Posts by Steve Foster

Re: One True Mouse

The Intellimouse Explorer 2 is indeed (in my view) an excellent mouse, and I have several in use. But they do have one key flaw - the USB connector wiring cable is rather weak, and liable to break with anything more than very light desktop use.

I did pick up a batch directly from the Microsoft Store a couple of years ago, but I'm down to the last few.

My main PC has the bluetooth variant, which avoids the cabling flaw (along with the matching MS keyboard), but that has also been discontinued (indeed, decent bluetooth keyboard/mouse combos seem incredibly rare). And mine is getting rather worn (the battery covers are held on with sellotape & blutack), and I'm dreading the day they finally pack up completely.

Re: Telephone Tracking

Would that be the one with the stupid and utterly pointless "corporate whalesong" rebrand that (temporarily) went titsup recently?

Re: Intel 5200 at 4K?

I recently replaced an HD5450 in my mATX case with a R7, which is (I understand) about as far as it's possible to go with ATI^H^HMD graphics in low profile at a reasonable price.

Re: Convoluted registration

Oh my, yes. Whereas the old paper VAT return had just 7 boxes to fill, and a space to squiggle a signature at the bottom (I must admit I was surprised that they never tried to redesign the form, given how beautifully straight-forward it was).

Re: Do people still use ISP email accounts these days?

Lots of "ordinary" punters do, yes. Often for business purposes too! (it's not uncommon to see tradesfolk with aol.com/hotmail.com or similar cheaply stencilled on their vans)

Re: Diminshing returns

I just dropped £50 for an R7 (having previously had a 5450, though that had to be hijacked for a new Esxi box I was building). And I thought that was pushing the boat out somewhat!

Re: TeamViewer

Yes, W7 does come with Remote Assistance. And RA provides a better experience (than TeamViewer, IME) for the person providing assistance when it works. But I've also found it to be much less reliable at connecting than TeamViewer - particularly if the remote site is bandwidth-constrained (as is apparently the case here). So I tend to use TeamViewer by default, because it just works.

@roytrubshaw

"You mean you know of an IKEA store where you can actually pay for stuff before your credit/debit card has expired?"

There are two key items of knowledge for successfully visiting an Ikea store in less than three lifetimes:

a) where the internal shortcuts are (so that you aren't forced to circumnavigate the building), and

b) never, under any circumstances, visit after 4pm or on a weekend.

@AC

And there used to be a model railway group, sited between the Polish memorial, the codebreakers huts and TNMOC (and the Harrier when that was there too).

Re: It's not just about websites though is it?

«Take my work; every 28 days I'm instructed to "change my password for my security"»

The default in Windows domains is 42 days. I usually push that out to 90 days or so (it's a reasonable compromise for the environments I'm normally managing).

There are a couple of valid reasons for requiring regular password changes - a) if someone leaves and IT isn't informed (no, really, it does occasionally happen!), the password expiry should limit exposure[1], and b) it discourages users from password-reuse (in the same-password-everywhere sense).

[1] assuming supporting secure policies are in place (such as preventing remote changes of expired passwords).