Archive for October 2003

My tough as nails review of Writer’s Market 2004 has hit the Absolutewrite.com shelf. OK, it isn’t political. It’s hard to write a review on a book that refreshes itself every year.

Alan K’necht has written about three types of Web sites for reaching a global audience in Think Beyond – Think Global from Digital Web Magazine. It’s not possible or even necessary to go all out for a international Web site. It depends on the purpose of the site and the audience’s needs, of course.

I have had the opprtunity to work with him on global issues in Web design and he taught me a few things. He also writes about Web design without the technobabble and adds his own style.

Yes, there is a recall on a book! I get the CPSC recalls via email and couldn’t help but read this one. Candle and Soap Making For Dummies Instruction Book Recalled because one of the instructions in the book could potentially burn. Only 5,400 units are being recalled, so it’s not exactly a best seller.

Joel wrote another excellent entry and this one is on The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Thank goodness, I am not a developer, I don’t have time to encode this article. But if I had the time, I would.

I’ve been doing a lot of comment deleting lately. Oh no, I didn’t delete your wonderful and legitimate comments since you’re reading this otherwise as a spammer you’d ignore this and go right to spamming the comments. Instead, I’m deleting garbage comments from spammers.

It was bound to happen. They always get a little smarter with each advancement just like the Borg. Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog is targetted to MovableType users. If you read the comments in this article, you’ll get more resources for dealing with those youknowwhats.

It’s odd that I am putting this in my blog, but I like to point out non-techie and non-writer related things on occasion. Dave Lankford is an actor with a blog. This is the first real blog (in other words, regularly and recently updated) I’ve seen of an actor’s… well, except for Wil Wheaton, but he don’t count.

I’ve always been fascinated about what goes behind the scenes in creating movies and television shows. In 1984, I went to L.A. and saw a taping of Benson and Wheel of Fortune. Those shows taught me a lot about how an episode comes to be, but I like to know more.

I majored in radio / TV when I was a freshman in college, but it didn’t work out. Besides, I wanted to live in Texas, not LA or New York. Kind of hard to have such a career when your heart is set on living in a specific city.

It’s a shame. I’m the third cousin of a director and actor (they’re brothers), but have never met them. Talking to them would be a great way to learn about life behind the scenes.

Most of the files are gone. Only four files remain and they are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\System\ControlSet001\Control\Root\LEGACY_MCUPDMGR.EXE000\DeviceDesc\McAfee SecurityCenter Update Manager

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\System\ControlSet002\Control\Root\LEGACY_MCUPDMGR.EXE000\DeviceDesc\McAfee SecurityCenter Update Manager

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\System\ControlSet003\Control\Root\LEGACY_MCUPDMGR.EXE000\DeviceDesc\McAfee SecurityCenter Update Manager

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Root\LEGACY_MCUPDMGR.EXE000\DeviceDesc\McAfee SecurityCenter Update Manager

For the time being, I am using AVG from grisoft.com, which comes highly recommended based on the feedback from the original rant. I had reviewed AVG in the past and used it alongside with McAfee.

We contacted tech support again and now we’re spending a lot of time cleaning out the registry per these instructions. This is much more dangerous than what we did yesterday… but it’s the only way we’re going to get its claws off the computer.

Still can’t get work done since everything is on the sick computer and I’m borrowing Paul’s laptop to check email and such. I was trying to get ahead on work for one client and instead I fell behind. Just what I need the week before I return to my day job.

We finished the registry clean up and it still didn’t work. Back to tech support and they have us going in circles covering stuuff we already tried. For instance, he told us to go into regedit32 > Security > Permissions. This sounded too familiar as I did that two days ago and the steps are WRONG. Besides, we told him we already tried providing global permissions so that we could delete stuff in safe mode. Then, he sends us the instructions for booting up in safe mode. Hello!??! We just said we tried safe mode!

It’s as if we’re talking to a robot who doesn’t pay attention to our responses. We’re sick of this. Thanks to Gnomie suggestions, I am going to try a few of the registry editor programs I have. I did try Registry First Aid, but it could not get it all (understandable).

I even tried RegCleaner and JV16, but neither found McAfee-related entries. The only thing left is to remove the registry keys relating to devices, which have errored and won’t let us come within a 10-foot pole to delete them. I’ll write more details tomorrow as I am spent.

Doesn’t look like Norton’s is a good candidate based on the feedback I’ve received in yesterday’s entry.

Of all things to battle relating to virus, I’m at war with McAfee. Since the one year of updates was up, I clicked on Purchase to renew for a year. Nothing happened. Went to the Web site and signed up for another year and it tells me a new version is out. So I went ahead and upgraded to v8.0. It’s been a nightmare that’s taking up more than a day of my time to fix and it’s still not fixed.

Nothing told me to uninstall v7.0 when I received the upgrade to 8.0. Since it’s called Update / Upgrade, I was under the impression nothing needed uninstalling especially since all upgrades expect you to have the previous version on your system to be able to install. So, I proceeded with the v8.0 install and during the install, it indicated it was removing older versions of McAfee. Fine, be my guest.

Despite all this, I still received pop up boxes saying to purchase my one year update since it expired. Right, I did that already! Then, I got pop ups about Vshield not installed properly. Blah blah.

I went to the Web site to check the knowledgebase. No answers. So I contacted the online help. The support tech told me to manually uninstall v7.0. I followed the instructions and it still didn’t work because I could not delete a few items. Back to tech support… do a safe mode and try deleting again.

Done and still can’t delete. Back to support and this time to change permissions, but he could not give me the right instructions and I figured it out myself. Nope, didn’t work. I already had all permissions anyway.

Back to support who referred me to another document to delete a bunch of stuff from the registry. Of course, I backed up the registry first thing before all this started. As a result, I lost my TCP/IP protocol, which connects me to the Internet. I know exactly what happened and it’s fixed, but it wasn’t easy. The deleting stuff from registry instructions are terrible. If you delete EVERY entry using the Find Next, it will mean trouble.

Some entries are not just for McAfee. For example, a Windows-related entry had two McAfee items in it and a bunch of other non-McAfee items. You don’t delete the entry in this case. Instead, you have to open it and remove the two items. The instructions don’t go into this detail and it’s going to mess up many PCs. The average user is not a registry hacker.

There are four versions of McAfees out there along with a folder for McAfee and a folder for McAfee.com. The PC wants an .msi file to do the uninstalling. Well, it ain’t there. I ran a search and it’s no where to be found and I don’t delete things with reckless abandon.

Also, I had SpamKiller from McAfee. I uninstalled it because I didn’t like it. Also loaded was McAfee Security Center. Can’t uninstall the Security Center because everything else has to be uninstalled, which has not been possible. Catch-22.

Paul decided to call technical support since there are too many problems to try to resolve via online chat. It costs $2.95 per minute. I understand companies having to charge, but these problems are not anything I did. The problems are because of the way the company sets up the programs.

We tried to re-install v8.0 and it indicated a new upgrade is available. We need a product ID and password to get to the information. This information was supposed to be emailed to me, but no such email came.

The problem is McAfee makes the install / uninstall procedures complicated. It shouldn’t be this much trouble to upgrade to a new version. The uninstall through Add / Remove programs doesn’t work without problems, which is why the manual uninstall is required.

Imagine how bad things would be if I didn’t know what I was doing! AND I have Paul’s expertise to back me up. He ran into the same issues I did. P.S. If you need tech support help, give him a call. P.S.S. He is still available for full-time employment in the Dallas area (nudge).

Paul went through the registry doing the same thing I had done. The darn things are still in the Add / Remove list.

I would say not to upgrade without knowing what you’re facing. But, this is the first instance where an upgrade turned into a time-consuming nightmare. I’ve wasted an entire day on this garbage and thanks to losing connection to the Net, it’s also took away valuable work time especially since the virus scanner wasn’t enabled. Though I know better not to click on attachments, I don’t want to check email unprotected with virus-laden emails floating around.

Story is not over, but we stopped working on it for today since we have family priorities to handle for the rest of the evening especially with one kid who came home sick.

A positive? The fact the company has an online live chat for help, which is beneficial for me since I am hard of hearing and unable to navigate phone help without an operator and a lot of time on my hands. However, there is no capability to copy and paste the conversation (Gee, I wonder why? One reason is probably to avoid holding the company liable. The other is because we’ve gotten useless advice thus far.), which does provide info I need to write down.

The company is tempting me to switch products and I just might. But I want all the @*#$ stuff off first and my refund.

Firdamatic: the Design Tool for the Uninspired Webloggers is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customize layouts by completing forms. Create a 2-column or 3-column layout. Coooool! [Link: Webreference]