Saturday, January 14, 2012

The downside of M$ Office 2010 Starter Edition


Apart from the cost and lock in file formats why would anybody choose Microsoft Office Starter?



Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition has been with us for a while. It is a striped down basic version of Office Home and Student Edition minus the PowerPoint and OneNote components. So what do you get? Word and Excel with basic viewing and editing features that meet undemanding home users basic requirements. Power user features are omitted such as macros and it's advertising supported showing a small ad box in the bottom of a side bar which cannot be turned off, hidden or resized. This version of Office Microsoft only licences to be pre-installed by an OEM. It uses Microsoft Click-to-Run application virtualization and streaming technology which doesn't have a standard executable application file like we are used to in windows applicatons. Why am I blogging about this?



This week I had to set-up a brand new Dell consumer grade laptop where the owner wanted to transfer is files, mainly pictures and Word/Excel documents from a retired XP laptop to this new Windows 7 machine. User requirements are modest just standard letters and a few personal finance spreadsheets and a moderate quantity of photos which are edited with a 1.0 release of Adobe Photoshop Elements, which seems to work fine in Windows 7, a nice surprise. Because of the modest requirements the pre-installed Office Starter Edition was chosen rather than a Home and Student licence at £70 to replace an obsolete copy of MS Office 2000. The first sign of trouble was the user first finding the ads intrusive and the sidebar taking up far more screen space than is necessary. The real issue however, because the user uses this feature frequently, is that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided to remover the ability to scan an image directly into an office document. I believe this has been a feature since at least Office 95 and most probably even before that back in the bad old days of 16 bit versions of Windows and Office. There are of course work-arounds, involving macros but of course these features are unavailable in the Starter Edition.

There is a simple solution for users of other versions of Office 2010 to scan directly into Word 2010 explained at gmayor.com which uses a simple macro that can be assigned to a ribbon bar button, details here.
Sub InsertFromScanner()
On Error Resume Next
WordBasic.InsertImagerScan
End Sub

Of course this is only useful if you are not using the crippled version of Office and are willing to pay the inflated price for the privilege. You didn't really expect Micro$oft to give you something for nothing now did you? For new improved read retrograde step! The best fix for this...




Funny how you can still scan directly into OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice; truly free software any takers?

Labels: , ,

Monday, January 09, 2012

The Netbook From Hell

Acer Expire Aspire???
I've had a problem with an Acer Aspire One D255 Netbook over the past few days. I have previously restored this one back to factory default setting via the recovery partition. Luckily when I last had it here I made the owner, a teenager, a set of recovery media. These DVDs were tested and verified and all seemed well.
Well the inevitable happened teenagers and Windows don't make good bedfellows and Windows XP Home was unusable. It was looping at boot time giving a millisecond glimpse of a blue screen of death. I did all the usual fixes after backing all the owners data using a USB optical drive, The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and my trusty copy of Fab's Auto Backup For Tech. This comprised of; chkdsk, fixboot and fixmbr from a recovery console accessed from booting a Windows install disc. Enough time was already spent so I decided a nuke and pave the system was in order.
Nuke and pave is where the old system partition is deleted along with the entire operating system. Any user data stored on that partition is also destroyed and a fresh copy of the o/s, Windows XP Home in this case, is installed. This should eradicate any virus, malware or root kit infection which may have been causing the boot failure.
For some reason the recovery partition was toasted as was the small Android partition, which is no great shakes, if you have ever tried Android on a netbook you will know it's not a pleasant experience. This may well have been due to what I expect was a serious malware/root kit infection. Installing via the verified recovery DVDs went smoothly until the reboot where the damn thing went straight back into the same boot loop. So either the recovery media is corrupt or I'm thinking there is some issue with the master boot record area of the hard disk. I tried installing LinuxMint on it just to verify that it isn't a hardware issue and it worked flawlessly except the Mint installer really does not like the paltry 600 pixel vertical screen resolution and some guess work with the tab and enter keys was needed.
So I'm thinking a fresh clean install repair install of XP Home over the top of the non-booting install from the recovery media may work. This fails after inputting the product key attached to the machine, which is accepted, a dialog box requires activation before it will login. I tried an automatic activation via the Internet using hard wired Ethernet which was also accepted but a repeat of the same dialog box requiring activation before it will allow a login. The same happens when it prompts me to do a phone activation. And no amount of Googling helps for fsck sake!
I then had a brain wave maybe its my XP Home OEM disc that is the problem, this is a proper authentic MS install disc with all holograms and product key stickers that came with a machine purchased from a reputable source. So I downloaded a OEM iso via bit torrent and installed via that with the genuine product key from the underside of the netbook. Bingo it worked, great so now I do a recovery media install coupled with a repair install from my new torrented iso and reboot.
Some Acer recovery configuration program runs on startup and hangs on the Android setup because there isn't Android partition partition anymore, so I stopped it from auto-running on boot. Now the issue seems to be that it will not activate at least the Windows Activation Utility won't run and my only choice seem to be which of the four walls I'm surrounded by I should throw this b'stard feckin' thing at first!
More Googling... according to this post “After system repair, Windows Activation Wizard won't run” on Microsoft's TechNet Forums the answer is to install IE8 from a standalone file. I expect this was due to the original recovery install being SP2 where as the repair XP Home OEM cd is a SP3 disc. This seems to have done the trick and allows Windows Update to run and fix the miriad of other niggles that reared their ugly head too.
Finally IE8 wouldn't run properly due to incompatible addons so needed to be run in "No Addons" mode to disable the errant beasties, a download of all the normal freeware and Open Source goodies to trick it out, OpenOffice.org, Java, Ccleaner etc. Run MS Update and restore the backed up data and we are good to go.
So Acer you don't make it easy do you. How's a lowly PC tech supposed to calculate the invoice for this one? If I billed it by the hour they could have bought a shiny new MacBook Air with the money they wasted on this troublesome beast.


Labels: , , ,

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Kodak RIP?



The Demise of Kodak.
If you had told me 5 years ago that Kodak would be filing for bankruptcy I would have thought you a fool, however this week I'm not the slightest bit surprised. Technology has moved on and even though Kodak were the company that brought photography to the masses they failed to capture that market in the digital age. So what could they have done to prevent a 90% drop in their share worth in the last year. I don't know the answers maybe the fact that more photos are taken with phones than any other type of camera these days or how few images are ever printed. What I do believe though is it's a shame that there is a high possibility that a brand that was once synonymous with everyday photography and the "snap shot" may well disappear. Keep up or get left behind, its a jungle out there, Woolworth's anyone?

The day after I originally posted this Slashdot.org has an interesting post claiming "Camera Phones Not To Blame" for Kodak's imminent demise, but the way we take photos and how we share them with the lack of film sales. Doh! That's a no brainer, why am I not surprised? Kodak used the Gillette business model selling not camera hardware but film (software). Where have I seen that played out before? Oh yeah the PC industry, how many PC hardware vendors have we seen go to the wall? Software makes the money folks! Microsoft anyone?

Labels:

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Google Fail

Gmail



Google Mail Fail - I find it increasingly evident that for “New Improved” we should read “Cocked Up”. Why is it that everything has to change, the constant quest for a so called “new look” and “improved user experience” seems to be change for change sake. Take the new Googlemail interface, Gmail has been my mail service of choice since it was first beta released way back when you had to be invited to join. It has had plenty of new features added but the core of the service has remained the same, great mail handling via search technology with oodles of storage space. So why now do they fsck it up by so called cleaning up the interface and removing essential features like being able to choose between mail and web search right from the search input widget? And what’s this, extra clicks to get around cause the new drop down chooser is cleaner? What the hell was the matter with the old system where at least I could tell what mail had been read from a quick glance, something that is most definitely more difficult in the new look?
Google are you changing this just because Yahoo and Hotmail have released new and un-improved services in their quest to catch up with with your (what was) superior service? For now I'm thankful that at least there is a get-out and I'm able to revert albeit temporarily to the old interface. Google watch out you are about to “do evil” and that wouldn't do for a corporation that has the motto “do no evil” now would it?

Labels: ,

Monday, January 02, 2012

It's 2012!

So what's my New Years Resolution? It really should be to blog a little more frequently!

Well the last time I posted here it was 2008, admittedly it was 31st of December but 2008, come on get a grip and get on with it man 3 years is not a blogging release frequency in any universe, even the 'Hexpekverse'.

Well 2011 was crap, hardly any good new music a dearth of decent gigs and Ubuntu fscked it up big time.

The Ubuntu insistence that we use Unity as our desktop was just plain dumb. The damn thing wasn't any good on netbooks (where is was designed to be used) let alone on a full blown workstation environment. Yes I know Gnome 2 is end of life and I realise it is an alternative to the Gnome 3 Shell but making it default on 11.04 and forcing it on users from 11.10 was a huge mistake Mr. Shuttleworth. Canonical have just dropped the ball and they better quickly pick it up 'cause Mr. Minty is waiting in the wings and he has the solution.

Music wise the Marillion convention was as always brilliant and made more special than ever due to my solo attendance. I met some amazing people who will remain friends for life and discovered some quite astounding new music from Adrian Jones and his band Nine Stones Close. Who is an all round good bloke and top notch guitar player. If you have any leanings towards Pink Floyd et al or the more modern ProgRock sounds of bands like Radiohead this is well worth checking out. As is Paul Cusick whose new album P'dice, may well be my album of 2011 if only he could get my copy to me. I pre ordered it nearly a year ago, get your finger out mate.

Roger Waters reprised Pink Floyd's The Wall at The O2. I was fortunate to have seen Floyd perform it both in 1980 and 1981 which was simply stunning, Rog surpassed himself this show was incredible. Yes I know it wasn't Floyd but with the technical advancements of 30 years it is going to take one hell of a show to top that one.

Great album releases of the year were thin on the ground with nothing totally new to get excited about. The Beach Boys finally released Smile as The Smile Sessions, Pink Floyd tried to flog us its back catalogue all over again, The Beatles finally succumbed to the iTunes machine and became available to download legitimately. They released the entire back catalogue in a remastered form which did clean up the sound somewhat but had the normal problems of too much gain to make it radio friendly. However the release of the original mono recordings was a much better sonic affair. Fair play it was worth scraping that one out of the barrel but why was it so damned expensive? EMI as all the major record companies just love to rip us off time and time again. I think the time has come where music purchasing is going to move to a completely different model and there draconian, neolithic business model is ripe for extinction.

New music as I mentioned was thin on the ground but one beacon shone out. Alice Cooper released a sequel to his 1975 Welcome To My Nightmare. Welcome 2 My Nightmare an album of completely new tunes except for an overture just to remind us how utterly brilliant the original was. Do you know what 35 years on he's pulled it off again, it's definitely my most played release of 2011 so gets my award for album of the year.

Welcome 2 My Nightmare

Labels: , , , , , ,