Saw this on Vinny’s blog, it made me laugh out loud.

It’s always ticked me off the way Microsoft Office requires the install CD to do any number of seemingly minor things. Today though I was surprised to see an all new “feature”: I was working on a laptop that had Outlook 2003 installed, and I had signed up the owner for a hosted Exchange account and wanted to install Outlook 2007. Sure, I could install over top, but why not do an uninstall and keep things clean? I tried to uninstall Outlook 2003, but it wouldn’t uninstall without the Office 2003 install CD. What kind of lunacy is this? You should *never* need an install CD to remove a program - that’s idiotic on every level possible.

I’m just about read to rip out my hair here, and I can’t seem to figure out what the problem is: seemingly at random, Firefox will start to incorrectly interpret keyboard characters. The ‘ becomes a #. The / becomes an ѐ. When it first started happening, I thought it was Vista-wide problem, but I realized it wasn’t happening in Outlook, Windows Mail, Word, or anywhere else, including the Vista shell. Then I thought it might have been some sort of problem with the Logitech keyboard software, but it’s a Firefox-only problem from what I can see because if I shut down Firefox and re-start it, the problem goes away. In fact, now that I think about it, it seems that it only tends to happen if Firefox has been open all day or multiple days - which makes me wonder if it’s some sort of memory leak issue. Any other Firefox users seen a problem like this?

This is one of those things I’m posting solely for the purpose of perhaps saving someone else the same headache I’m now going through because I wasn’t able to find this information when I was searching. In a nutshell: I wanted to get the fastest, but completely silent, video card that I could find for the Shuttle SD39P2 system I was putting together. I looked at every option on the market, and it boiled down to one: the XFX GeForce 7950GT, a passively-cooled card that out-performed the 8000 series cards that were passively cooled. I knew it had a “big” heatsink and cooling fans, but I wasn’t sure how big. I also knew the SD39P2, like all Shuttle XPCs, was “small” - but that’s a relative term and I couldn’t find out how much space there was on all sides of the PCI Express slot. So I took a leap of faith and ordered this card for $325 and when it arrived I tried to install it. It would not fit. The picture pretty much says it all:

The heat pipes connect to the radiator and it sticks out the back a good 2cm or so, making it impossible to put the case back on.  So scratch that plan, it looks like I’ll be putting this 7950GT in my big tower and I’ll either put the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro in the Shuttle, or perhaps sell it on eBay and get a new 8000 series passively cooled card. And I’m still waiting for a new SD39P2 to come my way - this project is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare…