Laptop Diaries

Just building up a new laptop for the family, but this one’s MS Vista. I bought a copy of Norton, of course, but had a couple of problems installing MS Office and transferring data. Most of these seeem to be firewall problems, but it does seem that Vista/XP networking might not be as easy as it should. It would seem that Norton (and Microsoft) now have a new version of ‘Secure by Default’, which borrows from the good old security guru’s axiom, ‘if no-one can use it, no one can abuse it.’

On a more serious note, when adopting W95, Microsoft left the 3.11 program explorer interface in place, with XP you have ‘classic’ look and feel themes, I can’t find the retro interface on Vista and I found trying to get it to ‘see’ the exported devices on my home network exceptionally frustrating, and I still don’t know how we got it to work.

For more, see New Laptop, Studio 15 on my wiki. …

Laptop Diaries III

On my Sun/Oracle blog, I wrote an article about configuring my Laptop, primarily about getting X-Windows to work under Solaris. This documented some research, but not a solution, and as an easter egg, I pointed at some Gnome and Windows eye-candy. You can read it if you want, but its out of date; I wrote this pointer article in Feb 2016 and every piece of technology mentioned is obsolete. …