Yahoo email…
…is driving me crazy. It seems to be malfunctioning at the moment.
And I know, I know—a lot of you will tell me to go to Gmail, because it’s so much better. I have a Gmail account, too, and have had it for years, but something about the way it functions seems counterintuitive and awkward to me. I much prefer Yahoo—and Yahoo Classic, at that.
I get very set in my ways.
Right now I’m also transitioning from my Mac back to a PC: a Lenovo Thinkpad. I really like the keyboard and the lightweight sturdiness, but since I haven’t used a PC in ages I’m having to get used to Windows 7. And lots of other things.
For those of you who wonder why a got a PC instead of a Mac, the answer is here.
You know, getting set in one’s ways is the first step to utter ossification……. or otter ussification…. or something like that. I forget….
For what it’s worth: on the Lenovo that we bought for our daughter a couple of years ago, the video processor went out about six weeks after the warranty expired. Requires a new system board costing over half the original price of the machine. I’m about to start using it as a desktop. No more Lenovo for me.
And we bought it specifically because Lenovo has such a good reputation. You never know…
I’m with you on the Yahoo changes. I don’t need new features. I also don’t want to do Facebook or Twitter, play games, or photoshop pix. Just call me an old fogy.
Stay away from google period. I started using it for casual email. Then I got lazy. Now I have to move a couple of thousand contact to a new email address. When they “integrated” their services and announced their privacy policy changes it became necessary.
Sigh – this will be an ordeal.
You know new macs have intel processors and can run Windows instead of Mac OS. Personally I think Apple makes very good hardware.
Actually, I don’t think we need Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. any more. I have a Hotmail account that I use for business and initial contacts so that I don’t have to give out my Earthlink address to strangers, but I almost never see a spam message in my Earthlink account. They, and I expect most other major servers, pretty much have the spam problem solved. I agree with another poster that Gmail seems to be counterintuitive, and I never use that one any more. I’m seriously considering making my life less complicated and ditching those other accounts.
I’ve had great luck with Toshiba (Windows) and HP (Windows) laptops. In addition to those, I have an HP netbook which has a long battery life (for a laptopish unit) and is light and portable. It runs lots of things the iPad doesn’t and it cost 1/2 what an iPad costs. For the life of me, I don’t see the value of an iPad.
I may get interested in a tablet if one comes out that is inexpensive and runs Windows.
Wasn’t a hardware problem. Yahoo! *was* having problems today. Thanks to CapnEddieRicketyback for the tip about Earthlink, I need to look into that.
You’re going to love Windows 7. Many of the features in Linux that led me to love it are implemented in Win 7.
Ditto Thinkpad. I got one about a year ago and it is great. For one thing, it’s about one-third the weight of its predecessor, an HP-Compaq, and it has a really handy docking station which means that you can leave most peripherals plugged in which reduces the wear (and eventual failure) on things like the power adapter plug and USB sockets.
btw: they make Word for Macs.
“I’m having to get used to Windows 7”
If you don’t like change, let’s hope Window 7 has the longevity of XP.
Unfortunately life IS about evolving. g-mail is constantly evolving. One of my favorite features? UNDO How many time have you hit “SEND” and said, “I forgot to add this or that?” I set my UNDO for 20 seconds. Plenty of time to say, OOPS and click on UNDO. And TONS of FREE SPACE. Consider it.
Oh, and for the person who complained about their large CONTACT list . . . there is an import feature. You may have to edit some of them (ie. duplicates) But it beats re-typing.
Congratulations on coming back to the fold. As for the Lenovo, they are the best: the most bang for the buck. OF COURSE you buy the extended warranty with it – good for a year. Even if you do not get the “next day – office visit” variety, their “depot service” is amazing. I have had my second Lenovo now for two years – or is it three. I’m on my second extended warranty. If you “do it yourself” they have great videos on line. I’ve changed a hard drive (on the old one) and changed a keyboard (on this one). It wasn’t their fault that I got so many crumbs in it – and the hard drive failed on #1 one night after I overheated the thing in my lap blanket – so you could say that was me and Seagate who take the rap for that one. Oh, and if you purchase neoneocon.com and do email hosting, for under $50 a year you can be neo@neoneocon.com and then receive all that (internet) mail on Outlook on your Lenovo. Congratulations. Learn immediately to use the Windows 7 snippet tool – on your toolbar. You will love love it – and an immediate “send” function on it.
As i think I’ve said before, I have a Gmail account, don’t like it, and use it only when I have to. I much prefer Outlook using my ISP-provided email address.
The “conversation” organization of Gmail is annoying and yes, counterintuitive. Even more annoying, Google keeps plaguing and plaguing me every time I sign in to provide my cell phone number, with some nonsense excuse about how it might be needed if my account is ever hacked. Malarkey. I am not about to give Google any more information about me — it has way too much already and is most likely busy finding out more anyway, without my knowledge or consent.
I confess that there are a couple of things I do like about GMail. The chat feature works easily and these days comes with video chat — great for keeping in touch with my growing grandbaby. (But there are other ways to do that, such as Skype.) I also like Google Docs, which lets me do work-related writing at home without having to deal with incompatible word-processing programs. But that’s about it.
And M of Hollywood, YES about the snip-it (or however it’s spelled) feature on Windows 7. Love it, use it all the time.
the Lenovo that we bought for our daughter a couple of years ago, the video processor went out about six weeks after the warranty expired
Hmmm…let me guess, it has an NVidia graphics card?
NVidia had a rough patch about 5 or so years ago. Work had a couple of Dells under warranty that had to have new motherboards put in, and another that had a removable graphics card that had to be replaced twice. The second time, Dell offered us a “newer” machine because they didn’t have the parts to do another replacement, and then I had to replace that graphics card twice. And it flaked out again after the warranty finally ended.
I still have a Y! address. Hotmail, too. And a couple of Google addresses, mostly so I can have multiple Google Voice #s. And I have a cotse.net subscription, so I have an nearly infinite supply of something@”account name”. cotse.net.
Including time limited addresses… 😉
“Hmmm…let me guess, it has an NVidia graphics card?”
Can’t recall at the moment. The machine was bought in 2010. It was not their top line. RX series, if I remember correctly, but any of them ought to last more than 13 months. Apart from having no video, it’s a great machine.:-)
I know you can’t judge by one lemon. But the Dell Latitude D360 that I have at work has been going for four years now, all day every day, with frequent trips back and forth to home, and has given me zero problems. Its predecessor, also Dell, lasted as long. I’m in IT, so I *use* these machines. My daughter’s HP Pavilion, the Lenovo’s predecessor, took her through four years of college, not a very benign environment. Its screen went out about the time we bought the Lenovo. I replaced it and the keyboard (gone flaky) with cheap ones and am still using it–the rest of the machine has been fine. Unfortunately there are no cheap replacements for a Lenovo system board.
All anecdotal, of course, and Lenovo is probably a good bet. But I was really disappointed, having paid more for what I expected to be reliability among other things.
OT: Holder hs executive privledge on Fast and Furious. Oh my. this election cycle will be fun.
I was recently considering buying a Lenovo. I went to a local store which had comparable good deals on a Dell and on a Lenovo. I asked the salesperson which had better hardware. “Dell” was the immediate reply. From many purchases and salesman conversations at that store over the year, I trust the word of their salesmen.
Granted, I should have done the research myself, but what the heck.
I eventually purchased a new Dell. Dell had an offer I couldn’t refuse on a better machine than the store had. The deciding factor was the good track record of my seven year old Dell. With hardware upgrades, it has done very well. While Dell’s tech support is lousy, judging by my wait time on one call, the quality and durability of Dell machines mean you don’t need their tech support.
Mac and Gringo: my Lenovo has a 3-year warranty. Not that it covers everything, but that’s pretty good.
I also bought it because it’s significantly lighter than a Dell of the same magnitude. I do a fair amount of lugging it around.
On Lenovos (you can see I am a true believer): you go to the Lenovo website and order one custom. you do not get one from a store. you get more bang for the buck if you know what to order. they give one one model – presumably the one they are trying to offload – to the retail stores. the sales people are pretty helpful if you at all know what you are talking about.
One of my tasks is ensuring our rather large healthcare software application is browser independent. In my experience, Chrome is the best browser out there, followed by Firefox, Safari (Apple), and IE. I use Yahoo and Gmail for email. The current technology versions run much better in Chrome and Firefox than IE. This is because the Javascript engines in Chrome and Firefox are much faster than in IE. So, if you use Yahoo mail and/or Gmail, switch to Chrome or Firefox.
I’ve not used Macs; I’ve been a Microsoft guy for a generation. But Microsoft has a huge surprise coming up for loyal Windows users. Windows 8 introduces the Metro theme, a completely different user interface from the one used since Windows 95. You can revert to a Windows 7 style interface but it is like having two operating systems competing for your attention.
Microsoft has jumped back into the hardware market with the release of the Surface tablet. It features Windows 8. This link gives you glimpses of the Metro interface.
Surface link here:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx
>>> And we bought it specifically because Lenovo has such a good reputation. You never know…
Unfortunately, Mac, your one-example isn’t a statistical universe… now, if you investigated and found that model was having a consistently large set of failures, THEN you’d have a seriously legit complaint against Lenovo.
Not saying that to be obstreperous — or even for any particular defense of Lenovo — just noting that a single-failure does not a pattern make.
I had an expensive Asus notebook fail — not a $400-700 jobbie, it was $1400 for a fairly top-end model — this model, however, has since shown a history of on-board graphics “card” failures, due to insufficient cooling. Asus never recalled it or anything, despite that, and consistently claimed there was no problem, even though dozens complained that it failed just past the warranty.
So, Asus lost me as a customer, and that’s too bad for them — I’d probably bought more Asus than any other single brand of equipment over the last 10 years. At least five different items.
LOL, “Surface” — M$ trying desperately to stay the main OS, as Android eats its lunch.
Anyone who buys a tablet at this point that’s not either Apple (just because you like Apple stuff) or Android is making a mistake. I can justify that more but won’t at the moment.
And Surface is basically a tablet competitor.
Pat, that video shows almost nothing, or even nothing, of W8 — it’s cool and all, but it’s mainly a showpiece of the physical features of the Tablet… the most functional of which all of which will be added to the next gen Android and iP units.
And then you’ll be stuck with Windows 8 for another two years… :-S
>>>> I may get interested in a tablet if one comes out that is inexpensive and runs Windows.
Umm, both the nook and the kindle fire are ridiculously cheap and run Android, which is going to eat Microsoft alive over the next five-ten years. If you want something a lot bigger then there’s the Samsung @ 10″
Do not underestimate how much the convergence of smart phones and tablets are going to alter computing, just as small notebooks have altered much of it away from desktop machines.
The smartphone is nothing less than a first generation Star Trek Tricorder… and only 200 years early. Once it has an arbitrarily large screen, something the Glosses project is likely to provide, it’s going to be a quite impressive alteration in every aspect of things.
For example, Glosses could be used to show business signage. So actual businesses could eliminate the physical commercial signs that studies have shown contribute substantially to the visual “noise” level, and just have signs pop up showing the type of business you’re looking for, perhaps (if you set it that way) some random signs to make you aware of businesses you didn’t know even existed (“Really? There’s a gift shop in town that specializes in ‘pigs’?!?!?” [Note: “Hog Wild”, Faneuil Hall in Boston])… but if you turned the signage for the glosses off, you’d see no signs at all… and that might make for a much better place. If you were driving, they’d show various speed limit and relevant warning signs — if you wanted directions, it’d would pull them up for you — but only the ones that mattered for where you were going… and so forth.
There’ve been lots of spoofs of how these things could operate WRONG, but few have really tried to grasp all the possibilities of how they can be used RIGHT.
Ubiquitous computing is only in its infancy.
P.S., this is old, but very appropo:
(some language NSFW)
The Mac Killed My Inner Child
It’s based vaguely on a successful ad campaign of the 90s by Apple about the Mac “Bringing out your inner child”.
Strangely, you can’t find anything about that campaign anywhere. The only readily accessible remaining reference to it is something that makes fun of the Mac.
Whoop.
The Mac Killed My Inner Child
Neo …and everyone, really.
(Full disclosure: I’ve had Hotmail accounts since before Microsoft bought the original company. I’ve had Gmail accounts – dozens, and still growing, for various technical geekie reasons – since you had to be invited to get an account. And a couple or more Yahoo accounts …mostly for their groups, of which I’m a member of several, even now. An AOL account or two long past. Anyone recall the Prodigy network, heh? Yep. And various past school accounts, back in the dawn of time. They were all useful – and some still are – in one way or another. I’ve also had various proprietary ISP accounts over the years: blech, one and all.)
The “free” online email accounts all leave a bit to be desired. But if you can use them with MS Outlook (Hotmail provides the Outlook Connector, and Gmail is a no-brainer either as a POP3 or, preferrably, MAPI account), they’re all therefore, and uniformly, even more useful.
Outlook is the crown jewel of the Microsoft eco-verse. You do have to use it to appreciate it as the thing of digital beauty it is (in any of its forms since Outlook 2003, but especially 2K7 and 2K10), but its depths are easily plumbed. It makes email (and contacts, and notes, and calendars) easier, and more manageable. And it’s become simply better with each new iteration (though it was Outlook 2003 that marked the real maturation of the UI).
…but it is in combination with Exchange server, and cellular phones (iOS or Android: prefer the latter these days …might change, again, someday …maybe even to Windows Phone, gasp), that Outlook reaches for the heights.
With Exchange, Outlook really is a fast, intuitive, and solid “personal digitial assistant”, actually delivering on the hype of such a statement.
With. Exchange.
Which, of course, most private individuals do not have easy access to, outside their businesses (or some access to an account provided by a friendly business)?
Uh, no. There is another way.
That’s the good.
The bad? – It’s not free.
It will set you back $6 a month.
A mere pittance to pay for the best email service, and best – bar none – email client in existence.
That’s your own personal Exchange server (with as many additional accounts as you want to pay for) running on one of the larger, more reliable server farms on the planet. Microsoft’s. And with a personalized private email address (you can use your own domain name, too, if you want to spring for one of those too: another, call it $20 or so per year).
Microsoft Office 365 gets you to email nirvana.
NOTE: Though Office 365 includes an accomplished web-based Outlook portal, it really doesn’t shine without the use of Outlook 2007 (minimum) or 2010 (better). And I dunno if even I’d spring for the $6/mo, even for that much email “juice”, if I wasn’t willing to pony up for MS Outlook too.
And no, I’m not a sales rep (I wish). Just a sys admin with decades (two, heh) and thousands of hours of experience, and as a thoroughly satisfied customer of their service (and I’ve moved several of my clients to Office 365, with equally sanguine results).
…be happy to offer advice to anyone setting it up, if they don’t feel up to the task (it’s not hard, but after so many years of doing stuff like this, I’ve long since forgotten what it’s like to be utterly confused: and as my job is supporting the to-some-degree “confused”, if you will, I do remain conversant on a daily basis with the frustration of those being flummoxed over some otherwise mundane procedure that they’re quite sure should be a heckuva lot easier than “this” lol).
Another “note”. If you’re a Linux OS user, you might be able to use Evolution to much the same effect. No, it’s not as polished in use (the last time I used it: a bit over a year ago) as Outlook. But it’s free. And – with “regular” Exchange servers at least: dunno about Office 365 – it does work.
…and yes, I know there’s various discussions, especially at the enterprise level, about various pros-and-cons and issues and, well, Microsoft (I’m generally not a Microsoft “fan” …hardly! …but give the devil his due: Outlook is a work of art). But for the individual (and the small business: my area of expertise), none of those discussions are truly relevant. If you live & breathe email …especially collaborative email …Outlook & Office 365 will make your life easier.