November Mailbox: Free is better

Letters to the editor

Ted Gibbons | Tuesday, December 01 2009

I enjoyed your article “Picture Perfect” in the September edition, covering tools for photo manipulation. I was surprised, however, to see that you left out two of the best – Picasa and Paint.NET. These are both free tools that work superbly well.

Picasa is a free photo management tool from the brains trust at Google that provides a range of tools to crop and tweak your photographs.

Paint.NET is an open source picture editor that is the equal of older versions of Photoshop and PaintShopPro. It’s also a lot easier to use than the GIMP.

I’d be interested to see how both of these tools would score against the products you did review.
Bevan Arps, via email

No, we didn’t review Picasa or Paint.Net but we did put them on the DVD for readers to explore – Ed.

Cookie sleuth
Geoff Palmer has done it again. Just minutes after opening the October edition of PC World I’m sitting at my computer checking for super cookies. I found them. So how did I get them? I don’t have any Macromedia apps installed!

Now hang on, what is Adobe Flash Player 10 plug-in doing here? Does this plug-in do the same thing? Now I’m not paranoid, but do I uninstall it to be on the safe side? Well, I did. Plug-ins are easy to replace if their deletion causes trouble.

The thing that concerns me most is that the super cookies have been installed by sites like the New Zealand Herald. I often complete the survey on their site. Who else is getting access to my opinions and identifying me? You can tell by the question marks in this post that Geoff has me spinning. I’m sure he’s going to revisit this topic soon.
James Toner, Christchurch

Where was Apple?
I’m surprised you didn’t include Apple’s Airport Extreme in your review of wireless routers. I bought one about 18 months ago and had it up and running without trouble on two Dell Vista laptops, using 5GHz, in about 15 minutes.

To roughly compare with your testing, I transferred a 400MB video file from my NAS to a laptop eight metres away in an average of 65 seconds, and back to the NAS in an average of 45 seconds. Admittedly, this was with my normal 5GHz setting. Why else buy a draft-n router if not for greater speed, range, and less interference?

According to Vista the signal speed sits at 300Mbits/s in my study, around 240Mbits/s ten metres away downstairs, and about 60Mbits/s at a friend’s place two doors down the road. I actually throttle it back to 50% power most of the time for security reasons – there’s no need to broadcast the signal all over my suburb. I’m not that generous.

The Airport Extreme is faster than an Ethernet cable so long as I stay on my property, and a lot more convenient that running cables everywhere.

As soon as Sony puts out an 802.11n-compatible PS3 I’ll buy one, until then I’ll not be buying already obsolete hardware.
Chris Murray, Wellington

Chris wins a month’s supply of Illicit Cola for letter of the month.

Junk the junk
I love my PC World. I also usually love its principles and leadership on consumer issues like spamming. I was therefore appalled to have some aggressively marketed junk mail from PC123 ABC fall out of my PC World as I opened the plastic envelope.

Perhaps the glossy adverts within the pages (which I fully accept) are insufficient to pay the editor’s, and his staff’s salary in these tough times. But I’d rather pay a higher price for the magazine than have this unwelcome rubbish sneak through my mailbox.

I hope there are sufficient other complaints to ensure that this is a one off. Otherwise it may herald me cancelling my subscription and buying from the newsstand. At least then I can shake out the flotsam and jetsam at the counter before I take ownership.

PS. Writing this has resulted in a 10 minute delay in reading my PC World, and I’m starting to shake...
Clem Le Lievre, via email

More media centre
I’m a long time PC World subscriber and have been following the Project Lounge series with interest. I read Nial Greenstock’s letter in the October issue and it has prompted me to ask if you would consider inviting readers to submit their experiences for publication. I’m sure other peoples’ experiences would be useful to know about when you strike a problem you haven’t come across before.

Certainly, I’d be interested in knowing more about what Mr Greenstock did to set up and configure his optimal media centre. This is something I’m interested in doing myself but right now I don’t have the necessary level of knowledge to make a decent job of it. Understanding what other people have done and how they have dealt with problems along the way can be a great help.
Grant Power, Auckland

We’ve changed the format somewhat this issue, and we’d be more than happy to invite reader experiences. It’s a complex business and we don’t have all the answers, so if you’ve got a story to share we’d love to hear it – Ed.

An affordable PC
Well done on your article “Building an inexpensive high-performance PC for Windows 7” in the October issue of PC World.

It was good to see the value for money one can get and how easy it is to build your own – something I had not seriously considered previously. I bet it would have taken longer to take the packaging off each item than it would to install and run it up.

We can’t all afford the top-end gadgets and it was good to see just how well it performed against expensive PCs.
Mike Meade, via email

System not works
I used to run Norton SystemWorks but when a new subscription was due Symantec sold me Norton 360 version 1.0. This caused me no problems but Symantec recently ran a pop up ad for a free upgrade that inspired me to download and install version 3.0. Following the installation, however, my internet access was nonexistent except for a short period on one day, although email in and out was unaffected. With no access to the internet I couldn’t get to Symantec support – a Catch 22.

I removed version 3.0 and reloaded version 1.0, which didn’t work properly, but did allow me to get to Symantec’s support people. Apparently the problem was Spybot or Mailwasher (free) or both. Once these were removed Norton 360 version 3.0 seems to work properly.
Bruce Mackay, Christchurch

We go both ways
Just writing to say I loved your October issue of PC World. I own a MacBook running Parallels Leopard/Windows XP so it’s great to have a magazine that has both Windows and Mac articles. Your reviews of Snow Leopard, iTunes 9.0, networking routers and antivirus software were really interesting. Combined with the How To story on building your own PC (something I very much want to do) it made this issue an absolutely absorbing read. Well done!
James English, Nelson

Auctioned off
Isn’t it pathetic? TradeMe is so hard up that it has to spoil its site by putting ads on it to gain even more revenue. I particularly dislike them telling me I should use a Visa credit card when I personally prefer a Mastercard. I have no problem with sites like PC World having ads because they have to make the site pay. But with TradeMe it’s just sheer greed.

TradeMe makes its profits by charging an excessive success fee on each auction and it’s sad that a NZ company so milks its customers. We love homegrown TradeMe, of course, but Fairfax and Sam Morgan are ripping us off every time we use it.
Stephen Conn, Nelson