Alan Kleymeyer

Eric has a posts about Absurd Customer Service.
In larger companies, support is hit or miss.  With smaller companies there is a good chance you will get the best support you’ve experienced.  At DVFilm, if there is a serious problem with our software we are even able to release an update within a few days of discovery.  We also do our best to respond to all support requests within 24 hours but often response within just a few hours.  I know for me, there isn’t a better feeling than sending a support email and getting a response within minutes!  We use Google Mail so that multiple people can monitor the support emails.  The threaded structure of GMAIL, the labeling, search capability, and the client notification tool makes it ideal for support.  One thing I wish worked different, however, is how Google keeps track of the last account signed in.  We have multiple accounts in various Google properties, such as GMAIL, Blogger, Docs, and I want to be able to login to one account without changing the currently logged in account in all the other services.

Having problems getting multiple computers to talk to each other?

I have two XP Windows machines, a Vista laptop, a Mac mini, and a MacBook Pro I wish to network.

Sunthar summarizes some of the setup steps on this post.

For me, these were the important things I needed to do:

1. Make sure all computers are using the same work group. WORKGROUP seems to be the best one to use that is also mac friendly.
2. In the sharing properties for the folders I want to share,  added EVERYONE to the list of people I wanted to give permissions to. Made sure I selected FULL permissions.
3. In  Vista,  in Network & Sharing  Center, I made sure that Network Discovery, and File Sharing was ON. I turned on Public Folder Sharing and set  it to  FULL sharing.   Go HERE for an excellent step by step with screen shots.
4. On  XP machines, I installed the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder(LLTD).

Sunthar's post and the the linked article and threads include many more troubleshooting suggestions.  It's not for the faint of heart.  I wish I could say that there is a simple or definitive solution but there isn't.  You have to try different things and see what works for you.  The above four steps were all I needed to ADD (who knows what I've done on EACH machine in the past to prepare it to be networked).

Good luck.

On a newly created XP machine, when I went to share a folder it reported that sharing had been turned off and I would have to run Network  Setup to enable this feature.  I did.  Still couldn't login to the PC.  I then ran across this which did the trick:

One other solution which a lot of people miss is that you can not log onto, nor see the shares of, a target PC unless you have at least ONE folder shared on the target. Once you set up the share, on the source PC you will see the target's printers folder plus the shared folder.

I guess the shortcuts feature of the XP Windows Desktop Search was too geeky to carry over to Vista?  It was what I liked most about it.  The ability to type in a short acronym to bring up a  file, run a program, navigate to a website or many other actions, from a small area on the taskbar was awesome!

Thankfully, Brandon has made his Start++ program available that gives you the same functionality in Vista.  If you are developer, it is a must have.

My first MP3 player was a Creative Muvo. It only lasted a year.  Then I got some generic MP3 player with a small one line screen.  It supports playlists and generally works pretty well but the design is not very friendly.  It’s David’s now.  Then I bought an iPod shuffle for Jane followed by a shuffle for Cassidy. A few months ago we upgraded Cassidy’s shuffle with an iPod 4gig Nano.  I’ve "inherited Cassidy’s shuffle, Jane is still happy with her shuffle (Jane wants me to include that she ROCKS because of this).

My next portable music player will probably be a Zune.  It may or may not match the experience and design of an iPod, but I bet it will at least come close.  The least expensive Zune compares favorable with an iPod Nano.  They both cost the same at $149.  The Zune has a built  in FM tuner and can sync wirelessly.  The screen can also display in both portrait and landscape.  Although in recent years I’ve split my allegiance between Apple and Microsoft (Jane’s mini, our 3 ipods), we are an XBOX family and the Zune has some nice integration features with XBOX and Windows Media Center that I’m eager to play with.

Yeah, my next portable music player will probably be a Zune, unless I opt to go with the Apple iPhone!

Here are a few interesting articles regarding the Zune:

Zune vs iPod
Zune vs iPod specification smackdown

8 Zune Myths

Zune vs iPod, the final word on who should get your money

I was unable to print today because there was a job that was pending and I couldn’t delete it.
Ralph explains you can restart the spooler in a command prompt window by typing net stop spooler, net start spooler.  In Vista you must start the command prompt window as an administrator.

Thanks Ralph!

My in-laws received this Westinghouse DPF-0802 Digital Picture Frame for Christmas.

They also received a 1Gig card which came preloaded with 512mb of family photos. 

The frame has a resolution of 800×600 pixels and has 128mb of internal flash memory.  It supports the following memory cards: CF I,II / MD / MS / MS Pro / MS Duo / MS Pro Duo / SD / MMC / XD.

I located a very nice free image resizing program called VSO Image Resizer and promptly went about resizing all photos stored on the 1g card; some up to 5mb in size.  I  reduced the disk usage from 512mb to 30mb !

I wanted to copy some photos to the internal memory but they didn’t have an appropriate cable (USB to mini-USB).  I went shopping and a basic mini-usb to usb cable cost $27. Rediculous.  Fortunately I passed by the console accessories aisle and found a mini-usb to usb and charger combo cable for the PSP for $4.95.  I bought it and it worked fine.

Though with the Image Resizer program, the internal memory was sufficient to hold all their photos, it became clear that the easiest workflow would be for Sue to simply pull the 1gig card from the Picture Frame, plug it into her laptop which has a camera card slot, copy over the photos she wants and plug the card back into her Picture Frame.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a universal card adapter to  buy.   The  Picture  Frame  with it’s support for numerous cards could actually serve as an adapter to move files from one card to another.  I  was able to copy photos from Jane’s new Sony Cybershot camera.   She didn’t have her USB pc cable but I was able to read her Memory Stick Pro  Duo 2g card from the Picture Frame and connect my laptop using the cable I bought to download them.

Technology gets more accessible but remains as hard for normal  folks to use.

Back in June I wrote this post sharing my research on ordering replacement ink online.  I chose to try InkSmile. It wasn’t the cheapest but with other factors taken into consideration (money back guarantee, discount coupons, referral program, free shipping, reviews) it felt like the best choice.  I’m happy to report that my experience has been excellent and I highly recommend it.  If you give it a try and need a referral number (I get 5% credit) use mine: 52786.

Here is how SteveX does it.
I’d like to know how to transfer Windows Media Player ratings from one PC to another as well.

My Online Status for Yahoo IM is suppose to display along the left column of my home page here.  It has never worked.  I finally wrote TypePad technical support but the response did not lead me to a solution (make sure you aren’t logging in as invisible, make sure your status is available to all).  I investigated further and came across this post.  I viewed the source of my weblog home page and compared the code that is suppose to show status with the example in that post.  I recognized that the screen name that was being used on my weblog included @yahoo.com and it should have only been the screen name.  Updating my Typepad profile with only the screen name did the trick.    Another example of how computers are still way to hard for a normal person to navigate, and how great technical support is hard to come by.

I’m starting to provide technical support for DVFilm.com.  Hopefully, my experience on the other side will help me provide the type of technical support I have come to expect.

Article here

No doubt you’ve got a home wireless network or you’ve connected to hotspots at the local coffee shop or airport—but are you getting the most out of your Wi-Fi? Whether you want to strengthen, extend, bridge, secure, sniff, detect, or obscure your signal, today we’ve got our top 10 best Wi-Fi utilities and tweaks for the power wireless user