Jane Talks Tech!

Well, well, Whaddaya know! FeedDemon 2.8 Release Candidate 1 is out and it now contains ads. Wow. I feel like I've dodged a bullet with switching to RSS Bandit. Seriously, none of the applications on my laptop contains ads simply because: (a) they're free or (b) I paid for them. FeedDemon used to be shareware i.e. free for 30 days and about $30 to register. I paid for FeedDemon back then and was ecstatic when they made it a free program because it freed me from having to pay for upgrades. Now, the author of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury, feels the need to insert ads into this product because they need a source of revenue. That's his prerogative. I'll install FeedDemon on my Windows XP Pro SP3 virtual machine and see what the hubbub is about. In any case, I don't think I'm going back to FeedDemon till I read about serious improvements in the stability & handling all sorts of feeds. So far, beyond some minor User Interface gripes, I'm liking my switch to RSS Bandit. Whenever I click "mark all feeds read", it happens without locking up and forcing me to use Windows Task Manager to kill the process unlike *cough* FeedDemon *cough* :D On a serious note, it's not all roses with RSS Bandit though. Here's one of  my pet peeves in the picture on the right. Read More »

I haven't really talked about my computer set-up on this blog, but I did ramble a lot on my personal weblog (Fading Whispers). I own an HP dv9700t customized laptop and I've put it through its paces by installing & uninstalling a bunch of software on it. The past two days, I noticed something weird: my User profile folder has suddenly become a "protected system file". Right now, I can only see my User folder under C:\Users if I uncheck "hide protected system files" under "Folder Options" menu in Vista. Also, when I hide system files (which now ...