Okay. Success: it installed.

Now for the hard bit: getting the thing to (a) recognise there’s a treo connected, and (b) getting it to perform a full sync without crapping-out halfway through with some incomprehensible error message that not even the programmers in Redmond understand.

Restart time: here we go again…

I just had a heart-stopping moment there: straight after the PC manufacturer rubbish (Press F8 to do unspeakable acts to the BIOS), there was a black screen and a blinking cursor.

Phew, Windows hasn’t suddenly turned into a turgid pile of horse droppings infested with the worms of a thousand parasites. Well, no more than usual.

(By the way, before anyone complains how much I’m bagging windows tonight, consider, I’m well into my fourth hour on this sodding thing. I’m entitled to feel a little annoyed).

Okay, sync-time!Well, we’re back to what we had before the uninstall/reinstall loop.

Activesync refuses to accept there’s a Treo connected, while Windows syas there is.

Found New hardware it keeps saying, like a small dog with a sudden unabiding love for your leg.

Okay, I’ve waited a bit, and restarted the treo. Activesync seems to think it can deal with it now. And we’re Synchronising……with another sodding status bar that does NOTHING!

Let’s see what happens next…

And so it goes: Now to MS ActiveSync.

I’ve just uninstalled this, after 15 minutes trying to get it to understand that there was indeed a Treo connected via USB, and am now installing again.

Norton is up to its old tricks, holding everything up, like a bored gatekeeper at the gates of a rock-concert.

And now we’re back to the boredom of watching the installation status crawl from one end of the dialog to the other.

It’s like a rainy day in wales: full of restless natives stuck inside and unable to bag London.

Wake me when it’s done will you? *snort*, wassat?

Oh, now it wants me to install. What? I thought I just did that?! So what the hell’s it been doing for the last 5 minutes? Warming me up?

Come on, I need to be up early tomorrow.

I’ve had better days at school being morbidly depressed!

Hey, we’ve got yet another status bar. Honestly, what’s the bloody point of a status bar if you keep renewing it every 5 minutes?! What’s the point if you don’t actually display anything going on?

Come on you decrepit piece of monkey effluent! Install for crying out loud! It’s only 6 hours to daylight. Some time soon would be nice!

Dear Hewlett Packard,

I have a friend who owns both a Windows XP PC and a HP Officejet 9110 multifunction print,fax,scan,copy machine.

I’ve recently been asked by her to clean-up and reinstall her system for her, a task which took a little time due to the computer being the aforementioned Windows machine.

However, I have achieved this task admirably.

That is, until it came to reinstalling your printer.

Initially I thought that the Windows drivers might handle the printer; the system certainly popped up saying the system had found the printer with monotonous regularity. But alas, this did not work once I shifted the printer to the Apple wireless network. It didn’t even work when the printer was connected to the computer!

So, I reconnected the printer to the computer and started again, with your purpose-built HP Officejet 9110 CDs which came with the unit.

This took a little time to install, but it wasn’t an issue, I felt like a latte anyway. When I arrived back from the shop, I found the software had installed. A quickish restart, and there appeared to be no more complaints.

Being the arse-covering tech that I am, I tried to print. This worked. Good; just what I was hoping for.

So I tried to scan something.

The printer initially came up with an error stating there was no software installed.

Funny, I thought, I could have sworn I just had a latte while waiting for the software to install. A quick check revealed my empty cup and there, in the Start Menu, was HP printer software.

Odd, I thought.

So I tried the process in reverse by firing up your image management software. Another latte later and it was up and running.

I clicked the scan button in the UI and was greeted with a message saying there was an error connecting to the scanner.

I checked the cable. Yes, connected. But of course it was connected; it just printed something.

Right, third try; Let’s try someone else’s software: Apple’s Bonjour in this case.

This solved the printing, but not the scanning.

Back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the Control Panel and the Add Remove Programmes folder, where I attempted to uninstall the HP printer programmes.

But to no avail; An error message told me I would have to attempt uninstallation again once I’d restarted the machine.

I resisted the urge to go out and get another latte; the caffeine was beginning to make me twitchy (or perhaps it was the ongoing frustrating failures of your software to speak with your hardware?). No matter; I was made of sterner stuff, so restarted the machine once more.

Then I tried the same process: Start>Control Panel>Add Remove Programmes.

And I got the same error message.

I wondered briefly if I had offended some heathen god, but persevered, finding an unistallation programme in the Start>Programs>HP printer folder. This uninstallation worked, and required only one more restart of the system.

Like the dutiful hardware user that I am, I performed said restart, located the HP CD once more and commenced the software reinstallation process. I went for lunch, knowing that it would finish some time before I arrived back.

And I was right, it had finished, and required another restart to make things work.

So I restarted the system and tried printing again. This worked. Good.

I tried scanning again. This did not.

I’m at a loss why your hardware won’t talk to your software and vice-versa on a clean installation of Windows XP SP2. There’s a direct connection, there’s nothing wrong with the cable (as evidenced by the fact the printer can receive a print message and that XP goes freaking bananas and beeps repeatedly at me when it’s connected); so what’s the issue?

Perhaps it thinks I should be running Vista. Think again bozo.

Perhaps it misses the old installation of XP? So sorry, it’s dead; move on.

Perhaps even, it just doesn’t like the muttering and cursing I have allowed to be uttered in its presence while trying to get it to work? Well, to quote The Master: tough, I’m like that when I’m frustrated at inane plastic objects refusing to work.

Whatever the reason, one thing is certain: as long as there is breath in my lungs, as long as I have conscious thought processes going through my head, I will Never Ever purchase an HP product.

Yours with much love and kisses,

Lisa 4.0

Watch from 00:34 – 01:00 for what I’m feeling at the moment with this sodding application that I’m attempting to document.

HP* -  Shite!

MS** – CRAP

Why? Installing printers. Try installing a printer on an HP laptop… a printer that is connected to an apple airport network… and you’ve got hair ripping fun for the whole freaking family.

Here’s one of the many sites that I’ve just found — at 11pm at night while in bed — to potentially find a cause for the issue.

Bottom line, however, was that my plan to be in bed by 9pm has gone right out the damn window.

However, I have discovered — or managed to put into words — something that has dogged me for some time.

Which is this: I take failure personally.

—————-

*or as I now call them, Hewlett CRAPard

** Great piece of dialogue in “The Last of the Time Lords” (SPOILER ALERT), from the professor trying to get a computer to work: “Whoever thought we’d miss Bill Gates.”. I L O L’d.

Disappointing.

That’s what I call the Kensington Expert Mouse trackball.

It’s my own fault, of course. I bought it sight-unseen. That is, I’d seen the site and thought that it couldn’t possibly be that big.

Well, big it is. Huge in fact. I was hoping to be able to use it portably, for the laptop among other things. Not This Little Black Duck.

4-5 inches long by 4 inches wide, is freaking enormous by mouse standards, not to mention trackball standards.

I was finding the Logitech trackball a bit big, but the Kensington one makes my current trackball look positively tiny. Side-by-side, the Logitech one is half the size and half the weight. It’s also got a smoother ride on the ball, and while the Kensington one has a natty scroll wheel (around the ball), it’s not that big a deal.

I think I’m going to stick the kensington one on eBay as soon as I get home.

Note to self: don’t buy sight unseen. Unless it’s Apple stuff

Well, the official word from MS is this:

Note  The default location is a hidden folder. To use Windows Explorer to navigate to this folder, you must first turn on the display of hidden folders. In Windows Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Folder Options. On the View tab, under Advanced Settings, under Files and Folders, under Hidden files and folders, click Show hidden files and folders. If you want to see all file name extensions, clear the Hide extensions for known file types check box under Files and Folders. Hidden folders appear dimmed to indicate they are not typical folders.

Now that was simple wasn’t it?  Except this information is bunk; I’ve got Hidden Files and Folders turned on already. Morons.

Riddle me this: Why won’t the Windows XP search find and display a file that exists on the system?

Try searching for *.pst and you might come across the same issue that I did.

For those out there that don’t know what a “Pst” file is – and are perhaps wondering if it’s something to do with drinking – I shall explain: it’s a file which is used to store all the email from Outlook.

An interesting thought just occurred to me. All right, another interesting thought.

Leading up to the turn of last century, the new millennium, we had the terror of the Y2k bug.

Every computer in the world – it was said – had this issue, where there was a distinct possibility of the dates on said machines clicking over at midnight on the 31st December 1999 to the 1st of January 1900.

Lots of money was at stake. Lives, too. Chaos was forecast, devastation even. Don’t fly on an aeroplane, we were told.

But to combat this problem, computer developers the world over were recruited to rewrite fundamental code in what may one day come to be known as Developers Save The World!

Or perhaps not.

Anyway, my point is this:

If we can all pull together to combat something as fundamental as every computer in the world going Splat come the turn of the century, then why can’t we do the same for global warming?

It suddenly occurs to me that Microsoft products suffer from systematic “Trying-to-be-too-many-things-to-too-many-people”. What this means is that their products, while they can do all sorts of amazing things, are either too complicated for the average Jo to understand but at the same time, set-up with the Lowest-Common-Denominator in mind, thus annoying the hell out of the more advanced user. MS Word Paperclip anyone? How about that sodding dog for searching?

In short, the designers don’t know their own audience, and so the software isn’t any good for anyone specifically. The features are vast, but you can’t get at most of them without a brick-thick book next to you, titled something along the lines of Windows functionality for people who don’t necessarily know everything about it but need to do a single simple thing. Setting up your email? A home network? Turn off those damn bubble messages that popup whenever windows has found something and wants to tell you about, like some 4 year old?*

Apple on the other hand, has designed their software with simple useability in mind. Yes, the systems restrict you to doing things in a particular way, but once you know that way, you’re fine.

Take the iPod. Yes, that old chestnut. Install iTunes, plug the iPod in and you’re off. Anycomputer (Mac or Windows [not sure about Linux to be honest]), any time.

Now take the Creative Zen that I was trying to get to work 2 years ago, brand-new, out of the box. I do hope they’ve improved their software and hardware because frankly, a system requirement that I had to search high-and-low for on the net because it wasn’t on the box is fundamentally bent-in-the-head. Turned out, the hardware required an obscure XP service pack to be installed, a version of Windows Media Player 10 and dose of good luck (and I’m not joking about that last bit) before it would even think about working with Windows and copying music. And if you had a mac, well, forget it, because it wouldn’t work.

That is why Apple carved-up the personal player market. The Zen has more features, an FM radio, good internal functionality, but if you can’t load music onto it, then it’s an expensive doorstop.

Similarly, the PC versus Mac thing. All right, PC has got the lions-share of the home and business computer market, but given the sick, sick joke that is Vista, computer manufacturers offering windows XP as an operating system and Microsoft’s forcible retirement of XP (presumably because they just can’t admit what a brick Vista actually is and there’s far too much money at stake share-wise if they do, not to mention the scalps of many on the payroll) and you’ve got what could very well be The End Of The Line.

——————-

*Ah, you might say, what about the Interweb? To which I reply, what about it? I’ve got a PC at home which can’t see the bleeding network which is connected to said web, and you’re telling me to refer to the internet to tell me how to connect to the internet?

Isn’t technology wonderful?

Here I am, I’ve just watched Yet Another Doctor Who episode, with a PC on one side (which I’m backing-up, then going to reformat – Muahahaaaa, take THAT Microsoft – for a friend) a Mac on the other, a cat on the chair beside me (all right, he’s not technology, but it’s a nice touch) and to add to the mix, I’ve just been told via a BBC announcement over the end of the episode that I can hear writer Mark Gatisss right now on BBC3 and the champagne lifestyle awaits on The National Lottery Jetset.

Just like being there, ey?

The sun is shining, and it’s a pleasant clement (as opposed to inclement) day for a change.

Pity I’m up here at work.

However, I need the cash to fund my outrageous lifestyle.

Onto other things however, I will inform you of the reasoning for the title of this blog: Lisa 4.0.

• Lisa 1.0 was pre-goth, vaguely boring, still very edgy and somewhat bland.
• Lisa 2.0 was goth Lisa, who was very black but using the fabulous clothing to tell the world to Look but not touch. She liked being allowed to be different, wintertime, the active use of the piss-take (esp being a goth in Camberwell) and Apple Computers; and didn’t like one little bit, blandites, suburbia, loudmouths, naysayers, boredom and bureaucracy.
• Lisa 3.0 was post-goth, still oddly attired (and a winter person in general, mainly because she could dress-up and stuff and that the clothing she owned was far too heavy [wintery anyone] for summertime conditions). She liked being able to dress oddly, wintertime, apple computers; hated summer, the new doctor who, four-wheel drivers, Freaking PCs (both the hardware and the individuals), Microsoft Windows and all that sailed in her.
• Lisa 4.0 is post vipassana meditation, and is very chilled, relaxed and has her circles securely aligned. She likes the new doctor who, bike riding and silent meditation. Nothing bothers her except for bad drivers (whom she forgives as they are obviously SPMs*), and four-wheel-drives and their drivers (and since she has friends with these, she’s had to tone-down her four-letter diatribes about them and their owners). C’est la vie.

So there you are. The explanation, the generalities and the transformation.

—————————–

* SPMs = Small Penis Men