There is no doubt that Apple makes beautiful products, but their recent monitor offering, the Apple Cinema LED Display, while quite attractive, leaves a lot to be desired.

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done.  After a variety of different frustrations – even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security – I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better.  Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant – it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me.  OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

I truly believe that Apple computer has won the “how cool can we package our products” contest, but of all the other companies that I’ve seen, it would appear that Bang & Olufsen (B&O) is running a very close second.  Their stereos, televisions, telephones and headsets are the coolest of cool and it’s usually not long after they release a new product that you’ll find it in a James Bond movie or Nip Tuck episode.  What you can’t see in those shows is how well those products work or how they’re packaged, which is what I’m hoping to bring to you here.

You would think, for nearly $400, that a Monster Cable Home Theater and Lighting Controller (AVL 300 Home Theater and Lighting Controller) would do everything that you could want and more.  Unfortunately, in my case the more is raising my blood pressure and increasing my frustration.

In all fairness, I have yet to call Monster technical support, and I will do that before I toss this technical powerhouse, but my initial impression is poor.  First, it would seem that the Monster product uses the Logitech software and the automated internet setup is little more than an interface to select how your house is laid out (which rooms you want to control) and the exact model numbers of products that you have and want to control.  In Monster’s case this can be a television, DVD player, or even a Monster controlled light switch – or pretty much anything else that takes a remote control.  Once you’ve selected your rooms and equipment you’re supposed to plug in the remote via USB and it downloads your configuration.  My experience wasn’t so fluid.