Greetings, Folks!
I need to wrap up a few loose ends on this so that we can all move on with life and so that Scott can get started on shopping for his new 64-bit systems!
ITEM #1 - VSD on my Office Boot Partition:
Okay, my 30-day activation limit expired yesterday on my personal Office partition, so I decided to re-install Windows 7 to my office partition. I reformatted the thing, then installed Windows 7 fresh. Soon after rolling the 1394 driver back to "legacy driver", installing my latest GeForce 8xxx drivers and doing the Windows Update thing, I installed VSD 6. No problems this time, it performed the installation just fine. I will soon de-install it from my DAW partition just to keep things as tidy as possible.
Here's what I think caused the issue before. The aforementioned GeForce 6200 graphics card and 1394 firewire incompatibilities were causing blue-screen crashes (see my prior posts for details), and one particular time I remember a BSOD occurred right in the middle of an application program install. It wasn't VSD, but I now believe that it was THAT CRASH that buggered up my registry, poisoning it from that point on.
The two crash-causing issues have been corrected now, so I "should' be good going forward.
Moral of the Story #1: Sus out your system and fix the blue screen problems before you go installing software willy-nilly!
Item #2 - Jo Ann's Question about BlueCoat:
I just went to the Blue Coat site (here on my personal office machine that does not go through a corporate network). The site can be found at sitereview.bluecoat.com and has the web page review process. Jo Ann, your "accessoriesoftheworld.com" site is already present on Blue Coat. This must have happened between the time you posed your question and the time of this writing. Your site is classified in the "Shopping" catagory, which seems correct to me.
Just to be clear for everybody else who may read this: Corporations are increasingly putting controls on what web sites can be viewed from behind the corporate firewalls. Any corporation can restrict web viewing to whatever level they choose. Some corporations might actually prevent viewing of pages categorized as "shopping". Mine does allow employees to view "shopping" pages, but will not allow the viewing of "uncategorized" pages.
For example, Category = null or Category = none. This was the problem I noticed the first time I tried to go to Jo Ann's page.
Moral of the Story #2: Is it necessary to categorize your website? No, it's not required. But I would highly encourage website designers to be aware of filtering customs. Incorrect or missing categorization can actually prevent people from seeing your site. If you sell LAN equipment or... er... web authoring software, you most certainly would want to be properly categorized so that people in corporations can see your site.
In case you were wondering, BlueCoat shows that "coffeecup.com" is categorized as "Computers/Internet", and my HOA website is ... hmmm, in the "Charitable Organizations" category. Although we do run food drives at Christmas time, I'll have to check on that. I thought it was listed as a "Civic Organization".
Item #3 - Scott's Corporate PC Refresh Plan:
Scott, I won't tell you how to run Coffeecup, but I will tell you that every corporation should have a plan in place for refreshing hardware as it ages. Actually, I'm sure you already have such a plan in place.
For the benefit of other readers, though: Did you know that hard drive failure rates rise exponentially after three full years of use?
Yes, and laptop failure rates (fan failure, overheating, CPU failure, motherboard DOA, memory crashes, on-board graphic adapters) have an exceedingly high failure rate also after the third year, but that rate rises even faster after the fourth full year.
By the time any system reaches its fifth or sixth birthday, not only can't it take advantage of technological advances such as heat reduction and power savings, it probably should be considered maybe too elderly for use as a production system.
Almost no company can afford to refresh all computers at once. But somebody should be in charge of an ongoing refresh project. For example, you might decide to refresh 25% of your systems annually, which would put your systems at an average age of four years till retirement. If you can't afford 25%, then you do 20% annually...though your risk of "some" failures will certainly rise before they make it through that fifth year. It's a cost-benefit thing, and smarter people than me will know how this stuff all works.
This is probably WAAAY oversimplified, but for any software vendor large or small, I might suggest that they first prioritize the product developers, testers, and the corporate site's web designer/server systems. The accounting, legal, and office staff maybe should go to the end of the refresh list.
You could also consider a more frequent refresh rate for product development and a less-frequent rate for the end-user office staff.
Moral of the Story #3: Mind you, this is for all of us! We should all be planning for system obsolescence, whether we're the IT director or just some lowly webmaster using his pesonal workstation (like me) to toil at the bottom rung of a homeowner association!
Thanks to everybody who tried to help me with my issues! I'll see ya'll around!
Windows 11
Intel i9 (workstation) and i9 (laptop). Gobs of RAM and acres of SSD space on both machines.
