I have been remiss, apologies
It was brought to my notice that I have been very quiet on the Blog front lately, and for that my apologies. I have been very busy with work since the end of November and also with hardware problems that have necessitated the complete re-build of both my laptop and desktop machines within the past month. That, as we all know, is an extremely time-consuming business. What sort of problems you may ask?
Well, the laptop was my own fault – I dropped it! It appeared to be OK but after a couple of weeks, immediately after a Windows Update, the video began to play up. Of course, I suspected a driver conflict with the new “patch” from Microsoft so re-installed the video drivers. No difference! The video was so bad that the only viewable resolution was 1024 x 768 (on a machine which normally runs at 1900 x 1200!). The machine was running XP and I have had problems in the past with XP losing its marbles so, after some thought, I decided to try re-installing XP (I hadn’t Freeman’d the machine in a while so it wasn’t such a bad idea anyway).
Unfortunately after nearly two days re-building the problem was still there. So I now suspected hardware and took it down to my local dealers. They agreed it was probably the controller, and said they’d have to order the part (2/3 days). Well, it was still usable so I took it home and next day it was dead. Totally! So I took it back in to my guys and they opened it up (which they hadn’t done before) and, would you believe it, a connector was loose! They pushed it back on and everything was fine again. Presumably when I dropped it, it worked loose and eventually disconnected totally. So the two day rebuild was technically unnecessary after all, but it was good to have re-built and re-installed everything anyway.
My desktop issue was more serious. I have, for many years, run Norton AntiVirus and although I have, over the past few years, become increasingly dissatisfied both with the quality of the product and the quality of their service, I had a subscription that was valid until March of this year and so had done nothing about it. Suddenly while I was at my very busiest, and for no apparent reason that I could determine, Norton refused to update my Virus Definitions and not because the subscription had expired, but because of some problem with “LiveUpdate”. I really didn’t have time to mess around, so I thought I would just re-install from my original disk.
Wrong! On plugging in the disk, a message popped up saying that the installed version was newer than the original, so either use LiveUpdate to update the existing version (which of course was the problem, I couldn’t) or uninstall the current version first.
Irritating, but reasonable I suppose, after all you wouldn’t want to trash someone’s virus protection, now would you. Oh, hang on – it already was trashed! Anyway I go to remove the existing installation, and can’t! Norton kept telling me that “installed products are using live update” and wouldn’t un-install. Tried a re-boot, no good, same thing. So I am now in the situation where:
· My virus protection is out of date because live update has trashed itself somehow
· I can’t re-install the product because the installed version is newer
· I can’t un-install the product because live update is “in use”
I tried calling Symantec Technical support. Ha! After 45 minutes on hold I gave up. I have now wasted nearly two hours that I really don’t have to spare. OK, so next I hit the registry and delete all entries I can find for Symantec, Norton, LiveUpdate and so on. Another 2 hours trying to find all the places where Symantec shoves its little tentacles. Finally I have it removed and can delete Norton and all traces of it completely.
As it happens, when I re-formatted my laptop I had bought licenses for AVAST and had installed that on the laptop. So I installed Avast on my desktop too (and so far I have been very happy with it – it costs no more than Norton and seems to be just as good, if not actually better).
Unfortunately in all my registry hacking I must have deleted something that I shouldn’t have because I suddenly found, a day or so later, that Internet Explorer would not allow me to edit a post on the MSDN FoxPro forum. I could create one, but not edit it. On the Foxite forum everything worked except the automated insertion of formatting tags. I really didn’t have time for this so I just installed FireFox and went on working.
Then the other day I wanted to uninstall a COM component, so I opened Add/Remove programs to be confronted with an empty screen! Whoops, looks like I clobbered another registry entry. I tried using the Win2K Repair factility to fix this problem. No good! After another hour or so messing around I gave up. I don’t know what the “repair” option is supposed to do, but it certainly doesn’t fix missing registry keys. The machine would simply have to be re-built.
That had to wait till last week when I finally had a couple of quiet days and could re-build the entire machine from scratch with Windows 2000, Avast and IE6 (Although I liked FireFox, and especially the tabbed browsing, too many sites do not support it properly and I really didn’t want to be bothered with running and maintaining two browsers).
So now you know why things have been quiet here. Now I will have some more time (though of course, I am now looking for new work too) and I will try to resume my Blog postings on a more regular basis.