Alps Touchpad Gestures

In my last post, I said that I recently upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). I also had to install Firefox 2.0 because there were some websites that looked strange under IE7. Now I have noticed that something else is funny.

I have a notebook computer, specifically a Toshiba Satellite 1415-S173. This computer comes with an Alps Touchpad. It has some touchpad features known as gestures. These gestures mimic the actions of the scrollbars and Back and Forward buttons in Internet Explorer 6. However, I have found that in both Firefox and IE7, the Back and Forward gestures don't work. I've checked on the Toshiba website, and there doesn't seem to be an update for this problem.

Does anybody know of a workaround for this touchpad problem? Some "upgrade" these new browsers are when they cause websites to look funny, and your hardware not to function correctly.

Internet Explorer 7 Upgrade

I recently upgraded my browser to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) by Microsoft. This upgrade is only available for legitimate owners of Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Some of the new features that I like in the new IE7 are tabbed browsing, a customizable search box on the right side of the address bar, and a shrink-to-fit feature for printing wide webpages. In Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), many webpages had to be rotated (or the right side was cut off), and thus wasted lots of paper.

But, what I like the best about the new IE7 browser is the ability to read RSS feeds (i.e. XML) directly. For example. The URL of the RSS feed for this blog is luck9271.blogspot.com/rss.xml. This usually appears as gibberish in older browsers, but is formatted quite nicely in IE7. It includes all of the links, and if the blog is broken out into categories, you can filter posts by category. I think that this will be most useful when reading blogs that choose to load down their site with advertising. I am not opposed to ads, since I have a few on my own site. However, when a site has ads on the top, left column, right column, in-between posts, and so on, it gets a little out of hand...

I have noted a few issues with IE7. In Blogger, there is a preview function on the "edit posts" page that lets you view a post without going into the editor. This doesn't work in IE7. There are various other websites that I've seen where parts of the text or images are cropped off, or don't display the same as they did in IE6. In some cases, there are parts of the webpage that you can't read.

In a twist of irony, there isn't a way to run IE7 and IE6 on same computer. This will force me to install a competing browser, Firefox, on my machine in order to view the websites that have problems in IE7. This is probably not Microsoft's original intent.

Closing out QQQQ

Nasdaq-100 Tracking Stock (Nasdaq: QQQQ) has had a good run since I first recommended buying QQQQ back in August.

The Nasdaq-100 Index is starting to encounter some resistance after this prolonged uptrend. Although QQQQ may continue to climb, and I am now closing my recommendation on QQQQ. This doesn't necessarily mean that I think QQQQ is going to drop. However, I'm pretty confident that we won't be seeing the same kind of increase in QQQQ that we have in the past three months. At this time, my opinion is that the safe thing to do is to take certain profits now, and perhaps look for other investment opportunities.

My caution here is that I will admit to having the tendency to sell a little bit early. From the time of my recommendation through Thursday's close, QQQQ increased in price from 38.79 to 42.04. This represents a respectable gain of over 8%.

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