The Lady Programmer

Have you ever been locked out of your email address?

I could not log-in to my old Yahoo email address today. This suddenly happened after I deleted one of my Yahoo profiles. I had two Yahoo profiles linked to my email address and the deletion somehow affected my Yahoo account. I did not change my password during the process.

photo credits: sachyn (SXC)

Yahoo mail has always been my primary email address. I have other email addresses but I configured these other addresses to automatically forward mails to my Yahoo address. I’m still glad that my Gmail account is set to archive received email after these are forwarded to my Yahoo mail: I could still easily see the emails that passed through my Gmail account.

I tried to retrieve the password by trying the link “forgot ID or password”. I was not lucky to retrieve the password. The Yahoo system simply told me that it is not possible to retrieve the password online. It further added that I had to contact their customer support. After weeding through their FAQ pages, I got their customer support link and I proceeded to leave a message describing this problem.

I got into my other email account and I’ve seen the response of Yahoo customer support. They were asking me the answer to the security question. Unfortunately, I could not remember the answer to that question. I was holding to this dear Yahoo mail account for so long to poke around updating my account details. After typing in my answer I have not yet received any reply. I just do not know if I will be able to open that email address again – ever.

All my contacts are in that account.

Beware!

I have not explored much of Windows Vista and now another new operating system is cooking up at Microsoft. Microsoft Windows 7 is a new project in Microsoft where a blog was opened up for discussion. This operating system is slated to be released in about three years after the launch of Windows Vista last January 2007. Senior Engineers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky lead this new community blog. Their whole engineering team will participate in this discussion.

I guess Microsoft realized the value of getting the hearts of their users. Not all are happy with the launch of the Windows Vista, where it is known to have the Aero features. I still find more people who are still happy with using the Windows XP. In the places where I had worked before, management still decided to stick out to Windows XP because it is compatible to the existing drivers and hardware. I even converted a whole set of laptops from the bundled Windows Vista to Windows XP because of compatibility.

With this move I would be sure that Microsoft would now be more successful in launching their new Windows 7. With only two entries on the blog as of this moment, their posts had received hundreds of commments and suggestions from various users. Participate on their discussion on Engineering Windows 7 on their MSDN blog.

What features do you want to see in Windows 7?

I was up all morning trying to present a quick photoshow. I had to do it because my friends had wanted to see something new from me. Here’s the love of my life:

Setting up this photoshow was fun and easy for me. I uploaded my picture selection and tweaked the settings. The coolest things that I’ve seen as I was doing the photoshow are the styles and stickers that I get to choose from. I had to admit that the final result was far from what I typically envision presentations.

I did not have to spend any buck to create this photoshow. I got this done from Roxio online. The final photoshow can be a embedded in a widget or a blog, just like what I’ve done in this post.

I’m still amazed at the potential uses of stem cells. Preserving some of these cells can do amazing benefits to our kin who has a disease that is deemed incurable by surgery, chemotherapy and other alternative medicine healing. C’elle clearly explained about the science of stem cells: a healthy woman can simply save some of her stem cell by simply getting samples of her monthly period. I’m showing off a sample of the entire kit from C’elle which is necessary to collect such life-giving stem cells for preservation. This kit is now offered at $200 less than the original price at a limited period of time.

As I was watching a featured C’elle Client Testimonial, I could feel the speaker’s happiness to be able to save some of her stem cells for future use. I get so sad at some real stories that I read off from some magazines where their parents get to suffer Alzheimer’s disease and forget the rich memories of their past. I also read sad stories about children born with genetic defects which makes it difficult for them to adjust to the normal life. I realized that may be needing these stem cells that I saved in the future.

I’ve been troubleshooting my very slow PC today. I could not really bear the slow response of my computer. I just have a very slow computer and I do not really know what’s causing it: fragmented files, installed antivirus, full hard disk may have caused this slowdown.

photo credit: erwinbacik (SXC)

I had to start with the basics first and I’ve mentioned these simple steps in this blog. But it seemed that my own simple advice was not working. Reformatting the whole machine may be the next step that I may do. Adding new hardware may have solved my woes. But I find it better to do the simpler steps that I can still do. Not all of the things that I did are for the faint hearted.

• Defragment. The built-in Windows defragmenter does a fair job of defragmenting files on the hard disk. But I prefer using Diskeeper 2008 to analyze and defrag my old hard disk. Diskeeper does a great job of showing a map of my hard drive: I could see where my page file, folders, system files and other non-system files in place. I could even choose to have autodefragmentation on and forget about it. I could even do a boot defragmentation to defrag my MFT and page files.
• Change Antivirus (with Firewall). Bitdefender and Kaspersky are two leading antivirus programs that eats a lot of resources. I prefer the ones with the firewall versions because I like the seamless connection between the antivirus and its firewall. I switched to ESET Smart Security, another leading antivirus program, and I kept it since because it does not slow down my PC.
• Uninstall Unnecessary applications. A full hard disk results a fragmented paging file. A fragmented paging file results to a slower response when the RAM tries to read data from the hard disk.I decided to remove all the applications that I do not need anymore to free up much space and make it easier for the paging file and other applications that temporarily use the hard disk as scratch, such as Photoshop. The huge free space also makes it possible to perform hard disk defragmentation.
• Deleting unnecessary and temporary files. The built-in disk cleanup in the accessories section does a good job of removing unnecessary files. But there are other utilities that even clears up all the unnecessary files in place. TuneUp Utilities provides all-in-one computer utilities and can be easily used by basic computer users. This software not only delete unnecessary files but also lets me cleanup the registry and repair errors. It even lets me optimize the use of windows and customize it so that I use my own customized icons for “My Computer” and “Recycle Bin”.
• Reinstall hard disk IDE driver. I’m still using my old IDE hard disk, but I should be shifting to a SATA one soon. The IDE channel transfer mode was down to PIO mode. It should be in DMA so that I get to have a faster access. The easiest way for me to shift back to DMA mode is to reinstall its driver. The change may have been caused by read errors that may be creeping into my old hard disk. I would be needing a new hard disk soon.

I got my PC faster with the steps that I did above. It seemed that my computer seems to be as fast as a newly reformatted one and I’m happy with it.

What are your own tips?