Tuesday 10 March 2009

Fair's fair

Posted by speedygeoff on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 with
• "If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed" – Mark Twain.
(I hope Friar doesn't mind me using quotes)
(Mark Twain had nothing to say about those who read blogs)

Some recent race results
• Weston Park 5k 3 March
39. Thea Zimpel 21:36
41. Yili Zhu M45 22:13
54. Roger Pilkington M50 23:47
55. Neil Boden M55 23:50
63. Mick Charlton M55 24:33
71. Cathy Montalto W55 26:05
91. Margaret McSpadden W60 29:14
94 finishers

• Weston Creek Half Marathon 8 March
60 Geoff Moore 1:34:33 M60
63 RUN FATBOY RUN 1:35:46 first relay team
(FMF Amanda Walker, Ken White, Katie Forestier)
67 Michelle Wells 1:37:23 W35
98 Mick Horan 1:41:39 M45
119 Bronwyn Calver 1:44:05 W35
123 Roger Pilkington 1:44:25 M50
134 Kelley Flood 1:45:36 W45
163 Rae Palmer 1:49:58 W60
172 Alan Duus 1:51:29 M60
212 Ruth Baussmann 2:00:17 W55
267 finishers (individuals + teams)

Fair's fair - having given Apple a serve a couple of days ago, I thought I had better redress the balance. I would be blind, deaf and dumb if I thought Microsoft products were perfect. Although my chief difficulty is with a Symantec product, Norton 2009.

I have an HP-Pavilion desktop with an Intel Pentium processor running Vista, with Outlook 2007 for emails etc and Norton Antivirus 2009 for security. I have Internet Explorer 7 but prefer not to use it, my main internet browser is Opera.

As an aside, while Opera is a nice Browser it doesn't have all the functionality I need, and sometimes I have to use IE7. The Opera deficiencies include -
(1) select all and copy doesn't pick up pictures, links, tables: just text. Affects me when I want to email my blog contents, or want to copy a link, etc.
(2) there is no option to open html in word for editing. Affects me when I want to update ACTVAC news.
(3) copying spreadsheets removes some blank lines. Affects me when I load results to the ACTVAC database
(4) "not secure enough" for Symantec to do a subscription renewal. Which is probably just a bit of missing Symantec functionality.

However I find Opera superior in a few areas, which is why I use it.
For example
(1) backing up my blog
(2) speed dial

I want to sleep
Now to the pain. My wife and I both use this PC. Recently it failed to start up and continued to do so about 25% of the time. Recovery takes half an hour and involves a tricky restore/repair process. and then, once the PC successfully restarts, Norton tells me I am not protected. Ignoring Norton's first suggestion to "fix", I can then "run a tool" to fix it, which usually goes ahead without me later having to re-download virus definitions etc. But not always.

That's not the real problem! The solution to the restart problem was to use "sleep" mode instead of shutting down. But when my Norton licence expired last week I installed Norton 2009. Unfortunately Norton 2009 has a bug: described perfectly here which in summary is: Norton 2009 causes Outlook 2007 to fail after you switch users. Also there is some suspicion that sleep mode itself might contribute to the problem, but that's not proven and might be a red herring. Restarting the PC will get Outlook working again, but I don't actually want to restart in case the restart problem occurs again! I want to sleep. Plus just having to restart is a pain in itself.

The discussion in the pages at and following the above link haven't led to a conclusion yet, but the discussion is current and on-going. Help might be on its way, hopefully in the form of a Norton update.

Meanwhile I could uninstall Norton and install another product in its place. But that's a bit extreme; it would make more sense to use an alternative to Outlook, if that works, something I haven't thought through yet. Netspeed webmail is of course the temporary solution when Outlook doesn't work, I always use webmail when I am interstate, but I need to download emails to my PC at some stage as webmail has only limited capacity. And I like Outlook.

Or I could buy Jenny a laptop...

Who said computers are easy to use? Well, I did. What should I do next? Any suggestions?

Anyway, computers lie: