Windows Live Writer Network Connection Error

Sometimes when I try to make things better I do the opposite, I break things.

I like to use Windows Live Writer to compose  posts to my blogs. (I have a blog besides this one, sort of a rant, ramble and rave blog, named Martha’s Blog)

Both of my blogs are using a template from StudioPress. I really like these templates, but the blogs seem to take a long time to load when I get ready to work on them.

So I have been working to find a way to make them load faster.  I’ve installed plugins and removed plugins and finally decided to use a feature called CloudfFare.

I’m not sure exactly what CloudFlare does but it is supposed to make my blogs load faster and so I went for it. It’s also supported by BlueHost my hosting provider.

In the process of all the plugin installing and removing, I managed to break the publishing to my blog with Windows Live Writer. When I tried to post, I got this message instead.



So I rebooted because that’s the first thing I do when something appears to be broken, but that didn’t fix it.

I knew it had to be a setting somewhere that had been changed and I was right.  I went to Options in Windows Live Writer and clicked Accounts and selected MyNotSoPerfect PC/Blog and clicked Edit. I could see the web address was incorrect! The www was missing! I clicked Update account information and made the correction and saved it.

The post draft to blog works just fine now.  I vaguely remember making a change somewhere in the blog’s setting to remove the www from the web address. Why I did that was probably from bad advice somewhere in Google searching.

But all is well that ends well, so they say.

The Last Day Is Fast Approaching For Windows XP

Windows XP will not quit working on April 7, 2014. It will work just like it does on April 6. But it will no longer get updates from Microsoft.

For some users this may not really be a problem. As long as a user has a backup so that when their computer gets hacked or infected, they can restore it to a good condition, at least as good as Windows XP can be.

I have a Fujitsu laptop with Windows XP SP3.  Recently I put this computer back to when it was new in 2005. I installed all of the updates and put just a few basic stuff on it and installed all of the games we like to play and made a full backup. It will no longer be connected to the Internet when there are no more security updates.

This computer is really better than a lot of what is available today in terms of hardware.But it is old tech. Windows XP was a great system (still is in lots of ways). Unfortunately there are big security holes. A great many of them were patched, but the code is old and some of those holes just can’t really be fixed.

So what will  you do if you are still using Windows XP?  Will you just keep using it or get a new computer? You could just upgrade the operating system.

Find out if your PC can run Windows 7 with the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

Or maybe you want to go to Windows 8?  How to upgrade to Windows 8 (You will like Windows 7 better.)

There are some ‘gotchas’ to watch out for, mainly drivers, usually the driver for your video card, but there could be driver issues for other hardware.  The advisor should let you know in advance what you might have a problem with, as well as programs you are using.

Before you install a new version of Windows, be sure to backup any important data files to external media, such as an external hard drive, flash drives or even CDs. If you aren’t sure which files to back up, look at the How-to Geek’s site for suggestions.

We upgraded an old HP desktop (2003) from Windows XP to Windows 7. The only issue was the video driver. If you don’t play any games, the generic drivers will probably work.  We found a driver on HPs website, it was a driver for Vista, but it worked.

Please note, you will have to do a clean install and reinstall all of your programs.  A lot of your old data can be found in a file on the C drive, named windows.old. But just to be on the safe side, make that external backup of your files. Once you are sure you have all of stuff safely on the new Windows, you can remove the windows.old using Disc Cleanup. Disc Cleanup can be found in Accessories/System Tools.