My Thoughts

A summary of my daily thoughts.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

000001
Those are the last six digits of the serial number on my new computer. That scared me silly when I saw that. It is amazing that it has run for six days with so few problems. I think it is a real tribute to Sony that it is running so smoothly. They must have put the extra month they took after the introduction of Vista to good use.

I did have a problem with the computer yesterday. I went ahead and installed the Palm Desktop software so I could sync my PDA. Palm said the Desktop was working for the basic PIM functions, but the third party software such as Documents to Go were not compatible with Vista. The bad part was the Palm software automatically installs Documents to Go along with the Palm Desktop. I went through the sync steps and attached the PDA to the computer after installing the software. The sync was successful but generated error messages pertaining to Documents to Go. The computer behaved normally until I shut it down.

We had a very severe thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. When the sky darkened, I shut the computer down. After the worst of the storm, I turned the computer on. I noticed a message in the task bar that said some programs were blocked at startup. Then I found that I could not connect to the wireless network. The less than helpful Vista diagnostics said to call the ISP or network administrator. I was able to connect to the network with the Palm. I checked the device manager and found no hardware problems with the network adapter and the little WiFi LED on the computer was illuminated. I called AT&T's DSL number. When I told the tech that I was running Vista, she put me on hold for a lengthy time while she searched for Vista support information. She came back and led me through steps that I had already done. She then told me to call the computer support line.

I shut the computer down and rebooted. This time I was able to click on the error message before it disappeared. It brought up a window that listed all the programs that load at startup. I noticed DataViz was listed. They are the publisher of Documents to Go. I unchecked that program and rebooted. This time there was no error message and the pc connected to the network. I decided to again sync the Palm. It hung when it attempted to sync Documents to Go. It would not respond to the command to cancel. In desperation I finally disconnected the USB cable. The computer straightened out. I had to do a soft reset on the Palm, but no data was lost. I then went into Control Panel and uninstalled Documents to Go. I again synced the Palm and this time it zipped through the process with no errors.

I did more reading on the problems of iTunes with Vista. Apple released version 7.1 of iTunes last week. It addresses some of the problems with Vista but is not a complete cure. I read some awful stories of how iTunes messes up Vista. Some reported that when they attempt to burn a CD with iTunes the computer looses the ability to find the drive. After reading that I have decided to wait until Apple relased a fully compatible version of iTunes. I don't want anymore trouble.

I do have one piece of good news. This morning when I checked my AMEX account I saw that a credit from HP for the returned service policy posted to my account. That ugly episode is now closed.

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