Tag Archives | Microsoft

Post dated 2002-04-05 00:00:00

Friday, 05 April, 2002

MSDN Universal and Microsoft’s anti-piracy product key activation software stinks. I’ve got a new subscription (hard to gripe – it’s free, compliments of the MVP Program) and the Passport ID I’ve used to get on to MSDN in the past no longer works, telling my my sub is no longer active. I know that – let me enter a new one! I tried to create a new Passport ID and use that one to register the new subscription ID, and it complains that that subscription doesn’t exist.

This all wouldn’t be more than a minor annoyance, except that it is happening during a workstation crash. My Omnibook 7100 crashed, following the installation of a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse, and all attempts at repair were fruitless. Rebooting from CD and choosing repair got me as far as the Product Key string and – foolish me! My bad! – I hadn’t written it down somewhere. No Key, no run. 24 hours of frustration. Microsoft finally got back to me, 20 hours after I send in a technical support request email… and asked for my address. They promise they can “escalate” it with that. Another day lost…

Experiments with Twiki templates and skins were less than stellar. Managed to change the background blue. Messing with the page headers resulted in awful results. More study needed.

Post dated 2002-04-04 00:00:00

Thursday, 04 April, 2002

Last night was the Windows 2000 User Group. Joe Stagner, Technical Evangelist for the Waltham Office presented an unofficial, sometimes irreverant “sneak peek” at the next version of Windows Server, tentatively named NET Server. Interesting stuff.

Some of the links he mentioned:

http://uddi.microsoft.com
http://www.gotdotnet.com

Tough day. Working on the test laptop (HP Omnibook 7100, PII-266, 8 Gb, 160 Mb RAM), and installed a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse. Ran the tutorial, visited the web site to try to get the latest drivers, chose to ‘repair’ the installation. That was the end of that operating system. WinXP? died an ungraceful death. Last Known Good Configuration wasn’t good. Turns out the floppy drive is bad. Attempted a re-install. No Product Key. Microsoft won’t let me on to their MSDN Universal downloads so I can get another one. Doesn’t matter what I tell them – no access. So this is what good Microsoft’s anti-piracy does for them. I’ll install Win2K instead. Or maybe Linux.

Learning more about Twiki. That, at least, works.

Post dated 2002-03-28 00:00:00

Thursday, 28 March, 2002

Last night was the March meeting of the Greater Boston FoxPro Users Group. Excellent meeting!

Barb Bowman is a Windows XP MVP with a gret interest in wireless. Check out her column at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/columns/bowman/december03.asp.

Spent a few self-indulgent moments listening to my favorite radio station — WBUR — playing through RealPlayer on my laptop. The only thing was, the laptop wasn’t wired. It’s using an 802.11 radio signal to receive the streaming signal from my wired LAN, which in turn is using TCP/IP over my cable TV cable. Thousands of dollars of equipment and technology to listen to a radio station 30 miles outside its broadcast zone. You gotta wonder.

Tuesday, 19 March, 2002

The private MVP newsgroups have had some fascinating discussions on wireless, although I’m a little concerned with setting something up on the home office LAN. A high school is 100 yards away, through the backyard. Reports of 802.11b cracking of WEP-protected WLANs makes me concerned. Until today, I thought my choices were limited to 802.11 flavors a and b, with a faster, more expensive, but just as insecure. Today, I ran into HomeRF (link broken), which apparently has been around for a couple of years, and HiperLAN/2 (link broken), a European import, and power-line based home lans from Linksys. TMI – too much information!

Another item of interest today is http://www.books24x7.com, a place to read books online, for a fee. The annual fee, $299 for an individual, may sound stiff, but that’s only 6 books at $50 a year. I easily go through that many. Worth considering.

Another CoolLink for those with too much time on their hands: “The Sad Parable of OS/2” – some very good PC History, not too much Microsoft-bashing. Interesting stuff.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.