Things which annoy me

Two of them are on my mind at the moment

Vodafone: They have conveniently broken the online “My Account” system, meaning that I am not able to alter my call diversion settings or view my credit balance online. At the moment I would like to divert all calls to Call Minder which will send me a text message with the phone number of anyone who tries to call me. I suppose that I could just turn off my phone, but I don’t really want to send everyone to voicemail.

Microsoft: I’m performing a clean installation of Windows Vista for a family member. The computer in question has a 3Com 3C905B network card. These cards were quite popular at one stage, and are still relatively common, however Microsoft have decided that they don’t need to include the driver for these network cards with Vista, and Vista also seems to be incapable of identifying the network card. Annoyingly, this meant that I had to boot to another Operating System in order to work out exactly what network card it is, then visit the 3Com website ^[1] to download the drivers (first download on the linked page), copy them to a flash drive and then extract them on the computer in question.

After installing the drivers for this 3Com network card, I ran Windows Update, only to discover that a newer version of the driver is available from Windows Update. If Microsoft can go to the trouble of having a newer version of the driver on Windows Update than is available directly from 3Com, would it really have been so much trouble to use up a few of the bytes of the Vista DVD with the driver?

Oh, and the default volume setting of Creative sound drivers…yes, I want to be blasted out of the room by your maximum volume.

Samuel