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South Korea is mostly mountainous, which is why 25% of their population lives in Seoul. A majority of the rest live in other nearby cities around the yellow sea basin. So their population density is extremely high.

The raw average density for South Korea is 1,288 people per square mile. I’d guess that’s about triple if you’re considering the yellow sea basin area.

America has a population density of a whopping 84 people per square mile. Sure, that also includes places like Alaska and Wyoming, but there are sure a lot of rural areas with about 85 people living in each square mile. I totally wouldn’t change that–I love having elbow room. But it explains why it’s kind of difficult to get good internet speeds across the country.

Of course, if you compare cities like New York (Thanks, AMF1932) with Seoul or Tokyo, things may look different. But I question your assumptions–According to Akamai, the average internet speed in South Korea is only 23.6 Mbps (https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/content/state-of-the-internet-2015-executive-review-volume-01.pdf). Sure, gigabit internet may be available in some places for $40/month, but apparently isn’t very common yet. (a few 1000 Mbps connections skew averages pretty fast.) The first source I could find for a New York City average was http://testmy.net/city/new_york_ny , which places that fair city right in the neck of the woods with South Korea/Seoul.

If we’re comparing “available” speeds, Google Fiber in Kansas City is 1Gbps for $70/month, which isn’t much worse than the prices quoted in the article.

My advise: be patient. Companies will get faster bandwidth to you as fast as they can. It’s only good business.

Fred,

You had a great article today–I got a lot from your description of different kinds of computer passwords.

However, I’m afraid you may have sent Susan on a bit of a rabbit trail, at least in her search for the retired Microsoft Money. When Microsoft discontinued the Money product, they released something called the ‘Sunset’ edition. The problem was that Microsoft wanted to shut down their activation servers for Money, but didn’t want to lock existing customers out from installing the software, and possibly accessing financial data. The solution, then, was to release a version of Money that doesn’t require activation, and is available as a free download. You can find the program here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738 . It supports Windows 7, and should therefore run just fine on Windows 8 and 8.1.

Hope that’s helpful!

– Jonathan

In my channels, 7 Pro is about $40 more for a bundled copy of XP. I don’t see VMWare offering that. Plus, it’s a whole lot easier to setup.

“Bob might have jumped up faster, or Clippy could have offered his helpful admonitions a fraction of a millisecond more quickly.” I find this hilarious, but I’m not sure your “target” audience would. A single usage model will rarely work for your average power user, let alone the majority of them. And I doubt your average vanilla user would remember Bob.

I really like the idea behind this series, but I’d like to see more options–particularly in areas that are still relevant, like backups. Windows 7’s backup utility doesn’t offer offsite storage or realtime protection–two keys if you really value your data.

I’ve found that Google Earth really slows down an older computer (as auntie is likely to have), and as a computer service tech I’ve removed it from computers whose owners had absolutely no idea what the icon was for. So please, make sure that your relative knows what the program is and that he/she wants it in the first place.

Otherwise, great article. I love hearing about the best free apps to keep everything running smoothly.