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Layman, everyone: when you need to change a site password, login to that site via their main page – NOT from a link in an email purporting to be from that site – trust no-one and certainly not links in emails.

That is good advice, and it made me suspicious that the message contained such a link. If the message is legit, LogMeIn should be more sophisticated than to send such a thing. I did approach this by going directly to LogMeIn’s site. That did not work, so I then tried the link in the message. In view of the fact that they already had my e-mail address and I had no known password, the worst that could happen was confirmation that the address they had for me was valid. The link in the message is to the same forgotten password page that is reached by going through the actual site login, so I dunno. All I do know for sure is that that page is a dud. I do wonder if some sort of hijack is taking place. LogMeIn’s URL is logmein.com, but the forgotten password feature takes you to a page on logme.in. Hmmmm.

I, too, received e-mail from LogMeIn instructing me to change my password. However, I had no corresponding account in my password minder. Could be that I slipped up, so I pursued the forgotten password route using the address where they’d addressed the message. That resulted in a display to follow the instructions we’ve e-mailed to your address. Trouble is: no message (and nothing trapped by filters.) Tried multiple times over several days without success, and was left with the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that the whole thing might have been bogus. Under the circumstances, can LogMeIn possibly be so inept that their password reset feature isn’t working?

What unwanted extras? There’s only one – Foxit Cloud. Admittedly it’s a nuisance but it’s the only extra included.

I dumped Adobe for Foxit years ago, but then dumped Foxit when it became indistinguishable from Adobe in resource usage and began offering to install piggybacked crapware. Maybe the Foxit folks came to their senses, but I switched to the free version of Nitro Reader and haven’t looked back. Like it a lot. I would certainly recommend that anyone investigating free PDF readers check it out.

Complicated topic, and the simple coverage at HowToGeek may not be enough to solve your problem. Networking XP with Windows 7 machines is a nightmare. If you dig in and seriously investigate, you’ll find that a variety of things can cause machines to disappear and file-/printer-sharing to break down. Significantly, you should not be using the HomeGroup feature of Windows 7 if you want to network with XP. Below are a couple of helpful threads on this subject:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-networking/xp-network-new-windows-7-laptop-cannot-see/c5dc0f40-4b28-4f71-8b29-df80f1eb9ccd?page=1

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Windows_File_Sharing_(SMB/SAMBA/CIFS)

One of the most confusing things I encountered was setting up a Win7 machine for using a printer shared from an XP machine. It’s counter-intuitive — you need to set it up using the “local port” option. Doing a bit of search engine research beforehand will save you a lot of head scratching and frustration. The tricks are out there.

Has anyone has some experience with this application?

I do. I used Link Commander for some years, but was dissatisfied with the quality of the software and the poor response of the company to these quality issues. They don’t very actively support the product from a development standpoint, and when they finally issued a new release, it was such a resource hog as to be unusable. Buggy, too, so I bailed. I switched to a simple program called LinkCollector PC. It offers more limited functionality than Link Commander, but has worked pretty well for me in synchronizing my bookmarks between machines and browsers (LnkCollector, itself, does not automate the synchronizing.) I actually rely on the native browser bookmarks (Opera and IE) more than I use the bookmark minder’s database to launch things, but the bookmark minder makes it possible to keep them synced up (I have roughly 3,000 bookmarks). When I tested LinkCollector with Chrome, it gutted the Chrome bookmarks, and there’s been no new release since that time.

There is a beta version of LinkCollector that I’ve tried but dumped, as it was far from being ready for prime time.

So, I can’t recommend Link Commander (right idea, poor execution.) Anyone looking for a bookmark minder similar to Link Commander should probably check out LinkStash by XRayz Software.

Acronis TIH 2010: unpredictable, bloated, and buggy. None good in a backup/restore program.

I was a True Image user for many years, but have switched to Macrium Reflect for the reasons you mention. TI did become more and more bloated, and the added features rarely worked well (indeed, they commonly had horrid, obvious bugs.) From a usability standpoint, it was apparent that no one with a lick of ergonomic sense was ever employed by the company: the word ‘amateurish’ comes to mind. Indeed, I’d have to say the same word applies to their software development, generally. Their shop is nothing if not amateurish, and they show no signs of knowing anything about software quality control. If they do have this professional expertise on staff, it is being squelched by ignorati in the executive suite who insist on pushing product out the door prematurely. I have continued to use Disk Director, but took a pass on the recent release of a new version. I am done with Acronis.

As for Paramount Software (Macrium Reflect), the difference from Acronis is like night and day. Macrium Reflect has been solid as a rock. When they ship an update, I don’t find myself fretting about what this release has screwed up. They also have a sensible way of handling updates to the recovery environment(s). You don’t have to buy a new version or jump through hoops to get a recovery environment update as was necessary with Acronis.

I have three PCs, A, B and C, each of which contains a directory DIR to which changes (additions, updates and deletions) may be made by that PC during the day.

I am interested at the end of each day in ensuring that the DIR directory on each PC contains exactly the same files at exactly the same update levels.

Trouble is: what you are describing is unsolvable by the sort of synchronization being discussed. You are venturing here into why file systems provide file- and record-locking, and why database management systems provide serialization mechanisms for changes. Crude synchronization cannot prevent collision of changes that are effectively concurrent (i.e. occur between syncs) and cannot interpret other sorts of collisions — say, for instance that File XYZ gets updated in one copy during the same interval that it’s deleted from another — which of these changes should prevail? So, you definitely need a master that really is a master (which is to say that all changes are serialized through it and immediately propagated from it) and you’d pretty much have to use the cloud to accomplish that.

I was a Quicken/TurboTax user years ago, but soured on Intuit because 1) the same defects remain uncorrected in their products year after year while they release superficial changes, 2) it’s hard to imagine a company less inclined to listen to the Voice of the Customer. So, way back, when Intuit pulled the plug on their user forum (your only hope for useful technical support was from other users) I decided to switch to Money and Microsoft’s tax product. I found both to be superior to Intuit product, but, of course, Microsoft dropped out of the tax software biz long ago. My aversion to intuit was strong enough that I began using TaxCut rather than switch back to TurboTax. Now, of course, Microsoft has abandoned its Money customers. I’ve chosen to switch to GNUCash, which I’m running parallel with Money. My Money online services have expired, but I’m able to download data from banks using their manual download. I’ve also contrived to keep updating stock prices by adapting Python scripts you can find on the Web. I’ll likely stop running parallel at the end of this month.

I’m generally happy with GNUCash. My stock prices are updated via Perl scripts and I can import the same data I download for Money (OFX files) into GNUCash. There is an elegance about GNUCash that is lacking in Quicken and Money, but it may be hard to see because of an outdated appearance and sometimes awkward, untuitive user interface. Anyone switching to GNUCash from the commercial products will have to climb a learning curve. I’m well along that climb now and satisfied that I made the right choice, going to GNUCash rather than Quicken or Quickbooks. The biggest problem for most former users of Money or Quicken will likely be the switch to double-entry accounting. Personally, I find it preferable to the dumbed-down categories of the commercial programs. Be advised, however, that GNUCash isn’t in the same league with OpenOffice. It lacks the polish of OpenOffice and is rough around the UI edges, The libraries used in the software don’t always run gracefully in my Windows XP environment, producing annoying display anomalies now and then.

I use the software both for personal and business financial record keeping. One major consideration is that small business accountants almost universally use QuickBooks, and may want your data provided in that format. QuickBooks consulting is often a sizable part of their business, so I guess they don’t mind putting up with Intuit’s poor software quality and deaf ear.