A Successful Saturday

Saturday is Computer Club day. Tony is away at the moment, usually we head to the Computer Club together.

There was a lady there who had two computers, one a Vista laptop she brought with her, the other a desktop PC running XP which was back at her residence. She was unable to get her laptop to start up and connect to the internet, she kept getting a message about an incompatibility 'vector' problem between a driver and Vista. The message went on to say connect to the internet to solve the problem but the incompatible driver was one which was required to get on the internet.

The Club President is also a Computer Repair guy and we needed his expertise to solve the problem. It turned out the problem was with her firewall 'Zone Alarm'. As soon as we uninstalled Zone Alarm she connected to the internet OK and her computer began working flawlessly.

Her PC at home had a pirate version of XP on it and she was unable to get Internet Explorer or Firefox to work and get on the internet. Microsoft had identified the pirate copy (see photo left) and every now and again she was getting a pop-up message regarding her pirate copy. She was looking to get a 'real' copy of XP and install it. She thought the Microsoft message was not allowing her to get on the internet. I tried to get her to run a small program which would remove the 'pirate copy' notification. However she couldn't get on the internet as both Internet Explorer and Firefox would not run properly and just shut down.

As a last resort I got her to check if she had Zone Alarm installed on the PC. It was installed and as soon as it was uninstalled she was able to access Internet Explorer and Firefox which worked perfectly. Her problem was Zone Alarm was stopping Firefox and Internet Explorer from working, not that she had a pirate version of XP! She was very happy to have both computers working again and that she was able to access the internet.

Later on Saturday evening I had a phone call from my brother. It was great to have a chat.

Finally my footy team had a great win Saturday night and is now set to play off for the 2009 AFL Premiership next Saturday!