W.A. Mozart

The difference between my site and other sites is that classicalweekly.com goes right to the good part; many people I know like certain parts of a classical work but don’t want to hear all of it.  So with this site I’ve selected a particular movement of a classical work to introduce, as opposed to the entire piece.  If after hearing the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth you decide to go ahead and hear more (like the animated fourth movement), that’s great.  but if you just want to hear a little, then stick with what I’ve posted.

Each week I will post a new work, along with my comments, a YouTube video of the selected portion,  and an Amazon affiliate link to  the version of the work I like best (one of the great things about Amazon.com, especially with classical music, is that you can really get good review of an CD before you buy it).

I just launched it this week and to start I’ve put up 5 diverse works of music.  So if you are interested in learning more about classical music or just getting gentle weekly nudge, check out the site and subscribe to the newsletter so you can receive the weekly updates.  And for those of you gurus out there, let me know if you think of a great work that I should have on my list.

1) increase the performance of a single, memory intensive program (like Photoshop or AutoCad)

2) increase the speed of your computer when running multiple applications or programs.

It’s important not to confuse the memory I’m talking about now — also known as RAM — with Hard Drive storage space.  Some people talk about “hard drive memory” but there really not talking about hard drive memory at all — there’s no such thing. What they are speaking about is the storage space on their hard drive.  The reason that people use the term “memory” when discussing RAM (which I’m talking about in this article) vs. Hard Drive space is because they are both measured in Gigabytes or GB.

Memory or Memory
One of the easiest ways to know the difference when someone is speaking of RAM (memory) vs hard drive space is to look at the numbers they are using.  When people talk about memory they are usually taking about 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, 6Gb (rarely) 8GB or 16GB. When people are talking about hard drive space, the number are much larger — 160GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1000GB (which is a terabyte, or 1TB).

Will it Make a Difference?
Before you invest in more memory (which I’ll call RAM from now on), it’s important to see if it will make a difference. If you are only browsing the web and doing light tasks such as email and basic word processing, you may not see a large increase in performance by adding RAM. However, you should know that at this time you should be running with at least 2GB of RAM for Windows XP and OS X, 3GB of RAM for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

What’s the Maximum Amount of RAM I can Add?
The answer to this question is based on two factors. The first is dependent upon the maximum amount of RAM your operating system can handle (e.g. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7) and the second is based upon the maximum amount of RAM your computer can support.

The easiest thing to do first is to see what operating system you are running and find out the maximum amount of RAM that the OS can support. Windows XP and Windows Vista each can support up to a maximum of 4GB of RAM (technically this assumes you have the 32-bit version of XP or Vista. There are 64-bit versions of XP and Vista out there but if you have one of them then you don’t need this article). Windows 7 is a different story. Windows 7 comes in two flavors: a 32-bit edition which supports a Maximum of 4GB or RAM, and a 64-bit version which supports more than 4GB of RAM. You can easily tell which version of Windows 7 you have (32-bit or 64-bit) by going to START->Control Panel->System.  In the “System” section about halfway down the screen you will see a “System Type” property which will tell you if the computer is a 32 or 64-bit system.

Once you know the maximum amount of RAM your OS can support, you can now look to your computer to see how much memory your physical computer hardware can support.  Finding this information out is usually as easy as looking in the manual.  However, sometimes the manual isn’t always handy and you need another way.  One of the best places I’ve found not only to buy RAM but to lookup how much RAM (and what type) of RAM your computer can support is at crucial.com.  If you use their wizard you can look up your system in their database and you will be able to find out how much RAM your system can hold and what type of RAM you need that is compatible with your system. (more on the type of RAM in a minute).

Obviously you cannot install more RAM than your system can support — even though Windows 7 64-bit can handle more than 4GB of  RAM, if your computer doesn’t support more than 4GB of RAM then you are wasting your time and money.

Types of RAM
For the purposes of this discussion I’m not going to get into the different types of RAM — there are many different types and speeds of RAM and that discussion is beyond the scope of this article.  Just know that usually a system can take a few different types of RAM and Crucial should be able to tell you what type of RAM your computer can support.  If you have any questions look in the manual that came with your machine — there should be a section about upgrading the RAM and it will get into specifics about what type of RAM you can use.  If all else fails, call or email the tech support of your computer maker and given the model number (or serial number) they should be able to tell you exactly what you need).  To give you an idea of the types (and don’t worry about this stuff — it’s here so you can recognize the terms when you see them), there’s DDR2, DDR3, ECC, NON-ECC and there are a variety of speeds in MHz.

Other Considerations
A final thing to consider is the amount of RAM you have already installed and the slots you have available in your machine to add RAM. Most machines will come with two or four slots that are available to install RAM. But consider that if you are going to add new RAM modules, you may have to remove old ones to make room. For example, if you have a computer that has two RAM slots, and each slot already has 1GB, if you want to upgrade to 4GB of RAM, you’d need to remove both existing 1GB modules and replace them with two new 2GB modules. If however, you only wanted to upgrade to a total of 3GB of RAM in the same situation, you could remove one of the existing RAM modules, and then add a new 2GB module. This would put you at a total of 3GB (the original 1GB module in the first slot, and the new 2GB module in the second slot). Fortunately, Crucial.com will also often tell you how many RAM slots your machine has and sometimes will even tell you about the default factory RAM configuration,

Adding RAM is one of the best and least expensive things you can do to speed up your computer and increase your computer’s performance (note that as of this writing Apple requires that you use Apple-branded RAM to keep within the bounds of their warranty). I hope this article sheds some light on the memory upgrade process.

The program is free, loads quickly, and has an interface that puts all of the controls at your fingertips.  At first the program can be overwhelming because there are a myriad of options and ways you can manipulate your file names.  The program has a left side windows-explorer type tree-view, and a right side display of the files in the directory that’s selected in the left panel.  Below these two windows sits the configuration options.  You can use RegEx patterns, replacements, and case changes.  You can remove characters that are “n” places in, or add characters that are “n” places in (or both!).  In addition, you can also add numbering to the files and you can easily add prefixes and suffixes.

For a FREE, comprehensive and fully illustrated white paper on how to create MP3 CDs in track order using iTunes, visit ClassicalWeekly.com and look for instructions in the right-column.

One of the best features of the program (in addition to its intended purpose) is the ability for you to preview the changes you are planning to make to your file(s).  If you have the file selected and make a change to the name, you’ll see a preview of that change so you can check your work prior to changing all of your file names (though if you make a mistake you can just use the program to correct the names back to what they were).

In summary, Bulk Rename Utility is an integral part of my iTunes workflow and should be considered by anyone who needs to manipulate large numbers of file names.

1. First you should know that the $79.99 Roku Player (the Roku SD) does not allow you to take advantage of Netflix’s HD content.  I was ready to roll at this low price of $80 until I realized that I wouldn’t be able to watch HD Netflix content unless I purchased the $100 Roku HD.  Fine. $20 isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things and since HD make a world of difference, I plannned to go for the Roku HD.   Note that the only difference I can see between the Roku HD and the Roku HD XR is the fact that the XR model has wireless-N.  I do not believe that $30 is worth it to add wireless-N (and as it turns out with my Insignia NS-WBRDVD which currently runs on my wireless G network does a superb job for Netflix — so no need to go with wireless-N for this purpose).  So at this point I was ready to purchase the $100 Roku HD player.

2. Until I read the reviews…..Looking on the Roku site, the reviews for all three Roku products were overwhelmingly positive.  AMAZINGLY, the average review for ALL THREE products was 4.4.  And taking a look at the reviews, all of the responses are very similar and I didn’t see negative comments.  That was a red light for me — any company that has a product with what are basically 100% positive reviews causes me to raise an eyebrow.  Take a look for yourself – scroll down and look at the product titles — under them you will see the rankings and you can click to read the reviews.

To get what I believed to be a more accurate review and headed to Amazon.com.  I was very disappointed to see what I found.  The basic gist of the matter was that if you received the product and it worked right out of the box, then you would be in good shape with a great product.  The problem was that if you had a problem with the device, wanted to return the product under the money-back guarantee, or just had a technical problem, that the company’s support was non-existent.  Thus, there were a bulk of reviews in the 4-5 star range, but also a bulge of reviews in the 1 star range, too.

At this point I had a choice to make:  should I spend $100 and roll the dice  that it may cost me a few hours of my life straightening things out if there were a problem with the Roku, or should I spend $180 on the Insignia Blu-Ray Netflix enabled player.    No question — Insignia hands down. So while I never actually owned a Roku player, their customer service reputation preceded them.  I elected to go with the Best Buy Insignia product instead, where if I had a problem, getting a new unit would be as simple as driving down the road to the store…

Visit the forum at www.helpspa.com/forum.

The home page has changed as well, as the home page now shows our two featured posts as well as a listing of the most recent post in our major categories. The fonts throughout the site have also been changed in order to improve usability and readability, and our social bookmarking quick links have been moved to a more accessible area. We also added a more prominent signup box for our monthly newsletter, in which you will find terrific computer tips, tricks, advice, and a list of our newest articles.

In all, we really like our new look and we hope that you do too. Let us know what you think — we’re happy to hear from you.

1.  I will tag all of the digital photos that I have in Picasa. I thought about using Adobe Bridge, but after some testing, I believe that using Picasa is the best way to go.  Plus, I find that Picasa is faster to use to get to and organize photos.  Now I have to start deciding how many tags I’m going to have (And I will NOT also be geo-tagging 10,000 photos. I’ll leave that for next year.)

2.  I will go through all of the songs I have in iTunes and I will make sure that all of them have proper information and tags. I will sort my classical music by classical genre, and I will go through all of my operas and add a “01-”, “02-” to the tracks so I can listen to an opera in the proper order (as opposed to in iTune’s alphabetical order).  I will NOT, however,  be re-ripping all of my CDs, even though they aren’t all encoded at 128kpbs.  I just purchased the Brilliant Classics Complete Works of Bach, and I REFUSE to re-rip 150+ CDs.

3.  I will purchase a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner (the deluxe version that comes with Rack2Filer) so I can start to convert my life to paperless. No more papers and business cards everywhere!  (I almost purchased a  NeatDesk last year for the same purpose, but the Fujistu seems to be getting much better reviews).  I will spend the first two months of 2010 convincing my wife that this is a necessary purchase.

4.  I will replace my last traditional mouse with another Logitech TrackMan. Ever since I used my first Logitech TrackMan mouse, I’ve refused to use anything else.  I still have a machine that uses a traditional mouse, and after this year, we will haev a “TrackMan-only” household.  I may have to spring for the Cordless TrackMan.

So I think those four things are respectable and achievable aims for 2010. What did I miss? Or is there something even better I can do?  What are your 2010 New Year’s Computer Resolutions?

1. Head to the control panel (Start->Settings->Control Panel) and select Folder Options.

2. In the “Folder Options” dialog box that opens, select the View tab.

3. Finally, select “Show hidden files and folders” and press OK.”

To reverse this (and to hide hidden files), go back to the “Folder Options” dialog box and uncheck the option you checked in step 3.