Thursday, March 29, 2007

Yahoo to offer unlimited email storage

According to My Way News "Yahoo Promises Unlimited E-Mail Storage" and Yahoo themselves say "Yahoo Mail goes to Infinity and Beyond"

I'd rather have a Gmail account with only 2.8 GB of space and non-intrusive text adverts than infinite storage and adverts flashing in my face. Actually, I do have a Yahoo account, and the adblock extension in FireFox makes it bearable.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Still around

Yes, I'm still around, I don't have writer's block nor have I (gasp) abandoned this Blog.
I've just had some Critical crashing computer syndrome (my main PC this time) - more about that later...

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Random shutdowns

That was what my eMachines Desktop is doing. It has being doing this since around September last year. The weird thing is that the power button would stay illuminated. It is not like a Windows shutdown, but an immediate power off. I would then just unplug the power cord, wait a few minutes and then plug it in and boot up the PC.

That was until a week or so ago when it just didn't come on after I plugged it again. Of course I thought the power supply had gone for good, and started hunting for a new power supply. The next day I tried it the PC again, and it started up fine. The only problem now is that it only seems to run for a few hours before it shuts down without warning. The strangest thing is that this always happens when I'm not using the computer.

Anyway, after much web research, this seems like a there may be a few possible solutions. Sometimes just blowing out dust from inside the computer case does the trick, or a new power supply solves the problem. Then there are other possibilities like problems with the motherboard, or the CPU fan - that's when troubleshooting is just too complicated (and expensive) for a budget PC.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Weird patch results

As mentioned yesterday, I applied Daylight Savings Patches to several handhelds.
Well, this morning I checked the results. First was my Tungsten T3, and I was initially dismayed - the screen was displaying the message "Please insert CD to continue with the installation". This was was fairly familiar to me as one of the screens displayed after the hard reset process (I've had more than my fair share of hard resets in the past month). Once I had verified that my programs and data were still there I relaxed a bit. How other Palm users would interpret this message I don't know (Apparently the Palm LifeDrive displays a similar message). Palm should have really tested this patch and advised users what to expect.
My wife's Palm Zire 72 only displayed the standard "Your clock has been adjusted for Daylight Savings Time" message. I had forgotten to turn my Treo 650 off, but it had not automatically updated its time from the wireless network. It only did so when I switched the phone off and on again.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

DST Patching Away

It has been called the "Mini Y2K" (Year 2000) by some, but to me the Daylight Savings Time changes have resulted in more applying of patches than changing software code. Even at home today I spent a fair amount of time applying patches to various handheld computers. I drew the line at patching my Dell Axim with its Windows Mobile Operating System though. Sure, Microsoft had a patch for it, but to apply the patch I would have to upgrade the ActiveSync to version 4.5 on my Desktop PC (ActiveSync being the utility which handles synchronizing data between the Desktop PC and the Pocket PC).

Typical for Microsoft, as the automatic Daylight Savings Patch for Windows PCs only works on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and above - it will patch run Windows XP Service Pack 1 if run manually. If you have Windows 98 or Windows 2000 then a manual patch is required, unless you downloaded one of the third-party patches.

Back to Palm, their patch didn't work on my old Treo 600 (which they said should be patched), giving an obscure "Cannot update CityTime database" message - guess they never tested it. I got two emails today, one from Palm, and another from Verizon Wireless, both about patching my Treo 650. I didn't, relying on the network to update my Treo's time.