When I posted about how to drag off links to the desktop in IE7 I promised to post any more differences that came to my attention. Here's one ...

Sometimes it's handy as a web designer to be able to see an image outside of the webpage in which it is displayed and one of the easiest ways to do this was to click on the image and drag it to the address bar (which works just fine in previous IE versions, provided there is no link around the image).

Once again in IE7 it works, but with the subtle difference that instead of the address bar you need to drag it to the Title Bar (eg the blue bar at the top of the browser window).

(While my holiday snow flakes are falling on the website, why not see if you can catch one and drag it into the title bar to view it on its own!)

Here’s a little holiday cheer to get you in the spirit of things!

• http://www.savethesnowman.com Help him before he melts!
• http://www.stucktoapole.com/   My favorite - Christmas carols sung by (who else?) a little kid with his tongue frozen to a pole!
• http://www.guessmygift.com/ This one really got me!

  Happy holidays to everyone!

Since I’ve posted a couple of times about my Bitdefender problems, lots of other people are emailing me tell me about theirs.  One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people are having trouble uninstalling it and have even resorted to manually deleting hunks of their registry to try and get rid of it.  All without success. 

Luckily I myself didn’t have that problem because I used the uninstall tool.  Nearly all antivirus and firewall software applications don’t like uninstalling themselves properly through the uninstall shortcut or Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.  I don’t know why this is … but it’s always best whenever you’ve installed a program of this kind, possibly on a trial, and decided that you want rid of it always hunt for the full uninstall tool.  That way you can be sure it’s well and truly gone.

Here’s a link to the Bitdefender Uninstall Tool.

It's easy to use:

• Download!
• Run it
• Click Uninstall
• Wait until it's done
• Reboot!  (Important last step. Don’t forget!)

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antivirus |
bitdefender

Oh my God, Adrian asked for an iPod for Christmas! He even put it in his ZDNet blog …  after he’s been so anti all things Apple for so long.  Our daughter wanted to get an iPod a while back but he talked her out of it (she got an Archos XS202S instead that died after a few weeks).  I never thought he’d be a convert.  I can see his reasoning though wanting it to work with audio books from Audible.  I’m still angry that my Creative Zen Touch doesn’t support Audible.com books.  And I still don’t know why they don’t support it as they support other Zens.  Even the online petition didn’t help to convince them.

I’ve been asked several times whether Adrian will get his iPod for Christmas … well I’d like to tell you but that would spoil the surpise!  (But all the referrals from ZDNet are certainly helping my cursor towards ‘Add to cart’! )

Happy Christmas shopping everyone – only twenty online shopping days left!

Since I’ve been trialing Norton Internet Security 2007 I've run with the phishing filter part of it switched off because it put a big banner across the top of my browser.

The banner takes up a lot of screen real estate plus I don’t think I really need it.  (I don’t tend to click on links in email and its only function is to check that the site I think is Amazon.com is not really a known fake phishing site pretending to be Amazon. It doesn’t for example check that Amazon.com really resolves out to Amazon’s IP address. Also it tends to throw up false positives with some advertisers with embedded links within web pages.)  But I think the main reason for disabling the phishing filter is because I prefer to start my browser with a blank home page and the phishing filter’s opinion of Internet Explorer’s ‘About:blank’ page makes an unwelcoming start to the day:

That is just annoying!  The only solution I’d found was to disable the Phishing Filter in the settings, but running with it disabled has the drawback that Norton shows the alert icon  in the system tray and the big scary alert shown at left in the progam’s control panel. 

Also I occasionally need to switch off parts of the program in the course of my work, and I do rely on the alert in the system tray to remind me to switch it back on again when I’m finished.  But running without the entire package enabled means that this is always showing red and hence I’ve caught myself out a few times now without antivirus running. 

Luckily it is possible to have the phishing filter enabled but hide the Norton toolbar showing in Internet Exporer 7. Here's how:

Click the  Tools button, then select ‘Toolbars’ and check ‘Show Norton Toolbar’. 

This lets you get rid of the phishing filter from the top of the page as well as showing the green Norton Protection Center icon in the system tray.

internet explorer 7 | browser | Norton Internet Security | antivirus