Some of you may be wondering why my blogging frequency has dropped recently. Well, I've been busy!
I have been doing a lot more webmastering work as of late than is typical for me. Jobs that I have recently worked on include:
- Helping do a vbulletin forum upgrade over at Kenzer & Company.
- Creating a blog for my daughter and her friends over at Yellow Pole.
- Moved a friend of mine off of MySpace to his own domain over at Grimjesta.com.
- Setting up a basic website for my local girl scout camp.
- Designing a custom database for the same girl scout camp to use in tracking staff, campers and other bits of information. No, I'm not going to provide a link to this one as it is password protected!
- Trying to help my wife decide on a new computer to purchase. What we do know is that we will not be buying a Vista machine!
- Doing some tech support calls for local PC problems. No, I will not support your Vista machine so don't ask!
The funny thing about Vista is that I got a call from my Dad over the weekend and he had a Vista question for me. The first thing I told him was that I don't support Vista!
Now, before you think I'm being mean to my Dad you need to understand something. My Dad has been writing code since the 1970's. It is because of him that I got into coding in the first place. He wrote database applications from scratch to run on Unix machines years ago. He wrote in the days when you had to count every bit because RAM was a finite resource measured in KB not GB!
The problem he has is related to another issue. He recently sent a laptop back to the manufacturer because of a defect. Rather than fix the one he sent back (multiple times) they sent him a brand new one... that had Vista loaded on it.
He then began to load his old software onto it and encountered a few problems. The main problem is that one of his programs would not install correctly and, when he went to delete it, Vista would not allow him to delete it!
Remember, my Dad is not a computer n00b, he knows computers and it is only in rare circumstances that he can not figure something out. This time he was stumped.
Vista kept telling him he did not have the correct permissions to delete files, even though he was running as admin. He tried to change his permissions but he could not. He was locked out of doing what he wanted to do by this.
He tried going online to find some answers but the answers he found required so much work (i.e. registry hacks) that he just said the heck with this and went on to do other things. More enjoyable things such as playing golf and visiting with friends.
- No related posts
Ugh! I hope I don’t run into your Dad’s issue with my mom’s new PC. I had been hoping to avoid buying her a new system by replacing the hard drive and when that didn’t work (motherboard issue according to geek friend) had to go with a new PC - this was the most cost and time effective answer.
Unfortunately, I had to get Vista (well, I could have probably figured out a way to get XP but she’ll have that system for hopefully 4-5 years so I just got it over with).
Registry hacks?? Registry hacks? Dang!
Not just any registry hacks but a hack for every single file he wanted to delete!!!
It’s great you’re keeping busy! Are you buying a computer already built? Or are you going to buy the parts and put it together yourself? I always got newegg :D
If I go the “make your own” route than I can’t use my classic, “Hey, you picked it out,” line.
Or…you could just get a Mac.
We are leaning towards a Mac because all the “pre-made” PC companies are no longer offering XP as an option.
I know someone who signed up with Dell as a small business and as such was offered deals on PCs loaded with XP. Dell knows that small businesses need to stick with XP to support their clients so they’re showing they still support it on their prebuilt office systems.
You’re going to have to get with the times eventually. Vista is stable now and there are a lot of improvements over XP. XP’s biggest update, service pack 2, is almost 3 years old now. Service Pack 3 isn’t due for another year. After that, I doubt they’re going to resume XP support.