have browser, will travel Jim Roepcke's weblog, since 1999

Mail, iChat and Safari

Dad's rocking on his new iMac. He's already got Mail, iChat AV and Safari set up and working properly. I had to tell him what his Mail and AIM account settings were over the phone since I'd always set it up for him in the past.

iChat AV Audio chat worked on the first attempt. Now mom and dad can audio chat with each other. Never mind that they're in adjacent rooms and could hear each other barely needing to raise their voices, this is cool shit man!

It's going to take months to get this smile off my face. 8-D

Dad’s a switcher

My mom and dad are now both happy owners of beautiful 1GHz iMacs. Dad bought it today from SOHO Services in Victoria, my favorite Mac store, the same place he got my Mom's in April.

Thank goodness. I know that this makes everyone in our family happier... me and Cheryl because we don't have to worry about Dad's machine anymore, Mom because they'll be able to help each other and have more seamless interaction between the computers, and Dad because his Windows days are finally behind him again.

SOHO set him all up at the store ...it's perfect, I don't even have to go over and set it up for him!

Muuuhhahahaha!!! Now we need to make a Switcher commercial with my parents, using their new iMacs and iMovie.

Dad’s WinBox is hosed

Well the W32.Blaster saga just gets suckier all the time. I finally got SP2 downloaded on Dad's PC yesterday evening, but then it wouldn't install because the Print Spooler service wasn't started.

Exfuckingcuse me? Why does the Print Spooler service need to running to install a service pack? If anything, the less that's running the better during an OS upgrade! Okay whatever, I'll start it. Bzzzt. Can't start it because a dependency isn't started. Okay... what would that be. Perhaps the RPC service I had disabled in safe mode earlier? Fine, I'll re-enable and start it. Bzzzt. Now the Services MMC module is broken, trying to bring up the Properties for a service to set it from Disabled to Manual doesn't work... the window just doesn't appear. If I try to close the Services window it says I have to close the Property Sheets before closing... but none appear! Also, the Users and Groups control panel was buggered up, and so was Norton LiveUpdate and AntiVirus. IE wasn't working properly either, but Mozilla was (mostly).

Call me paranoid, but I think Dad had another virus on his machine, or got one after the W32.Blaster infection, or W32.Blaster does more than people think, or, Dad's machine was just seriously hosed already.

Either way, I can't seem to fix it. Can't install Microsoft's patch because SP2 isn't installed, but I can't install that because I can't start the service that the Print Spooler is dependent on which the SP2 installer insists be running to continue because the software that lets me start it is broken or infected.

I had a really long bitch session about Microsoft and buggy vulnerable software and still didn't feel any better. Dad might end up buying a Mac, because he's had way way too many seriously bad experiences with his PC and Mom's PC (Mom already switched to Mac OS X) and he's sick of it.

I don't know if he'll do it, or just buy another (clean) PC and defend it to the hilt, or what, but I really am sick of supporting people's Windows machines because of viruses and software that just stops working or blows itself up.

My free time is not worth those kinds of preventable problems (especially when I'm as busy as I am right now), and neither should anyone else's. People should not put up with this crap. It doesn't need to be this way.