I just got a good deal on Lenovo 3000 N100 machines with a free memory upgrade, so I bought three for the office. Vista still isn’t ready for prime-time, so I got Windows XP Pro recovery disks with the machines and downgraded from Vista to XP. This makes them great machines, especially for the price. However, browsing in Explorer or Internet Explorer causes the touchpad to lock up for a few seconds.

I’ve removed all unnecessary programs (including Diskeeper Lite), have patched Windows XP and upgraded all drivers, and I even upgraded to IE 7, but the touchpad still hangs for a few seconds.

The problem is definitely software related since it doesn’t occur in Safe Mode, and it doesn’t occur in Firefox (my preferred browser anyway). But it does occur even when an external mouse is attached. Because there’s no replacement for Explorer itself, moreover, it makes file management go slower. Every time a user opens a new folder in My Computer or Explorer, the cursor freezes for a few seconds.

I saw one other post on this, in Notebook Forums, but no reply was posted. I guess I’m going to have to contact Lenovo or return three otherwise great laptops.

OK, here’s one that belongs squarely in the unexplained weirdness category. A customer is running Terminal Server and recently had a remote user with a Mac start logging in. The remote user is using the latest Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac, which happens to be listed as a beta version (RDC 2.0 Beta).

Now if you know anything about RDC, you know that remote users can enable an option that connects their local disk drives when they remote into the TS, and they need to do that if they plan to do any file transfers between host server and remote computer so they can work offline. When that feature is enabled, TS shows the client drives at the bottom of a My Computer window and lists them as “C on RemotePCName” where “RemotePCName” is the actual name of the computer the user is logging in from. That is, if I’m using a computer called “Home Machine,” my local harddrive should be listed as “C on Home Machine.”

Other users logged into the Terminal Server at the same time would see their local drives listed with the names of their own home computers. At least, that’s how it should work.

However, when the Mac user logs into the TS with his Mac, his Mac’s computer name hijacks the system so that everyone’s local drives are listed as “C on MacMachine” where “MacMachine” is the name of the Mac user’s home computer. The system still correctly maps to each user’s local drives; it’s just the name that’s wrong. So the error isn’t a big deal, but it is confusing to remote users (many of whom aren’t particularly saavy about file management anyway).

The only “fix” I’ve found is simply to reboot the Terminal Server, which works fine until the Mac user logs in again. I also can’t tell if the problem occurs only when he Disconnects from RDC instead of Logging Off his session (the recommended procedure).

Even though the problem is being caused by a Mac, the client is provided by Microsoft, so it’s their issue. I’ve Googled the problem, but haven’t found anything, partly because it’s a difficult issue to describe. But if you’ve run across this and especially if you’ve found a permanent fix, please comment.

You know you want to get rid of the paper and the file cabinets and the endless hours of searching for lost records, so you’ve decided to go paperless. Why stop there? Scanning papers just guarantees that you’re going to have a bunch of image files on your network, but you can search a picture. To run searches, you need text. That’s where OCR software comes in.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It’s the function that interprets graphical marks as letters forming words. Of course, that recognition is seldom 100% perfect, but it’s getting better. What you will want is an application that will run the OCR function in the background and then append the recognized text to the PDF image to create one searchable file.

Several OCR softwares are available, including OmniPage, Readiris, Presto, and Microsoft Office Document Imaging. What you will want to do is implement a solution that you can use in conjunction with your high-volume copier/scanners.

I’ll be writing more on this topic soon. Really, the point of this entry is to alert you to the fact that not all PDF files are the same: some are searchable and some aren’t. If you want the searchable kind (recommended for a paperless office), you’ll need OCR software to get it.