Author Archives: Laz

Acer Aspire Battery Not Charging

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Greetings all, I’d like to share with you an interesting tidbit of information that I ran across recently.  I have several customers that have purchased and been very happy with the Acer Aspire series of Netbooks.  I liked them so much I even got one for myself, and I too am very pleased with this little dynamo.  I’ll post a review later maybe, it really is a great machine. Especially considering the price, but now I will get back to the topic at hand.

One of these customers suddenly had a problem with the battery not charging.  In fact, the battery was non-existant, it wouldn’t charge or give an error light or really … anything.  Now, the little netbook ran fine when plugged into the AC adapter, so that ruled that out as being bad.  The logical assumption of course was that this customer simply had a dud for a battery.  You know, a bad cell, and open connection, whatever it is it rendered the battery useless much quicker than it should have.

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NO! I don’t want the stupid Yahoo toolbar

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I know times are tough, I got it.  And I know that folks have to make a living pretty much any way they can (I do mean legally of course).  So, it shouldn’t and doesn’t really surprise me when I see some insipid phrase telling me how I really in fact do want to install that Yahoo toolbar piggy backed onto whatever the real application is that I am installing.  I mean really, are you software authors getting that much out of it that it’s OK to piss off your users?  Every time I turn around some application or installer or updater is trying to slip that damn Yahoo toolbar into my computer.  I feel like I should get dinner and a drink first at least.

Now, I have used the Yahoo toolbar in the past, long time ago it snuck in on me.  As far as I am concerned it’s malware, cause you can’t get the damn thing fully un-installed.  To be fair, it’s gotten better over the years. The un-install part that is.  I remember way back I would uninstall it, and on the next reboot it would be back.  I’d uninstall it and then delete all of the files, registry entries, everything.  And it would come back when I booted up next.  It was like that creepy guy at work that always wants to watch what you are doing over your shoulder, it wouldn’t go away.  Still, why the hell do people bundle it all over the place?  Unless something has changed it only works in Internet Exploder … er, Explorer anyway, and I don’t use IE.  Neither do more and more people as we see the browser stats shift from IE to Firefox and Chrome.  Besides, what does it really get you?  Aside from hijacking your browser which is good for Yahoo I guess, but I don’t see any benefit to the end user.  I think it’s one of those Microsoft strategies, take a crappy product, put it EVERYwhere in front of people and hope that if you tell them that they need or want it enough times, they will be stupid enough to believe it.  Or at least incompetent enough to not know how to get rid of the damn thing.

Here’s to you Yahoo, making the Internet suck just a little more each day.  Thanks.

Solaris patchadd Return Codes

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I just posted some new goodness for all of the Solaris admins out there.  I have compiled a list of return codes from the patchadd command for both Solaris 9 and Solaris 10, and it has come in very handy over the ages.  So, I thought I would share.  Take a look at it here, and don’t forget to check out the entire library with all sorts of information in it here.  Enjoy!

Windows XP to Windows 7 Upgrade

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OK folks, here is a tidbit for you, if anyone has been checking out Windows 7 and thought that an upgrade might be in their future, well they would have been dismayed to find out that there is no direct upgrade path from XP to 7.  That means you can’t insert you good ol’ Windows 7 disk and upgrade your XP machine.  The only upgrade path is from Vista to 7.  At least that is the story from Microsoft.  I have read a few people who have posted hacks and workarounds, but I haven’t tried any, maybe they work maybe not but it seems like a lot of trouble nonetheless.  So, what’s the point of this post?  Glad you asked!  A colleague passed on this link to a tool that is supposed to support the allusive in place upgrade of Windows XP to Windows 7.  Now, I haven’t tested it yet since it’s a commercial app, but I am going to see if I can get a demo in order to do a proper review.  If anyone has tried it, or does try it please drop a line and let me know how it works out for you.  Enjoy!

http://solarum.com/v.php?l=0949Ka29

Verizon Email Update and Solution

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You have heard me share information about the fiasco that Verizon created.  In case you haven’t heard, I’ll recap quickly.  In the name of fighting SPAM, Verizon decided that they would block ALL port 25 SMTP traffic on their network for all of their ISP customers.  That means that anyone and everyone that uses Verizon as their ISP (DSL, FIOS, Dial-up, etc) cannot use any third party mail server or service that is configured to use the industry standard port 25.  That’s just plain stupid, but I have complained about that already.

I was in a quandary with this one, or maybe a catch-22 is a better term.  If I didn’t do anything about this “problem” that Verizon created, then all the people that I host email services for that use Verizon as their ISP are now out of luck.  They can’t send mail through their (read: my) mail servers.  So, I can just change the port that sendmail listens on, right?  Yeah, I could, and then my Verizon tethered customers can send mail again … but, all my other customers that don’t use Verizon have to change their email client settings too, since they would still be sending through port 25.  OK, I didn’t want to go down that road.  I wanted to fix the problem with the least impact on everyone. Continue reading →