Accessing Folders In Vista And Windows; My Palm Story
Posted by Mitch on May 25, 2010
Vista is trouble, Adobe is da bomb; let’s just get that out of the way.
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Some of you may remember when I was lamenting that my Palm had gone on the fritz months earlier and how I wanted to get something that would work the same way, but not only could I not find anything else that worked like a Palm (stupid smartphones), but there was a problem with Palm the company falling apart; I think they’ve finally found a buyer, though I have no idea what that means for the company overall.
Anyway, I ended up buying a Palm, the same as I have now, on eBay, had it break 10 days later, sent it back for repairs, got it back, and I feel like my world is fairly complete once again. That “fairly” is because I still had one overriding issue that was messing me up and driving me crazy; keep my first line in your mind because we’ll be back to that.
I’ve always had Adobe Reader for Palm, which is great because I get tons of PDF files and no time to read them, and it’s great being able to put them on the Palm for those times when I have long periods away from the computer, like on an airplane. Well, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t load onto the new Palm. It was freaking me out. For almost a month I kept trying to load it here and there, and it just wasn’t having it. It wouldn’t load when I first had the Palm either, but I thought after it broke that maybe there was a problem with the software.
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As I said, I kept trying to get it to load, but it wasn’t having it. I would reset the Palm; nothing. I would load and unload this program called Hotsync, which is how you sync a Palm to a computer; nothing. I would download the program time after time, even though it was the same program, and I thought that one day it would just magically work; nothing. The program was on the computer just fine, with PDFs ready to load and others already on my Palm; what the hey?
Last Thursday, it finally hit me as to what the answer could possibly be, and this is where stupid Vista comes back into play, and actually Windows 7 follows this rule, but I don’t have that so I’m not going to call it stupid; yet anyway. One thing most of us who have ended up with this operating system learned is that Vista put files in a different place than where they resided on XP. I did a quick search for the file I was trying to load onto the program, knowing the extension was “.prc”, and I found it.
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What I needed to know was what folder it was in, and I found it buried deep in a User file under my name, under Documents for some reason, then under Palm and finally in a folder called Installations. I looked at the properties for the folder, and I saw that it was set to “read only”.
I clicked that off, figuring that was the entire problem, and tried again; nope. But I knew I was on to something. I went into the properties again, this time to all the “users”. Under Security, they were me, Admin, and System; go figure, but that’s what was there. There were shaded out checkmarks for each name, which meant I couldn’t do anything with them, but thought the checkmarks meant that it was already set for me to use that folder. However, it wasn’t working. So I decided to click on Edit, which opened another menu, and then clicked on Add. The name “Everyone” came up, and I selected that. I gave that name approval to do everything in the folder, saved it, and closed every menu.
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I went to sync the Palm, and everything worked perfectly. I’m a happy guy once more, with my PDF files and the like on my Palm, and I’m feeling pretty smart about it all. What made me think about it? I remembered my wife’s computer, which is on Windows 7, and when I was trying to load Mailwasher onto it. For some reason, it wouldn’t let me activate it, and I tried at least once a day for a week. That is, after the two week period that it lets one run the program before it decides it’s not going to play any longer until you update. I couldn’t get it to load, so I went online to see if anyone else had the problem previously, they had, and they talked about doing what I did as a potential fix, and afterwards it worked perfectly.
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See, Vista and Windows 7 have put in a lot of protections up front to keep people who don’t know what they’re doing from messing things up. That’s why most people can’t see the extension on their files, which is moronic because that makes people click on some of the stupidest stuff, not knowing it’s not a program file, and that will mess up some computers here and there as well. The area I was in is one that’s not critical to the operation of a computer, and thus it makes no sense for it to have the same kind of security as every other folder. But I guess that would have been too complicated for Microsoft to do for us; sigh.
Anyway, if you find yourself trying to install something, or get something working that doesn’t seem to have any other fault, this is something you can think of trying out.
RSS For Your Business Websites
Posted by Mitch on Mar 24, 2010
Oddly enough, I guess I owe this post to much of the spam I’ve been receiving lately. Much of it asks, stupidly of course, how they can subscribe to my RSS feed for this blog, which is pretty much all over the place, especially if you use Firefox.
However, it got me thinking about RSS feeds in general, especially as they apply to business websites. I have enough websites, I figure, but in reality I have 3 business websites. And I don’t have RSS feeds on any of them.
I’ve started wondering if I should have feeds on them. After all, I don’t do a lot of updating to those sites. One of them I have my business blog attached, and it obviously has a RSS feed, so I’ve just assumed that site didn’t need one. For my other two sites, though, I do add something here and there, and those are mainly articles, and maybe I need a RSS feed for those. After all, who doesn’t want more RSS subscribers?
The question of course is why anyone would subscribe to the RSS feed for a business site. It’s not news, and since most of us assume that most sites are fairly static, what would compel us to subscribe? Or is this a case of “if you build it they will come”?
I’m not the only one who thinks about this sort of thing. A woman named Sarah wrote an article titled Why RSS Is So Important For Your Business That You’re Probably Already Using It (whew, long title!), and she talks about the importance of having RSS feeds if you’re constantly updating your information. That’s easy to agree with, but what about if you’re not constantly updating your content?
Actually, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? As a consultant, I often advise potential clients that they need to have constantly updated content in some fashion. Of course I usually recommend blogs first, and most blogging software comes with the ability to easily add RSS feeds so you’re covered there. But what about the website itself? Other than news sources and sales pages, are there any other reasons for a business to syndicate their site?
Something more to think about, I guess. Meanwhile, the palm trees are for my friend Sue. 
Microsoft Updates; What The Hey?
Posted by Mitch on Feb 25, 2010
Have you ever taken a look at the Microsoft updates that come to your computer at least once a week? I always take a quick look, although I’m not sure why since, with Vista, it came with the Genuine Advantage thing, so maybe I shouldn’t care what’s being put onto my computer.
But I do look, and most of the time I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. For instance, last night, there were 5 updates awaiting me when I got home:
“Install this update to resolve issues caused by revised daylight saving time and time zone laws in several countries. This update enables your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date in 2010.”
Okay, that one I easy understood, since last year they changed the dates for daylight savings time.
“Install this update to improve Internet Explorer 8′s JSON interoperability in conformance with the new ECMAScript, fifth edition standard.”
What the heck does that mean?
“Install this update to resolve issues with non-compatible applications for Windows Vista.”
I’m thinking it would have been nice if they’d told me which issues those were more specifically. Actually, to be fair, they did give a Knowledge Base article number, and if you follow that you see there’s over 200 programs it’s affecting, so maybe I should be glad they didn’t try telling me all of those.
“Both the Meiryo UI font and the Meiryo UI Bold font are included in this update. These new fonts let an application optimally display Kana characters in the Ribbon UI component and in other parts of the user interface, especially in areas where text area is limited.”
Part of me realizes I have a new font; not sure if I’m supposed to use it or not. The rest of it; no clue.
“Install this update to resolve issues caused by manifest expiration in AD RMS enabled applications. This update will fix any existing issues in addition to addressing any future application manifest expirations.”
Once again, huh? Even my spell check freaked out on that one.
Part of me gets it; these tekkie guys are trying to tell us something. They might have well written most of it in Sanskrit if you ask me. Maybe they should just say “download this update; you don’t want to know”, and being the sheep we are, we’ll just accept it and move on. It’s about as clear to us if they do that as what they’re telling us now.
I’m just feeling so stupid and inadequate now; I need cake.
When You Can’t Even Boot Up In Safe Mode in XP
Posted by Mitch on Dec 30, 2009
While talking to one of my best friends Monday night, she mentioned that her computer had suddenly just crashed and wouldn’t work anymore. I had sent her a message earlier in the day through Facebook letting her know that I thought she might have a virus on her computer because I’d received two emails from her email address that had a link going back to Germany, and saying nothing else. I knew she didn’t send them, so I figured it had to be coming from her computer.
She told me that she had also been unable to get the computer to reboot, even to safe mode, and that she kept getting the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). I’m sure everyone who’s ever been on XP has had to deal with it at some point; I dealt with it often before getting this new computer. But not being able to boot into safe mode; that was something new. I told her to bring it over and that I’d see what I can do; I love challenges.
I got the computer this evening, hooked it up, and turned it on. She was correct, that bad boy just wasn’t going to boot up at all. I knew that to get into the computer I was going to have to pull out my old XP disc and boot it up with the CD. I pulled up an old bootleg CD and it booted just fine; I did have to go into the BIOS to tell it to look for the CD option first.
I decided to go into the Recovery Console option, which many folks will tell you not to do unless you know what you’re doing, and I figured I did, even though it’s been about 10 months since I’d been into a computer with XP on it. I tried to run “bootcfg” in some fashion, but nothing would work initially. I finally got it to give me a message saying I had to run “chkdsk” first, which I tried, but nothing would happen.
I decided to try it again to see if maybe it had corrected itself; nope. But I also knew that the bootleg wasn’t going to get it done. So I pulled out my genuine copy, put that CD in, and booted the computer up again. I went back into Recovery Console and tried to do chkdsk again. This time it did what it was supposed to do, finding some errors along the way and fixing them. I was going to try to run bootcfg /rebuild and create the boot.ini file again, but I decided to see if the computer would boot up since chkdsk worked.
This time it booted up perfectly, and all was right with the world; well, at least the bootup was. I hooked my cable to her computer and tried to open a browser; wasn’t happening. I knew that something was in her computer messing things up, and that I had to run some checks on it.
The first thing I did was go to my wife’s computer and download the latest version of Stinger.exe from McAfee. The new version checks for more than 1,300 viruses, as opposed to the 600 or so it used to check for. That bad boy took about 40 minutes, and when it was done it found nothing. I knew I couldn’t stop there. So I ran Combofix, which some of you might remember I had to run on a different friend’s computer’s in June. It did its thing, taking about 25 minutes again, but it found malware that it cleared out of the computer, though a couple of times some kind of thing popped up, trying to fight its way back into play. While it’s doing its thing, at some point it will reboot itself, and when the computer comes back up runs chkdsk again and does some other things before it’s finally completed its work.
Her computer is running okay once more. I say that because they’re over capacity on the hard drive, and it’s going to run slow until her husband moves over most of his music and video files to the new external hard drive he purchased. But this is a good lesson for everyone else, I figure, which is why I’m sharing it with you. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but if it does, hopefully it’ll give you an idea of what you can try.
Google Desktop For Vista 64-bit Is Finally Here!
Posted by Mitch on Aug 16, 2009
Oh,… my,… goodness!
It’s been a tough road to hoe, but now, maybe, my bliss will be returning to my computer very soon.
Back in December, I bought this new computer, Vista and all, and very quickly realized that I couldn’t run Google Desktop on it. It wasn’t compatible with the 64-bit operating system, which was grossly irritating. Yeah, there was a way you could force it through, which I started, then halfway through I realized what I’d be doing to my computer and decided that wasn’t a smart move.
Then PC World magazine came up with a program that supposedly would work just as well as Google Desktop, only for 64-bit computers. It was called Copernic Desktop Search, and it was free. It was also a big program, at 29 MBs, but that’s not such a big deal. I loaded it, gave it time to scan my computer for stuff, then tried it out.
Miserable; it couldn’t find any of the stuff I specifically wanted. I even tried giving it easy ones to knock out of the park, specific file names I knew it should be able to find because, well, a couple of times I was looking right at the file. Nope, it couldn’t do it. Sucker found lots of other stuff, but never a specific file name I was looking for.
That, plus the window was divided in half, and the lower half acted like a search engine on the web. Now why would I want a desktop program looking for things on the web? Google Desktop never did that?
So, I deleted it from my computer on Wednesday, and figured I’d just take another quick look to see if Google Desktop might finally have a 64-bit version. After all, Windows 7 will be coming soon, and they announced that they’re not going backwards, so 64-bit is going to be the new standard, plain and simple.
And I found it! It’s called Google Desktop 5.9, and it’s now available for download. Man, you should have seen the smile that crossed my face!
Of course, I know how this will go. I’ve downloaded it, and now I’m going through the time process of allowing it to go through my computer and find stuff. It only runs when I’m not doing anything on the computer for awhile, which means it’ll mainly have to run overnight, or at least the 5 hours I’m usually sleeping; isn’t that a shame? I hope it works out just as I need it to, especially when it comes to email.
And, for all of you who were using the original version of Google Desktop and having problems with the indexing, you can be sure that if I encounter that problem with this version I’ll certainly let you know how to fix it. I don’t want to go through mess like this again.
Google Announces Its New Operating System
Posted by Mitch on Jul 8, 2009
Of course the rumors were always out there, at least for the last year, so when Google announced to day that they were coming out with their own operating system, some people were surprised, but many people who dabble online were wondering just what they thought they were doing.
This might end up being a good OS, but who’s going to know? Unlike Microsoft, it’s hard to imagine that Google will be able to convince a lot of computer makers to switch to their new OS just because they’re Google. Some might be inclined to try if it’s free, which it just might be, but it’s not going to gain a lot of attention initially, if at all.
Still, they had to do it, just as Microsoft feels they have to try to get into the search market stronger with their latest effort (how many is this now?), Bing (does anyone else ever want to break out into a song when they see that?). But one has to wonder what the ulterior motives of it all is.
Yeah, I’m sounding like a conspiracy guy, but let’s look at this for a minute. First they come out with Google Apps, which mimic all the Microsoft Office products only it’s a free online service. However, you store all your records on Google’s servers; do we really know that they don’t have the capability to scan all those records and do something with all that information?
Then they do an end-round on Firefox by developing their own browser, which they say will be faster than any other and work better with Google since they developed it. Mozilla supposedly really didn’t know until late that Google was working on the project, and when they found out, along with the rest of us, we all questioned what the relationship would be with the Mozilla Foundation, whom Google used to fund; they still might.
To date, Microsoft is still leading on office products (by the way, who else asks themselves why Microsoft has both Office and Works, yet they’re not compatible with each other?), and Mozilla is still holding a strong second. Truthfully, I think Chrome is still down around 5th, but don’t quote me on that one. I don’t know all that much about Google Apps to be able to talk about why Microsoft is still killing them when it’s free, but I do know about Firefox enough to talk about it.
Firefox is the bomb because of all the add-ons you can attach to it, which can do so many things. Neither IE nor Chrome nor Opera or anyone else can make that claim. Sure, even with the new Firefox 3.5, which I like, we all know that Firefox isn’t the fastest browser out there; Opera has always made that claim in the past (turns out that lately it might not be true). But it’s the most customizable, therefore the most fun and the most productive.
So, what about the Chrome OS? It’s best feature might be that there won’t be any viruses for it for a long time. The worst features is that, from what I’m hearing, it might not work with any of the Microsoft products on the market right now, and it’s unsure how they’ll work with other products. Sure, there’s Google Apps, but it’s not universally used, so at some point you need more in an OS than being able to tell people to load it, then go online to do everything. And, just to mention this, but right now it’s only for notebooks.
All that, and then there was this article from PC World titled 5 Ways Microsoft Will Bring the Hurt to Google Chrome OS that’s an interesting read. Microsoft isn’t just sitting around waiting for Google to catch up.
I’m certainly not the biggest Microsoft fan out there, especially when it comes to Vista, but one has to acknowledge that Microsoft is firmly entrenched in our computer lives, and we’d really be in a lot of mess if we had to deal with another operating system that has limits to what it can allow us to use and do.
It should be an interesting battle over the next five years.
Vista, The Dog Of All Operating Systems
Posted by Mitch on Jun 14, 2009
Last July, when I first started thinking about getting a new computer, I wrote about my Vista worries, based on everything I’d been hearing about it. Then came December, when I finally bought my new computer with Vista, since that’s all that was around (well, I could have paid extra for XP, but that didn’t seem so smart), and I hadn’t quite had enough time to truly evaluate it.
Now I’m about six months into it, and I think I can give an honest evaluation of it; Vista is the dog of all operating systems. To be fair, I never tried ME, which I heard was pretty bad, so I don’t know about it. But compared to all the other Microsoft operating systems, it’s the worst.
Since I’ve had this computer, it’s crashed twice. By crash, I mean the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). That’s actually not so bad when I consider what my other computer used to do. Still, this isn’t a dog of a computer; it’s got real power in it. This time, I know it’s not the computer itself, but the operating system.
The problem is the 64-bit thing. There aren’t all that many programs, at least older ones, that will work properly in the 64-bit setting. Many of my programs wouldn’t load into this OS. Some that did loaded into a different Program Files directory. Vista has two, those programs it likes, and those that it tolerates.
Some of those that it tolerates are their own products, though older versions. I have the Office 2003 suite, which I loaded. You’d think I wouldn’t have any problems with it, but it does, probably because they wanted everyone to go to Office 2007, which I saw and didn’t like.
Anyway, on my computer, there are certain programs where, if I let the computer go into its own energy saving mode, will freak behind the scenes and cause me minor grief when I come back and shake the mouse. One is Webshots; another is my email program, ECTOOL. A third is Top Style, the program I use to create my HTML pages. If those were open when I left, they’ll have corrupted when I come back. That’s not so bad, as I just have to shut them down, then reopen them again. Of course, if I hadn’t saved what I was doing in Top Style, I have to do it all again.
The real culprits, though, are Word and Excel, the two Office programs I use the most. They totally change how they look, and they freeze. Luckily, when I close them both back, they’ll have saved the files, since I made the settings save those files every 5 minutes. However, today, something new was added to the mix.
I had a business meeting that lasted about 3 hours today. I came back to the office, and once again the files had corrupted themselves. Word, my email chess program, Top Style and Webshots all had decided to pick on me. I went to shut down Word, as I had two different files open on it, when the computer decided to die on me. I got the BSOD, which is the second incidence ever that I mentioned earlier.
Then it started to reboot on me, which has never happened to me before, never on XP, and not the first time on this computer. I figured no big deal, except I’d had a Notepad file open that had some information I really wanted to keep. Then I realized I hadn’t heard a sound I’m used to hearing when the computer boots up, and looked on the screen to see something saying “ERROR LOAD OS”. What the hey? I tried hitting the button to shut the computer down, and instead it started to reboot again.
This happened a few times, and the start button never went off. I tried pulling the plug, waiting a bit, then put it back in. The first couple of times the light was immediately on, which was strange. The last time it was off when I plugged in, but it still wouldn’t boot up properly.
At that point, I knew it was time to try to boot into safe mode, so I did and it came up just as it was supposed to. I thought that was kind of odd, based on the error message I’d gotten, but I ran a quick diagnostic, and everything came up fine. I then rebooted in regular mode, but lo and behold I got the same error message again.
This time, I rebooted, but decided to go into the BIOS. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, but thought looking around wouldn’t hurt. Everything looked pretty normal until I got to the area where it talked about boot order. Oddly enough, I noticed things had changed. For whatever reason, Vista had changed the boot order so my computer was trying to load my USB external hard drives first. Now things made some sense. I don’t have any OS on either of the external drives, but once Vista recognizes it as a hard drive instead of a floppy or CD it thinks that’s the drive and that’s that. In safe mode, your USB connections don’t work the same way, as in your computer won’t boot safe mode from an external source like that, which is why that worked.
I changed the order to have my main hard drive first, saved it, booted up, and all is fine with the world once more. But I’m thinking that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, the BIOS changing orders like that.
In any case, it’s made me disdain Vista even more than I already was. I hate that so many of my good programs won’t work. I hate that things such as Zone Alarm won’t work because they won’t create it in 64-bit. I hate that I can’t run my Dragon program, which had been relatively new, because they want me to buy the latest version at $150 to work with Vista; nope, not happening. I hate that Vista didn’t come with a fax program, so I’ve had to purchase one. Yeah, the professional version came with it, but it wasn’t offered when I bought this sucker; well, I didn’t want to pay an extra $200 for it.
There’s a rumor that Best Buy will be offering a special deal for the upgrade to Windows 7 the last week of June, even though it won’t be released for awhile. I’m hearing nothing but good things about it, however, if I go this route, I don’t want to buy an upgrade, but the entire program when it’s ready. So, for now, I’m stuck with what I have, but now have to be more cognizant of what I leave open when I leave the house, or go to bed.
And that just stinks.
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