MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

Sometimes technology changes, even when we don’t want it to.

One of my clients is blind, and runs a computer-based recording studio (that is verrrry nice, let me tell you….). There’s a constant dance we have to do to keep his machines running, because not only do you have the inherent complexities of dealing with Windows (XP pro in his case), PLUS the weirdnesses of audio on Windows, you have JAWS, a screenreader fropm Freedom Scientific to boot.

It can get hairy keeping things running.

My client has depended on Outlook Express for years for his email – primarily because Jaws didn’t play well with the full Outlook, and webmail isn’t an option (for the same reason). Summer 2009 Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook Express on Hotmail because they moved to “Windows Live”, which uses a fundamentally different technology for email fetching.

Now, I understand the technical and business reason for Microsoft’s decision – after all, this is a FREE product they’re offering. I also understand my client SHOULD have moved off of using MSN for his primary email a long time ago, and moved it onto his own domain – but generally you don’t fix what’s broken, especially when you have a memorize what is onscreen because you can’t see it!

But this means my client can do NO business online, because email is how he conducts a good part of his studio work.

A tough situation – one he didn’t ask for. In the next installment I’ll describe what we decided on after much discussion – and let you know how it all came out.

As I type this I’m waiting to find out myself!

Yet another client story:
I received a phone call from a client who is unabashedly not comfortable with computers. She was getting some weird errors from Firefox and AVG, but couldn’t really describe what they said.

Fortunately it was on may way, so I was able to swing in quickly just to see what was going on. I confirmed the errors, which were the “generic” type of thing you get when the application has a situation it doesn’t know how to handle.

I tried to do a quick online virus scan, to no avail – the machine was running way too slow. Granted, its a slow machine, underpwoered, needs RAM (which the company has not installed yet), and is running Windows 2000 – but even by IT’S standards it was running slow.

After a few minutes I thought the check teh hard drive. That 18gig drive had – wait for it – 20 kilobytes of free space.

{insert dragnet theme here!}

The computer had no working space on teh hard drive – avg had nowhere to stash the virus definitions update file, and Firefox couldn’t update it’s cache.

I deleted several non-used apps, and cleared out the Windows Temp folder…. a simple fix for a major problem. It isn’t a long-term solution, but will keep them running for a while longer.