Windows XP SP3 Conflicts With Norton Software

Windows XP Service Pack 3 continues to have difficulties playing nice with other software, or vice-versa. Now it’s been found that Norton software behaves strangely after SP3 is installed. Just what SP3 needs…more good news.

On the other hand, it’s a good case for dumping Norton. Back in the day I was a big fan of the original Norton Utilities. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and if I buy a computer now with Norton on it, one of the first things I do is uninstall Norton and put AVG on the machine. I happen to prefer AVG, but there are many viable alternatives these days to the bloated, bog-slow, intrusive Norton software.

McAfee Antivirus is almost as bad, so I won’t have that on any of my machines, either. I haven’t heard of any conflicts between McAfee Antivirus and SP3 yet, but it won’t surprise me if I do. We use the enterprise version of McAfee Antivirus at work and we’ve had a number of conflicts with our enterprise software applications that were traced back to McAfee Antivirus and required patches or workarounds for one or both applications.

It’s becoming even more obvious that unless you desperately need SP3 for some reason, you should avoid upgrading until Microsoft and the hardware and software folks get these issues worked out. They will get resolved, it’s just a question of when.

John The Geek

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Windows XP Service Pack 3 – No Rush

Those of us still using Windows XP are hearing a lot about Service Pack 3 lately.  Windows XP SP3 has been released for a while now and the usual reports of problems are being received from the early adopters who have already installed it.  It’s good that there are those brave (or foolish) enough to install a new service pack as soon as it’s available.  The rest of us can sit back and watch the fireworks from a safe distance!

My advice is to wait a while before installing SP3.  Hewlett-Packard (HP) has warned owners of their PCs with AMD processors not to install SP3.  There is a known problem where the machines continually reboot after SP3 is installed.  That’s just one example of problems found in the field in the short time SP3 has been available to the public.

Any software upgrade of this magnitude is bound to have some glitches.  Windows XP is a very complex piece of software, actually multiple pieces of software, and catching all the potential bugs in the testing process is simply impossible.  There are too many variables with PC configurations and applications for any testing program to cover every possible combination.

If you’re concerned about the end of life of Windows XP SP2, don’t be.  Microsoft will continue to support SP2 until August of 2009, so you have over a year before you have to worry about that.  By that time SP3 will be stable and you’ll probably have installed it long since.

As with most newly released software, unless there’s a feature or bug fix you absolutely have to have, it’s safer to wait until it’s been released long enough for most of the more serious bugs to be found and fixed.  SP3 adds some features, but the vast majority of those features aren’t things that the average user will even notice.  In short, if you’re not sure you need SP3, you don’t, yet.

Here are some related posts from the blogosphere:

Windows XP Service Pack 3 woes – Windows XP holdouts were blinded by a ray of hope with the release of Service Pack 3, a major update consisting of existing patches with a few enhancements thrown in that has been widely reported to significantly boost significant …

Does your AMD-based computer boot after installing XP SP3? – Last night WSUS deployed XP Service Pack 3 to the sole remaining computer running XP that I have. This morning, I came down and was greeted with incessant reboots. The computer booted, apologized for not being able to boot properly, …

HP recommends against installing Windows XP SP3 – Both HP and Microsoft are working to fix problems causing AMD-based PCs to reboot repeatedly after XP Service Pack 3 is loaded. In the meantime, security expert Dr. Jesper Johansson has beaten the companies to the punch by devising a …

XP Change Corrupts Data, Halts SP3 Rollout – XP Change Corrupts Data, Halts SP3 Rollout Microsoft also suspends autodelivery of Windows Vista SP1. Computerworld — Microsoft Corp. confirmed on Wednesday that it delayed the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) because changes …

Fix for Restart Bug after installing Windows XP SP3 – You can only use the following information if you use a non-Intel processor and encounter the previously mentioned restart bug after installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. I’m going to list two possible solutions, one from Microsoft and …

Microsoft blocks Windows XP SP3 update to HP PCs Running AMD CPU’s – The recent Windows XP Service Pack 3 update has left certain AMD-based PCs manufactured by Hewlett-Packard caught in an endless reboot (here) cycle caused by an Intel-specific disk image mistakenly being used with AMD hardware. …

[bit-tech] XP SP3 breaks WHS RDP – According to a post on the Windows Home Server Forums provided by Microsoft, users with Service Pack 3 installed on their Windows XP desktop may well find themselves unable to connect to their Windows Home Server box via the Remote …

John The Geek

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UBBCode vs. HTML

A newsletter reader asked the difference between UBBCode and HTML, specifically for creating signatures in forums. Many forums turn off HTML and only allow UBBCode so it pays to learn UBBCode if you do much interacting in forums online.

In a nutshell, UBBCode is a very simple set of four tags or codes which are used for the following purposes:

• Adding a hyperlink to your message
• Adding a hyperlinked email address to your message
• Adding an image to your message
• Quoting other messages within your message

The four tags are used as follows:

Hyperlink: [url]JohnTheGeek.com[/url]

Hyperlinked email address: [email]John@JohnsAGeek.com[/email]

Image: [img]http://JohnTheGeek.com/images/header.jpg[/img]

Quoting: [QUOTE]Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.[/QUOTE]

The tags are case-insensitive, meaning that capitalization doesn’t matter. In the quote example above, for instance, either [QUOTE] or [quote] will work. Notice that there must be both a start and an end tag.

Put these tags to good use in your forum posts!

John The Geek

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The User Experience – How Not To Provide a Good User Experience Part 1

One of my mantras is that people who design things should be required to use them for at least 6 months. Every time I encounter a web site, application or any other user interface that defies all logic, I have to wonder if the person(s) who designed it ever actually tried to use it for the purpose for which it was intended. In most cases, I’m betting the answer is no.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of poor user interface design and very few that can be considered good user interface design. User interface design is an art and a science, just like programming. Really good user interfaces provide a pleasurable user experience and brilliant user interface design is so intuitive that the user can just pick up the device, or run the application, or visit the website and get around in it as though they’d been using it all their lives.

Obviously, that’s the ideal and it’s very rarely achieved. For one thing, different people prefer different things in a design, and for another, it’s extremely difficult to provide a truly seamless experience for the majority of users. There is almost always something that requires the user to get used to the way the interface works, but of course, the goal is to have as few of those as possible.

So, now that we’ve established what the ideal is, we’ll be looking at various examples of bad user interfaces from time to time. It happens to be one of my pet peeves and as a result I seem to encounter them on a regular basis. Sure, maybe I’m too picky, but I’ve gotten to where my time is too valuable to be spent trying to figure out what the designer was thinking when they implemented the particular interface that’s driving me up the wall.

Here’s one I encountered recently. I have a frequent flyer account with a major airline that has accumulated some 22,000 miles. I haven’t flown for going on two years now, so the account has been sitting there idle. The airline has decreed that if the account sits idle too long, they’re going to deactivate it and I lose my miles.

Okay, I have no beef with that. They gave me a deadline and said I had to either have some activity in the account or pay them $25 by that date or my account would be closed. The email that I got on this subject gave me several alternative ways of contacting them to pay my $25 one of which was a link to their web site. I like doing things online so I clicked that link.

After digging up my user ID and password out of the archives, I managed to get logged into the account and tried to navigate to the link given. I got an error 404 – page not found. I spent a bit of time surfing around their site looking for anything that looked promising, but found nothing. So, I went to the “Contact Us” page and sent them an email asking the whereabouts of the page referenced in their email.

A day or so later, I got a response that said, in essence, “Oh, that page doesn’t actually exist. You can call the 1-800 number to pay your $25 and keep your account active.” Gosh, thanks, guys. If I’d have wanted to call, I’d have done so in the first place and avoided this whole problem. I have to assume that the designer of this particular campaign did just that: assumed that everyone would call and only tested that scenario: “Hey, it worked when I tried it.”

So, I called the 1-800 number and got a very nice lady on the line who didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. She put me on hold for several minutes while she went to find out what was up with this $25 deal. Upon her return, she announced that I could accomplish the same goal by going to their web store and buying something there. Purchasing anything via the web store adds miles to my account which constitutes activity which would keep my account open until the next deadline.

Peachy. The only problem with that was: A) that wasn’t specified as an option in the deadline email (they only referred to “activity in the account”), and B) I’d be paying about double what I’d pay from most any other outlet for the same item if I bought it through their web store.

I told the nice lady that I really didn’t want to shop in the online store and that I was perfectly happy to pay the $25 and resolve this issue for another year or two. Back on hold I go while she checks into how to actually put this into the computer. Some time later she’s back and we spend another 10 minutes or so navigating the computer system until she finally gets the info entered and my card charged and a confirmation number spewed forth.

Apparently, the concept of someone actually wanting to pay them $25 to keep their miles active was so far from the process designer’s mind that they hadn’t bothered to actually test the process to see if it worked. Somebody managed to get it into the requirements, very possibly as an afterthought, and the implementers blew it off as so unlikely as to not need any real testing. They threw the link into the email to meet the requirement and left it at that.

The lesson here is obvious: if you’re going to provide a path down which a user can go, make sure it actually goes where the user wants to go. This applies to programming, web site design and any other discipline where a user has to interact with your product. Making your product easy to use should be a top priority right along with making it work correctly. Given the choice of two products, one of which is easy to figure out and use, if the other is a beast, consumers who are aware of both products will choose the easy one every time.

John The Geek

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Marketing Mistakes Easily Avoided

If you’ve been involved with Internet marketing for any length of time, you’ve gotten at least one email that starts out with a glaring error, like:

Hi, {!fristname_fix}!

There are any number of variations on this fundamental error, but the point is we’ve all seen them. I don’t know about you, but my first impression when I see something like that is: “Whoever sent this email is clueless!”

I may be dating myself, but I remember when it was a big deal to find a spelling or grammatical error in a book or newspaper. It was pretty much unheard of. Nowadays, you see them all the time. Either people use the wrong word (spelled correctly, mind you) in the context of the sentence, or commit some egregious grammatical error that won’t get caught by the computer’s spellcheck software. It’s become pretty well accepted that “stuff happens” and as long as the reader gets the meaning of the sentence, it apparently doesn’t matter much any more whether it’s correct or not.

Cultural shifts notwithstanding, such errors are the result of people trying to get too much done in too little time. With writing, no big deal, but with marketing, it’s a very big deal.

Why do people buy from you? Or a better question: why do they buy again and again from you? It’s about trust. People will buy from someone once if they feel it’s worth a shot, but they won’t buy again unless their first impression is borne out and they have a good experience.

Getting that first sale is important because without that first sale, you’re not going to get a second. If I get offers from several different marketers, if it’s a product that I think I can use which marketer am I most likely to buy from? Assuming the price is the same, I’m going to go with the one that I trust the most. If it’s somebody I’ve bought from previously, they’ve got an advantage, but let’s assume this is a new product and I’m hearing from several marketers I’ve never bought from before.

How do I determine which one gets my business? By going with my impression of whether they can deliver the product with a minimum of hassle. If the sales letter or email is loaded with typos and grammatical errors, I’m going to move on to the next one. Why? Because I figure if someone doesn’t take the time to create a professional-looking sales piece, they’re not going to care much if I have a problem downloading their product, or using it after I’ve bought it.

Looking professional is important! If I get an email from johnsmarketing@yahoo.com and another from john@johnthegeek.com, which one am I most likely to buy from? It should be pretty obvious. Here’s a little by-the-way tip for you to make an email address look even more professional: John@JohnTheGeek.com not only stands out better, but looks like I made the effort to make it look good.

Yes, “stuff happens”, but you can prevent most of the “stuff” from making you look like an amateur. I use AWeber for my autoresponder and they have a little link that reads “Test” on every broadcast and followup message I create. The first thing I do after I save a message is click the Test link and send myself a copy of it. You’d be surprised how many little glitches you can catch that way.

You’ll know right away if you mistyped the code to insert the recipient’s first name, for example. If you don’t use the Insert Code function to be safe, chances are pretty good you’re going to get it wrong a certain percentage of the time. Your test email will show you that immediately.

Another thing to test is any links you insert into the message, like those affiliate links that are making you the big bucks. If the potential customer clicks on a link and gets a 404 Error page, they’re moving on to the next marketer’s offer. Click the links in the email! It takes a couple of minutes to test the obvious stuff like that and can save you hundreds or thousands in lost commissions.

Never assume your email is correct as it stands. Having to send out a correction because you fat-fingered a URL just makes you look careless and sloppy. I’ve had to do it twice myself and it’s no fun, not to mention damaging to your reputation. Do what you have to do to test it until you’re *sure* it’s right.

I once saw a sign in a machine shop that read:

“Why is there never enough time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over?”

The fact is that there *isn’t* time to do it over, but you end up having to spend that time anyway. It’s just bad business to save a couple of minutes only to cost yourself time and/or money later on. We all have a tendency to run out of day before we run out of things we “have” to do. Don’t compound the problem by having to do things over if you can prevent it.

John The Geek

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Upgrade WordPress Quickly and Easily

Upgrading WordPress blogs just got a whole lot easier. The normal upgrade process is a manual effort prone to errors and omissions and needed to be automated. There is now a plugin called the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin that streamlines WordPress upgrades considerably.

As with most scripts, however, there are a couple of areas that can be confusing if you’ve not run it before, so I’ve put together an e-book that steps you through the process and points out the gotchas. Follow the steps in the e-book and you’ll have your WordPress upgraded in a few mouse clicks and be ready to rock and roll with the latest and greatest.

Get your copy of this free guide to upgrading WordPress here:

How To Upgrade Your WordPress Blog To The Latest Version

Enjoy!

John The Geek