NCP VPN not quite Windows 7 compatible

I got so frustrated with the NCP VPN client software, specifically a recent update, that I decided to let my frustration out by writing about it. For a long time I used the, IT approved, Cisco VPN client to access our corporate network. And as the OS technology moved along, so did my systems, meaning Vista, Windows 7, and 64-bit. While, for the most part, our IT approved systems remained to be only 32-bit XP. Cisco, for some reason, maybe they are representative of IT organizations as a whole, was late to support Vista, was late to support Windows 7, and for the longest time never supported x64. ...

July 21, 2010 · 5 min

Amazon Unbox on x64 Vista

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try. The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show. Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time. ...

June 14, 2009 · 4 min

DxO Optics Pro and Adobe Lightroom on Vista x64

I bought my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D, and my first wide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22, several years ago. Amongst the many articles and reviews I read, online and in magazines, I came across a product called DxO Optics Pro, a product that would supposedly correct, amongst other things, lens distortion. This seemed like the perfect tool to help me with my wide angle pictures that looked very “fishy eyed”. And since DxO, then version 4, was receiving good reviews, I decided to trial the product. In those days the DxO licensing model was to pay per camera body and per lens module, not a cheap investment, but I really liked the results and so I purchased the product. ...

February 11, 2009 · 8 min

Google Email Uploader on Vista x64

I am currently importing a few thousand email messages from Outlook 2007 to my email account hosted on Google Apps. Google provides an Email Uploader utility, and it is easy to use, but getting it to work with Outlook 2007 on Vista x64 was less than trivial. The utility installed fine on my Vista x64 system, but it found no mailboxes to import. A little research showed that several other people using Vista x64 and Outlook 2007 have exactly the same problem. ...

January 10, 2009 · 2 min