Ironic Note

Here at the Belle experiment at the KEK National Lab in Japan I find myself with a choice of two desktops, Windows 2000 and Solaris CDE. The CDE desktop comes with netscape 4.7-something.

It's incredible how antiquated and horrible netsape-4.7 is. A large fraction of the web is now unaccessible to this software. On Windows 2000 I have to use IE because I'm not allowed to install software on the machine. Well the default page for IE on this machine is.. you guessed it, www.msn.com. And www.msn.com crashes this version of IE every time.

Since I know nothing about Windows admining I can't change the default home page without first loading IE and IE crashes everytime it goes to that home page.

Well f*ck it I thought. I'll try this stupid windows update thing and try to get a new version of IE that doesn't crash. I clicked it and sure enough it told me that I needed to be "Administrator" to run windows update. Ah but look it's actually running IE! So now I can change the home page :-)

So it just goes to show that Windows Update really does work.