After weeks of pain, dealing with the fact that my mouse (external, trackpad or pointer) stopped working in Word 2007 and Outlook 2007 after a random amount of time after launching, and having have tried a myriad of “solutions”, I finally came across the relevant and final solution to the problem.

While performing my research into this issue, it struck me as interesting and odd that a great number of posts made mention of the hardware where this issue occurred and it was consistently a Lenovo Laptop.  Different models, but all Lenovo.  Guess what my hardware make is where these sweet problems where occurring?  Yeah, my new Lenovo W500.

If you own a Lenovo laptop running Windows 7 (any version, any platform), the problem is most likely NOT one of the common ones you may have already run across, that include:

• Delete the “Data” key from the registry key
• Reinstall Office/Change the Key
• Disable add-ons
• Launch the app by going the “Run as Administrator” route.

I tried all of the above, mostly in haste after running quick searches and implementing “quick fixes” in what I perceived to be the right way to approach the problem/solution given my limited amount of available time during my very busy and hectic schedule… wrong… I should have dug deeper, I should have persisted and I would have found the solution that ended being the relevant one that applied to my situation.

The real culprit: Lenovo’s Password Manager Utility.

Solutions:

Drastic: Remove, Uninstall, Wipe, Annihilate.
Less Drastic:

1. Open the “Password Vault” utility.  Either search for it, or click on the appropriate shortcut if available.
2. Click “Set Preferences”
3. Under “General” tab, uncheck “Enable Hot Keys”
4. Click “Ok”
5. Close
6. Reboot

That is the summary, for all the thread’s details and other noise, if you feel like it, go to the Microsoft Communities post itself.

I just got done with running the upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my previous Vista Ultimate x64 system. 

Kudos, two thumbs up, hooray and well done!

Painless, quick, efficient, transparent.  System is performing like a charm.  The only one visible change was that it swapped my wallpaper.

After having pre ordered it from Amazon (sorry, no links… not making it easier for anyone to give ASUS business they don’t deserve) and paying a hefty $375 for it (in comparison to the competition), the unit shipped on February 7th of this year 2009 and I received it a few days later.

I was motivated to pre order, because as I had read somewhere in the “interwebs”, that the ASUS 1000HE was the first one to offer the (back then) new Atom N280 processor.  Sparing anyone the details of what the benefits of the N280 processor are over its brother the N270 processor (yes, to me processors are MALE because they do all the hard work and the heavy lifting, plus they can multitask!), but suffice it to say it was not because of the clock speed difference: 1.60ghz for the N270 in contrast to the whopping 1.66ghz of its big brother the N280.

3 months after, the unit’s integrated wireless card sadly died.  I called, got on their phone with their tech support, explained my case and after running a series of unnecessary tests to satisfy their need to prove the customer is not an idiot, it was determined (you don’t say?) that the wireless card was indeed kaput! As if I didn’t know already, but oh well… the RMA was issued and the unit went out the door and unto little machine hospital care. 

Little did I know, “little machine hospital” care turned out to be the worst HMO anyone would ever want to put their selves into their hands.

About a month later I received the unit back, and promptly turned it back on making my first order of business to test that the wireless card was indeed in working order.  Oh jolly, yeay! it was.

Don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you, and maybe its part of my stupid OCD habits, but I decided to check on the hardware specs by “right clicking” on my computer and selecting properties (you know these .  Oh, I remember, I wanted to confirm it had 1GB of memory and not 2GB, because my ultimate plan was (and quite honestly probably still is) to install Windows 7 on it.  I wanted to set out to buy extra RAM for it.

This is what I saw:

Surprise and darn! WTF??? 1.6Ghz Atom N270… not Atom N280… hmm… am I going crazy?  So I go and check Amazon’s receipts and sure enough, It says right there I bought a unit with an N280 processor. 

I then went and check the box in which the unit originally shipped, the same one I used to ship it back to repair the wireless card (yes, I keep that sort of stuff laying around.  I told you I have annoying OCD habits).

Sure enough, you can see the serial number AND that it is an EEEPC 1000HE, even the color is listed so thank God they didn’t send me back a pink one! can you imagine the post I’d write? 

There it is: INTEL ATOM280.

I quickly call them up, state the case and … surprise #2: with what sounded to me at the time, a very condescending forcibly polite little tone of voice, the tech proceeds to tell me that “it is all ok, because right here in my system it says that the serial number for your machine indicates the unit shipped from factory with a N270 processor”  I literally felt my head flush with the fluids of irrational anger and almost had to run and put it under the bathroom sink faucet to cool it off.   10 minutes later, after futile attempts to use logic to explain that “it must be an error”, I concluded with the statement “I don’t give a fuck what your system says, my unit was purchased as, was shipped from Amazon as, and I used it for 2 months as configured with an N280 processor” and followed it up with “what do I need to do to prove to you guys you are verging on committing retail fraud or at the very least deception by assumption of stupidity?”. 

Long story short (yeah right, but believe me when I say this is the abridged version) I had to write an essay about 5 times lengthier and angrier than this post is turning to be, and included every picture possible to prove to those idiots that I am not an idiot and that indeed my EeePC was originally equipped with an N280 and they shipped it back after repair with a lesser processor, the N270.

Blah, blah, blah, yada-yada-yada… about 2 weeks later I finally got a new RMA, and after my strong position that I wasn’t going to pay for shipping so that they can correct their blatant mistake, they included a pre-paid shipping label.  So I shipped it out and readied myself to let the waiting begin.

Yesterday after approximately 3 or 4 weeks, I received my EeePc 1000HE back from ASUS technical service (well technically speaking, I picked it up).  

Got it home, power it up and of course the first thing I do is go into the BIOS to check the processor… surprise, surprise, or should I be surprised?  You guessed it… same shit.  N270 Processor… this is even AFTER their order slip reads and says they actually replaced it AGAIN with the N280 (see the picture of the body of the repair slip included in the box back from the repair center):

Breath in Guillermo, Breath in… on the phone again, calmly explain the situation to the rep on the other side and guess what line they tried to feed me yet once again? “sir, the serial number for your machine shows that…” I said “STOP… STOP it right there and get me the highest ranking someone that I can talk to right now that is not going to insult my intelligence”.  She did, and I got Irish on the line, and she listened and did not try the “the serial number says” line again on me, although in all fairness i did warn her about it.

I am still waiting for yet another RMA, yet another pre paid shipping label and will send it out again.  This unit has spend more time in transit and in repair than it has on my lap and in my house.  I am not hopeful, but I have no recourse so I’ll try to make myself a believer.

Maybe I am not helping my case, but I felt compelled to and so I did… and wrote a note to the poor soul who is fortunate enough to be dealt the card of opening this box when it comes into ASUS’s technical black hole.

Here it is in all its glory.  Tell me what you think.

According to Baseline Magazine, you should make room on your bookshelf for the following books:

1. Managing the Human Factor in Information Security: How to win over staff and influence business managers by David Lacey
2. Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance by Randolph Kahn, Barclay Blair
3. The Truth About Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter by Paul Osterman
4. Strategic Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams by Terry Schmidt
5. Growing Software: Proven Strategies for Managing Software Engineers by Louis Testa
6. Identifying and Managing Project Risk: Essential Tools for Failure-Proofin​g Your Project by Tom Kendrick PMP
7. The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment by John Lamb
8. Winning the Hardware-Softwa​re Game: Using Game Theory to Optimize the Pace of New Technology Adoption by Ruth D. Fisher
9. The Deciding Factor: The Power of Analytics to Make Every Decision a Winner by Larry E. Rosenberger
10. Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) by Johanna Rothman

Once I stumble across a list like this, I’ll likely read a couple… already ordered one of them.

Fresh off the production line, a P2V tool by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, formerly of Sysinternals.

The tool is called Disk2Vhd and this is the 1.0 offering, and is now part of the Sysinternals Suite.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.

This assumes “other” tools require you to power down the system you wish to create an image of.  I guess this sounds reasonable to expect, and since I haven’t used either tool yet, I am not one to make a judgment call.

I am turning my old Dell 600SC server into a virtual host exclusively and in doing so I need to P2V it and store that image on my new NAS and then host it virtually amongst other environments I plan to add.  These tools are now a critical component of that plan and my plan is to write a post about the process and results once I get to doing it.

This has simplified my Christmas shopping for all my married friends.

Me?  Naahhh, I don’t need that!  Right honey?

I realized this has been around for a while, it is so dead on though, I couldn’t help but share it.

I just signed up for a 24/7 Web Monitoring service, and granted it is probably a startup and probably going through growing pains, I still couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony.

(Image hosted FREE by pict.com)

I needed a virtual machine to test an application in isolation and realized I didn’t have any of my .vhd images on hand.  

I looked around and came across this collection of downloadable VHDs directly from Microsoft, pre-activated, for both Vista and XP with different versions of IE including IE6 (XP only), IE7 & IE8.

The OSes are trial versions (of course) and expire January 1st for the XP installs and 120 days after first use for the Vista images.

Images require at least 1.5GB of HD space once expanded, so make sure you have some room available for it.

It appears the word/verb “Refactor” is absent “out of the box” from all if not most of the environments that provide a spell checker service or feature.  At least the ones I’ve used lately and since I started to notice.  From (this) Live Writer to Word to within the browser on the update textbox of twitter, you name it, I keep having to “right click, Add to Dictionary”.

Wikipedia does have an article for the term “Refactoring”, and so does Dictionary.com but the “verb” Refactor is not on either (Wikipedia redirects to Refactoring) and Merriam-Webster comes up empty when searching for either.

Is there a way to carry around one’s dictionary from environment to environment and use it on all if not most of the aforementioned tools? 

I guess I have to do a little bit of research, and no I won’t hold the post until I do.  I’d rather note my observation and I *should* then later do the legwork and update with my findings.  I reserve the right to slack on such task, do nothing and instead keep “right clicking, Adding to Dictionary” as I go.

Image by hisks

If you take the approach to clean up after yourself as you progress through whatever maybe your daily routine, and create this good habit for everything you do, you’ll end up avoiding what is almost unavoidably natural for most of us: procrastination.

Whether it is while you cook, write code/implement software solutions, do the laundry or go though things on your desk at the office, if you let things pile up… well, you’ll end up with a pile of <insert appropriate noun here>.

Why not keep your projects, solutions, classes, layers, frameworks, third party components et.al. in an organized manner right off the bat?  Regardless of the size and scope of the project, platform or technology…  Why wait until it becomes a tangled mess of bad historic legacy waiting… clamoring for someone to come in, criticize, refactor and “waste time” cleaning up your mess?

Why wait until your roommate, spouse, parent or sibling comes around and has to deal with piles of dirty dishes, filthy counters or messy bathroom?

I believe it is one of the easiest forms of procrastination to avoid with the highest payback in quantity, quality and immediacy of satisfaction.

Be it with the proverbial or actual dirty dishes, don’t be a slob, love yourself and those around you and Clean as you go… whatever that may end up being.