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Internet Explorer 8 is out – Microsoft fails at QA…

By on March 19, 2009 in Windows Vista

Excellent. IE8 is out! I grabbed the installer they said I needed. Double clicked.

Parameter is incorrect

Ok, what’s up there then? That’s right, they didn’t flag the process as needing elevated permissions on Vista. So it wasn’t running as Administrator. Would have been nice for it to tell me. Oh well, Right click, Run as Administrator…

“This installation does not support your system architecture (32/64bits)”

Oh I need to go get the specific 64-bit one. Go get that, still have to manually run as administrator to install.

Microsoft have failed to QA that release then. /golfclap

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Apple Bluetooth Keyboard under Vista

By on November 29, 2008 in Mac / OSX, Windows Vista

I enjoy gaming. I don’t enjoy having to use a full PC rig to play them. I prefer playing on my Macbook Pro. I recently got myself the new Unibody one and wanted to play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 under Vista x64 (it has 4GB of RAM, x86 makes little sense).

After a painful install, I wanted to get my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work. When I am at home, my MBP sits up on a Griffin stand and I use the Bluetooth keyboard. However, for love nor money, I could not make the thing work under Vista. It would just keep flashing it’s little green light for no apparent reason – until I finally figured it out!

At the step where you have to ‘enter’ the passkey. Enter it, then press ENTER repeatedly. Silly? Yes! The only thing that got it working for me? Yes! It seems that you have to keep persuading the keyboard to actually stop being discoverable and be useful. This appears, to me at least, the only way to achieve it.

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Vista in death moment

By on January 13, 2007 in Operating Systems, Windows Vista

Thank you avast! for breaking my Vista install.

Bit of a shame really – but it upgraded last night and rebooted as normal. I didn’t bother logging back in, went to bed.

Got back to the machine in the morning to Log In. It said Logging Off! So I tried to Log In again and when it got to the desktop, it claimed all my Recycle Bins were corrupt and they needed rebuilding. I couldn’t even run a Command Prompt. No Start Menu, Win+E didn’t work either.

So I hit hard reset and tried to log in again. Same problem.

It appears that avast was blocking access to everything on the machine. It meant I had no premissions to access anything as a logged in user. So I promptly rebooted into Safe Mode and uninstalled it.

Problem gone!

But it does highlight an important point. Just like you don’t trust Microsoft Updates (hence why companies use WSUS to handle updates), don’t trust your AV vendor either. Always test the update on a non-major machine first.

That said – why can’t I trust my AV vendor? I have done for years!

Oh well, gone to a trial of Trend. Have you tried running Vista without AV? I can’t stand the moaning :)

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