Category Archives: Grumbles

annoyances… to me, anyway

Grumbles, Reviews

Lexar PowerToGo crashes after update

One of my annoyances with the Lexar Lightning with PowerToGo was the lack of a free backup utility. With Lexar, it is a $10 USD download.

As a result, I hesitated to make the purchase… and now I’m sorry that I didn’t just consider that cost as part of the cost of the device!

Last week Lexar released an update to the PowerToGo system that enables you to run Windows programs from their Lexar Lightning memory stick. My PowerToGo booted this morning with a request to update the software. Foolishly -and I say ‘foolishly’ because I did not have any backup- I agreed and pressed ‘OK’.

The rest you can guess. The process generates two error messages about the software certificate being different and after installing the Lexar Lightning is effectively dead in the water. Files in My Documents are accessible by those in the secure vault are not and none of the installed apps will run properly.

Lexar Support online chat is unresponsive, no doubt due to the volume of complaints, and you are directed to leave an email.

I’ll let you know what happens when I get a response from Lexar Support.

-The (Foolish) Portable Consultant

ECM, Grumbles

OpenText’s LiveLinkUp Conference: no blogs (yet) in their ECM world

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OpenText’s LiveLinkUp conference began today in Phoenix.

Last year I attended LinkUp as a participant. This year finds OpenText, the company, much bigger, having recently acquired Hummingbird (and the RedDot CMS that came with it). So I was understandably interested in what things look like from the conference floor and I rather thought someone would be blogging from the LiveLinkUp conference.

Sadly, my Technorati searches only came up with one LinkUp blog… not a real blog since it was a trade publication and much of the content was (yawn…) text from Open Text’s recent press release on their new release.

-pmh

Grumbles

ECM Physician, heal thyself

One might expect that software companies that lay claim to leading ECM solutions would have some of the best-managed web content sites on the ‘net… but, no, they can be just as sick as anyone else’s web site.

I’ve just run a search for “Red Dot”, a Hummingbird company, on Hummingbird’s own site.

What I get is a list of (mainly external) links. The top one – an old trade article – is a dead link. The next one is a German language Hummingbird download page dated 2003. The third links to an article that mentions Red Dot but says “ Rather than buying into… Red Dot, [a Hummigbird customer] has renewed its contract…to use the Rythmyx WCMS for at least another year.” Hardly a great endorsement for prospective customers.

All in all I’d say this vendor hasn’t maximized on the opportunity to convert passing interest into solid sales!
-pmh