This is one of those bizarre stories where one problem with your computer leads you down a rabbit hole. When you eventually come out the other side, you discover that the culprit was something completely asinine, like say, some piece of software that you uninstalled weeks ago!

Context: Backing Up

I noticed over at GearFire that you can get Free Acronis TrueImage if you have a Seagate Hardrive. Since I’ve just purchased a new external SeaGate hard drive for backing up purposes (and hated the software that came with it), I thought, great! Let’s get this new stuff and make an image of our working computer.

Now, the external hard drive is actually attached to my desktop. But I want to access it from my laptop. Should be easy enough; just share the drive, and I can see it from my laptop, just like I do with every other drive on my desktop. I’ve done it before; it’s an easy setting to change. I’ve even figured out how to get my new McAfee anti-virus/firewall software to all the talking back and forth.

Not So Easy

So, even though I’ve shared drives before without much problem, this one stumped me. I did the share, went back to my laptop and tried to open the drive. No go. Even went through the Network Places, navigated carefully to the new drive, which I could see, but still no go. I wasn’t allowed to open it.

The error, which I had never seen before, was “Not enough server storage is available”. What?

Since Google is my friend, I checked it out. Several sites point back to a registry edit that might be required on the server (i.e., the computer that holds the drive I’m trying to get to, not the computer doing the calling). They all point back to this Microsoft knowledge base article that gives you very clear instructions on the registry edit. I followed said clear instructions. To the letter.

No go.

Norton Crap

If you read the Microsoft article, you’ll note that the ultimate cause of the problem is that when you install Norton AnitVirus, you can receive the aforementioned error message. Hmmmmmm.

It turns out that I’ve been using Norton antivirus products for years now. It’s available for free by my university. At one point, all of my machines had it. And it worked fine.

But then the romance cooled. First, the last time I reformatted my laptop (every 12-18 months or so), I couldn’t get Norton to reinstall. Even though I had completely reformatted my C drive, and installed fresh WinXp from scratch, Norton kept giving me grief about not being an administrator. Me not an administrator? I am the administrator. Nobody else touches my machine. I don’t even have a general or power-user account on this thing. It’s all me all the time. Yeeesh. But Norton didn’t listen to reason. I tried many times over the past year to get it to work. No go there.

So for a while I was using a freeware antivirus program. It was okay, but not quite satisfying. But I really didn’t feel like ponying up money for software that I should have had working for free, courtesy of my university.

Anyway, I got really bitter when the antivirus on my desktop started going hinky. Norton was still running, seemingly fine. It updated itself every week, and performed the weekly scan, right on schedule. Except, the weekly scan started taking 3 minutes. Now, consider the fact that I’ve got three internal hard drives in that machine, the smallest of which is 120 GB. 3 minutes? To scan everything? I don’t think so. Obviously, there was something wrong. I uninstalled/reinstalled a few times, but couldn’t get it to work.

McAfee to the Rescue

All this to say, I was finally so disenchanted with Norton that I broke down and bought McAfee. It was a reasonable price to protect both machines. Like a good girl, I went to uninstall Norton before installing the new antivirus program. It wouldn’t let me uninstall!!! I finally had to basically rip it out of my hard drive by manually deleting directories and registry edits. Don’t do this at home - it’s not the recommended procedure! By this time, I was cheerfully cursing Norton.

Fast Forward

I did this weeks ago, but it seems that Norton crap was still infecting my machine. Just yesterday, I had the most bizarre thing happen. Every time I right-clicked on something, Norton would pop up and tell me that it was in the middle of doing an installation, and could I please put in the installation CD. I would have to cancel it in order to get to the right-click menu that I was originally aiming for.

When I looked in my Add/Remove programs list - Norton was sitting there, grinning at me. I clicked to uninstall it, and it went away, quite cheerfully. The right-click problem stopped. I thought to myself, “Phew, it’s finally gone!”

But Norton is a sneaky troll…

Back to the Point

The point of this whole exercise was to be able to do some backing up to my new external hard drive. Even after the registry edit above, and uninstalling Norton yesterday, again, I still couldn’t see the drive.

More searching online brought me to the Norton Removal Tool, designed “to remove a failed installation or a damaged Norton product.” I downloaded it and ran it. Rebooted my machine (the desktop, that is). It seems that Norton still had something, who knows what, still sitting around somewhere. The removal tool cleaned it all out. And now that it’s all gone, I can interact with the external hard drive, from my laptop. Whooo!

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story is two-fold:

1. If, for some reason, you can’t access your network shares, and you’re getting a bizarre “Not enough server storage is available” available, check out the Microsoft article discussed above. It may or may not solve your problem.
2. If you’re having trouble removing a stubborn Norton antivirus troll from your system, remove it completely with the Norton Removal Tool.

The combination of these two steps (or perhaps just the second step; I’ll never know) was enough to let me get back to where I was originally headed - to being able to make an image of my work computer on an external drive hosted by my desktop. Phew, what a trail that was to follow!

I’ve been lucky enough to be included in Brad Isaac’s new list of The Top 50 Blogs That Will Unleash Your Motivation over at the Achieve-IT! blog. There are 49 other blogs there that you should find fascinating :) It also seems that my readership has skyrocketed in the past few days. Did the former influence the latter? Enquiring minds want to know ;)

Anyway, it seems that I have most likely garnered some new readers based on Brad’s post. I’d like to welcome you all here. Unfortunately, I’ve been very busy lately, and not able to post much, but I’m going to get back to it soon. Just throw me in your feed catcher and you’ll be the first to know when I post again ;)

And as for the rest of you faithful readers, check out Brad’s Achieve-IT! blog. It’s one of my favourites and is guaranteed to having something that interests you. Some of the posts that have piqued my interest lately are:

• 8 Proven Strategies for Defeating The Fear of Public Speaking and 4 Myths That Won’t
• 10 Steps That You Can Take to Guarantee Failure
• The 13-Year Old Omelette

Hello all. I just wanted to let you all know that, yes, I’m still alive. However, I’ve got this massive research deadline that has dominated everything else in my life. More posting will follow, at some point in the future :)

I’d like to draw your attention to the fancy ad on the right side of my blog. Just over there —>. (Okay, those of you who are just reading the RSS feed, you’ll have to actually navigate to the blog to see the very fancy animated ad.)

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to the CompanionLink trial that is currently being offered. The advertisement is about to run out, and before it does, I wanted to let you know that I’m using CompanionLink to sync my Google calendar with my Palm Zire 72, and it is *nice*.

You may remember that I tried out CompanionLink a few months ago, but didn’t have any joy. Even after a second attempt, I still couldn’t get it to work.

Well, this time, I had the undivided attention of one of their tech gurus (thanks Andy!). Between my sending in error logs, and their excellent support, we were able to get my system to work. And do you know what the problem was?

It turns out that I use a custom date format. Have for years. All of my hand-rolled backup batch files are tied to it. The custom format showed, for instance, “Tue 03 Jul 07″. For whatever reason, the combination of this custom format, combined with Google Calendar and a synchronization app (such as CompanionLink and probably gSyncIt and SyncMyCal as well) caused a major melt-down. The easy solution? Change my custom date format to a standard one.

Okay, it wasn’t a perfectly easy transition. Since I’ve been using my palm for years, and have alternated between using Outlook and the Palm Desktop as my conduit, I had a bit more trouble. It turned out that I had some strange recurring appointments that I couldn’t see at all, even when I tried using the Palm Desktop again. They weren’t even visible on the Palm. But CompanionLink would sync them to the Google Calendar, which would then proceed to throw a hissy fit. I ended up reinstalling the Palm Desktop, using a blank calendar to overwrite my Palm a couple of times, dancing around dressed in paint and waving a chicken bone. And then, things worked perfectly.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the best thing about CompanionLink was the customer service. And I’m a big proponent of good customer service.

The next best thing? It lets me sync to either Outlook (and then to Palm), or to the Palm Desktop, or to the Palm itself. It also offers support to other applications, such as Lotus Notes (which I hope to use one day), Windows Mobile, and even the Blackberry.

If you’re using Google Calendar, and want to hook it into your other calendar apps or hardware, check out CompanionLink.

Have you ever used Excel’s subtotal functionality? It’s great for counting things. For instance, I’m running some tests right now, where the output is a sequence. If I run the test 10,000 times, then I have 10,000 sequences. I want to know how many times each sequence happens.

I copy the output into Excel, then sort the column containing the sequence into alphabetic order, thereby sticking like sequences with like. Then, I use the subtotal feature to count how many times each sequence occurs.

It’s great - it does exactly what I want. See the snapshot below.

The only problem I have is that sometimes I want to manipulate the aggregate information, say, calculate percentages, or compare it to some hand-created date from somewhere else. So, what I really want to work on is the aggregate data, not the underlying information.

As you can see in the diagram, there are actually over 10,000 rows of information in the sheet, even though I can hide all but 20-some. But, when I want to do a calculation on the data, I end up also doing the calculation on the *underlying* data as well. I can’t even just copy the subtotal information to somewhere else, because all of the underlying data comes too!

There has got to be a way around it. After some searching, and some bad suggestions (i.e., didn’t work for me), I discovered help in the form of Joseph Rubin’s ExcelTip.com. You can follow his instructions. It’s really easy. Basically, all you do is:

1. In the view I have above, I just click on some cell in the data range, e.g., A260.
2. Press Ctrl+A to select all of the subtotal data (would also include the underlying data).
3. Magic Step: Press Alt+; (This selects only the *visible* cells. Magic!)
4. Copy and paste as desired.

Wow, that little Alt+; step is pure magic. You can also get there by using the F5 key (which brings you up the Go To Dialog), selecting Special… and then selecting Visible cells only. Why you can select visible cells only by going through the “Go To” menu is completely beyond me.

As you can see in the screenshots below, selecting visible cells makes them look slightly different. The shot on the left (first) is the Ctrl+A selection (all data, including underlying, hidden, data). Notice the dark border. The shot on the right (second) is Alt+; selection (visible cells only). notice that the border is gone. A good visual way to make sure you’ve selected exactly what you want.

An interesting sidebar: I’ve just gone through the Help for Excel 2007. I originally went there, but had no joy when looking for information about copying and subtotals. But, if you search for “visible data”, you can get to a set of instructions that will let you copy just the subtotals. Funnily enough, there are no shortcut keys provided, just how to do the task with the ribbon. And, there’s not even a listing discussing what the Alt+; keyboard combination is good for! Shocking. It really is magic :)