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Tag Archive for 'Mac'

Windows Live OneCare is a POS

Published

on 20/4/2007

in Mac, Microsoft, Vista, Windows and os x to vista

. 37 Comments

Windows Live OneCare is a fantastic idea. Write buggy insecure software and then charge the people who buy your software extra if they want to buy OneCare, which is supposed to protect them from the errors you created in the first place.

Anyone else see a conflict of interest here? Why fix the software, when fixing it, only gives people a reason not to buy OneCare!

Anyway, a trial version of OneCare came on the Vista laptop that Microsoft sent me. This morning I was sent an Activation key to upgrade from the trial version to a full version. Excellent, that will get rid of the nagware screens Microsoft have in the trial version and allow me to update the virus definitions.

Ah, the naivete, if only life (with Vista) were that simple.

Three hours and countless restarts later I was still battling unsuccessfully to Activate OneCare.

First off, if you want to go from the trial version to a full version you have to uninstall the trial version (requires a restart) and download and install the full version (requires a restart). Why? Why can’t you simply add an activation code to the trial version and it change automatically to the full version?

Anyway, after going through this process I was faced with the following unhelpful error message:

When you click the Get Help button, you are brought to a screen which asks you what the error is! I dunno. You tell me. You are the one with the bloody problem.

“OneCare has encountered a problem” doesn’t elicit any helpful responses unsurprisingly!

I decided to make sure I had done a full uninstall. So I uninstalled OneCare (and restarted) and then I ran the OneCareCleanup tool (has to be run as Administrator and requires a restart).

I then reinstalled OneCare and sure enough an Activation screen appeared - wohoo, I thought, success at last. Silly me.

I clicked on the Activate button, the screen closed and nothing happened after that. I decided to try a restart as almost everything else in this process had required a restart! Still no joy.

I tried going further in the Windows Live OneCare Support pages. Could I contact someone to help out? Of course not. Why? Because Windows Live OneCare determined that I was still in the Free Trial Period so I was only entitled to email support (24 hour turnaround).

AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I give up.

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 5

Published

Tom Raftery

on 10/4/2007

in Mac, Vista and os x to vista

. 10 Comments

I love having lots of screen space. My MacBook Pro has a maximum screen resolution of 1440×900, which, while not great, is better than the 1280×800 maximum on the Vaio which Microsoft sent me.

To get the most out of these screen resolutions on the Mac, I position the Dock on the right hand side and turn Hiding on. I put the Dock on the right (as opposed to the default option of the bottom) because the laptop display is widescreen. As a result, I have more horizontal than vertical space on the screen and most websites require more vertical than horizontal scrolling!

It is possible to mirror this on Vista by sending the Taskbar to the right and turning on hiding, however when you do that, you immediately miss the clock! I don’t wear a watch and therefore always check the time on whatever computer I am on (and I make sure my computer synchs with a timeserver so the time is accurate!).

In fact, in OS X I have the current time and lots of other information in the menubar at the top of the screen (see image below):

I miss not having all that information available at a glance, at all times, in Vista.

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 1

Published

Tom Raftery

on 23/3/2007

in Mac, Microsoft, Windows and os x to vista

. 8 Comments

This is my first blog post from within Vista - I’ll try to put up a post a day on the move across.

Of course I am also moving from a Mac to a Sony Vaio so I will also be referencing that move in these posts.

The first thing I had to do when moving from my Mac to this Vista machine was to decide on a Windows compatible RSS reader. I use NetNewsWire on the Mac.

I quickly settled on Google Reader because I could quickly export my opml file from NetNewsWire, import it into Google Reader on the Mac, log into Google Reader on the Vaio and all my feeds were there. I realise NewsGator have an online reader which is sunched with my NetNewsWire which I could have used but Google Reader is the better product.

Then, I decided to try Outlook 2007 as my email client. The setup was painless enough (I went with IMAP so the mails will be left on the server and I will be able to retrieve them from the Mac if I revert!).

However I did run into one very annoying issue with Outlook 2007. When I exported my OPML file from NetNewsWire, I asked it to keep the folder structure I had set up. Google recognised this structure no problem at all however Outlook ignored the structure and just brought in the feeds. Worse than that, if you want to delete the feeds from Outlook, you have to select the feeds individually. With several hundred feeds, this took some time. Grrrr.

In fairness to Outlook though, I had exactly the same issues when I imported me feeds into Thunderbird. Annoying.

Switching from OS X to Vista (kinda)

Published

Tom Raftery

on 23/3/2007

in Email, Mac, Microsoft, Vista and Windows

. 5 Comments

Microsoft gave me a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista Ultimate and Office Ultimate installed to try out. I have been toying with the Vaio but not using it heavily. To be fair to Microsoft, I’m going to try to switch as much as possible of my work from my MacBook Pro to the Vaio to see how I get on over the next few weeks.

A lot of my work is done online so that part shouldn’t be too difficult (I installed Firefox on the laptop last night!). However, for presentations I will continue to use the Mac as there is no comparison in the quality of presentations created in Keynote versus those done inÂ PowerPoint.

Oh, and for my photos I will continue to use iPhoto because that is where my current extensive library of photos resides.

The most difficult move will be my email I suspect. I love Apple’s Mail app. It will take a lot to win me back to Outlook.

Wish me luck!

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition running on my Mac!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 2/3/2007

in Mac and Microsoft

. 8 Comments

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is Microsoft’s free version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio Lite, if you will).

I installed it on my Mac to see if it would install and run ok - as you can see above, it runs fine!

I now have the lite/free versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server installed and running on this machine. If I were a web developer, why would I want any other machine?

Apple capitalising on Microsoft’s failings

Published

Tom Raftery

on 2/3/2007

in Mac and Microsoft

. 1 Comment

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple’s sales of Mac computers in January is up over 100% on January ‘06.

The article goes on to say:

sales of Mac notebooks grew 194 percent year-over-year in January with a rising ASP that drove 221 percent revenue growth in the segment.

“January was the third-largest revenue month for Mac notebooks ever,” he added.

The analyst noted that over the past eight quarters, the first month of NPD data has been between 7 percent and 9 percent of Apple’s quarterly Mac unit sales.

“If this relationship holds in fiscal Q2 (March), Mac sales would significantly exceed our Q2 estimate of 1.495 million units,”

With Microsoft Vista’s well publicised problems.
With Microsoft’s top executives having to spin wildly and even lie about Vista’s capabilities publicly.
With Microsoft’s most outspoken fans promoting OS X as being preferable to Vista.
With Vista’s (unhackable) Activation having been hacked.

It is no wonder that Apple’s sales are on the up and up.

And with all the investment they have tied up in Vista, it isn’t easy to see how Microsoft can turn this around any time soon.