DocHawk for Blackberry

I recently had occassion to need a document viewer for the Blackberry so I went on a little search. I found a couple of options but decided on DocHawk for its simplicity and decent price. The way it works is you go into your mail app and choose a document attachment to send to the DocHawk servers. In a few seconds, they've opened and converted your attachment to an image that you can view in the DocHawk program. I was a little confused by the setup so I called their tech support line and got to a human with one keypress and no waiting whatsoever.

After a few weeks, I had problem with it where it wouldn't let me delete any of the documents that were sent to the server earlier. Again, a quick call to the support team had me up and running in a few minutes. All I had to do was go into the settings in DocHawk and allow it to close completely. Then I went in and closed it and restarted it from the Applications menu. Apparently most apps in the Blackberry run all the time and just get backgrounded when you switch to another app.

So after "rebooting" DocHawk, the document list updated and showed only the last one that was submitted to their servers. If you need a way to view(people want to edit?!?!?) documents on the Blackberry, use DocHawk. You can get it at Terratial.com

FYI: This is not a paid advertisement. I'm just impressed with the product and support and think they deserve more business.

Get Office Free With OpenOffice

Software is a funny thing. It can be copied endlessly, which is great if you're a consumer but if you're selling software, it can be a nightmare. For example, what if you were a carpenter and built one redwood picnic table featuring beautiful inlays depicting scenes from Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure. You delivered it to your customer on Monday only to see 100 copies of it all over town on Tuesday. You bet you would find ways to tell the copies from the genuine article and to seek some recourse for the copies.

Software makers use serial numbers for this purpose. During installation the serial number is checked and if it's not valid, you can't use all the features of the software. This works for about 5 minutes followed closely by the distributed copying of mountains of CDs with serial numbers scribbled in Sharpie.

Clearly serial numbers alone don’t work. That’s why the recent advent of software activation is so popular. Activation makes sure each copy is installed only once by having the software “phone home.” The result is a way higher percentage of people paying for Office software than ever before.

Paying for software is the right thing to do. There’s just something missing in this activation equation. While the price of Windows is included in new computers, Office has always been an expensive but necessary add-on. Since many people don't want to pay $250 or more for Word and Excel, they haven't.

Allow me to speculate. If you took the number of copies of Office in use and divided the total revenues from Office by that huge number, the actual price people have been paying for Office is probably closer to $100 than to $250 or more. I think people would gladly pay that $100 but Microsoft has no reason to drop the price now that they are finally making sure they get their money.

If it weren’t for one key development, I’d say they were right. Open Office. Open Office aims to replace Microsoft Office and make itself available to everyone in the world for free. Open Office allows you to open and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with only minor differences for most users. Since it is under constant improvement by developers and users alike, the more people use it, the faster the pace of development will grow. Just go to OpenOffice.org to download the latest version.

Open Office can save you some money and release you from future purchases of Microsoft Office. Whether you use it or not, you will reap the benefits as Office software is pushed to include more of the features you want at lower prices. More directly, the money you save using Open Office can be used to get better trained on the Internet or to backup all the photos and music you're saving.

Dell PC Restore Command

Over the past 6 months I've run into a couple of brand new Dell machines that after running for a couple of hours, had this same problem. They both showed only the desktop with no icons and no Start menu/task bar. In each case, booting into safe mode worked but didn't shed much light on how to fix it. Dell's tech support got me started with the PC Restore process as the best fix.

Since I don't look forward to calling Dell's tech support again for this issue I just wanted to put right here on my blog the way to trigger the on-disk factory reset or recovery procedure: Repeatedly tap Ctrl-F11 just as the computer is booting up. That is, from the computer completely off, you can hold down Ctrl, hit the power button , and tap F11 every second or so until the Dell Symantec recovery process starts.

When I did it the other day it showed the process was run by version 8.3 of Symantec's ghost. That's a little extra trivia I'm throwing in so if you find something different when you run your PC Restore feel free to drop me a line. Hopefully you don't have to run this but if you do, you can save yourself 15-30 minutes of useless troubleshooting. Good luck fellow techies.

If you know how to run other hidden utilities, who not leave it for me as a comment? Pretty please? You may save a lot of people a lot of time...including me.