Doug's Mailbag: Hotmail, IE 9 and Droid
Here are one reader's experiences with Hotmail:
I got a friend set up with Hotmail after having helped a few other friends with Gmail setup. The one thing that puzzled me about Hotmail was the lack (at least I did not find it) of links to nice exhaustive explanations about how to configure a hotmail account to interoperate with Outlook or Outlook Express. The person I helped with Hotmail does not use either version of Outlook, so that it did not matter. But it does puzzle me. Is a Hotmail account not able to be configured to serve as a POP3 server for Outlook?
-Lou
A developer gives his insight on Microsoft's newest Internet Explorer version:
As an independent developer, I'm always investigating the latest releases, but am wary of messing up my critical-development PC. But in this case, IE 9 is definitely a winner! With IE 8 I had to sometimes use Chrome or Firefox for certain Web sites, since things didn't always work with IE 8 (for example, I'd get 'the connection with the server was reset' when trying to download a file in IE 8, but it worked fine in Chrome). I sometimes spent hours trying to figure out what settings in IE 8 were causing the problem, often without success. These problems are gone with IE 9. I like the clean UI, and so far the performance is great too.
-Selden
A reader writes in to give some insight why his Android-based smartphone is coming up short on the job:
My Droid 2 works like a champ... Almost. I have an app that lets me RDP to all the servers via our TS Gateway. I have an app that lets me SSH to our Unix servers. I can do everything I want, except use the built-in VPN capability.
I can't do a PPTP VPN to Win2k or Win2k3 servers. I even tried a Linksys router that supports PPTP, and it won't connect there either. As I understand it from Internet chat rooms, L2TP VPNs don't work either. It all worked in Droid 2.0 and they broke them all in 2.1. I guess Google is too busy making sure it works great with Facebook to worry about those of us with connectivity needs.
Grumble.
-Bryan
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/28/2011 at 1:18 PM