Saturday, September 25, 2004
Cut my hair. Brunch with AJ and Patrick. Patrick made a fruit salad, beignets, and Community coffee and chicory. AJ brought his 2 laptops. He needed to migrate his data from one to the other. I hadn't known he hadn't even turned on the new one. Dell has been very troublesome for him, and he only has this new laptop for another month before they send him a new one. I had to set up the new computer first. I started around 11:30 AM and finished around 4:30 PM. The biggest problem was when we tried to register McAfee VirusScan 8—we got this error message: "McAfee Product Setup: McAfee Security Setup Error: Your Dell PC Has Already Been Registered for This Offer: Your Dell PC has already been registered for this McAfee product subscription. If you need access to your service, click the "Log In" button. You can also obtain specific support related to this Dell offer at: http://ts.mcafeehelp.com/dell (Log In) (Cancel)" The only thing I found in Google was a description from April 2004 of the exact same problem at techtales.com. No solution—just (rightly) making fun of McAfee for sending the customer to Dell (because McAfee's software was pre-installed) who had originally (and rightly) sent the customer to McAfee (because it's a McAfee registration problem, not a Dell problem). We had typed in a login and new password on the previous screen, but when we click Log In and try to log in, we get another error: "The email address or password you entered was invalid. Please try again." When we choose the "Forgot Your Password?" link, we're asked to enter the e-mail address we used to register then click Get Password. So we do, and the error we get is "The email address does not exist in our system. Please try again." These problems are consistently reproducible. It seems that McAfee is incorrectly determining that the copy of McAfee on our PC has already been registered. Our solution to this problem will likely be to go to the store to buy Norton Anti-Virus, disconnect from the Internet, uninstall McAfee VirusScan and McAfee Firewall, then install Norton Anti-Virus then install the free version of ZoneAlarm. I warn Aaron that it's a choice between spending $40 and spending hours talking to inefficient technical support teams. (If they were efficient, the answer would already be on the web by now.) Neither of us are rich, but this choice is a clear one to both of us—we both would opt to spend $40 for Norton. Lunch: quesadilla, tortellini with red sauce. I set up networking between the 2 using a crossover cable, set up TCP/IP with static addresses 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 (subnet 255.255.0.0) with File and Printer Sharing and in the same workgroup. Still had trouble connecting until I shared the hard drive roots. Melissa comes over with several beautiful dahlias for us, and I help her do more setup with her new laptop computer as well. I introduced her to hosts files, Firefox, AdBlock, and KeePass all in one day—it was all a little much, but I think she can handle it. We invite her to stay for dinner: steamed rice, stir-fried cow slices in a soy sauce marinade, baked sweet potato with nutmeg and hazelnut oil. After she left, I chatted online briefly with Travis, then Patrick and I watched 2 Simpsons episodes. Mikey sent us a thank you card and photo cdrom for his recent visit. Thanks, Mikey!