Nerd Christmas Thoughts

It is fast approaching that time of year again – the Christmas Season – boy am I politically incorrect. Actually, freedom of religion in the United States is a freedom of inclusion and not exclusion. This means that all those for banning Christmas are barking up the wrong tree. They should ask for inclusion of all religions and religious holidays – even the religion of atheism.

For a Nerd Christmas means gadgets. Now this season I like the old tried and true, flat panel TVs. The one that I bought for $1,700 two years ago, is now $1,300 and falling. Apparently Grinches live in the three large flat panel manufacturers and they were caught by the Feds for price fixing. So now prices should move lower still. If you can get cable or FIOS HD TV, that is the way to go. The only other thing you need is the heated easy chair recliner (if they make them).

Less expensive presents should be new cell phones. Several manufacturers are fast on the heels of Apple’s iPhone offering keyboard-less phones. There appears to be a keyboard-less Blackberry out that looks really cool. These should be in the several hundred dollar price range.

OK less expensive still are Internet E-cards. Send all you want from http://www.jacquielawson.com. These are great animated cards and the cost per year is $12. This is less than the cost of a box of fancy Christmas Cards. Try them, you will like them.

I also like the short tools from Husky at Home Depot. There is the short ratchet driver, the short hammer, and the short adjustable wrench. Husky calls them stubby. Nothing wrong with being short because it lets them all fit into tight spots. At three bucks a shot, they are great gifts for Nerds. Hey, Nerds sometimes work on other things besides computers, like installing bathroom faucets. When they do, these tools come in really handy.

What not to buy. Well, do not get try the FinallyFast.com TV offer. This sounds great and the TV ad looks seductive. So I went to the web site and tested my PC. What do you think happened? It failed. Surprise, surprise, according to the web site, it was not optimized.

To test you download a free test program and run it. To make your PC “Finally Fast” you must purchase four $30 programs from the web site. In total you spend about $120.

Needless to say my PC was not so slow as to compel me to do this. It has an overclocked quad core CPU, PCI Express graphics, SATA II drives, and more. For an old dude, I have a really tricked out PC. So I searched for free PC optimizing programs and found one or two that did some optimizing. They were run to optimize my PC and then the “Finally Fast” test was rerun. It quickly marked the failed tests again just as it did before. It appeared to me that the program always failed a PC even though it was optimized in some fashion. Further, my experience is that when I did a lot of things that supposedly sped up my PC, they did not and the default Windows settings worked best. TV offers like this can do some good, but perhaps not $120 worth of good.