Google

Swine Google toolbar!

google errormessage The old laptop has been coming up with the rather generic error (left) of “Runtime Error! Program C:\program files\Internet Explorer.exe This application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team” for the past couple of days and I’ve only just had a chance to have a look at it. A repair of ie didn’t make any difference and it seemed such a generic error, I thought that googling for the answer was going to be a tough one. As it turned out, the solution from Wugnet solved the problem – removing the google toolbar and everything went back to normal – very strange. Like the OP in the forum, this toolbar has been on the computer with ie for a long time with no changes that I’m aware of – but then again the google toolbar does have an autoupdate facility that you can’t switch off and it doesn’t tell you that it is being updated – which makes it hard to track down problems when things like this occur.
Reinstalling the toolbar from a fresh download has produced no further problems so this should make Kristen happy again (and me too)

Google Talk.

From the bbc I found a link to Google Talk – their latest beta product enabling free voip for computer to computer chat.
What I can’t understand is the need for yet another im/voice chat running on yet another protocol. Surely all these conflicting services mean people end up with too many ways of communicating so they need to buy faster machines and bigger screens to cope with all the icons in their system tray (I have 19 at the moment!). This also seems to be moving away from the “one number gets me anywhere” philosophy that people would like. Now to get hold of me you can send me an email, ring me on the home phone, the mobile, send me an sms, yahoo, google, msn, aol message me (and you used to be able to contact me via irc but I don’t do that anymore).
The big drawback of this app is that it doesn’t do talk to landlines.
Update I’ve added my systray picture to flickr tagged with systray – what does yours look like?
My systray

Google earth and display driver.

I’ve never had my display driver blue screen and not respond, but this morning it happened for the first time. Using Google Earth I was exploring Australia when all of a sudden the mouse and keyboard stopped working and the computer beeped. About 20 seconds later I got a fault in the display and it went back to a 640*480, 16 colours resolution, told me to reboot and then send the error report to Microsoft. Immediately after sending the error report I get sent to their analysis page which tells me that a Microsoft analyst has investigated this problem and they don’t have a solution and that I should contact Intel for a solution…..hmmmmm I wonder how much of that is true. Apparently you can track this problem and get notified when/if they update a solution – apart from the fact that the wizard fails saying the page can’t be found.