Strike Force Behind The Book: strikeforce.mp3 Writers Roundtable Interview With Dale Brown ATARI ACT OF WAR: DIRECT ACTION LINKS Dale Brown Interview With: Peter Anthony Holder When a former pilot turns his hand to thrillers you can take their authenticity for granted. His writing is exceptional and the dialogue, plots and characters are first-class... far too good to be missed.' --Sunday Mirror ‘Dale Brown is a superb storyteller’ --WASHINGTON POST ‘Dale Brown is the best military adventure writer in the country’ --CLIVE CUSSLER

Safely Downgraded
by Dale Brown, 2008

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, July 21, 2008

The desktop computer really started running slowly on me. I do have a lot of applications and processes that keep the processor busy: the biggies are Norton 360 anti-virus/optimizer and Carbonite online backup. Vista is not any faster or slower than XP unless other programs start using resources, and then it slows down dramatically.

Removing a few of these process-intensive apps didn't seem to help, so I thought it was time to reformat the hard disk, reload the OS, and start fresh. Since my restore DVDs are Windows XP (I bought Vista separately), I decided to stick with XP Pro instead of reloading Vista.

I'm glad I did. Networking on XP is so much easier than Vista, and XP has far fewer security and administrator warning messages. The Vista version of some programs (Paperport, my scanning and filing program, is one) weren't as good as the XP versions, so I'm happy I'm back to XP.

I also decided to keep Office 2003 instead of reloading Office 2007. I'm just more familiar with the earlier version. All of my documents were running in Compatibility mode on Office 2007, so they opened just fine in 2003. No problems there.

The office network webcam is running again at 192.168.2.107. Vista pretty much blocked all access to the camera. It requires an ActiveX control to be downloaded to view the image--you may need to change some browser security settings to allow your browser to download it. I'll move it around occasionally so you can get a look at the goings-on around here...

....not that there's much to look at.

Because I have lots of backups around here along with Carbonite, I'm not afraid of erasing the HDD and reloading the OS, so I encourage you to do it if you keep good backups and have a complete restore disk set. Don't put up with a slow-running PC if you don't have to! I keep a list of apps to reload after the computer is restored, so at most it takes a few hours to do it.

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