This week Benjamin interviewed Bob Meighan from Turbo Tax, a great tool for taxes with new features. Turbo Tax 2008 features a live community where you can speak with other users, an audit risk meter, and finds deductions in your files. Tell it what you donated to charity and it will find the value of those items on the market.

Benjamin also went into the dangers in computing. Viruses used to be primarily found only on floppy drives, so they didn’t spread very quickly. Nowadays, all you have to do is open an e-mail that could have been sent to hundreds of other people with the virus in it to get infected. Viruses frequently come from hacker communities, usually foreign based, which are constantly changing targets and methods, from credit card info via e-mails to business secrets in pop-ups. Be careful what sites you go to and make sure you have anti-virus software.

In the news department, Benjamin brought us some information on Windows  7, which will be backwards compatible, meaning you won’t have to buy a new computer just to use it like you have with all the previous Windows versions. It will actually work with computers that weren’t powerful enough to run Vista. This creates an interesting new situation, in which more power is delivered with less needs.

Benjamin also talked about a new computer chip that rounds off decimals to give an approximate answer. This technology, which would conserve battery power, would let a cell phone run for weeks on a single charge. Computers round out to innumerable digits to be as exact as possible when a simple answer would work fine, such as in a picture or sound file. The developer, Krishna Palem, is working on finding out just how vague he can make things before the human brain notices. Before that point, it will simply fill in the information based on surrounding area and previous knowledge. If this pans out it could completely revolutionize the industry.

As for the Contacts department, Kenny wrote in and asked about fast but inexpensive DSL and where to get it. In addition, Mary asked what to do about her scratched recovery disks, which were preventing her from recovering her data.