Apple resellers are not learning

With the new Apple store open in Sydney it's amazing the existing Apple resellers are still messing around their customers.

In an article in today's Sydney Morning Herald Dan Kaufman describes his saga of transferring data from an old Windows system to a Mac.

Now transferring data to a new computer can be fiddly. I spent 4 hours doing what was a straight forward copy from an XP system to a Vista box last week.

Copying between Windows and Macs can be even more tricky, as Dan found with the rigmarole of importing Outlook data into Thunderbird, then copying the mailboxes to the Mac and finally importing them into Mac Mail.

Fiddly, time consuming and irritating but doable. If things go well.

When things go wrong, it can get ugly. In Dan's case his Mac Mail refused to work.

This should have been a relatively easy fix but instead his local Apple reseller turned it into a refund issue, first telling him he could return it and then telling him tough luck.

All along, a knowledgeable tech could have identified the problem and resolved it quickly.

It really surprises me Mac resellers haven't lifted their game since the opening of the Apple store.

Grisoft's link scanning mistake

It's funny how anti virus companies seem to lose the plot so comprehensively. Over the years we've seen this with Norton, McAffee and now Grisoft, the makers of AVG.

AVG Free has been a favorite of ours. I've recommended it to thousands of people and happily used it myself.

But the Link Scanner function has upset a lot of people. For users it can slow web pages down. Australian web surfers have an additional problem in that it can boost traffic and take some users over their download limits and hit them with big bills.

For webmasters, the problem's even worse. It means websites can be tied up by excess traffic and messes up their access logs.

To compound the problem, AVG's response is pretty arrogant. Sure you can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, but this is an egg fight in the kitchen.

I've posted a fix for the problem on our IT Queries site, but it's an irritating issue.

This is a serious PR problem for Grisoft and they need to swallow their pride and put out an update that modifies the link scanning feature before they damage their brand any further.