Thursday, March 29, 2007

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Burned Seagate SeaTools for DOS to cdrom. Tested Alyssa's computer with SeaTools. disk cleanup and defrag for new laptop. Prepared a filing for reimbursement. Sent presales questions to our Pointsec representative. It surprises me that they do not support Windows 2003 Server and have stated no commitment to support Windows Vista. This lack of Vista support supports my recent thinking that it will likely be middle of 2008 before Vista is really reliable in terms of compatibility with a wide array of hardware and software. Our anti-virus and anti-spyware and firewall vendors still have not yet delivered enterprise versions of their software that is compatible with Vista. Unpacked the Targus Universal 25-in-1 memory card reader/writer (TGR-CRD25) which I bought yesterday from Radio Shack for $10 on sale. It's much smaller than other media readers I have seen in the past and measures 1.25 x 2.5 x 0.5 inches. It comes in a blister package. It unabashedly includes a safety warning: the words USE CAUTION WHEN OPENING appear next to a triangle with an exclamation mark and a drawing of scissors cutting open the blister package. The product has a 1-year warranty, which seems really short to me, considering there are no moving parts. I unpacked it but so far have not tried using it yet. Document archiving. Alyssa's computer has been very unexpectedly problematic today. It had been operating properly as expected. But while running a routine Scandisk, the computer gave a blue screen of death (BSOD) which appeared after several hours of effort to be unsolvable. Starting in Safe Mode was unsuccessful—the computer froze while loading drivers. Last known good would not work—BSOD again. Second R repair was unavailable. Hard drive passed diagnostics successfully with Dell, Maxtor, and Seagate tools. I eventually resolved it by entering Recovery Console, running fixboot then fixmbr then chkdsk /r then restart into Windows XP cdrom and then the second R repair option was available. And then it made sense—either fixboot or fixmbr probably resolved whatever corruption existed. I repaired Win XP then installed Service Pack 2 and all 77 Microsoft Updates and now I think everything is fine. These symptoms are similar to what I experienced with Steaven's computer, and I am frustrated that we didn't upgrade our computers earlier—this is wasting so much of my time. (It wasn't my decision to keep our computers in service for 5 years.) I fear these BSODs will pop up on the other computers, but at least now I have something that might work to resolve it. Did a lot of computer maintenance—disk cleanup, defrag, hard drive diags, uninstalled unneeded and old apps. Used Cindy's computer to troubleshoot the problem we have with network scanning, but an uninstall and restart and reinstall did not fix it, so I guess I'll be on the phone with Brother next week. Citrix installations. I discovered today that Microsoft has set up a website so that you can use Office 2007 in a web browser before you buy or install it. I'm writing an intro to Office 2007 for my office staff, so I'll point them to this site. Only problem is that my staffmembers run Windows XP as limited users—not admins—so I need to manually log in to each computer, visit the Office 2007 tryout-in-a-browser site to install their works-only-in-IE plug-in, test it, then log out—very annoying and time-consuming. I gave up trying to get Vista to work on my test workstation—it wasn't built for Vista and failed to start properly after shutting down—so I reinstalled Windows XP SP2 from scratch on it. It will be helpful to have this computer back in service since I need another computer to have Office 2003 applications on. I have Office 2007 on my primary machine, which means when people I'm supporting ask me questions about Office 2003 I'm at a loss for a quick answer. Windows 2003 Server SP2 installation. Acrobat 8 Pro installation for Lucia. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Good news is coming your way—it will be here any day. Chatted briefly with Drew and Phil online. Dinner at home with Patrick: Korean beef, steamed broccoli, baked potato. Chatted on the phone with Nate, then Tina. Tomorrow is a university holiday—woo! Trimmed my bookmarks page—don't feel snubbed if I removed the link to your blog; I've been using Sage to read anything that drools RSS for months now, so those links on my bookmarks page were extraneous.