Many readers here have limited experience and limited knowledge. I believe responses from the more knowledgeable people should avoid strong, unfounded biases. There's no place for doing that with a beginner level audience, they (like you) may not have the time, interest, or ability to reach their own conclusions. I don't make it a point to find issues to quibble about, but it does seem you don't like it when people don't share your opinions. I try to present balanced views, keeping in mind that some people may know nothing more than what they've read in this forum. MS Internet Explorer is reported to be the most widely used browser in governmental and business use. They take that responsibility seriously, because an awful lot of essential stuff relies on it. To suggest that some grandma somewhere should worry about using the latest update to play tic-tac-toe is simply silly. And no, I don't have to have the last word.

Does seem strange to me that you're the only lot with issues in a subdivision...especially based on the size of subdivision lots I'm used to (usually 1 - 3 acres). I know I had a similar issue when it was time to build. Our initial excavation showed 100% silt, which you can't build on. They wanted piles (similar to piers) drilled, but the large stones in the area drove the cost up hugely because we couldn't use a standard piling company (that works in clay soils around here). Our engineer offered us a number of options: He said we could do piles, OR we could do a slab-on-grade (no basement), or even to over-excavate the land down to a more suitable soil type and then backfill with granular material. For us, the backfilling would have been the best option since there's a lot of gravel pits in the area and we could hopefully pay someone to crush the boulders we pulled out during the excavation. Keep in mind, we took the soil sample in OURSELVES to get tested by the lab, not trusting what contractors and people who can reap the financial benefits might say. That said, our Building Inspector argued PROFUSELY that there was no silt in our area. Not a lick of silt he assured us, not on our neighbours' place 100' away, not up the hill, nowhere in the municipality. :P In the end, the soil test came back 30% silt at the house-site, and 100% silt in our back field. PHEW. We also discovered that we hit bedrock at 6' of excavation depth. Meaning we built directly on bedrock, silt be damned. (and I can assure you the neighbours have silt too...one has a slab-on-grade, the other is down-hill from us with a walk-out basement sitting on bedrock. The thing was, our building inspector was new, the old logs were crappy and it's not that common of a soil around here). So in part, we really lucked out, but there were a number of options we could have taken to alleviate the problem. I would consider a proper soil sample, and taking it to the lab yourself. The cost is cheap and worth it. Ask your engineer for ideas on what can be done, even things like wider footings. As for financing, I can understand money being tight. I went over budget, and no, didn't have this huge 20% contingency either. Some of these folks would say I shouldn't have built, but I couldn't afford to buy a home, I couldn't keep living where I was, and I built the least home I could, managing the finances carefully and cutting things out where I needed to, for later. In the end, I have a beautiful home that I can afford, for FAR less than I could have bought a much older home for. Consider doing more of the the labor yourself to save money; I ended up digging my own foundation, shoveled all the pea gravel for the basement floor, did the basement floor myself, ICFs myself, installed all the carpet, tile, hardwood, painted, plumbed, HVAC, landscaped, pulled my own electrical permit and completed it, shingled, hung doors, hung baseboards (well, still doing those a year later lol), insulated, vapor barriered, put in all the small windows, hung all the cabinetry, designed my own kitchen so I could pay less for cabinets... What I'm saying, is if you don't want to scale back on the size of the house or the finishings anymore, but need the $25k to cover the piers, maybe you guys can do a bit more work to cover the costs?? Some of that stuff isn't so hard and costs a FORTUNE! Or downgrade stuff that's easy to replace later on, like lighting or countertops :) Heck, I'm not even 30 and between me and my 60 year old parents and the odd begged help from some friends, built a 1400 sq. ft. house in 8 months, for 50% of the cost had I GC'd it. You can do this. If you want it, you'll make it work.

Hi everyone, I found this on a website that tells you how to do it in Firefox. Open up FireFox and then go to view, then go to Zoom and you can Scroll down and select the 'ZOOM' option, then slide across, then down and select the 'ZOOM TEXT ONLY' option which should put a check mark by it. Now scroll back up and select the 'ZOOM IN' option to enlarge the text that you view on any website. Each time you go back and select the 'ZOOM IN' feature, the text will get larger. If you want to make the text smaller then go to Zoom Out And to get back to where it was before you started simply select the 'RESET' option. I did that here and it has stayed where I put it. You can do this as you move from site to site and it will stay the same as long as you have the check mark in "Zoom Text Only" That is what I found in my search, you can check it out to see what you get, so far this has worked. thirdfrt!!!

From what I've read, most of the changes are of a User Interface nature. The under-the-hood stuff has been stable and efficient back to 7. Of course, we all know that it was just the UI area that caused Microsoft the nightmares that they're trying to put behind them. WIn 8 has been great to work with as far as my experience has gone. The infamous Start button problem became something most people found could be quickly and easily fixed. Smartphones have had useable voice recognition capabilities for many years. My five year old car has it for telephone use, and in my newest car I can control everything in the center part of the dashboard, except climate control. I've found that the novelty quickly wears off. Even with very capable voice comprehension software as is now available, it remains easier to not use it, in most cases.