Google Pack

I’m sure loads of people have blogged about Google pack which is a bundle of google software and third party software for free. One of the cool things is Norton Antivirus 2005 with 6 months subscription – great for people who don’t have antivirus on their machine. It would be good if they included a free firewall package AND had the ability to download the lot as a cd image (or one big install file) so I could download it and make it available for friends on a cd when I go to fix their pc.
This weekend I have a project of getting together some software for a (shudder) 98 machine including antivirus and a firewall for a new broadband user. Not sure which firewall I’m going to use just yet……

In other software updates I’m still struggling with Internet Explorer – i’ve fixed the problem when new windows would only open in firefox by downloading Setbrowser which allows you to force the computer to use a particular browser. This solved the direct problem and now I can open new windows in ie but……The problem is that now the browser seems to download part of the webpage and then hangs. The browser title will change to the title text within the webpage so I know its downloading something but then it just completely hangs. After 2 or 3 minutes (if I’ve not loaded the page in firefox) I may be lucky enough to find the whole page has downloaded successfully.
I downloaded AvantBrowser, a tabbed version of ie to see if this would have the same problem and it does (as does ie7 to a lesser degree). Unfortunately it is not possible to repair an ie installation apart from reinstalling sp2 (which I’ve done twice) but it doesn’t help matters.

On other software related issues I’ve also switched my mail server across to Surgemail, a free mail server which includes pop3,imap,smtp,webmail, spamfiltering and blogging software. It’s pretty powerful but the user interface is done through a webbrowser and is incredibly complicated and confusing. I can never find a setting that I was using just a minute ago and it doesn’t help that all the webpages are titled “Surgemail” so the back function in the web browser history is useless. It is not as good as vpop3 for downloading pop mail and sorting mail into the relevant mailboxes as it is really geared to be a proper mailserver with incoming smtp traffic for mail delivery – but it works. I’d recommend downloading a copy if you want a free local mail server and have some time to play with the settings.