Krehbiel Tech

Updating the status of technology in my life, in no particular order.

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If you’re having trouble with Internet Explorer 8 not opening links in Vista, try running IE once as an Administrator.

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I recently upgraded my home computer to a 2.6GHz AMD Athlon X2 5050e with 4GB of memory.  Parts for this upgrade, including a whole new case, motherboard and hard drive, cost about $350.

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I bought a Zune last week.  Yeah, a Zune.  Big woop.  Wanna fight about it?

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I came across a situation where I wanted to rename a Windows service that had already been installed.  (In this case I wasn't able to rebuild the application to alter the service installation properties, which would of course be the ideal solution.)  Google was spectacularly unhelpful, so this is how you do it.

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Here's a quick Vista tip: Make sure the built-in Administrator account is enabled with a password before you go and remove your normal login from the Administrators group.

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I've been trying to use Microsoft's SyncToy for my directory synchronization tasks, and I'm just about fed up with it.  For reasons I can't fathom, it routinely "forgets" what to synchronize.  I frequently synchronize to and from a USB stick, and I find that SyncToy usually wants to copy far more files than have actually been changed.  Like I'll make a couple of changes to some files on the stick, and then for some reason SyncToy thinks it needs to re-copy all kinds of files from both the stick and the computer.  So I end up having to copy files manually from one side to another.  It's a bit aggravating.

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Most of the buzz from Microsoft's PDC is about Azure and C# 4.0.  I don't usually pay too much attention to bleeding edge Microsoft technology until it might actually be used in real-life situations, but I thought I'd break from tradition and peek at these two shiny new things.

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I was in a store recently where the clerk vehemently declared that we should stick with XP and not install Vista until there was absolutely no choice.

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I installed Vista Service Pack 1 this weekend. Now, I can't seem to FTP into my web site with FileZilla anymore. I think it's just a coincidence and that my web host's FTP server is down for completely unrelated reasons, but they aren't usually down this long and I'm starting to wonder...

I recently ran into one of the most perplexing computer problems I've experienced in a long time. Naturally, the resolution turned out to be head-smackingly simple.

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I installed Windows Vista on the new development computer I'm building. This is the first time I've even seen Vista running. I figured that with the impending release of the first Vista Service Pack, now was as good a time as any to jump into it. (I also wanted to try out Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, which I think requires Vista - I might be wrong about that though.)

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I used to be the kind of person to upgrade software immediately as soon as new versions were available, because it used to be true that upgrades meant there would be some kind of improvement. But lately Microsoft has been working to redefine the term "software upgrade" to mean "an entirely different application rewritten from the ground up without any quality control." First there was Visual Studio 2005, which is definitely quirkier and slower than Visual Studio 2003. Then, in the same vein, there's SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio, which I've had the pleasure of using for a year now. It has one of the slowest and buggiest interfaces in a Microsoft product I've ever seen. How is it even possible that the faster the computer hardware gets, the slower the applications run?

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Hurray, a technology post!

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