Chaos, confusion and me

This weekend I went out to visit my parents and siblings on the farm. My first encounter was with a nine week old Cocker Spaniel pup so I was off to a good start. It’s always great to come out to the farm and wind down with some country life and the company of animals. My version of country life is patting the dog and watching the wildlife through the window. My sisters version of country life is currently being an extremly busy midwife to 600+ ewes. So far just over 400 lambs have seen the light of day. I intend to go down and have a look at them as soon as I solved the constant problem of my family’s various ISPs, e-mail accounts and general computer problems.

This time the task was to move my mother from her very, very unstable e-mail provider onto my domain. Creating a new account and fixing the settings in Outlook Express was a breeze. All that remained was setting an away message for her previous e-mail address so that people who tried to reach her would know that she had moved onto a new address. Finding where to create and activate an away message was simple, getting it to actually work wasn’t. After spending nearly two hours on this thankless task I mailed their support for help. I doubt they will help since they haven’t been bothered to answer my mum’s support requests earlier. Which of course is part of why she wants to leave Spray for another provider. Her original provider home.se was bought by Spray and from then on it went rapidly down hill.

My brother has moved and because of this he will loose his current e-mail address since he is changing ISP. Creating his new e-mail account and creating autoforward and away messages from his old e-mail account took no more than five minutes, tops. That is how an e-mail service should function.

The last support task on my list was getting my sisters e-mail to work on her new computer. I had previously guided her on the phone and when I got hold of her computer everything was configured correctly. I did however discover that their home network wasn’t. Setting up a wired and wireless home network for Windows Vista and Windows XP wasn’t as straight forward as expected and if it hadn’t been for my sisters little toddlers running around I would have used some very bad words indeed. After configuring the router and various networks cards without success I was more than a little peeved.

Since I had had problems while trying to share a printer over my parents home network and finally discovering that it was Trend Micro’s security suite PC-Cilllin that was the problem I deactivated the Panda AntiVirus + Firewall 2007 Titanium installation on the computers and suddenly everything was A OK again. I even got printer sharing set up and working. I then reactivated Panda and everything died. After trying to add exceptions to allow printer sharing with out finding anything that worked I finally killed Pandas firewall and let the computers rely on Windows firewall and yet again everything works as it should. Finally done but I am still confused to why third party security software always is so hard to configure. If the sell software for home users they shouldn’t prevent home users from using standard functions such as printer sharing. Sure, it is a safety risk and should probably be turned off by default but it should also be possible to turn on without having to resort to exorcism and dark rituals.

Now it’s starting to get dark and I can sneak down to the sheeps to see my sister working. It’s always good to see other people working but it would have been nice to get out while it was still light outside.

Posted by Edward on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 17:52:09.