All entries for February 2010

Great Experience with MicroSoft OS & Office Software. Shame about the IE Browser!!

Writing about web page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917964

I’ve recently been upgrading one of the many Dell PCs in the house.
The standard OS in the network remains MS XP Pro and none of the family, including the students, like ribbons so MS Office 2003 Professional remains the office product of choice. We inherited one machine with XP Home and I also wanted a second PC in the house to be legitimate for business use so I got some upgrade licences.

The Office installation was a dream. It came with the Business Contact Manager extension for Outlook which was a real bonus that brought together all the contacts, emails & documents together into one account view.

Upgrading the OS was a bigger problem. This loaded fine but refused to register. If fact the registration wizard failed to run and IE was broken.
The MS helpline failed to spot the problem so I went back to the Google approach and typed in the error message “The requested look up key was not found in any activation context”.

I found that the SP3 2009 copyright disk went back to IE6. Ok I knew that but the IE8 and IE7 engines were still under the bonnet causing IE to be broken. Answer uninstall them in order:

For Windows Internet Explorer 8
CD ie8\spuninst
batch Spuninst.txt
For Windows Internet Explorer 7
CD ie7\spuninst
batch Spuninst.txt

After cleaning these out then the OS registered and the update cycle back up to IE8 was set off. This one piece of integration has caused Microsoft endless problems in the courts and left maintainability landmines that will lurk for years to come.

The optional integration of BCM worked like a dream but can easily be uninstalled.

Robert McGonigle : 26 Feb 2010 21:03 |  Tags: Ms Business Contacts Manager Ms Office Ms Xp Pro Upgrade |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Google Adwords Broad Matching finds wide new meanings for 'vehicle sell'

I have blogged before about how Google’s AdWords algorithms can find matches for poor searches where the usual Google search completely fails.

This week I found some more amazing, creative, matches for the keyword ‘vehicle sell’. This was in the campaign of a “scrap car removals” business and they had success using a number of wide terms such as this.

My filters show the broad matched term then the real search term after the comma, below.
vehicle sell, lend+money+on+your+car
vehicle sell, sell+my+tyre
vehicle sell, car+trailer+for+sale
vehicle sell, car+sealler
So ‘vehicle sell’ can mean a search for a pawn broker with a yard, vehicle can be a tyre and sell a typo for sealer!

I always recommend using all matching types, see picture, right; broad without any annotation, “phrase matching” in quotes and [exact matching] in square brackets. What is the point of phrase matching a single word, you ask? Well in our example Adwords would use synonyms for google and we all know ‘to google’ is to search so this could be matched to search, seek or even look!

Robert McGonigle : 04 Feb 2010 13:00 |  Tags: Adwords Broad Matching Scrap Cars |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem