This time, Microsoft sent a letter saying I needed to include the top of the box from my TaxCut purchase in order to get my $40 rebate. Unfortunately I already sent the top of the box from my TaxCut purchase. A reasonably quick call to the rebate line on 1 800 622 4445 got a new tracking id and the rebate approved. Apparently it’s all staple’s fault. How it can possibly be staples fault when its a Microsoft rebate I have no idea!
Now all I am waiting for is Microcenter to give me my Vista upgrade that I was promised.
Month: April 2007
Unfortunately Lotus Notes hangs on my pc all the time with no apparent reason. It does look like it has issues with replicating databases, but the database that has problems can change and about 20% of the time it does actually work. The other 80% of the time is a pain as I am working offline, go to my mail and all the recent stuff is not there. Alternatively I go to shut down Notes and it fails because it gets stuck on trying to replicate. So my favourite tool at the moment is Zapnotes which does a good job of killing notes processes and restarting notes. Sometime though I get the error message “An error was encountered while opening a window” – this can be solved by clicking ok to close notes and then running (in my case) c:\program files\lotus\notes\nsd -kill
No need for a reboot.
Red dwarf is available for download to watch thanks to the BBC and Vuze Bah – scratch that – too many plugins and “security updates” (that don’t actually tell you what they are doing) to install . You only get to watch it for 7 days thanks to DRM – I really can’t be bothered to go through all that hassle.
One of my client pc’s kept crashing about 1 minute after login with “The instruction at 0x745f2780 referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be read”. I installed the hotfix at kb927891 but before it could finish it crashed again, but this time it prompted me to send data to microsoft and I did – that then came back with a message to install the patch that I’d just applied (although I hadn’t rebooted). Nice going with patch management Microsoft! Bearing in mind this happened on a pc which is up to date as of yesterday with windows patches via windows updates, you’d have though this sort of thing should not happen. I am not sure why it happened this morning when the initial patch came out some time last year – very strange.
I was unable to log into an ftp site I setup with a specific user after setting the site up in isolation mode. I was getting 530 User username cannot log in, home directory inaccessible from the ftp prompt and event 13, User username failed to log on, could not access the home directory /.
It turns out that by following the instructions on converting an existing ftp site to isolate users mode it worked. The trick was to create a folder called LocalUser underneath the ftp root folder and then create a folder for the user underneath localuser.
Not sure why this worked but it did.