Skype or Vonage, which is better

I actually have both of these products and have a use for each. When we were in the military calling home to keep in touch with the family was expensive. It cost $0.25 a minute to make a long distance call. Then the telephone systems had to lower their rates and it got as low as $0.05 a minute which was nice. Then came a favorite, pay a flat fee and get unlimited long distance, but, and there is always a but, you had to sign up for two of their other services, i.e. caller ID, call forwarding, etc. So our phone bill was still about $100 a month.

About a year ago we signed up for Vonage, $28 a month and unlimited long distance. This worked great as my son had a girl friend out of state and some of his friends had just moved. One of the disadvantages to Vonage is that you have to have a cable modem, which for us, because I work from home isn't that big of a deal, but for some people, they just don't have a need for a cable modem. The other disadvantage is if the cable goes out, then we do not have phone service. This isn't that major of a hassle because we still have our cell phones but it still can make your life a little difficult. In my opinion the pros for Vonage far out way the cons, so we will continue to use Vonage at least until a better product comes around.

Now some people might say that product is Skype, which up until recently was free to make phone calls to anywhere in the United States. It didn't matter if the person had Skype or not. Now you have to pay a fee to make these phone calls. It costs $14.95 a year to make these phones calls and the price increases to $29.95 after January 31st. One of the disadvantages to Skype is that you can only use it on the computer, which means unless your computer is on you can not receive phone calls on it and if you are away from your computer you can not hear it ring, normally.

Like I said, I have both types because I like Vonage for my home phone and I like Skype for the computer, when I have to talk to the companies I work for. I will let you make your own decision whether either systems will work for you. Thankfully we have come to a time when making telephones calls is no longer going to break up, even if our teenage daughter is on the phone for 5 hours. Now if only we could get the same thing to work for cable....

Digital Camers

Yesterday, I decided to use my husband's camera to send some pictures to my friends in Vegas about our weather in Michigan. So I went outside and took a couple of pictures (I figured out how to use the camera) and then came back inside to send the pictures to my friends. Sounds pretty simple right? Wrong!

My husband owns a media PC, which means it already has the spot built into the computer for the flash card. I took the flash card out of the camera and put it into the computer (after I figured out which way it was supposed to go in. I then went into My Computer to try and find the drive that had the pictures. I couldn't find it. There was the hard drive listed and then 4 removable drives, do you think I could find the drive with the pictures. Normally when you put a CD into the computer it comes up under My Computer as the name of whatever CD you put it, so it is really easy to pull up the CD and access the information you need.

I waited until my son came home from school (he is 17) and he walked over to the computer, pulled up My Computer and opened the file. I was dumbfounded, I felt like an idiot...do you know why? It was one of the removable drives, I hadn't clicked on all of them and because of that I hadn't found the pictures. Once I was able to access the pictures I saved them to My Pictures and sent one to my friends.

Boy was I embarrassed, not only does my son know more about computers than I do (which I had already suspected), but now he knew it too. Oh well, at least he knew, so he won't have to wonder how to do it later.

Have a great day
Patti

Technology and You

I will be the first to admit that I don't know a lot about technology, but I am always willing to learn. Growing up I was the first one in my family to own a computer, it was a Commodore Vic20. I thought it was great when I was able to write a program to get a rainbow of colors on my screen or to print out letters in different colors. Technology has come a long way since then. I still remember buying a hard drive for our computer and it was $350 for a 250k hard drive. The prices we paid back then were amazing and now my husband just put together a media room and added a computer with two 500G hard drives to hold all of the movies. It is mind boggling.

So I decided I was going to do a blog that helped people get through the maze of technology one waddle at a time. To help the computer illiterate understand the nuances of our "Information Age" and in the meantime help myself to understand some of the things I don't understand.

If there is anything you want to know about or a new technology you want to learn about let me know and I will look into it. In the meantime, I am going to hit on a few of the subjects that have helped me over the years. I should be able to come up with a few as I was on the Internet before there was a World Wide Web, before email was commonplace (you had to pay extra for it), and online games were text-based.

Stop on by when you get a chance and hear the technology ramblings of the Polar Penguin.
Patti