Saturday 28 September 2013

Dongle Disaster 2

Having decided I needed a dongle I have not been easily put off by the troubles outlined in "Dongle Disaster".

Last week I finally managed to buy a dongle and get it working. That does not mean it was without issues - thanks to Windows 8 it took forty minutes to get the thing to work. Having learned my lesson at the hands of phones 4 U I did not leave the Vodafone shop until it was doing what it should.


Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Windows 8

For anyone unfamiliar with Windows 8, let me help. It is an operating system - Microsoft's latest but definitely not best. It has hidden menus which means that if your cursor does not hover over the right place on the screen you will never find them. I found this out when I tried to switch my laptop off for the first time. Gone is the "start" button which you click and then select "shut down"; enter the hidden menu for settings, this in turn hides the "power options menu" (which I would have thought related to battery saving) and inside this subterranean menu is the option to shut down. Call me a Luddite but if you have to use a different and now out of date PC to find out how to switch off your brand new laptop something is wrong!

End of grumpy rant against Microsoft Windows 8
Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Outlook 2013

Twenty minutes after I had left the shop I was in a cafe trying to use my dongle. Good old Microsoft did it again. Outlook 2013 - this time. The dongle worked fine - the green light flashed then went blue and flashed, finally I had a solid blue light and a stable connection. I opened up Outlook 2013 to check on emails. Or rather, I tried to open up Outlook 2013 to read emails. It opened and then promptly told me that it had detected a "metered connection" (Microsoft speak for - we have found the dongle you are paying for and it is working) and that as such it was switching me to work offline!! Thus they rendered my dongle useless unless I overrode the Outlook basic instinct to ruin my life.

Swiss-nephew-blog learned at the age of two how to operate the Apple IPad and he could not speak or read at the time. How do MS get it so wrong?

Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Outlook 2013

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