Wondering where the drop down menus went?!    Yeah … me too.  I admit I don't use IE very much anymore … so this didn't come up until I was trying to help Myrna troubleshoot why her blog was showing up differently in IE vs. Firefox vs. AOL … but suddenly it was very important (and annoying!) to discover the unexpected absence of drop down menus. 

Dang.

It turns out the Microsoft has hidden them in an effort to give you more room for browsing.  (Which in theory makes sense … until you look at how much room the buttons and toolbars take up compared to the drop down menus … but I digress) …

Want your menus back? 

Hit the ALT key.  Seriously … that's all it takes.

And the Frequently Asked Question is:
(actually I found and answered this on Yahoo Answers from Henry C, but it's a good one!)

Q: Hey Techie Coach, how do I use the numeric keypad on a dell inspiron e1705 laptop?

A: The solution is to use both the Number Lock and Fn keys.

• First, the Number Lock must be on.
  On my Inspiron 9100 it's located above the F11 key: 'Num Lk'
  There's a light that turns on when you activate it to show you that it's on. (again, on the 9100 it's the first of 3 lights above the keyboard, and to the left of the power button. The icon below it is tiny, but it's got a 9 inside a lock - thus Number Lock). Once number lock is on …
• Then hold down the blue Fn key.
  Second key in from the bottom left of the keyboard, right beside the Ctrl key: 'Fn' written in blue.
  Hold the Fn key down with your left hand (I use pinkie or thumb, actually) and type the number pad keys (also in in blue) with your right hand. (So M=0, J=1, K=2, etc.).

Just remember, you have to keep holding the Fn key the whole time or you revert back to letters.

Hope this helps, and Happy Numbering!

My laptop isn't ancient.  It's a dell inspiron 9100 … and it serves most of my purposes fine (which periodically involve needing to 'compute' from the couch or the bed) … but after 2 1/2 years of wear and tear the power cord started to get 'fitzy.'

'Fitzy how?' you ask?  : ) …  Well it started by only 'powering' when it was in a specific position … and the position got more and more inconvient until last week I had to actually drape it over the screen of the keyboard and hold it in order for the power to connect.  Now the battery was fine … so it wasn't as tho I was losing work when the power would cut out.  But it was annoying as hell. 

I looked around at new laptops, since there are other reasons to upgrade (namely this laptop weighs a ton!) … but I'm not hearing good things about Vista … so I'd rather not go there until some of the early bugs are worked out.  So I decided if I could fix the laptop for under $100 … it'd be worth it to try.

DELL

I started at Dell and they had what I needed (actually called an Assembly 150-Watt AC Adapter) except that it was

• refurbished
• $90, and
• ships in 1-2 weeks

I wasn't crazy about the refurbished part … but the main dealbreaker was that I didn't think my powercord was going to hang on for 2 more weeks.

Laptop Parts Now

So I googled 'laptop power adapters' and found Laptop Parts Now … who had exactly what I was looking for,  they called it the Dell Inspiron 9100, PP09L Series Replacement Laptop AC Adapter and even better it was

• new
• $49,
• usually ships same business day

Just to be certain I checked that the Dell product compatibility matched (N3834 - yup!). 

And with 2-day shipping I still spent less than what Dell wanted to charge me for the refurbished part.  (Oh, and an added bonus the new one is both lighter and smaller than the orignal!)

The $50 Fix

The part arrived, as ordered, 2 days later.  I plugged it in and 'voila!' it's working beautifully.  

The moral of the story … if your laptop is working fine … but cuts back to battery power even when the power cord is plugged in … a new ac adapter might be just what the doctor ordered.  And you too might be able to squeeze another year or so out of the your laptop, and for $50 the price can't be beat!

Addendum

I wanted to also give credit to Foner Books who had an illustrated guide to reparing laptop cords … and if I couldn't find anything else … I might have tried it.  But frankly, I'd prefer to have a backup solution in place before I start taking things apart. (Not all that confident in my ability to put it back together again.)

Got a docx file you can't open and don't know what to do with it?  Well, since Microsoft came out with its new 2007 versions of Office, it added new file formats (notably docx and pptx) … to denote files saved in the 2007 format. 

This, of course, does you no good if you're using Word 2003 or below.  However, they have come out with a free 'compatibility pack' download for previous Office Users.  It's a quick download and doesn't require a reboot after install (yay.)

Microsoft's Compatibility Pack Docx Converter

If you don't have a previous MS Office license, but still need a docx converted to doc … you can do so online for $2.  There may be more obscure free services out there (and if so please let me know), but I haven't found them yet.  The $2 service is memorably named:

Docx2Doc

So if, like me, you haven't found a reason to upgrade to 2007, you can still collaborate with folks using the new tools.

I get asked pretty often about whether I recommend that people have a blog or a website or both … and I'm delighted to say that it's a non-question these days.

Wordpress (and specifically wordpress in the form of Semiologic have made it easy to put create a blog that looks and functions like a website in its own right … with an optional 'blog' section as well.

Now, in reality the whole thing is a blog.  But your web visitors don't need to know that.  (Nor, frankly, do they care.)

There are also some real advantages to having a blogwebsite instead of the old fashioned kind … (and a couple of disadvantages as well.)  I'll just quickly list a couple here.

Advantages

• Software built in
  Blogs have the editing software built in to them, so once it's created, you don't need separate software to edit the pages. Semiologic also includes the ability to do basic graphic editing as well (image cropping, scaling, etc.).  That alone is a great reason to consider the package right there.
• Automatic & Easy Navigation
  When you add new pages, you can easily add them your navigation structure.  When you add new blog posts, they automatically get included in your navigation, so people can easily find what they're looking for.
• SEO friendly
  Blogs do SEO and bookmarking better than any other system, which is why you find so many of them in the search engines.  Now it's a good idea to have a strategy to make use of this, as search engine placement does you no good if you don't have a strategy for capturing the traffic.

Disadvantages

• Time lag
  If you're used to putting up web pages in any other way … blog posting can seem very tedious.  However the advantages probably outweigh this.  You can also write your posts / pages in another system and then simply upload them.
• More complicated to troublshoot
  Because blogs are fairly complex systems … they're more complicated to troubleshoot when something happens.  Again, however, the semiologic community is very responsive and helpful.

That's why I think the Blog v. Website question is a non-question these days.