Those Microsoft Ads
In my most recent Brief Notes, I commented on the first of the Seinfeld Microsoft adverts and suggested that it wasn’t going to convince anyone to go out and buy any Micorsoft. The second one came along a few days ago and was just plain confusing. Something about connecting with ordinary people, maybe? Whatever, it’s four and half minutes that I’ll never get back, and it still didn’t make me want to go out and buy any Microsoft products.
It seems that I was not alone in not getting what these adverts were trying to achieve, as despite supposedly originally being planned to be a longer series, the Seinfeld ads have now been canned. Allegedly, with a third one already in production. I’m sure Jerry isn’t upset - $10m for a few hours work? Nice!
But Microsoft have another ace up their marketing sleeve - the “I’m a PC” ads. And it’s here where I find myself in the unusual position of actually coming to Microsoft’s defence. I read several tech blogs and, being a Mac user, I tend towards the ones that are Mac-centric. Without exception, all of these blogs have commented on the new adverts and have torn them to pieces for jumping on Apple’s bandwagon, missing the point of the “Get a Mac” adverts, having to rely on spoofing an existing, successful campaign, and so on.
If you’ve only heard the basic premise of the adverts, and not seen them for yourself, then you might be inclined to side with these commenters so why not go and watch them? There are three - Pride, Not Alone and Stereotype - and they’re only short so it won’t take you long.
Done? OK. So, to me, what these three new adverts are showing is the diverse range of people that currently use a PC, as opposed to a Mac. It gives an insight into the sort of things that these people do with their PC and it helps to show that PCs can, actually, be a lot more than a biege box that sits in a corner being hated by everyone. I think it shows, much more than Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads do, that the PC can be used in many different settings, by people of differing abilities, and with a wide range of different goals that they want to achieve. Apple and Mac, I’m sorry to say, still have not overcome that image of being for artsy-fartsy graphic designers and too-cool people with money to waste.
But, say some, Apple are giving reasons to buy a Mac, which is their computer, but Microsoft are trumpeting the joys of being a PC, which is not their computer; why aren’t they talking about being a Window? Firstly, of course, Apple made the association between PC and Windows / Microsoft in their own adverts so - as these are intended to spoof the Apple ones - Microsoft have continued that association. But secondly, and more importantly, public perception is still very much that if you’re talking about a PC, you’re talking about Windows. Yes, Linux is making in-roads but the majority of PC users will be running Windows. So it’s a fair comparison.
Let’s face it, most people are perfectly happy being a PC. It does what they want it to do, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and if they don’t mess with it then most of the time it won’t fall over. (So often, the reason Windows falls over is because the user has decided to delete vital files, or change settings he knows nothing about. Trust me, voice of experience). Mac’s don’t fall over, either, but that’s because OS X doesn’t let you get at the vital files so easily so they can’t be accidentally deleted. And, of course, OS X doesn’t have to support multitudes of different hardware in the way that Windows does.
On the whole, I think Microsoft have done something good with these new adverts and I’d hope to see a few more in this vein. Apple, on the other hand, need to think about retiring the “Get a Mac” ads - they were never as funny as Apple seemed to think they were, and they’ve gone on for too long now.
If Apples were.. well, Microsofts, actually
Just came across this story at TUAW, reporting that an anti-trust lawsuit has been filed against Apple for monopolising the online music industry with their tie-in of iTunes to iPods.
Most of the commenters seem to be of the opinion that this is a frivolous lawsuit that has no merit, and that the law firm that took the case should be despised for taking a case that will obviously fail. The contention is that just because Apple have been successful at what they do, why should they be punished?
It’s a valid point; why should a business be dragged through the courts just because they happen to be better at what they do than anyone else in their market? Why should they be forced to open up their systems to allow other companies access to the consumer-base that they’ve worked long and hard to build up? It makes a mockery of building a successful business.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment being put forward; but it does seem that these opinions are held because it’s Apple we’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the stuff that Apple do (I’m typing this entry on an iMac, whilst listening to music through iTunes) but there does seem to be a commonly held belief in the wider computing world that Apple = Good and Microsoft = Bad.
But let’s face it. Microsoft have become as big as they are because they succeeded where others failed. And they get slapped down in courts all over the world and forced to give up their proprietary information for no other reason than other companies can’t do it as well as they can. But everyone seems to think it’s right they should be slapped down. And now Apple are being hit with some of the same treatment, but it’s suddenly different. I’m not sure I really see how.
Open Office and NeoOffice
A while ago, I wrote a post about my attempt to use Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, in advance of moving from a PC laptop to an iMac. I was looking for an open source alternative to Microsoft, as I couldn’t afford to re-buy all my old software.
On the whole, Open Office was good and on a personal basis was a viable alternative to Microsoft. The problems I had with it were that I couldn’t use it effectively for doing some of my work stuff; it didn’t like some of my Excel documents and was no good with the Access databases that I needed to work with. That really scuppered any chances of being able to use Open Office at work.
When I moved to the Mac, one of the first things I did was to download Open Office. To run on the Mac, Open Office requires something called X11, which is an extra part of the OS X system. OK, so I loaded that. Everything worked fine, but it seemed an inelegant solution. Open Office are working on Open Office Aqua for the Mac, which doesn’t require X11, but as it was described as currently being “very beta” I decided against it.
A Google search for “Open Office for Mac” directed me to NeoOffice. Using Open Office as a base, NeoOffice is a development for Mac that does not require X11 but is a stable release. Excellent; downloaded it, installed it, got rid of Open Office.
And there it stayed for the last few weeks. While I had it available, I didn’t actually need to use it. One thing I did notice with both Open Office and NeoOffice was that - when printing to my HP Photosmart 7762 - the top margin got ignored. Very annoying.
Then, a couple of days ago, I saw this post on Slashdot, saying that the latest release of NeoOffice was available. And guess what? All my problems are solved - it prints the top margin, it will open those big Excel sheets from work in five minutes instead of 20, it will keep the graphs when I re-save in Excel format and it’s more closely integrated with native OS X functionality like Dictionary. All-in-all, it’s brilliant.
If you use a Mac and you want something to replace Microsoft Office (and iWork doesn’t really cut it for you) then check out NeoOffice. You won’t be disappointed.
Usbport.sys - Update
Back on 29 June, I wrote a post detailing my experiences with a constantly locking-up Windows laptop. For no reason, it would freeze and need to be restarted. It would do this whether I was running one application or five, or even if the PC was just sitting there doing nothing.
By chance, I came across usbport.sys and changed the version of the file from the SP2 one back to the SP1 version. The result seemed to be good and that’s when I wrote the post.
This post is just to update you a little bit. Changing usbport.sys definitely helped the PC lock-up less and, initially, seemed to have solved the problem completely. That did not prove to be long-lasting, though. Whilst never going back to previous levels, the laptop did return to its bad ways. About once every four or five days of use I’d get an unexpected BSOD - usually with some reference to IRQL_NOT_ EQUAL - which seems to be quite common for Windows users.
My solution has been to change my old laptop for a nice shiny new iMac and it is a solution that has been 100% successful and I would recommend it to everyone.
usbport.sys
For at least a year now, possibly longer, I’ve been having a problem with my laptop; every now and then (or every five minutes, if it was in that sort of mood) it would simply freeze for no reason that I could divine.
It seemed to do it whatever I was doing as well; it could be sitting there idle, or I would be in the middle of writing a letter, or watching a video clip, or listening to iTunes. There seemed to be no common cause.
So I did what any geek would do - I re-installed Windows. Complete re-format job, recovery disks, the lot. Seemed to work at first, but that could have been because nothing was loaded. Went through loading all the software back on and at some point in the process it started to do it again. But I hadn’t been paying attention and I wasn’t sure what had made it start playing up again.
It got quite bad so I did the whole process again. This time I went more slowly - partly because I really couldn’t be arsed - and for ages it didn’t do it’s whole locking-up, freezing thing. Then I loaded SP2 and it started to do it again. So I took SP2 off - and it stopped doing it.
That’s the solution, then, I thought; leave SP2 off. Something has changed in that update that screws my machine up. And I left it off for quite a while, until such time as I needed to load a new piece of software and it told me that SP2 was required. (Whilst I can’t now remember which piece of software it was, I know that I haven’t taken it off, so also haven’t taken SP2 off again yet).
But of course, as soon as I loaded SP2 again, the locking-up problem started again. Over time, I began to realise that the problem was somehow related to the USB ports, but I had no idea how. Anytime I used the laptop without anything connected to the USB, I had no problems. Plug a device in and sometime in the next few minutes or few hours (never few days) it would freeze again. I tried using a USB 2.0 card in the PC slot, in case it was the exiting hardware; no change. I tried removing all the USB controllers, etc from Device Manager and making the machine find them again; no change. I stopped using USB devices unless absolutely necessary, and that helped - but my ADSL modem is USB so if I wanted to check mail or publish blog posts, I was stuck.
Then last week, I loaded a new piece of software (Last.fm Player) and got one of those blue screens that says there’s been a problem and Windows needs to restart, starting memory dump. Usually, those screens are gone before you can read them properly but this one froze and I was able to read it all. The offending file - according to the last line - was usbport.sys.
Now, given that I thought the problem might be related to the USB ports this was quite a piece of news. When the machine restarted, I searched for the file. I found that I had two copies; one in system32 and the other in an uninstall folder; the SP2 version was the current one and the one in the uninstall folder was the one that it replaced. Remembering my previous belief that SP2 caused the problem in the first place, I thought the best thing to do was to put the old one back.
Since I did that - over a week ago now - my machine has not frozen at all, even though I have been using it quite heavily to test it. I think my problem is finally solved!
- - - - -
In the time that I’ve been having the problem, I’ve read numerous webpages, forums, blogs, etc with people having similar unexplained lock-ups. If you’re one of them, try doing what I did; the version of usbport.sys that you want is 133kb in size, is dated 29 August 2002 and is in the folder C:\Windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$. You need to copy it into C:\Windows\system32\drivers and, if your problem is the same as mine was, that should sort you out.
- - - - -
Of course, there is still the issue of when I create desktop shortcuts I get two of them - but if I delete one, the other one disappears when I refresh the screen. If anyone knows what might cause that, let me know.
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
-
