reload applications and data. Then there is the expense of buying a new computer, or disk drive, or application software.

I lost my hard drive, because somehow my boot sector got corrupted. I found there are work arounds to repairing boot sectors, but a good majority of the time, you end up reformatting your disk and losing your data. I find myself getting more and more mad at Microsoft's stupid, difficult to understand what's going on menu choices, or menu choices that you want to be there, but you can't get there unless you reformat the drive. I get irritated, because there could have been an easier way of doing all this.

You wonder why it takes so long, I counted over 40 application programs I use regularly on Windows. All of them need to be reloaded. Of those 40, eight of them are there only for Windows security. I'm talking anti-virus, firewall, disk cleaners, registry checkers, and malware removers. I trust them more that I do Windows security updates, which to me, just slow down my computer.

If you have ever considered Ubuntu, or any of the Linux distros, now's the time that they come to mind. And actually, because they came to mind, I was able to save all my data before having to blow it all away. Here's a reason to make yourself an Ubuntu boot disk, and try Ubuntu out, before your next disk problem.

Ubuntu sets up its boot disk so you can boot from the disk without altering the contents of your computer. This was a very smart move on their part. If you'd like to try their operating system environment without messing up your computer, make yourself an Ubuntu CD, load the disk in your CD drive and reboot. Up comes Ubuntu, without accessing your hard drive.

What's nice about booting Ubuntu from disk is it has a file like explorer window that shows you the contents of your hard drive with all your files and folders. It is a full fledged file explorer, and you can copy files from one disk to another. That's right, even though your running Ubuntu, you can copy your Windows files. There's a good chance, even though, Windows cannot access your corrupted disk files, Ubuntu can. In my case, since the problem was in my boot sector, there was nothing wrong with any other portion of my disk and I had access to all my files.

I happen to have a 400Gb external USB drive that I use for just this type of backup situation. If you want you can take your entire drive to your external drive and your data is safe, but that's probably overkill, go get your data. If you don't have a large external USB drive, I recommend you purchase one. You'll be surprised how handy they are when you need them.

And if you'd like to make yourself an Ubuntu boot CD, not DVD, download the Ubuntu desktop from the web site. It comes down as an iso file, download an isoburner, InfraRecorder, burn your CD. Try it out, you may find that Ubuntu is a very nice operating system. If you like to know a bit more about creating an Ubuntu cd, I've written a previous article on this topic, where I've discussed how to do this in detail and why you want a CD instead of a DVD.

If you're like me, you put up with this agonizing long search for your file, because nothing else was available. But then again, every once in awhile, a ray of light shines down upon us poor, dumb, computer users, and you realize you've been blessed with a piece of software that works and works great.

This particular program grew on me, crept up on me, to the point where I now can't do without it on Windows. It's hard to change the way you work with a computer over all these years, so change comes gradually at times. Enough of the platitudes, let me paint you a scenario.

You are up surfing the Web and you find a new program to download, or an update to one of your existing programs, like Firefox or Thunderbird. Have you ever noticed how the download file name is a bunch of gibberish. You download the program, and your set to install. Ah, where's the file you downloaded? It's happen to me several times, even if I think its in my download directory, I've still lost it. What do you do? Watch the wagging tail again? No! I mean hell no!

You download a program called, Everything. It use to be called Search Everything, and that's what it does. The program works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

This search program works differently than other search programs. You install the program and during the install, it indexes all the files and folders on your computer. The indexing is fast. If you have a million files and folders, it will take you about one minute total on the install to build its index. After that, it automatically, updates its index on every new file and folder added, downloaded, or deleted from your system with out you doing anything.

So why is it so good. Let me count the ways. This is the fastest search engine I have found anywhere, and I mean fast. When you open the program a window opens, instantly, with all the files and folders on your system shown, yep, all million of them if you care to do some scrolling. But why do that when you have a search bar right up there at the top of the screen.

As you type in the search bar, you filter your files and folders out of the window. So every character you type reduces the list until you end up with the file you wanted. It is filtering the list as you type. Did I say it was fast. It is almost fun to search now to watch all the files melt away.

The user interface at first doesn't look that great, it grows on you. Other search engines, ask you to put your search in a particular form field box for say, a file extension. I don't find this helpful, as it makes me have to think about what I need, when all I really want to do is find the file. You do this all from the one search box in Everything.

If you want a png file, you could search on "*.png".  You can use regular expressions, wild cards *, one character ?,  Boolean AND, OR, and NOT. You search every file and folder on your system, alas it does not search inside the file itself.  I could call it a drawback, but there's other tools for that.

Once you find your file you can click on it and open it, or run it just like if it was in an Explorer windows.

Everything is not a system hog, it uses very little system resources.  Those million files and folders will take up 45Mb of memory, and 5Mb of disk space. 20,000 files uses about 3-5Mb of memory, and 1 Mb of disk space. With today's memory being in the Gigabyte range this is a walk in the park.

I placed the program permanently on my Start menu by right clicking on the program and selecting "pin to start menu," so its always on top. Any time I need to search for anything, I go "Start->Search Everything," and I'm off and running.

I left out the best part of this program. It's absolutely free. The author asks for a donation if you like the program. So give it a try, and enjoy!

I had to admit, I was in the habit of not looking things up in texts, and just trying to find the answer to my one problem on the Internet. It usually works. I don't know if you want to call this being lazy, or being efficient, maybe a little of both.

This led to electronic books and readers now available on line that can answer your problem and at the same time go beyond and give you the background information for future problem solving. We both agreed that we don't like reading books on line and prefer a text in our hands. There's something about the smell and feel of books in your hand that makes you treasure them, and enjoy the read.

The Kindle Reader for the Windows PC

Following our discussion, I downloaded the "new" free Amazon Kindle reader for the PC, and a free Kindle book from Amazon to check out the reader. This is currently just a Window's application, and it is in "beta" which means there are some bugs. They ask you to put in your Amazon account id and password which automatically links the reader to your account. Now with one click of the mouse you can buy a Kindle book and download it to your PC reader.

There's not a lot of free Kindle books available, but enough to check out the reader. You can find them on Amazon by searching for Kindle books, and a list of books are returned. A "Sort By" box will appear in the upper right side of the search results window, click on it, and sort by "Price low to high." All the free books rise to the top of the pile. Sherlock Holmes it was. And the purchase at $0.00 was completed. Amazon's hope is you'll build up a PC library, and then buy a $259 Kindle so you can take it with you.

They did a nice job with the software, and the reader is nice. You can change font size and page width easily, to make it universally acceptable for all eyesight, and it keeps track of what page you are on in the read. You move pages by the arrow keys or scrolling and can jump via bookmarks and a table of contents.

Since I had loaded it at work and it seemed to work fine, I decided to try it at home and in the end unloaded it. I do not believe they have their syncs worked out yet, and maybe had problems with my loading it down twice.

One thing I did notice is that the books I "purchased" were kept at Amazon.  I had to share in my purchase in my account on Amazon, and then sync to ereader to read it.   A pain at best that does not work properly. If I understand this correctly, when I put down my money, I get a copy of the book for as long as I remain sync'd with Amazon, although this is done automatically by the software, a piece of me wants it both ways. Keep a record on Amazon, but also give me a copy on my computer or computers for instant set up and access.

The Kindle reader looks nice, but its not quite ready for prime time yet, and is still a beta. I think e-readers and by default PC readers will come into their own, but their still working out the kinks and are not quite ready for prime time.

To review Window 7. I looked at their features page. So here's why you should spend money to upgrade from Vista, or if you were smart and our still running XP, from XP.  This is taken right from their Windows 7 feature page.

Windows 7 takes the headache out of sharing files and printers.  I thought your printer software took care of setting up a network printer.  My recent Cannon MX850 software went in smoothly with a couple of mouse clicks, since you have to install a printer driver from the printer manufacturer, what is Microsoft possibly adding to the mix here.

Speedy access to your favorite picture and documents.  Ah, didn't Microsoft include this with XP.  Hello, what's new?

Snap a quick and fun way to re-size and compare windows on your desktop. Wow! Windows finally figured out how to split a screen.  I have to admit this has been a pain when copying files between folders in explorer, I can't think when else I have needed this feature.  Microsoft says it will be fun though.  I wonder if my 9 year old boy will think so?

Windows Live Essentials. 7 great programs for free: Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, and more...I believe you can have any one of these programs for free anyway.  I'm thinking of Thunderbird for email.

Windows Search. We'll finally we come to something that's worthwhile. It's taken Microsoft how many years to finally figure out they need a better search engine then the one they've been using.  Microsoft searches have always been slow and just plain awful.  So much so that I went to third party search utilities to do the same thing.  This is an improvement, and maybe worth the upgrade price.

Window Taskbar, better thumbnail previews.  Another area that Microsoft has been lame is allowing users to decide how to customize the taskbar.  What their pushing is easier-to-see icons and previews.  That's questionable.  More ways to customize is an improvement, I think.

Full 64bit support. It looks like Microsoft is taking us into 64 bits.  We have the processors available, but until Microsoft supported it, application developers would not embrace it.  This is a good thing, but it will not affect your running of Windows 7 at home, it is more a gift to developers.

Remote Media Streaming.  So your going to log onto your home computer, which of course needs to be running, and listen to a song....why not just dial up Pandora?

Window 7 Touch...ah, I don't know about you, but I don't want to touch my monitor and leave fingerprints on the display, that I constantly have to clean off the monitor.  I have to be convinced on this one.  Maybe...

You can run XP programs in compatibility mode...ah, pardon me.  We've been able to do this since Windows 95.  This just means Microsoft has added XP to the list of old operating systems to be compatible with, so they can retire XP and get more revenue,  to force users to upgrade their operating system.  They're trying to force users off of XP any way they can.

So to sum up. This is typical Microsoft puffery marketing.  Telling you about features that you really all ready have in a new light.  My kids can't stand their TV ads.  The big thing in this release is improved search, which is really a rework of the Vista search, and for the future full support of 64 bit, but as I said this should not be important in your use of the computer at home or work for awhile.

In the future, it will mean Microsoft will sell you the 64 bit version of all their applications.  After all, you always need something new to sell consumers to keep that revenue stream going. They'll claim faster performance and quicker applications, you'll see.

Windows 7 is just the next release of their operating system, just like a week later Ubuntu is releasing their next release of their operating system.  Only Ubuntu is free, and you do not have onerous registration licensing with Ubuntu.

I can't say that I hung up happy, in fact, I finished the call  downright angry.  What was the problem?  About a year and half ago, I had built a computer. and paid for and installed the OEM version of Vista Home Premium as the operating system.

For those of you who have not looked at operating system pricing, the OEM version, as opposed to the Retail version,  is supposedly for system manufactures and integrators who build systems.

To continue the story, the system crashed and in the process took out the power supply and motherboard.  There was nothing wrong with the disk drives, and I still had Vista and all my data on the drives.   So I purchased a new power supply and motherboard, and connected everything up.

That's when I found out my system wouldn't boot.  What was the problem.  Well, in one word, Microsoft.  It turns out if you have an OEM copy of the operating system, It can only be reinstalled on a system with the exact same make and model of motherboard as where it was originally installed. My original motherboard was obsolete, so I was in a "Catch-22."

What did Microsoft Customer Support say, "Well, that's our policy."  Which made me instantly angry.  To paraphrase heir policy, we know you build systems, and that you repair systems, but if your customer has a problem with his motherboard, which needs replacing, you'll have to buy a new operating system, of course, you could have bought the retail version initially, hint, hint.  In order to get up and running I had to purchase another license.  Pay another $200 to turn a software switch on.

You would think that Microsoft would give its partners a break, which it supposedly does by making the OEM version about $100 less than the retail version.  But as you can see from this experience, you are better off initially buying the retail version.

Better yet, your better off boycotting Microsoft products all together.   Is that possible?  I believe so, yes,  I've just ordered the parts for a new computer.  It's purpose is to prove to myself that I, or anyone else for that matter, don't need to use Microsoft products.   That you can still have a fully functional computer without using Microsoft products.   I believe Microsoft is going the way of IBM, a has-been, and has peaked.  And I aim to do my part to help Microsoft along.  Yep, I guess you could say, "that's my new policy."

The immediate thought is I have spyware, a virus, or trojan running on my computer, and wonder how I got it.

Well, I have a surprise for you.  It may be Microsoft's error reporting causing the problem.  The theory of error reporting is  if enough people have a problem, and you report it to Microsoft, then Microsoft may come up with a solution, and fix your problem.

Microsoft has been doing error reporting for a long time.  I'm not sure when they started having user's computers, attached to the Internet, automatically send messages back to Microsoft.   It's been a long time.  When Vista first came out, it was so bad, I figured, yea, let's help get this operating system as good as XP.  But enough all ready, Microsoft has given up, and is rushing out Windows 7.  And I have to say, I have never had a message back from Microsoft fixing my problem, or even a message about a current problem.  That's never in all these years.  So what gives.  I do wonder if they are not just tracking the software on your computer.

If you would like to see what get''s reported to Microsoft in Vista, get ready for a surprise.   Go to Start>Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Problem Reports and Solutions>View Problem History.  It looks to me like every application you run gets reported at one time or another.  Each one of those reports may cause one of  the slow down problems we described at the start of this post.

My advice is to turn it off, forget about it, and stop those annoying slow downs.  To turn it off go to  Start>Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Problem Reports and Solutions>Change Settings> click "Ask me to check if a problem occurs.  Your not done yet. Click in the same window right below that "Advanced Settings>For my Programs, problem report is "OFF" ."   Then click "Change Settings."  Windows will protest, and  remind you to turn it back on occassionally, but you don't need it, and you  can safely ignore their prompts.  Your computer will run a lot better and a lot quicker.