Tag: tips

Anticipate your customer’s needs, eliminate inconveniences

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 29/07/2008
1 Comment on Anticipate your customer’s needs, eliminate inconveniences

John Wayne Airport saw that customers were inconvenienced and came up with a simple solution, showing that sometimes more (power plugs) is better… and need not be expensive.

Picture this, frequent air travelers: you’re at the airport, awaiting a flight, and unable to get to the airline lounge. You don’t want to run down the battery on your notebook PC or other important portable electronic gadget, so you search out a convenient electric power plug… only to find that the only rare ones available are either in use by another traveler recharging their menagerie of devices, or no where near a convenient place to sit or use your PC.

This won’t happen to you in southern California… Orange County, to be specific.

One of the reasons I like John Wayne Airport: they put the traveler first.

Three words: plentiful electrical plugs.

In this case, a long power bar tracks the back of the seating at the gate, with the plugs easily accessible as you recline in the well-worn leather seats. My kids were able to power their Nintendos, Zunes and leave me a plug for my laptop and phone.

This is a good example of how one airport — which I’ve seen grow from my traveling trade show days from a small municipal airport to a very nice, modern regional hub — recognized that their customers were inconvenienced by a lack of a key resource (power) and made more ports available. Cheaper than touch down stations or another lounge area, unobtrusive, and conveniently located.

“Gates 2 – 14, in Terminals A and B of the Riley Terminal now have custom-designed power receptacles located between the backs of the passenger seating rows. The outlets are surge protected, ensuring safe usage.

“We are pleased to be able to offer new and improved services in the Terminal providing our passengers with more convenience and a positive travel experience,” said Alan L. Murphy, Airport Director.”

You can read about other improvements at the airport here. This is also one of the few airports that actually seems to have ample seating for all passengers awaiting their flight. (For more information about the Airport Improvement Program, email improvements@ocair.com.)

What barrier or nuisance can you eliminate today that will benefit your customer? What can you provide that will lower their frustration?

Tags customer satisfaction, tips, whack

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At TR7 with some down time? Consider a trip to Bainbridge Island

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 26/07/2008
1 Comment on At TR7 with some down time? Consider a trip to Bainbridge Island

Coming to TR7 in Seattle and wondering what to do with a day off? sure, there’s plenty to do and see in Seattle but consider this: Hop the ferry to Bainbridge Island – the weather is quite nice this weekend (so far) and if you walk on to the boat, it’s a short walk into town for a quiet day. Nice shops, lots to see and very god food: lunch or dinner at the Winslow Way café (save room for dessert) or Nola’s.

Tags conferences, of interest, tips, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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Advisory: New Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone updates available for Windows

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 26/07/2008
2 Comments on Advisory: New Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone updates available for Windows

A quick note to let you know that Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387 “How to configure daylight saving time for Microsoft Windows operating systems” reflects the manual changes and additions DST and TZ. KB 914387 should contain all DST changes made since RTM.

The cumulative DST packages for Windows have been released to the DLC for supported versions of XP, WS03, Vista and Server 2008.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951072

The next release of the 2008 Cumulative Time Zone Update for Windows (and other products) is scheduled to release in Nov/December.

The above packages will be pushed out via Windows Update next month.

More info to be available soon at Microsoft DST & Time Zone updates

Tags advice, Announcements, customer satisfaction, DST, tips, Windows Server, Windows XP

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Your questions: “How do I make Internet Explorer my default web browser?”

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 23/06/2008
1 Comment on Your questions: “How do I make Internet Explorer my default web browser?”

As I work in the Windows division, a letter made its way to my office: a customer mail sent to one of our senior leaders that asked…

“How do I set up Internet Explorer to be my default web browser?”

Simple question you may say, but unfortunately in this case, the customer noted that they were unable to find the information on our web sites or using online help. So, after first apologizing for the difficulty the customer had in locating the information, I then provided the following steps on how to configure your PC to use Internet Explorer your default web browser.

The following Microsoft Knowledge Base Article answers the question: How to Make Internet Explorer the Default Web Browser (kb 284456, as located through Live Search).

For Internet Explorer 3.x, 4.x, 5.x…

Open Control Panel and double-click Internet Options.
Click the Programs tab.
Click to select the Internet Explorer should check to see whether it is the default browser check box.
Click OK.
Start Internet Explorer and when you are prompted to make it the default browser, click Yes.

For IE 6 and IE7, you may also use the following steps…

Launch “Internet Explorer”.
If a message is displayed asking if you want Internet Explorer to be your default browser, click “Yes”. That’s all you need to do.
If a message does not appear, go to the next step.
Click the “Tools” button, and then click “Internet Options”.
Click the “Programs” tab, and then click “Make default”.
Click “OK”, and then close Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is now the default web browser.

For future, immediate self help, you can often find answers using the Live Search site at http://search.live.com/, http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/cu_inventory, or visit the main Microsoft Support page at http://support.microsoft.com/. In the US, customers may also use one of the free customer support features such as real-time chat at http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/cu_sc_more_master#tab1.

Microsoft is absolutely focused on delivering the best customer experience. We’ll always have more work to do, but we’re confident about delivering the best set of experiences for our customers and partners now and in the future. It’s so important for us to hear from customers using our products, so please send us feedback on what we’re doing well and areas for improvement.

Tags: Microsoft, customer support, feedback, customer service, IE7, Internet Explorer.

Tags customer feedback, IE, tips, Your Questions

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Another look at the year 2038 problem

Post author By M3 Sweatt
Post date 21/04/2008
2 Comments on Another look at the year 2038 problem

I was asked last week (again) for guidance I could give (being involved in time in one way or another, in addition to my day job) on how Microsoft products may be impacted by the 2038 issue.

As I noted in January, the Year 2038 problem (as defined by the Wikipedia entry)…

“The year 2038 problem (also known as “Unix Millennium bug”, “Y2K38,” “Y2K+38,” or “Y2.038K” by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represent system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970.^[1] This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.

Some people believed that the bulk of issues would surface on January 19, 2008, the date when new 30-year mortgages and bonds could be impacted. In fact, much of the impact would have been seen years ago given that there are many financial instruments with a greater than 30 year life span: some mortgages and bonds extend out 40 years, and there are Japanese and English mortgages that can span close to a century.

From what I understand (thanks to the education from Geoff, Shay and several folks in DevDiv), information on how to mitigate the year 2038 bug was included in our Y2K response in the late 1990’s. And Microsoft has provided guidance and statements on our various web sites, as impacts have generally been product specific for older products no longer in support (unless otherwise indicated in a supporting KB article).

In general…

currently supported core OS and mainstream support products operate as designed and with no known negative impact with regards to the 2038 unless otherwise noted.
SYSTEMTIME has no problems and can go until the year 30,827.
FILETIME, a 64-bit integer (two DWORDs representing LOW and HIGH values) since January 1, 1601 (Julian). It too can represent a 30,000 (or 60,000 unsigned) year interval.
Difficulties will be found were developers use C/C++ time_t, which will run out in 2038.

Programs that are compiled with VC8 or newer and do not define _USE_32BIT_TIME_T are immune to Year 2038 problems caused by time_t, assuming that they do not contain bugs themselves (casting a time_t to an int and back will truncate it). I’m told by the Developer division that…

VC7.1 (Visual Studio 2003) contained __time64_t (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1f4c8f33(VS.71).aspx ), but developers had to specifically use it. (It appears that VC6 did not contain __time64_t – see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa272948(VS.60).aspx – but VC6 is no longer supported, unlike VC7.1.)
we expanded time_t to 64 bits by default in VC8 (Visual Studio 2005). See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235429(VS.80).aspx. Also see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w4ddyt9h(VS.80).aspx, which explains that _USE_32BIT_TIME_T is provided for backwards compatibility.

For more references…