Seems the launch of the iPhone has been plagued by problems caused by AT&T. I’ll bet Steve Jobs isn’t too happy after a relatively smooth distribution in the US. People are reporting having difficulty in activating their shinny new phones on to the AT&T network.

Many owners are reporting one of the following two errors:

We’re sorry, AT&T has determined that your current account cannot be used with the iPhone.

or

Your activation requires additional time to complete.

Apparently you can still use the phone to transfer music and pictures, but hey, most iPhone users will already own a standard iPod with their music library’s already installed and won’t be impressed. First thing I’d be wanting to do is call through my contacts and boast about my new gadget.

Customers are being told by AT&T support that there are issues and that they should retry activation every 30 minutes or so. Quite how a company the size of AT&T could botch such an important launch is amazing. Or maybe not? Either way I guess Apple won’t be best pleased.

You can read more over at the Macrumors Forum.

Hopefully the UK launch will go a lot smoother, but then our own providers have been equally inept at times in the past.

Forza Motorsport 2 Bricking XBox 360 consoles?

Seems like there are more problems with the Xbox 360 hardware. Apparently people playing the new Forza Motorsport 2 game are experiencing their consoles regularly freezing. Some are even ending up with the ‘3 red lights’ and having to send their 360s in for repair.


With the amount of 360 failures that are being reported at the moment it seems like another nail in the coffin of the current hardware setup. Something is obviously very wrong and I doubt Microsoft be able to continue to deny that there is a problem.

I am a big fan of the Xbox 360, my release model has been working fine for 18 months now. Although I do have a desire to play Forza, I won’t be tempting fate until there is some resolution to this issue whether that be an update for the game or some guarantee from Microsoft that a bricked console will be fixed free of charge regardless of age.

You can view people's experiences over at this thread.

Internet Explorer will not display HTTPS (Secure) pages

Just spent the last 2 hours trying to resolve a problem for a customer who could not log in to his Hotmail account. When I first looked at the machine which is running Windows XP SP2 and fully patched it was obvious that the problem was that IE could not display secure pages (those addresses that start with HTTPS://).

After a fruitless search for a solution, all of which suggested variations on clearing temporary Internet files and restoring all settings to their default state, I still had no luck. The last suggestion was to create a new user account and try accessing Hotmail from that... again no luck, same error message.

Finally I decided to check that Windows Update had been run recently, the customer had assured me that he did this religiously, and I was soon greeted with the error number 0x800b0001 and the usual nonsense from Microsoft which gives no indication as to what has gone wrong. After searching Google for 0x800b001 I found an article that suggested the following:

Register the following files with these steps:

Click on Start, Run and type "REGSVR32 SOFTPUB.DLL" (w/o the quotes). You should see a popup message that this process succeeded.

Click on Start, Run and type "REGSVR32 INITPKI.DLL" (w/o the quotes). You should see a popup message that this process succeeded.

Click on Start, Run and type "REGSVR32 MSSIP32.DLL" (w/o the quotes). You should see a popup message that this process succeeded.

Click on Start, Run and type "REGSVR32 WINTRUST.DLL (w/o the quotes). You should see a popup message that this process succeeded.

The first thing I noticed was that registering INITPKI.DLL took over 3 minutes to come back with the success message. But on completion of the above, Windows Update ran successfully. The bonus of this was that the above solution had also resolved the original issue of viewing secure Internet pages.

I'm really not sure why the above solved the problem, but I'm sure glad it did. I found it strange that not one of the sites we searched, Microsoft's included, did not mention any of the above as a potential resolution to our original problem?

Think your computer is running slow?

Then perhaps your security software is to blame. Most people will have read the stories of Norton Internet Security 2007 crippling machines but I'd not known the full extent of the problem. It's an absolute shame when you see people using McAfee or Norton to protect themselves simply because it came pre-installed on their Dell computer or they'd been told it was a must have by the helpful staff PC World. Again, profit before quality/customer satisfaction.

Trawling around for some figures I stumbled upon the blog of Jeff Atwood who has a nice article on security software and it's implications. It's amazing to see just how much these security suites actually degrade the performance of your machine:

	Percent slower
	Boot	CPU	Disk
Norton Internet Security 2006	46%	20%	2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8	7%	20%	2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007	45%	8%	1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006	2%	0%	1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS	16%	0%	992%
Norton Antivirus 2002	11%	8%	658%
Windows Live OneCare	11%	8%	512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper	6%	8%	369%
Nod32 v2.5	7%	8%	177%
avast! 4.7 Home	4%	8%	115%
Windows Defender	5%	8%	54%
Panda Antivirus 2007	20%	4%	15%
AVG 7.1 Free	15%	0%	19%

I've always liked AVG Free myself. Quite often it's picked up infections on computers that Norton has supposedly been protecting but has the added benefit of being totally free. Obviously you'd need a seperate firewall installed, but there are a couple of very good free products out there.

BT Tech Support Nightmare

Just had the most frustrating call to the BT (British Telecommunications) Tech Support people in India.A customer had phoned me because he was experiencing difficulty setting up his new BT Home Hub. He estimated that over the past 2 days he'd spent more than 4 1/2 hours on the phone trying to resolve the problem. As usual he was paying for the premium calls, was refused a free-phone number and still had no solution. Each time that he called he'd give them his reference number and although his record was showing that he'd called previously and which steps he'd completed in search of a solution, he'd be taken back to the start.
When I arrived, I uninstalled the BT software, unplugged the Hub and started over. The instruction sheet you receive with the Hub is really well set out. Large, lots of pictures and little room for error. I went through the steps as shown:

• Unpack and check the contents
• Connect the power cable Hub
• Connect the ADSL cable to the Hub
• Plug the ADSL cable in to the microfilter and connect to the phone socket
  
• Plug the mains adapter in to a socket and switch on

Now that's straight forward, but it's as far as I got. The next step tells you to wait for 4 lights to illuminate (Power, Broadband, Internet & Wireless). After 2 minutes it's obvious that there is a problem because we only have the power and wireless lights on. You know straight away there is a phone line problem and the best course of action is to check the filters and cables inside the house. After replacing these the Hub is still only showing the two lights so I figure the line is not digital and ask the customer if BT have checked his line. No.

So he gets on the phone to BT again, we're on hold for 10+ minutes and are finally through to an operator. The customer tells the BT woman that he wants her to talk to me about the problem. I don't think at this point he could go through with the conversation and keep his cool. I explain the problem we're having and ask if they could check the line? No. She wants to go back to the start so I humor her. Again we get two lights illuminated.

Now this is the part that gets ridiculous. Up to now the instructions have not told us to switch the computer on, not even told us to connect the router to the computer. The operator asks me to switch the PC on. Apparently I have to click START->RUN and type CMD then press ENTER. As I'm being told to type in P... I... N... G... I stop and ask the operator what it is I am going to PING? Ignoring me she continues to give me the IP address of the router. I type it in and happily watch the No Response messages come back on screen.

Finally I get a chance to tell her that we've not got the ethernet cable plugged in and I am scolded and promptly connect the computer to the Hub. Of course this time, we get a response from the routers IP address and we move on to ping the microsoft.com IP address. No response.

Now to cut a long and frustrating story short, we spend a further 20 minutes going around in circles trying to connect to the internet. Finally the operator says that I'm going to be put on hold whilst she does a line check! Finally... another 5 minutes on hold and she comes back to inform me that there IS a fault on the line and it's been raised with the engineers.

Within 24 hours the customer is happy, the fault has been resolved and he's browsing away to his hearts content.

What I don't understand is:

• Why can't operators review customers records when several calls are required to find a solution? Why do they like to treat each call as if it's the first?
• When you have a problem and there's even the remotest possibility of a line fault can't they simply check your line?
• Why can't they give you a free-phone number at the end of the first call? Or is this where they make some of their massive profits?
• Why can't the operators be trained to have some manners and listen to customers? Sometimes you may as well be listening to a recorded message.
• When a customer has been off-line for 2 days and made multiple calls to get a resolution, can't it be flagged up as urgent and BT take the initiative to contact the customer?

The good news is that BT have promised to refund the cost of the calls although I imagine this will not be a straightforward process. I wish I could run a business were my customers paid for me to resolve my mistakes.

PSAPI.DLL error with BT Home Hub

People choosing to switch to or upgrade their BT Broadband accounts are being given the BT Home Hub (above) wireless router as standard now. It seems some users who have upraded to Internet Explorer 7 and then install the Home Hub via the CD supplied in the pack are likely to receive the following error message:

"MotiveSB.exe Entry Point Not Found
The procedure entry point GetProcessImageFileNameW could not be located in the dynamic link library PSAPI.DLL"

Motive seems to be a program for communicating Internet issues and errors over a network rather than the Internet. However the version distributed to BT customers on the installation CD is not fully compatible with IE 7. Although your connection will be working fine, it's annoying to receive an error each and every time you start your computer up.

Resolving the issues is relatively straight forward:

• Open up Windows Explorer [Windows Key + E]
• Navigate to the C:\PROGRAM FILES\BT BROADBAND DESKTOP HELP\SMARTBRIDGE directory
• Right-Click on the PSAPI.DLL file (note: If you computer is not set to display file extensions you may not see the .DLL part)
• Select Rename from the context menu
• Rename to PSAPIOLD.DLL

Restart the computer and the message should be gone. Quite why BT have not updated their installation system yet is a mystery but then so is the reasoning behind so many people switching to BT Broadband in the first place.

Blu-ray Disc Rot

There's a thread running over at the AVS Forums in which people are discussing the problem of what's been termed 'Blu-ray disc rot'. Seems many people are seeing mold-like markings appear on their Blu-ray discs, most notably The Prestige. I'd wonder if this is mearly a manufacturing glitch or something that is going to turn out to be more widespread? Hopefully the former, at £20+ a disc people aren't going to be too happy when their movie collections disintegrate within 12 months. It reminds me of the horror stories that floated around during the late 80's about music CDs that were oxidising and would be useless after a decade or so. Thankfully that turned out to be a false alarm.

I guess fans of HD-DVD may be getting a kick out of this at the moment?

Windows XP reporting the wrong wireless security mode

I was called out to help a friend today who was experiencing problems with a brand new Dell Inspiron 1501. Within the two days that she’d had the laptop, and barely used, the Windows XP installation had gotten totally messed up. The desktop had switched to classic view, clicked icons would not run and certain control panel items had no contents. Anyway, instead of chasing the cause of the problem I re-installed Windows from the supplied Dell CD.

Everything was fine and back up and running until I tried to connect to the wireless network that had been installed 2 years back. Sensing that the Dell Network Assistant might be causing problems I uninstalled it and switch to Wireless Zero Configuration. Again, I couldn’t connect to the network which was showing fine in the list of available wireless networks and flagged as having WPA security. After a few tries I asked a couple of questions and was told that the network was configured with WEP security on a shared key. Changing this over immediately gave a connection and we were up and running again.

Quite why Windows XP was reporting that the network was WPA and not WEP I’m not sure but if anybody has any ideas I’d sure be glad to hear them.

Vista CD Hidden Holographic Images

After reading the story on digg.com about the image of the three guys hidden in a holographic image we decided to dig out our Intel Play microscope and have a closer look. We managed to find a further 3 images. These are taken at 200x zoom. The CD we looked at was a UK Vista Home Premium OEM. The lighting conditions aren't great, we'll try and get better shots tomorrow in daylight.