Sheryl's Blog

Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000

I have a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 that I bought when I bought my new Thinkpad with built-in Bluetooth. At the time I was running 64-bit Vista and all was well. Then I upgraded to 64-bit Windows 7, and suddenly the mouse started constantly losing connection.

There was no detectable pattern. It would work fine for a while, and then start disconnecting all the time for no apparently reason. Sometimes it would not wake up after sleeping, but sometimes it would quit while I was using it. At first I got it going again by removing the mouse from the list of Bluetooth devices and then adding it back in. That took too much time. Then, by accident, I discovered that I could wake it up by opening my Bluetooth settings and toggling the checkbox “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer”. If it was off I’d turn it on, if it was on I’d turn it off. That was faster, but still a pain.

I searched the internet and found many similar complaints, but no solutions. Several sites suggested upgrading your Bluetooth drivers. There’s no new driver for the Microsoft mouse, but I updated the Thinkpad Bluetooth drivers. No joy. Then the other day the mouse started quitting on me every few minutes and in desperation I searched again. This time I found the answer. There are two separate settings that need to be changed.

Continue reading ‘Bluetooth Mouse Losing Connection No More!’ »

The NetworkedBlogs app on Facebook was recently updated. For one thing, you only need four followers for a feed now. For another, you can use automatic updates to publish your blog to a Facebook page, as well as your profile.

Theoretically, this blog post will appear on my Facebook profile page, Can’t wait to see if it really does! The last one didn’t… But this one did! Cool!

Do you use Dreamweaver? Have you ever been editing a file and then suddenly you can’t save it and Dreamweaver reports the file as locked? And then if you reboot to unlock the file, you discover it has vanished?

Do you use the InDesign book feature? Have you ever saved the book and then discovered that it has vanished?

Both problems appear to occur only with CS4 running on Vista. Here are the workarounds.

Continue reading ‘Locked & Vanishing Files in Dreamweaver and InDesign’ »

Take my advice: Before you even think about installing Adobe trial software, do a full mirror backup of your computer’s hard disk, and be prepared to use it. I had horrible problems with Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4), and according to the three tech support guys in India that I spent hours on the phone with today, I am not the only one.

Here’s the whole sad story, with the ultimate solution.

Continue reading ‘Problems Removing and Installing Adobe CS4’ »

I keep encountering an annoying error message as I try to set up my new 64-bit Vista laptop. Often when I try to install a program, I’m told that another installation is already in progress and I must complete that one first. But no other installation is in progress, and simply rebooting doesn’t help.

I googled this problem, and found some complicated advice about failed installations and the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. But I find that this error occurs when a program installs just fine in every respect except that it leaves the Windows Installer Service running.

There’s a easy way to fix this.

Continue reading ‘Another Installation Already in Progress (But it’s Not)’ »

Here the solution to an annoying problem that took me some time to track down. I’m posting the problem and the solution to help any other fellow sufferers there may be out there.

I have a brand new ThinkPad running 64-bit Vista. But when I tried to install Microsoft Office 2007, no joy – it would copy the files from DVD then stall until I cancelled it. Same thing happened with Office updates. When I tried to install the Java Development Kit (JDK), I got an error message saying that another install process was running and that had to complete first.

After much pain, I finally tracked this down to the Brother XP spl Service (BrSplService – brsvc01a.exe), installed with the software for my Brother MFC 420CN. I still have no idea what this does, but I did find a patch for the problem on the Brother site. Problem solved.

In the old days, before everyone had a personal computer, paper appointment books provided a permanent record of what we did when. Sometimes that’s useful – sometimes you need to refer back. Today, I use Outlook on the PC and Pocket PC to keep track of my appointments. And when things are electronic, there is the potential for problems.

I have a recurring weekly appointment in Outlook, and I wanted to change the time of the appointment. That should be easy, right? You’d think you could change all the times going forward? But noooooo. Outlook warns you that if you make a change, all exceptions will be lost. But actually, it’s worse than that. It changes the time of every appointment – including appointments that occurred in the past. Happily I found a workaround.

Continue reading ‘Change Outlook Recurring Appointments without Losing Your History’ »

I use the open source, instant messaging client Pidgin to connect to multiple IM services at once. From my home computer, I had no problem configuring the program to work with AIM, SMS messaging (my cell phone), MSN Messenger, Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger. But at work I encountered firewall problems with the last three.

Here’s how I was finally able to connect (listing only the changes from the default). I’m running Pidgin 2.5.2. All the setting changes are on the “Advanced” page of the account setup dialog. Of course, what worked for me might not work for you, but hopefully it will help.

Continue reading ‘Configuring Pidgin from Behind a Firewall’ »

I’m still trying to decide how I will use this blog, now that computer technology is no longer my main focus. But yesterday I installed the latest Wordpress software, imported posts from my old MovableType blog, and wrote an .htaccess file to preserve the old MT links, so I have computer technology on the mind. Here are two great utilities – one for programmers, one for everybody.

What Color Is That?

I use Dreamweaver 8 (Macromedia version) for Web development and while I like it a lot, it’s a resource hog – so much so that I can’t launch my bitmap editing program at the same time to access its color selection feature.

I wanted a color selection program with a tiny footprint – something that does everything I need but nothing more. After looking at over a dozen of them, I finally found one that’s just about perfect – all the more so because it’s free: Color Cop. (Voluntary donations are accepted.)

Color Cop lets you identify any color on the screen, enter a color code to see what it looks like, use a standard Windows color selector to find a color, determine whether a color is Websafe, snap to the closest Websafe color, and sample colors using multi-pixel averages. It’s nicely designed, intuitive to use, and the entire executable is just 96K.

The elegance of Color Cop reminded me of another very elegant program I found that has nothing to do with programming.

Continue reading ‘2 Elegant Little Programs’ »

Ever since Microsoft pushed Version 5 of Windows Update onto my XP SP1 system, I have been unable to access Windows Update – until just now. I found it!! I just accessed Windows Update and successfully downloaded and installed updates to my system.

The particular error message I was getting was 0×80072F78 (appeared when Windows Update tried to find the updates for my system), but I think this solution will fix the problem on systems getting other error messages as well. If your error code starts with “800″, I think there’s a good chance this solution will help.

Continue reading ‘Fix for Windows Update 5 Errors’ »