Computers

[pony_trekker]

I am curious. My IT department is somewhere between the stone and bronze ages.

Can you receive emailed deposition transcripts in executeable format?

Can you use your notebook on the corporate network?

Does anyone have a work wireless network?

Can you scan documents?

Can you use a personal pop or imap email account?

Does your firewall block emails entiled ORDER from people called Your Honor while permitting 250 porno spam emails per day?

[Anne Elk]

Originally posted by pony_trekker
I am curious. My IT department is somewhere between the stone and bronze ages.

Can you receive emailed deposition transcripts in executeable format?

No. All *.exe file attachments are blocked by our firewall. We usually ask the court reporter to zip those files or just send us an ASCII txt file so we can import into LiveNote (our preferred transcript management application).

Can you use your notebook on the corporate network?

No. I could at my previous firm.

Does anyone have a work wireless network?

No, although we plan on doing some testing in the future. There are still issues with having a consistent signal thorughout the building.

Can you scan documents?

Yes. We can scan to TIFF and PDF ourselves and have OCR software set up in a central location. Large volume scanning can be sent to our FM.

Can you use a personal pop or imap email account?

No.

Does your firewall block emails entiled ORDER from people called Your Honor while permitting 250 porno spam emails per day?

Yes. Especially e-mails coming from the Federal District court. For some reason our system views them as SPAM. As a work around, attorneys set up an Outlook filter to put all e-mails from the court into a special folder rather than the spam folder.

Originally posted by pony_trekker
I am curious. My IT department is somewhere between the stone and bronze ages.

Can you receive emailed deposition transcripts in executeable format?

Yes.

Can you use your notebook on the corporate network?

Yes.

Does anyone have a work wireless network?

Sort of -- we're primarily wired, but keep wireless available in conference/work/deposition rooms, and all the attorney laptops have wireless capability.

Can you scan documents?

Yes.

Can you use a personal pop or imap email account?

Yes.

Does your firewall block emails entiled ORDER from people called Your Honor while permitting 250 porno spam emails per day?

Probably -- if I'm not just deleting the Orders along all my opportunities to buy Cialis soft tabs.

We're a midsize firm with a mostly high-tech clientele, with about half the partners being IP/computer geeks.

[Say_hello_for_me]

So when I bought my Dell, I got a 2 or 3 year subscription to McAfee for the ride. Before I continue, I'll specify that the computer has XP Professional.

The McAfee is constantly notifying me that its installed a security update. Other than that, the only stuff I transfer to the computer is pretty much documents emailed from work to home and back.

Starting yesterday, McAfee starts notifying me randomly that it doesn't have the passwords for my MSN hotmail accounts, and is having trouble managing the spam.

And when I check my MSN accounts, all the inbox messages are in the trash. Put em in the "saved" message folder and they stay, but put em in the inbox and their deleted in 5 minutes.

So tonight (when this repeated when I got home), I start screwing around with McAfee. Anyone ever check out their default spam filters? I'm not positive, but I think that's where this started (I disabled the spam program). This fucking thing was giving an explanation for each and every deleted email.

By each and every, I mean every single email that was present. From 50-60 friends and family members.

And with the MSN trash can is set to empty every day, these things would have been gone if I hadn't checked it when I was using this computer yesterday.

Hope this helps someone. Somebody is going to get royally fucked with this bullshit.

Hello

[pony_trekker]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
So when I bought my Dell, I got a 2 or 3 year subscription to McAfee for the ride. Before I continue, I'll specify that the computer has XP Professional.

The McAfee is constantly notifying me that its installed a security update. Other than that, the only stuff I transfer to the computer is pretty much documents emailed from work to home and back.

Starting yesterday, McAfee starts notifying me randomly that it doesn't have the passwords for my MSN hotmail accounts, and is having trouble managing the spam.

And when I check my MSN accounts, all the inbox messages are in the trash. Put em in the "saved" message folder and they stay, but put em in the inbox and their deleted in 5 minutes.

So tonight (when this repeated when I got home), I start screwing around with McAfee. Anyone ever check out their default spam filters? I'm not positive, but I think that's where this started (I disabled the spam program). This fucking thing was giving an explanation for each and every deleted email.

By each and every, I mean every single email that was present. From 50-60 friends and family members.

And with the MSN trash can is set to empty every day, these things would have been gone if I hadn't checked it when I was using this computer yesterday.

Hope this helps someone. Somebody is going to get royally fucked with this bullshit.

Hello

Hotmail plain old sucks ass. I still have my hotmail account open but I haven't received a legitimate email in 2 years. Even though many legitimate emails have been sent and I receive 1100 spam emails a day.

Gmail, macmail, yahoo, are all better.

[mmm3587]

Originally posted by pony_trekker
Hotmail plain old sucks ass. I still have my hotmail account open but I haven't received a legitimate email in 2 years. Even though many legitimate emails have been sent and I receive 1100 spam emails a day.

Gmail, macmail, yahoo, are all better.

Also, there is no reason an external program should have to do anything with a web e-mail account, unless it's just checking to see if you have mail. Let the web e-mail accounts do their own spam filtering; Yahoo! and Gmail do a good job at it.

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by mmm3587
Also, there is no reason an external program should have to do anything with a web e-mail account, unless it's just checking to see if you have mail. Let the web e-mail accounts do their own spam filtering; Yahoo! and Gmail do a good job at it.

2.

It was the McAfee program's default settings, and its like they connived with MSN to do this. I've had the computer for 3 months though, so it appears that it was one of their recent "updates" or whatever that did this.

Nevertheless, I hope this helps someone else. As general advice, do not let an external program filter things for a web-based e-mail account.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me

It was the McAfee program's default settings, and its like they connived with MSN to do this.

Reminder: Your computer came with McAfee and Windows, owned by Microsoft, preloaded.

You're surprised that MSN, owned by Microsoft, might have some kind of actual integration with McAfee?

Put differently: Dude, if you want to get away from Microsoft's bullshit (or most of it), get a mac, drop your hotmail account, and use Safari or Firefox to surf the web.

[Replaced_Texan]

Windows on my laptop crashed in December, and I'd installed Service Pack 2 sometime in October or so.

After losing everything and eventually getting a new harddrive, I declined Microsoft's invitation to load SP2 when I got the computer back from the service people.

Now, Microsoft's updates are pestering me again about SP2. Is there a consensus on whether or not I should load it? I don't know what caused the Windows crash before, though I suspect it may have been my iPod and not SP2.

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Reminder: Your computer came with McAfee and Windows, owned by Microsoft, preloaded.

You're surprised that MSN, owned by Microsoft, might have some kind of actual integration with McAfee?

Put differently: Dude, if you want to get away from Microsoft's bullshit (or most of it), get a mac, drop your hotmail account, and use Safari or Firefox to surf the web.

A. I have a mac laptop at home, and I'm using the Airport Extreme/Express network for all 3 computers in the house.

B. Dell fits into this picture somewhere. Plus HP for the printer. And so on and so on. I sorta imagine there is some level of integration for everything, and its not really the integration that scares me.

What scares me is some major publicly traded company updating a "spamkiller" program in a way that your email is suddenly dumping your entire inbox in the trash.

This is like a whole nother level of fucking up for a tech company. Security my ass.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me

What scares me is some major publicly traded company updating a "spamkiller" program in a way that your email is suddenly dumping your entire inbox in the trash.

Fair enough. BTW, on Mmms point, though, a virus checker/spyware checker does need to check webmail because otherwise you can download viruses that way. Work turned off webmail access for just this reason (of course, this was the result of their jackass decision to turn off pop-mail access through outlook, which allowed the built-in, system-wide virus checker to check those emails).

[pony_trekker]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Reminder: Your computer came with McAfee and Windows, owned by Microsoft, preloaded.

You're surprised that MSN, owned by Microsoft, might have some kind of actual integration with McAfee?

Put differently: Dude, if you want to get away from Microsoft's bullshit (or most of it), get a mac, drop your hotmail account, and use Safari or Firefox to surf the web.

2.

[pony_trekker]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Windows on my laptop crashed in December, and I'd installed Service Pack 2 sometime in October or so.

After losing everything and eventually getting a new harddrive, I declined Microsoft's invitation to load SP2 when I got the computer back from the service people.

Now, Microsoft's updates are pestering me again about SP2. Is there a consensus on whether or not I should load it? I don't know what caused the Windows crash before, though I suspect it may have been my iPod and not SP2.

Wasn't that an allegation in the DOJ's ill-fated complaint -- that Gates wanted competing software intentionally crippled? Can anyone convince me that's not what's going on here?

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Windows on my laptop crashed in December, and I'd installed Service Pack 2 sometime in October or so.

After losing everything and eventually getting a new harddrive, I declined Microsoft's invitation to load SP2 when I got the computer back from the service people.

Now, Microsoft's updates are pestering me again about SP2. Is there a consensus on whether or not I should load it? I don't know what caused the Windows crash before, though I suspect it may have been my iPod and not SP2.

I would install SP2, but, and I know you know this, don't ever ever ever ever run Explorer and probably you should not use outlook either.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...1/tc_zd/148835 -- yet another story about how fucked up explorer is.

My hard drive got very screwed up and when I got a new one, I reinstalled pre-SP2 windows, immediately installed virus etc. stuff, then immediately did the SP2 thing, and didn't go anywhere on the internet until that was all done. I then installed Firefox and use that unless something won't run on it.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Windows on my laptop crashed in December, and I'd installed Service Pack 2 sometime in October or so.

After losing everything and eventually getting a new harddrive, I declined Microsoft's invitation to load SP2 when I got the computer back from the service people.

Now, Microsoft's updates are pestering me again about SP2. Is there a consensus on whether or not I should load it? I don't know what caused the Windows crash before, though I suspect it may have been my iPod and not SP2.

Load it. Back up first, but it's a good patch, and fixes some important stuff that slipped by SP1.