HP’s technical incompetence


In their posts, Amit, followed by Alok reenergized my recent wound. Actually, they have talked about HP’s technical competence – how HP had blown down its own, running data center just to show that their mission critical applications did not affected a bit. But this news made me sick. Real sick because HP had shown total technical Incompetence on me.

OK, let me tell you in detail.

I had needed a Laptop once again (My old Compaq 33 Mhz, Pentium 386, 250 MB HDD, 8 MB RAM, Win95 had died two years ago giving uninterrupted, faithful service to about eight years) so I collected information, specifications, referred laptop shoot outs, starred endlessly at comparison charts, build my own laptop about a dozen times at Dell’s site and then finally settled for Compaq Presario V3225AU. This machine looks advanced enough and less taxing to my pocket. Digit – July07 had already declared this machine as best buy in its category.

Let us see some of the main specifications of Compaq Presario V3225AU: –

Processor – AMD Turion64 MK-36 2.0Ghz

OS – Windows Vista Home Basic

Chipset, Memory --- Blah blah…., but they were the best in their category.

Telling you only two main specification has a reason – I just want to tell you where HP wounded me and had shown me its utter technical incompetence.

As you had seen above, this laptop contains an advanced 64 bit AMD Turion mobile processor. To get most out of it, you MUST install 64 bit OS and applications on this laptop. But I got first jolt after purchasing it – it was supplied with 32 bit Windows Vista Home Basic! I had never imagined this kind of technical backwardness from HP!

The outer cover shows you the picture of a castle, but inside it is only hut!

I got more jolts later. The laptop contains no genuine installation media – instead, instruction manual told me that user must first create his own backup of installation and OS through Recovery Manager Program. I tried thrice but failed.

Further, my life goes all hell again – Compaq online registration dialogue box comes pop out every ten minute or so even after registering successfully at least five times. I finally got rid it by deleting its executable file that needs your time and patient to hunt down it.

So, don’t you think - HP had blown me off to show its Technical Incompetence? I am feeling cheated. Really cheated. What do you say?

How to connect to Internet through RIM LG Mobile in Windows Vista

 

Here is a quick, no-nonsense, easy method to connect to Internet (Rconnect) through LG Reliance India Mobile phones (having built in modem) in Windows Vista.

The method is tested with LG RIM 5130 in Windows Vista Home basic. But it will, and should work in other models and other versions of Windows Vista as well.

Prerequisite : An already established Internet connection to download and update drivers.

Step 1 – Settings at Mobile phone:

Go to your mobile’s menu and select :

Settings> Phone>Data settings>Data/Fax>Data In

and,

Settings> Phone>Data settings>Data Baud>USB

(you must use USB modem cable to connect to your PC/Laptop with Mobile. If you use serial cable which is not recommended, settings will be different)

Step 2 – Settings at Computer:

Connect the LG Reliance India Mobile with the help of USB cable to your PC / Laptop running Vista which is ALREADY connected to Internet. Vista will detect it immediately and will ask you to download and install updated driver. Say yes, and it will install the latest driver needed for your LG Mobile modem. When your hardware – i.e. mobile is installed and configured successfully (the process is pretty much automatic) you can create a connection and connect to internet through this newly installed mobile modem as you do with any standard modem.

To create a new connection, go to –

Start Menu>Connect to> and then select ‘Setup a connection or network’. A new selection window will appear where you will find ‘Setup a dial-up connection.’ Select it and click on Next button. In the new window that appears, fill your mobile phone number as username and password. In the Dial-up phone number, fill #777. Give your connection a name and you are done.

Now click on connect, and within no time you will be connected to Reliance RConnect through your LG RIM Mobile. Enjoy!

First look at Windows Vista Hindi




Recently, Microsoft had released Windows Vista Language Installer Pack (lip) for Hindi language. It is a sleek 2.6 MB file that you can download from here and install in your Vista machine.

I tried to give a quick look on Windows Vista Hindi.

It is far better than its predecessor – Windows XP Hindi. When you install Language pack in Windows XP, it was nearly an irreversible process and you will find difficulty in bringing back your default interface.

This major annoying problem had been beautifully addressed in Windows Vista language pack. Now you can select language from control panel, and to change your system language, all you need is a reboot. Different users can have different language and you can install as many language pack as you wish. Unlike in Windows XP, in Vista, you can uninstall and disable language packs easily.

Still, Windows Vista is way behind against multilingual capabilities of Linux where you can use multiple language environment simultaneously, and, in background, you can start and login at least six different language desktops simultaneously.

Windows Vista Hindi had many shortcomings that includes –

  • You cannot install Vista Hindi LIP in 64 bit architecture as of now.
  • Vista’s default Hindi font is very small, and hence created visibility problem. You need to increase desktop font size from 8-9 to 10-11 for each and every item which is very cumbersome and annoying. As in Linux, there must be some facility to increase all font size in one go within the same windowing scheme. Hadn’t developers / testers notice this? Or they have different, larger desktops?
  • One can easily guess that quality and quantity of translations were not up to the mark. User interface has been translated most, and the help files had not been translated at all.
  • In most cases, translations appears straight from English to Hindi – word by word. You can find at least a couple of translation error in most pages. Some example –

There is a translation at some place – कार्य पर केंद्रित करने के लिए इसे आसान बनाएँ” what do you understand by this string? I also do not understand what it meant.

At another place it says – इससे सॉर्ट करें. Mr. Translator, had you translated it this way - इस विधि से छांटे then it might have been a bit correct and better.

Similarly, Windows Media Player’s Now Playing becomes अब चला रहा है in Hindi. You will find many strings like ताज़ा आइटम्स as well as व्यक्तिगत बनाऐं.

In a couple of his blog posts, Alok had already thrashed poor quality of Windows XP Hindi.

Verdict : In all, there is a feel and a sense of goodness, a kind of euphoria users feel while using Vista Hindi especially if you are one among Hindi loving people. So what are you waiting for? Download and install Windows Vista Hindi language pack today. And, there is no need to loose heart if you are using old, faithful Windows XP. You can find link to download Windows XP Hindi LIP from the same, above stated location.

***-***

The way the top bloggers blog…


(Amit Agrawal wrote about page views in Digital inspiration)


(Darren Rowse wrote about page views in Problogger)

Do you know how top bloggers blog? I mean, how they choose their subject? How they think a particular subject may interest their readers?

I have since been following some of the world’s top blogger’s blog and had found some interesting things that I wanted to share you.

Grab the big Stories from biggies.

Chances are, every top blogger will blog about big stories. No matter hundreds of other blogger out there may have blogged about the story earlier. And, many times they will be blogging and telling nearly same thing, but with a different language. So, if you are reading a couple of top bloggers, chances are you may be reading same stories multiple times. Here is an example –

Official Adesense blog blogged about a new adsense feature – Adsense ads now can have Rounded corners. Not a big thing. It simply is a new feature added to an existing service. Yet, top bloggers grabbed the stories. Darren Rowse wrote about it, Amit Agrawal wrote about it, Quick Online Tips blogged about it!

Similarly, recently there is a story about Page View – how Page Load is becoming irrelevant and actual page view time counts – Darren Rowse blogged about it, Amit Agrwal wrote about it, Mashable wrote about it.

When Adsense earning dips, Amit wrote about it and so is Rowse. When Adsense Referral 2 launched officially, Darren Rowse and Quick Online Tips were quick enough to grab the big news and blogged about it.

Moral of the story –

To become a top blogger yourself, Grab the big news. Blog about it. Even if hundreds may have already blogged about it since the news broke – you must blog anyway. And, when you really become a top blogger one fine day, you can freely blog rubbish – such as this one occasionally :)

Aol.in ???????




aol.in recently tried to invade Indian Internet user base with a bang. It is trying every idea and pushing every effort to win Indian Internet users.

You can find aol.in advertisement in virtually every media. Indian blogs – where Adsense advertisements were embedded in their blog posts - were bombarded with aol.in advertisement. You can see a performer blowing flames in aol.in advertisement – can it blow out other players – Yahoo or Google? Certainly not. Why? Let us see.

Completely blown out with aol’s flame that I encountered everywhere, finally I opened an email account on aol.in.

Aol.in exactly looks like Yahoo!. Its appearance is exactly Yahoo! look alike and at times you forget that you are not in Yahoo!. Further, there is nothing new in aol.in’s interface and it is crowded with flash based advertisement. The interface takes time to load completely. Though for slower connection, it has older interface that loads a bit faster but comes with some less functionality. I wanted to test its Unicode Hindi handling capabilities. For this, I send a Hindi mail to this new aol.in account and send another one from this account.

And, predictably, result came out – the same Question marks…??????

Though the Unicode Hindi matter in the body of email remain intact, its From / To and Subject field gets corrupted.

Aol.in is trying to invade Indian internet user base with a new aol.in brand name, but it had miserably failed in addressing Indian Language’s Unicode issue – or it is luring only Indians who are using English?

Will aol.in be able to get the taste of success in India? Only time will tell. Since it is not offering anything new that is to be noticed upon, users may remain shy away from aol.in for quite some time. And, unless there were some compelling reason, no one will switch to aol.in either.

And, yes, one thing you can bank upon - aol.in handles spam perfectly – at least it seems. It puts my own mail in to spam folder that I had send from that alternative mail address which I had used to register to create my new aol.in account!

Verdict: for Hindi Unicode – Gmail and iGoogle are the best, and you don’t need to look beyond that!

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