| Friday,
May 4, 2001 I am still stuffed up, sore throat, and no
sleep which makes things much worse. If I am sitting up I can breathe, but
I don't sleep well sitting up. I may have to get used to it. If I lie down
and try to sleep I twitch and keep Roberta up. So it goes.
Microsoft Outlook 2000 was designed by fiends. This is rapidly becoming
my true and only theory.
There probably is a way to do all this but I don't know it.
I set up Roberta's new machine. To make my life easier in setting it up
I logged on as Administrator. That was my mistake. I installed Office
2000. I imported her OUTLOOK mail files. I logged on as rjp. Of course she
can't read her mail files as rjp. I did some trickery that let me import
the Administrator mail files to OUTLOOK as the system saw when logged in
as rjp.
OK. Fine. Now to turn on the junk email filters. Only I can't. It tells
me that you must do organize, then turn on that option; but that option
wasn't available in organize any longer. I can't get at it. I don't know
how.
I finally logged on as Administrator, nuked Office 2000, and I will
reinstall under the rjp login. Then I will import her mail files again
having turned on the junk email option first. This is insane, but it's the
way things are in Outlook. If there is any way to simply reset the
registry there is no documentation I can find that tells me how to do it.
What I am doing will take about an hour's work, and typing in those
very long product codes several times, but at least it will work. I don't
know any other way. The worst is that I am sure it is all very easy to
accomplish what I want if only there were something that told me
how.
Outlook is a pretty good program, but the documents are written by, uh,
sanity challenged people.
I know I promised a bunch of mail for yesterday but I felt lousy. I'll
try to get it up today.
WELL WELL, after I uninstalled Office 2000 I nuked the Outlook.PST file
(having saved it) and logged in as RJP. Then I put in the install Office
2000 disk, and LO! the system offered to set things up so that rjp could
use the program. Of course that wasn't possible since I had killed it
dead, but that turns out to be the way to let someone other than the
Administrator use an Administrator installed program. It even makes sense;
it is probably documented; but it isn't documented any place I have run
across.
When Roland acts like an Administrator he always reads everything,
including on line stuff, sometimes taking an hour or more before he does
anything at all. It is a good habit to be in. But I don't tend to act like
a professional systems administrator here, and I suspect most readers
don't either. So I do all these silly things so you don't have to...
ROXIO strikes again: while they got Direct CD working, apparently Easy
Creator 5 kills Windows 2000 machines stone cold dead.
See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/18741.html
Ye flipping gods. It didn't happen to me because I use Nero BURNING ROM
and have said goodbye to Easy Creator....
Well, just at NOON, and continuing now to 12:20 so far my Internet
connections slowed to a crawl. Dunno if it is my modem line or what. I
could do a trace route... Hmm, it's after I get to Pair. Must be
something wrong with one of their servers.
12:30 PM Well, I have reinstalled Office 2000 on Roberta's new machine
(mindless multitasking seems to be within my capabilities) and I put in
Norton Anti-Virus. That has to go on as Administrator not rjp. Since
I guess it runs on startup that won't be too unhandy. We will see if it
drives her nuts.
Now to finish installation of her stuff as her. Maybe Windows 2000 will
catch on. Maybe.
12:50 PM Norton Anti-Virus takes FOREVER to scan everything. If she has
to go through that every time she logs on, forget it. Maybe it will make a
list of files it has scanned and only look for files that have changed
after the first time? I need to check on that. One of the things I liked
about the old Dr. Solomon's anti-virus scan was that it was pretty darned
fast. Of course we didn't have gigabyte drives in those days, and this may
be just as fast but with a lot more to do...
HOO HAH Norton found w32.natividad on files. It had not infected
THIS machine, but it may well have infected hers, which is why hers has
been flakey. As to why our previous virus software did not find it I do
not know. If anyone has a good URL to a description of this natividad
virus (it was in some Eudora mail files she had) please let me know.
(THANKS I have that information now.)
1: 10 PM FIENDS! FIENDS in human Vesture! That's Microsoft!
1:20 PM OK now I am trying install PhotoDraw which is part of the
Microsoft Office Suite. It WILL NOT INSTALL unless I am the Administrator.
God knows if Roberta will then be able to use it when I get it installed
(she will be a "power user"). Morons! No instructions.
Just barriers. Ye flipping gods! Why?
I have the times recorded wrong up there but it hardly matters. I have
an O'Reilly book WINDOWS 2000 In A Nutshell, and another Windows 2000 The
Missing Manual, both of which I have recommended; I guess it is time I
seriously tried to read through rather than just look things up. But with
my head not working this isn't the time to try systematic learning.
There is probably a pretty simple way to do what I am trying to do...
1:30 PM Well, reader Holden Aust has sent me a URL on the natividad
virus. Apparently it never infected her machine, since the symptoms are
far more severe than any she experienced. It comes as an attachment to be
opened and I have cautioned her never to open attachments to mail, even
from people we know unless we know that it was actually sent by that
person. Incidentally, those who send mail to me as an attachment aren't
getting answers because I don't see it: I seldom to never open unexpected
mail attachments.
So anyway I don't have to worry that she has an infection, only that
the virus is present on her system.
1:30 PM The problem with PAIR has gone away. It was definitely there:
two readers reported truncated pages but refresh fixed the problem. But it
is still slower than it ought to be.
1:45 PM OKAY Roberta's system is working. Having installed OUTLOOK when
logged in as RJP, I opened it, let it create a new outlook.pst file, then
imported to it from a copy of the old outlook.pst file which I had stored
ON ANOTHER COMPUTER so that Microsoft couldn't find it. I don't trust
those fiends any longer: they're capable of finding old pst files and
deleting them on the grounds that they shouldn't exist or something. How
would I know how devils like that think?
I then created her account, and it works, and she has new mail, and all
is well. Outlook is a pretty good program once you get it working but the
combination of Outlook and Windows 2000 is devastatingly hard to
comprehend largely because they weren't really well integrated. I ought to
have been able as administrator to set up her Outlook accounts so that she
could use them but if so I don't know.
Meanwhile, PhotoDraw whose integration into Windows 2000 is minimal, is
now what opens her jpg files; even though I had to install THAT as the
administrator, the rjp account had no trouble with it. So it goes.
The next step is to take the machine downstairs. At the moment it's a
lab rat with no clothes so I have to put its skin back on. Then we will
see about getting the modem connected for her connection to IC VERIFY for
taking credit card payments for subscriptions.
Of course paypals is more convenient
and we get more that way, but we still get enough credit card
subscriptions to make it worth keeping things going.
11:20 PM We went to see The Diary of Brigit Jones after dinner.
Before dinner I had Roberta's setup working: I had her modem configured,
and Outlook was told to stop listening to the internal network and go with
the phone lines.
Now it won't work. It dials, and logs on to Earthlink, then when it
tries to connect to the mail server it says the name and password were
"rejected by the domain." What domain isn't specified. I don't
know if this is some kind of internal error here or what. I know it did
work, now it doesn't, so for the moment I have her connecting to her email
through my internal network.
Microsoft, the integration of Outlook 2000 and Windows 2000 sucks dead
bunnies. I may have to scrub Windows 2000 and go back to 98 to get Outlook
to use the external modem to connect to the Internet. The modem works. I
can connect to Earthlink on her account. But when it comes to making
Outlook believe that it is connected through that, I am batting zero. And
I have tried deleting all user accounts and starting over. I have tried
evil and potent words of magic. I am about to try exorcism.
If I disconnect the internal network I can make Outlook do this. I
think. It may be this silly conflict between "administrator" and
a user that is at fault. Whatever it it, it is needlessly difficult, and
the testing of this must have been done perfunctorily or not at all.
Bah. There has to be something better than this.
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