So I installed two of the three VPNs I need on my Vista machine. First: isn’t there a proper UI somewhere to connect to networks? I hate that stupid “Connect to a network” window… The UI is horrible. I have to scroll up and down like crazy to get past the list of available wireless networks alone, while each of the entries takes up far too much place. Sure, I can switch over to “Dial-up and VPN”, but that setting isn’t remembered, so I have to switch over again each time I open the window …
I have previously written about the fact that OneCare killed the connectivity with my Windows Mobile device. Now I got a OneCare update installed yesterday (I think it was yesterday) (oh yes, and I loved that “OneCare is going to reboot your system in 4 hours” dialog… WTF? What if wasn’t there over the weekend or something? Can you spell “loss of data”, Microsoft?) and so I thought today I’d just try whether the issue had maybe been fixed.
Previously I had just disabled the firewall whil …
Suddenly today I noticed that my DVD drive/burner was no longer available to me. In Device Manager the device was shown, but Windows had a problem: “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)” Uninstalling and re-installing the device didn’t help, in fact the driver installation process ended with status “failed”.
So I looked around and I got lucky to find this forum post, which actually solved the problem (even without a reboot …
Another thing I don’t like about OneCare: it wants me to set automatic updates to the highest level, where they are automatically downloaded and installed. I don’t like to do that for a number of reasons — I just don’t want my computer trying to handle that kind of thing without me being there (and I have it running all day and night), and there are lots of situations during my workday when I just don’ …
This morning, OneCare told me its status was “fair”, and the detail dialog claimed there were important updates not installed on my computer. Well, here’s what the Vista update dialog has to say to that:
I have reported this issue to the OneCare feedback area, hope it gets fixed.
As posted previously, I have installed the new OneCare beta on my Vista RC1 machine. Now I found that everything’s not perfect with it: it kills connectivity with my Windows Mobile device, which had previously been working nicely. I’ve spent a moment looking around for relevant configuration opportunities and found none. I also looked for log files that might give more insight into the problem, but found none of those either. It’s possible to get a log file out of OneCare, but that doesn’t cont …
My virus scanner of choice had been NOD32 for a pretty long while now, but they don’t seem to be very supportive so far of Vista users. Same goes for ZoneAlarm Pro, which I had been using as a personal firewall solution, mainly for those situations where my laptop runs outside my own network. While the ESET guys (makers of NOD32), or at least their british support franchise, had the courtesy of replying to my mails, ZoneLabs did not, to this date, answer any of my questions about their state of …
Apparenly Vista beta 2 had a nice feature that is supposed to take the place of ActiveSync: the Windows Mobile Device Center. Daniel Moth wrote a few posts about it in the past (here and here), but in RC 1 it’s gone — of course Daniel works for Microsoft these days, so he might not even be aware that the program is not available to us ordinary Vista users :-)
The good news is it’s pretty easy to get the application back. These instructions detail how a registry key has to be created to make V …