Easier Upgrades to Vista?

So you’re thinking of upgrading to Vista?  Well, from a visual aspect, no one could blame you.  The new interface – Windows Aero they’re calling it – looks gorgeous.  But, as everyone knows, upgrading a desktop system can be dangerous stuff.  For those of us that have experienced desktop upgrades from one Microsoft system to another know that this doesn’t always go as planned.  The best way to “upgrade” from one operating system to another has always been to do a new install.  Even Microsoft says so.  But this pretty much negates the idea of an upgrade, doesn’t it?  Anyhow, this time around Microsoft did things a bit different.  No, there are still no guarantees that upgrading to Vista will be easier than before, but now you can tell if your system will upgrade properly or not by using Microsoft’s Upgrade Advisor tool.  Although I haven’t upgraded my system yet, I did run the advisor.  The information it gave me about my system was detailed even to the point of providing links to new drivers Vista would need to run properly.  Pretty cool.  So if you’re thinking of upgrading to Vista I would strongly recommend you run Upgrade Advisor first.  I think the jury is still out on how effective the tool is, but once I upgrade I’ll let you know how well it worked – first hand.

Spammers and Scammers

Isn’t it bad enough that spammers feel the need to overwhelm our email inbox with offer after offer for everything from financial services to other “services.”  Now they have decided to target blogs as well.  I am probably pretty fortunate that I only have to clear out a half dozen comment spam items each day.  Comment spam is where spammers automatically post a comment that is nothing but a series of links to their sites.  Argh!  Give me a break.  Luckily, the WordPress blogging tool is pretty good at weeding them out.  I simply have to delete them – but what a hassle.

Scammers are even worse.  Several times during the last year, my office has received a solicitation in the mail from someplace called Listingcorp.com.  Listingcorp purports to be a service that enhances your search engine ranking – something I have long considered a scam, as true search engine optimization comes from good website coding not some magical listing service.  The scammers at Listingcorp put them all to shame.  Not only is their line of business a scam – their “solicitation” looks a lot like a bill for $65.00.  So much so that it was passed on to my bookkeeper who entered it as a bill to be paid.  Others have reported the same thing and many have paid the fake bill.  Fortunately, I discovered it before it was paid.