Jumperless

I recently switched from Verizon to AT&T and tried the Samsung A737 before getting my current RAZR V3xx.  Here are some things I noticed about the A737:

- Bluetooth seems flaky, sometimes will connect to my Plantronics Voyager 510 when I power the headset on, sometimes I have to manually tell it to connect.  Bluetooth must be activated for the phone to connect to any Bluetooth device, so there is always a Bluetooth icon on the display, then another icon when it’s connected to a headset, making the display seem a bit cluttered.

- It was very simple connecting the phone to my Windows Vista PC via Bluetooth and transfer files to and from the phone, such as pictures and MP3 ringtones.  Something I missed on my old Verizon RAZR because it had those features locked down.

- The location of the voice mail menu is not intuitive.  In older phones, I’m used to it being under the messaging menu or having a shortcut key.  On this phone, it’s located in the Recent Calls sub menu, so to get to it, you have to hit the Menu button, move to the Recent Calls section, then scroll down to Voicemail in the sub menu.  I added Voicemail to an empty shortcut in the Options menu to get to it faster.

- I’ve had spotty reception problems with the phone that I’ve found other users complaining about also.  While walking my dog around the neighborhood, the phone struggled to get one bar in an area I know AT&T has good reception.  Two blocks over in the same neighbor hood, it showed full bars.  A couple of times it had reception problems in the pocket of my purse, draining the battery without my knowledge, so I’m always checking it now.

I use multiple GMail accounts at home and work and it gets tiring having one open in Firefox and Internet Explorer so I can check both at the same time. Here’s a Firefox plugin that lets you check multiple GMail accounts at a time and notifies you when any account has new messages. Once installed, click on the mail icon in the lower, right corner of Firefox and add the accounts you want it to check. Then you can just right-click on the icon and select the account from the pop-up menu, pretty slick.

Frustrated by my unfruitful research to solve my video problem, I finally emailed ATI (now AMD) support to see if I could get more information on driver plans. It took me 10 minutes of filtering through ATI’s site to find where I could just email support, I was forced to sift through knowledge base after knowledge base to see if my answer was in there before submitting a support request. Finally able to do so, I got a disappointing automated response:

“AMD Customer Care for ATI products does not provide direct technical support for laptops/notebooks at this current time (telephone or email). If you require direct technical support please contact the system manufacturer of your laptop/notebook.”

Followed by:

“AMD strives to continually improve our drivers and software and we thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback. The feedback you provided will be forwarded to our development team for review.”

Yeah, that’s quality support. Meanwhile, testing some apps in Vista yesterday nearly made me sick due to the jacked up video settings. Moving on, I attempted to contact Toshiba as instructed by above useless support message. As expected, got nowhere, Toshiba will not guarantee or support any laptop that does not have a Vista compatible sticker and they have no Vista drivers available for my laptop. Frustrated, I tried one more thing, a big gamble considering what happened with my last XP driver install, but this one worked and here’s what I did:

1. Download Toshiba’s Windows XP driver ATI Mobility driver, click to download.
2. Ran the self-extracting exe in Windows Vista, which launches the ATI installer then blows up with an unsupported hardware error.
3. Then go to the display properties in Vista and manually update the driver, selecting the “Have Disk” option and pointing to the driver sub folder of the newly extracted ATI directory (like C:\driver.temp) and selecting to first file listing.
4. Next the driver wizard will confirm which card you’re installing by showing 2 listings for ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, select the first one and proceed.

The driver installation should take Vista about 3 minutes then you’ll be prompted to reboot. On restart, the video settings should look much better and the display properties should show an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP for display adapter.

This is not a perfect solution, some programs leave desktop remnants and some of the desktop gadgets have an ugly purple frame around them. Aero and some of the built-in screen savers will not work. But it’s much better than the distorted default and I don’t feel like I’m going to hurl after working in Vista for 30 minutes.

I got a Nintendo DS Lite when it first came out over a year ago and the only color choice was white.  I’ve been more addicted to it lately with a wide selection of adult oriented learning games.  I’m a sucker for puzzle games and love having so many constructive options now.   My Word Coach is the newest addition to my collection and I’ve been playing for 2 weeks now.   I’m not the most articulate person in the world, but I’d love the ability to stump my boss with an impressive vocabulary and I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt my writing skills.

The game starts out with some basic learning exercises to determine your level and map out your daily adjectives and has you pick a character to be your word coach (I went with the red head).  It then gives some basic games, such as Missing Letter and Block Letters (which still stumps me), as you progress more games and levels are added.  Currently it takes me about a half an hour to meet my daily objective.  Once the objective is met, it recommends you stop for the day to let the new words sink in.  If you stop before your objective is complete, it will pickup where you left off if you play before the end of the day.  I like having it available to play while watching TV, but it’s also good for getting 5 minutes of play here and there.

WordPress is a new adventure for me and the first challenge was getting Google AdSense to flow with a theme.  After many unsuccessful attempts to edit themes myself, I looked into widget options.  Here are the 10 Best WordPress plugins.  Currently I’m using the AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar, installation and configuration was super easy.  But the configuration menus lack color palette menus, so you have to know the color codes you want to go with your theme.

Welcome to the new Jumperless!  I am redoing this site, expect great changes in the near future.