Wednesday, December 31, 2003

PowerQuest Acquisition

Just browsing to the PowerQuest website to get some info on their DataKeeper product, I see this "Symantec Acquires PowerQuest". Hmmm...

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Bought a new PC!

Bought a new desktop PC today:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Processor
512 MB RAM
160 GB Hard Drive
DVD +/- RW Drive
CD-ROM Drive
8-in-1 Media Reader(USB 2.0, Secure Digital (SD), Smart Media, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Micro Drive, Multimedia Card)
Video: NVIDIA GeForce4 MX graphics (1 AGP 8x slot available for a Gaming graphics card)
Sound: nForce 6-channel Audio

It was the PC Magazine's Editor's choice for machines under $1000

Saturday, December 13, 2003

RSS aggregator hits and misses



hit
A few days back I tried the freeware NewsMonster, which runs as a plugin to Mozilla, my current favorite web browser, or Netscape. It really was easy to install, use, and uninstall. I uninstalled it because I needed to read up how to stop it from starting automatically when Mozilla starts.


miss
Then I tried the standalone "Brindys WinRSS feed reader". What crap.
Firstly, it installs onto the C: Drive without asking or giving you any choice.
It doesn't give you the choice of web browser to use.
Then, after uninstalling, it leaves a "WinRSS website" icon on the Windows Desktop,
and it also leaves the whole C:\Program Files\BRiNDYS Software\WinRSS\RSS directory behind.
Messy, messy, messy...

Monday, December 08, 2003

PC not booting

Well, I've just got acquainted with the Windows XP Recovery Console.
My PC suddenly decided not to boot for some reason. Fortunately I had a
previous encounter with the Recovery Console in Windows 2000, so my PC
is up and running....

Saturday, December 06, 2003

Aaargh reinstall!!!

It started as a simple problem. I wasn't able to uninstall or repair Visual Studio .NET 2002
from Windows XP. I did a search on Google (after finding nothing on AllTheWeb), and what I found wasn't very promising.

It seemed the only thing I could do was to delete the Visual Studio.Net directory under Program Files, and I would not be able to re-install VS.NET. Since I actually wanted to install Visual Studio .NET 2003, that was no good.

So I deleted the Windows XP partition, and restored the (Norton Ghost) backup of the Windows 2000 I had made before upgrading to Windows XP. Then I uninstalled Visual Studio .NET 2002 from the restored Windows 2000.
For good measure I also uninstalled a few other programs I did not need.
Then I upgraded to Windows XP again. Several hours later Windows XP was running, and Visual Studio .NET 2002 was no more!

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Conspiracy

I had just seen this Dilbert Comic strip the other day.

Then one of my colleagues at work said that he refuses to buy anti-virus software from
"the same companies who also write the viruses". This is from an otherwise technically adept person.
Once again the American love of conspiracy theories triumphs over facts and logic.