Thank you for all the great tips. I missed the one where you described in detail how to download photo-enhancing software. Would you please fill me in? – Greg Cameron
A. Folks should know that many of the online photo-printing services permit customers to crop, fix red eye and do other minor enhancements with free software. Two of them are Shutterfly, at www.shutterfly.com, and Snapfish, at www.snapfish.com. I prefer Shutterfly because Snapfish makes you sign up as a customer before letting you download the software to make edits.
In terms of simplicity and lack of bother, nothing beats Picasa, the free photo-handling software from the Google search service. Picasa mainly focuses on letting users keep track of all of the digital images that build up on their hard drives, but it also includes editing tools that meet most folks’ needs. It is at picasa.google.com, and it is well worth a look.
If you’re into serious digital photo work, take a look at GIMP, an amazing, and free, open-source image-editing program that delivers many of the same powers as expensive commercial applications such as Adobe Photoshop CS or the consumer-level Adobe Photoshop Elements. The GIMP (GNU image manipulation program) comes up with a display very much like Adobe’s famous Photoshop workspace, offering a broad pallette of tools with icons that look a lot like the ones in Adobe’s software. You can download this treasure at www.gimp.org.
Q. My problem stems from having a hard drive crash and then taking it to a local tech company to get it fixed. It seems to work well except loading my Adobe Acrobat 6.0 standard software. When I go to load the program, I get an “Internal Error 2753” and “Dist -Acrodist.exe,” which halts the loading of the program. Any suggestions on how to remedy the problem and simply get it to load and work? -Mike Borquez, San Jose, Calif.
A. This can be fixed in a way that should delight you. Point your Web browser to www.adobe.com/reader and follow the prompts to the new version of this near- ubiquitous software for viewing those pesky PDF files that crop up more and more as the giant company’s footprint grows.
Since your current version of the reader software is bollixed, I suggest you try to uninstall it first and then go out and acquire Adobe Reader 7, which has replaced that Version 6 on your computer.
Click on Start and then Control Panel, and then open the icon for Add/Remove Programs. Select the one for Adobe Reader on the list of programs that comes up and follow the prompts to remove it. This should get rid of what’s causing that error message and let you reinstall with a blank slate.
The Adobe Reader software now is in version 7.0.8. A lot of customers get tired of the frequent need to upgrade the Reader software, and Adobe reacted by making Versions 5 and 6 available for download at the same website where 7.0.8 resides.
