John Lamansky

You may have received an email from Skype today (if you’re a user of their VoIP software), saying that they’re offering 10 free minutes of their SkypeOut service, which allows Skypers to call people who are using landlines.

Just in case you missed the email, here’s an excerpt:

Sometimes not all of the people you want to talk to are on Skype. That’s why we have SkypeOut, a pretty cheap way to call landlines and mobiles around the world at local rates. What’s more, we’re giving away 10 minutes of Skype Credit today to anyone who would like to try SkypeOut for free. We’re nice like that.

You can claim 10 minutes of Skype Credit today and try SkypeOut for free.

Hurry, you need to claim your free credit before midnight tonight

If you’re in the USA, you’ll find a “Get a free Skype gift” button on your account page. Hurry. You need to click on the button before the offer expires tonight, then, ‘hey presto’, your account will be topped up with the extra credit. It’s our little gift to you. We hope you like it.

Don’t worry if you’re too late to claim your gift. We’ll be offering SkypeOut Gift Days throughout February and March, so keep checking back on our blog, where we’ll post details as the next one is approaching.

Looks like they’ll keep offering free Skype minutes during the next two months. Keep your eyes peeled; these free minutes could add up.

It’s official: Office 12 is now Office 2007!

Here are the new Office editions:

• Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 – Can be installed on three PCs. Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. That’s right: not Outlook, OneNote. Costs $149; no upgrade version available.
• Microsoft Office Basic 2007 – Includes Word, Excel, and Outlook. Can only be purchased along with a PC.
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007 – Just like Basic, this includes Word, Excel, and Outlook. What’s the difference, I wonder? Costs $399, or $239 to upgrade.
• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 – Here we’ve got Word, Excel, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, and Publisher. Costs $449, or $279 to upgrade.
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007 – Includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, and Publisher. Costs $499, or $329 to upgrade.
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 – Wow: this version has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and Office Communicator, plus other corporate features. Only available via volume licensing.
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 – Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, OneNote, Office Communicator, and Office Groove. Only available via volume licensing.

Hey, what happened to the “Edition” branding? For example, now we have Office Small Business Edition 2003, but the Office 2007 edition of that will be known as Office Small Business 2007. Ugh, this will make it hard for newer PC users to differenciate between the suites and the products.

If you look at the list closely, you’ll see some new products in the lineup.

• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 – Instant Messaging for businesses.
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007 – Wow, uh, interesting name. This is a peer-to-peer networking product.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 – Okay, so this isn’t in the edition list; it’s a standalone product. This “new” product is actually, for the most part, a renamed FrontPage 2007.

Get the full scoop at the SuperSite for Windows.

I noticed that a recent Neowin article mentions that Windows Vista will be released in the mid-end of October 2006, to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the release date of Windows XP.

Now that I think of it, I’m surprised someone didn’t guess that beforehand.

According to Bink.nu, it’s going to be announced on February 16. My guess? Office 2007. Since some proposed names for Windows Vista were Windows Seven and Windows 07, and since the name of the current version of Office is Office 2003, I think a combination of the just-mentioned year and year format is a likely possibility.

I don’t think it’ll be Office 2006, since Microsoft already has an Office Small Business Management Edition 2006. (However, despite the version number, it just includes Office 2003 Small Business Edition plus Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006.)

What are your guesses?

I found this quite amusing: according to the Washington Post, a definitions update to Microsoft AntiSpyware has reportedly caused the program to identify Norton AntiVirus as a keylogger and password stealer and to suggest making component removals that will cripple the Norton installation.

Yep, sure looks like Microsoft is getting ready to launch Windows OneCare.

[Update: Hmm... according to CNet, Norton products aren't affected, but rather only Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Client Security. Who do we believe: Washington Post or CNet?]

[Note: This recollection of events is part 3 of a series, so to get the complete story, you'll probably want to read part 1 and part 2 first.]

Finally, the technician was here! We recognized the technician from before, when he had come to replace a dead hard drive in the same computer.

Right away, he asked me what the problem was. After I told him, he said he was sure it was the power supply. It just couldn’t be the motherboard. When I told him about how the fans were still running, he said the fans could run even with a bad power supply. I was half amused, half upset, that the problem was the power supply.

After I completed my normal routine of unplugging everything from the back of the computer for the technician, the technician opened the computer and began to rip the parts out of the motherboard at amazing speed. I was in shock, considering how I had spent nearly half an hour about a week ago trying to delicately take a RAM module out of the socket.

As he was replacing the motherboard, my mom asked him whether he advised buying a warranty extension, since the expiration date for this computer’s warranty was days away. Much to our surprise, the technician answered that even he bought extended Dell warranties.

This seemed rather strange. If something went wrong with the technician’s computers, he would be the one repairing them anyway! It turns out he gets a warranty for the parts, not the service. Dell has some proprietary parts in their computers (I, personally, wouldn’t be surprised if they do that on purpose) that are almost impossible to get from anyone but Dell.

I also mentioned that the service representative with whom I had chatted previously had said that the lack of POST beeps must be caused by a loose connection. But the technician disputed that hypothesis by pointing out that the internal speaker was built directly into the motherboard.

After the technician finished installing the new motherboard, he closed the computer and turned it upright. Clang! We heard something fall. The technician put the computer on its side again, opened it up, found the fallen screw, and rescrewed that screw.

He turned on the computer, and the orange light was gone! The computer booted up! (Oh, so it wasn’t the power supply…) Still no POST beeps. Oh well.

The technician entered BIOS setup, set the time, and changed other settings based on my computer’s hardware configuration. He then inserted a CD into the drive and restarted the computer. The CD gave him access to a command prompt, which he used to access a program on the CD. Using the program he then typed in the Service Tag for my Dell computer. And then the program actually changed the stored Service Tag in the motherboard’s memory. Oooohhh…

Then… it was all done! Or so we thought. After a restart, instead of the computer booting into Windows, we were met with a “Blue Screen of Death.” Of course, in the Windows XP-era, a blue screen either means a bad driver, or it means something is seriously wrong… unlike older Windows version where blue screens happen quite frequently.

And then something else surprising happened: the technician had to call Dell technical support to find the answer to the problem.

It turned out that the blue screen was caused by an incorrect hard drive setting in the BIOS. The technician changed that and — whala! — Windows XP booted up just fine. The mystery of the orange light was solved!

Or, again, so we thought. The technician packed up his things and went out the door. I sat down at my computer, clicked on my user account, and began to type in my password. Nothing happened.

I ran out the door after the technician. He came back in and tried to use the keyboard. Nothing. The technician then restarted the computer. And tada! it worked. And this time the technician was able to actually leave.

A few days later…

Okay, I was panicking. I had a BIOS error that said there had been a fan failure! I quickly turned off the computer. I went online and all Dell Chat representatives were busy. Okay, so I called instead. This time I was determined that I would not let them call me “ma’am.” When the representative asked for my name, I said very slowly and with diction, “John Lamansky.”

The representative stammered something like, “Is it… alright if I call you by that name?” I was taken aback by this question, and stammered in return something similar to, “Yes… it’s fine… I mean, please do… call me… that.”

While we continued our conversation, the representative actually seemed to be soothing me by repeatedly saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll send a technician to take a look at it.” And he actually said, much to my amusement, and with much soothingness, “Don’t think about it anymore.” (“Now remember you Dell technicians in India, those Americans are really attached to their computers”)

The last part of our conversation seemed to take forever, because the representative would not stop repeating how everything was going to turn out okay. I was growing very impatient. (“I’ll be okay if you let me hang up!!”)

The same technician came back again. He just couldn’t believe that he had to come back to service the same computer. He guessed that the fan wasn’t spinning up quickly enough at boot-up, which is why I received the error. He did a few tweaks and left. That must’ve done it, because thankfully I haven’t received the fan error again.

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Microsoft has announced the pricing details for Windows OneCare, the company’s forthcoming security software featuring functionality such as spyware and virus protection. Microsoft also announced the release date to be this June. Windows OneCare will cost $49.99 annually and will include licenses for 3 computers running Windows XP Service Pack 2.

From a News.com article:

Buyers can install OneCare on up to three PCs that run Windows XP with Service Pack 2. This is a discount over rival products from Symantec and McAfee, which charge $119.99 and $139.99, respectively, before rebates, for three-user editions of their security suites. The Symantec and McAfee products are often heavily rebated.

Microsoft will also be providing support that is much better than what is offered today by companies like Symantec:

OneCare also includes support at no additional charge via e-mail, online chat or phone, Microsoft said. This compares to oft-criticized, mostly paid-support options from Symantec and McAfee.

The article also says that OneCare will be subscription-based. Being a rather-unhappy Symantec user, I know all too well that there are two components of security protection that Symantec and many other security companies sell: the software and the subscription.

Normally, upgrading your security software (for example, upgrading from Norton AntiVirus 2004 to Norton AntiVirus 2006) provides you with new features, while buying a new subscription gives you updated virus definitions for a set period of time. Typically however, security software includes a “free” subscription period. OneCare will be different because it will offer both virus definition and feature updates in one subscription.

Hmm… Three computers? Simplified subscription? A whole security package rather than just anti-virus? For only $50? This is sounding much better than what I’m used to hearing from Symantec offers. However, we’ll almost certainly soon begin to see some equally good offerings by currently-dominant security software manufacturers. Symantec is already starting to show signs of “getting ready” with hints about new product, codenamed “Genesis.”

That would be neat: having AMD processors in Dell computers. One major problem I have with Dell is that they only offer Intel processors with their computers. But some say that could change as early as this spring. From this News.com article:

AMD’s antitrust lawsuit might have put pressure on Intel and Dell’s alleged sweetheart pricing deals, which both companies have denied.

[If] Dell were to finally adopt AMD chips[,] most analysts had thought the Opteron server processor would be first on the list. AMD’s advantage over Intel is more pronounced in multiprocessor servers with dual-core chips, whereas few PC users need all the performance that either company delivers.

So if this is true, it looks like Dimension desktops and Inspiron desktops might not get the AMD processors right away. But still, it would be a start.