Symptoms: The homepage icons don’t go into edit or wobble mode when they are held down. It works fine on mine but try as I might holding any of those icons down does nothing!

Problem: It means she can’t easily edit the icon order on the home pages or perhaps more importantly, can’t move things into the folders that the recent update provides.

If anyone knows the answer I’d be very pleased to hear from them.

iTunes sync made the whole operation pretty straightforward, if longwinded. After about 20mins-half an hour of data thrashing between the phone and the Mac, I was able to use a few of the new features – folders and email consolidation being the two most useful to me. Unfortunately the update also slowed the phone to a crawl for some apps.

After a lot of Googling I seem to have found a solution which gets back at least some of the speed – simply reset the phone a couple or three times!
By reset, I mean hold down the ON/OFF button and the Home button for about 15 seconds, that means past the “slide to power off” screen until a silver apple logo appears, you can then release the buttons. The phone will display the logo while it resets itself and after about another 30-40 seconds it displays the home screen and your all set to go. It took three goes to speed up anything on mine but it has worked – results may vary!

Of course you’d be daft to try this without having an up-to-date backup of all your settings – but you’ve already got one of those haven’t you ?

This blog uses built in WordPress tools to ensure that I don’t see any spam posted in the comments but keeping control of my mail client’s filters isn’t quite so easy – I should say wasn’t quite so easy!

All my registered domains have spam filtering on their mail servers but increasingly this doesn’t always catch the latest rubbish, that still makes its way through to my desktop and, in my case, Outlook. The inbuilt Microsoft filter isn’t that bright and for some years now I have relied on a little add-in called SpamBayes which is an Open Source solution to the problem using Baysian filters to “score” each message and filter it accordingly. All fine and dandy then? Well no, not really. Unfortunately updates to SpamBayes have been few and far between over the last 2 or 3 years and the project seems to have stalled. This means that recent updates to Windows and Outlook have started causing proiblems with it.

I have noticed that Outlook often doesn’t fully quit when I shut it down. That means that when I restart it, I actually get two copies, 1 hidden from the previous session and 1 for the latest startup, this causes resource problems by the end of each day as I have seen 5 or 6 Outlook sessions running in Task Manager. There are various add-ons to cure this but so far I haven’t found one without its own problems.

Enter SpamFighter! I came across this when I decided to ditch SpamBayes for something more up-to-date and have been using it for the last few weeks. It works a treat and doesn’t interfere with Outlook at all, so I decided to lash out the £17 for a years subscription to the system. After a very simple download/install, I now have aclean inbox again.

SpamFighter works as an add-in to Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird and for the main part operates as a basic spam filter, putting all bad mail into its own folder and marking it. The clever bit is that it is user supported and anything it misses which makes its way through to the inbox can simply be marked by me as spam and that action is relayed to several million other SpamFighter users who systems will also mark that message in the same way. Of course they do the same for my inbox! In addition to the “community” rules I can also add my own white or blacklist for senders and the software uses those rules to override the community ones if needbe.

There’s a free, fully functional, 30 day trial available at the website. Download SPAMfighter today.

Why? Well take a look here, the list of people with problems after this update is growing by the hour and they are having serious problems. My own machine(s) updated themselves automatically and, thankfully, seem to be working – Matt though has a problem with his laptop which, maybe coincidentally, now refuses to boot.

Matt’s machine failed with the famous BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and the display reports a problem with the boot section of his internal drive. While I can see no reference (at the link above) to the same thing happening anywhere else, it does seem odd that it happened on the same day as all these other reports.

There are fixes and details of how to apply them at the link – as usual with these things, it’s a good idea to read the most recent thread posts before doing anything which changes your setup….

I guess the other problem may be that you won’t be able to read this if your PC won’t boot! Doh!

I presume I can add photos somehow but I’ll leave that for another day!

Take a look at this post, the discussion there is a little confused in that it combines the basic lack of RDP function in Vista and W7 with the details for logging in concurrently with other users. MOST IMPORTANTLY the file posted there for download works! – Note: If you use it, make sure to run it as Admin

I can now connect to my W7 PC from anywhere with a couple of small caveats:

1. So far I have no sound via the connection – probably soemthing to do with the remote Dell PC itself
2. The RDP service runs perfectly and even sorts out firewall permissions, it doesn’t though show up as an option in Computer/Properties/Remote.

Well done Green Button… great work!

All looks OK for the moment… but then of course it always does.

Fingers crossed.

The single thing which causes most problems for the WordPress users I know is uploading and positioning images in their posts. Hopefully I have found a solution which will make things quite a bit easier – it’s called “Freebie Images” and is a WP plugin – you can get it here.

I just installed it and it shows up nicely as a panel in the WP “Add New Post” dashboard. From there it’s just a case of:

• Searching for a suitable picture from the included stock library
• Dragging its thumbnail from the panel into the post
• Finetuning the result

Up at the top of this post is a pic chosen after searching for “F1″ and dragging my choice into position.

So far it looks a very useful tool – I’ll report back after a few more tests….

About a year ago I applied to help with a UK broadband speed survey at SamKnows, I now have access to the results and can see how a stack of measurements actually turned out for my connection.

Perhaps the most obvious statistics are those regarding straight speed, so here’s the result for the year:

As you can see it’s been far from the 8Mb maximum to which I’m entitled although, of course, the clever guys at BT insist that 8Mb is an “up to” figure! Looking at the graph shows a wiggly line between 2 and 3Mb with a maximum somewhere around 2.7.

I have just finished a call to BT about the numbers and they insist that all is well and is “up to” 8Mb which of course it is but then 57Kb would be as well. They promised to carry out some extra diagnostics on the line but could offer me no clue as to when my line would be upgraded to something over 6Mb – the sort of connection I could be convinced was “up to” 8Mb.

Thanks to SamKnows and the extra customised router/software they supplied, my system is still being monitored and the results collated and added to others to give a true representation of what is happening across the UK.