When your mouse gets Parkinsons

So the other day…  My mouse on my home computer just started shaking, shaking and acting very erratic.   This was well after April fools day so I was fairly certain I wasn’t being punked.

Items plugged into this laptop are/were:

+ a Logitech VX Revolution (Wireless) Mouse.

+ a Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard (also wireless).

+ a USB cable into my USB KVM which also shows up as a mouse/HID device

+ a Bluetooth presentation mouse, though not currently active.

I did the normal trouble shooting steps.   Made sure my anti-viri software was up-to-date. Plugging and unplugging mice and keyboards.  I *thought* it was the diNovo Edge as it also has a little track pad.   It would go away for a while but not permanently.

It made using the computer almost impossible.

After a little more research I found technet Article: The Microsoft mouse pointer moves erratically or does not respond when you use a Microsoft pointing device # Q321122 and was appalled at the 82 steps it took to fix this.   Why this is still an issue after almost 2 years, and why since it is an issue that there isn’t a utility to deal with the 2000 registry entries I had to manually delete is beyond me.

But if your mouse suddenly gets the shakes.  You may want to look into this.

FWIW, deleting all the devices from the device manager had a greater impact than deleting all the registry entries.

-Datapoohbah.

No offense was intended to those that actually have Parkinsons disease and shake like my mouse was shaking.  It would be nice if you could eliminate a few drivers and registry entries to get rid of it.

Corporate Anti-virus What do you use?

We’re currently evaluating our corporate Anti-virus products.

For the past couple years we’ve used Trend Office Scan.  For the most part it’s worked OK.  The interface and admin tools are horrible though and it’s also good at finding things but not necessarily cleaning it up.

Over the last couple months we’ve had a few (read more than 4) instances where computers were infected and Trend Office Scan was oblivious.

We’re up for renewal in February, so the timing is perfect to switch.

In the recent cases of infestation we’ve been able to limit the damage and clean up after trend with other 3rd party products.  Mostly free versions so this really makes us suspicious of Trends effectiveness.

For the record, we are not open to any Symantec solutions.  That’s just not going to happen.  We’re also not big fans of McAfee.   Those two companies seem more focused on Marketing than creating reliable usable products.

We’ve looked at AVG and Kaspersky and Microsoft ForeFront and are leaning towards AVG.

AVG looks great on the client side, but administratively it’s kind of week.

Kaspersky is just overkill, we’ve toned down UAC messages, and installing Kaspersky will remind you why you did so.  It’s also prohibitively expensive.

Microsoft ForeFront, really come on…  A corporate anti-virus solution should not have the complexity of Sharepoint to administer it.  It also shouldn’t need to use 3 different servers.

We are leaning towards AVG but we are open to suggestions.

Requirements include:

  • Cost: < $20 a user
  • Basic Anti-virus is really all we need, we don’t need another firewall product and we don’t need extended browser enhancements or even email scanning.
  • Centralized updating and management is a MUST.  Our users shouldn’t ever need to do anything and we need to report on the condition of the product.

If you have a suggestion or a comment on any of these products please post away.

Thanks…

AVG Trial Download – Broken

When your business model is try before you buy.

It’s in your best interest to make sure the ‘try’ part works.

We’re re-evaluating centralized Anti-virus and would really like to evaluate AVG’s Network offerings, but it’s proving to be harder than it should be.

avgtrialbroken1

We’ve used Trend for the past couple years and it’s been OK.  Recently we’ve had a few things get by Trend and AVG Free has picked it up and dealt with it.  So we’re anxious to give it a look.

Dell e4300 is bittersweet.

e4300

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

Unwinding the Marketing Spin

"The Datapoohbah is frustrated.  Frustrated with MBA’s and "Highly Educated" people that quite simply, “do not have a clue”.  I have long subscribed to the philosophy that it is simply possible to over educate.  That higher education, without real world experience, is a dangerous thing.  Unfortunately today that seems to be more the norm.

One needs only to look at the economic crisis on Wall Street, banking, big business, retail and the automotive industry.  All of these industries are filled with MBA’s and folks who should know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be smart, right?

  • I know a person with a Masters in Computer Science who also holds an MBA and that literally couldn’t change a toner cartridge in a printer without help.
    (Yes I know they can be complicated, but damn, the instructions are pretty clear on the bag that the toner comes in).

The item that really got my goat today can be found here in the article written on November 28th entitled "You Can Support Headcount and Share of Voice on a Tight Budget" by one; "Alan See", Marketing Genius and MBA.

In this ~750 word article, the marketing genius would try to convince you that during these tough economic times you can "Do more with less" and by doing so you can still build sales leads and retain head count.

On the surface the article looks pretty good.  No, it’s not real deep, not a lot of marketing material is deep.

But the reality is this article spins and skews what went down during this "engagement" in a way that is almost criminal.

"the company increased qualified leads by 7 percent while cutting the budget by 24 percent. The decrease in spending was not the result of reducing headcount. During the campaign, the sales force set three consecutive monthly sales records, as well as three consecutive quarterly sales records."

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Who wouldn’t want to hire a guy who could increase your sales leads 7%, set sales records, cut your budget and allow you to retain staff during these tough economical times?  Oh, and while he’s at it, single handedly increase your "share of voice".

So that’s the spun version of what happened at this "engagement", and as you know there’s almost always two sides to every story.

I’ll try to keep this simple so those with MBA’s can keep up.

Suppose you run a lemonade stand.

Your basic costs include: Water, Ice, Lemons and cups. 

Your primary method for advertising includes:

  • Word of mouth (Brand X, our lemonade is delicious)
  • Print advertising (Direct, local market advertising, perhaps leveraging coupons to reach your market).
  • Direct Customer marketing, via email or snail mail.  (Hey Joe, you’ve enjoyed our Lemon aide in the past, you should try our new pink Lemon Aid)

You’re trying to grow your business so you hire engage a marketing genius.

This new guy has lots of great ideas for focusing your marketing. 

  • Fewer Tasters, More Buyers (Marketing term: higher quality leads)
    Specifically he wants to reduce the number of ‘shoppers or tasters’ so that you use fewer resources sampling your products (cost savings). 
    (Bear in mind that tasters and samplers aren’t a burden, and history has clearly shown that the more people you have tasting your product the more people buy)
  • Stop/Slow Direct Marketing (decrease the spend, save the headcount)
    Stop doing what you’re good at.  Stop that local or direct marketing that has worked so well in the past.  Stop inviting new and current customers to taste your new flavors, that might waste your time.
  • Use Smoke and Mirrors (Marketing term: proclaim yourself thought leaders)
    Instead of spending your hard earned marketing dollars to generate leads (tasters of your product).  Spend it on a thought leadership piece, to educate the market on organic lemon farming, water filtration.  The things that help to make good lemonade.  Nothing directly related to your specific product, just over-all feel good, brand awareness marketing. 
  • Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon (Marketing term: leverage social networks)
    The value proposition here is still debatable.  This too is feel-good marketing.  Being where your customers expect to see you.  Nothing wrong with this just, but be mindful of the time you spend doing it and the ripples that come from it.

There is nothing wrong with thought leadership marketing.  It’s generally a good thing.  But it’s the type of marketing you do "in addition to" what has made you successful in the past, not "instead of".

The problem comes in when you cut your marketing spending on your bread and butter marketing and focus all your internal resources on the other.

What you don’t read about in Mr. See’s article is the flat spin he put the company in by neglecting the bread and butter marketing that the company lives on.

Three months of consecutive sales records?  That’s a true statement that had absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to ‘reduce the spend and save the head count’.  
It’s completely unrelated. 

Did any of his work pay off?  Yes, in some ways it did.

It is true that the thought leadership piece did drive a few highly qualified prospects our way.  A few prospects closer to buying without wasting a lot of time tasting.  If we calculate the true cost of those leads, the cost would be considered astronomical.

In the process of this engagement we all learned a very valuable lesson.

Do what you’re good at, and do it well. Ignore the obvious and it will eventually catch up to you.

Yes it’s true, the Blackberry Storm is a turd.

BB_Storm_Front_Left271x500

Thankfully I don’t have to use one.  But I did get to play with one at a Christmas gathering last weekend.

It was pathetically slow, slow switching applications, slow changing from portrait to landscape.

The clickable front, button simulator, was a nice touch.  But the Pearl like keyboard in vertical mode is horrible.

I hope Blackberry can fix these issues.   It will not replace my 8830, or my iPhone which is still a sub-par enterprise device.

So basically, everything you’ve read on the Internet is true.  This phone sure is pretty but its poorly executed.