Friday, 16 July 2010

Letter to Mr HP – ProBook 4320s a lesson in how to make a great laptop…. and then ruin it.

Dear Mr HP,

good

Well done Mr HP – ProBook 4320s looks good!

I love your current model of the 4320s laptop – its a great combination of weight and size, performance with its core i3 processor - and even though this is the baby of the core-i range who ever thought that you’d see four cores in a laptop!

image It all seems a bit Buck-Rogers to someone who started with a BBC micro.

Nice screen, plenty of ram, suitably solid build, very usable keyboard, Windows 7 runs beautifully on it and once you work out how to open it up with its new fangled all-from-the-front-through-the-keyboard access stuff easy to upgrade it with bigger drives, ram and so on. It hibernates, sleeps without complaint, wireless is solid - all the things that a laptop should do.

But.IMG00067-20100716-1300

How did the worst touchpad in laptop history get past the usability testers, quality control engineers and anyone who used it before it went to production?

No Mr HP – this is not how you make a touchpad!

It makes the laptop almost useless as a lap-top – you have to have a mouse or other external pointer to get work done on it.

It has integrated buttons which are part of the touch-pad area – its possible that I’m missing the point about this what with all the Windows 7 multi-touch stuff but it is impossible whilst actually using this on your lap or a desk to avoid brushing against the ‘buttons’IMG00064-20100716-1225

This causes the mouse to jump, or for you to do a click-stretch/select move which is hopeless – you have to develop some kind of magic finger-levitate/hover action -

Thumb-levitate magic!

There are enough options in the driver panel to make your eyes-bleed but I cant find anything that will make the button areas be just buttons and not some useless button/touch combo area.

Mr HP, please try harder next time.

Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Calendaring agent failed with error code 0x8000ffff while saving appointment

Hello,

We've been experiencing event ID 8208 in the application log and event ID 10016 in the system log:

8208: "Calendaring agent failed with error code 0x8000ffff while saving appointment" in the application log and event ID 10016:



10016: "The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Launch permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {9DA0E106-86CE-11D1-8699-00C04FB98036}"

"to the user NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM SID (S-1-5-18). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool"




After some invesigation it appears the setupof Policy Patrol installs parts for Kaspersky antivirus scanning even if you have not purchased the product. To resolve this run regedit and delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lk.auto, once deleted resatart your exchange server and the errors should go away.