I’m a what?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Yesterday evening, I was watching Channel 4‘s satirical political show, “Bremner, Bird and Fortune“, when a Microsoft “I’m a PC” ad ran in one of the breaks. I was surprised – firstly because I thought the campaign was US-only (although I must confess that I don’t watch much commercial TV anyway) but also because it seemed to miss the point that 1 billion PC users run Windows. All we got was Sean the Apple PC guy lookalike, followed by lots of people saying “I’m a PC” and the final “Windows – Life without Walls” graphic.

As for this being effective or not – for me the question was answered when my wife – a middle class 30-something marketing professional (presumably in the demographic that these ads are aimed at) – said something to the effect of “I don’t understand! Why I’m a PC?”

That’s just one example of why these ads don’t work: the Mojave Experiment made a point (until Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with all the Windows 7 news and speculation about a 2009 release effectively killing Vista off prematurely); Windows without Walls works (especially with the recent web services announcements); Gates and Seinfeld – probably best not yo go there; but as for I’m a PC? It’s fine to be highlighing all the things that a billion people do with PCs… but this campaign is just not hitting the mark.

[Update: 11 November 2008]: In conversation, Garry Martin made a very good point that I failed to comment on in the original post: if you’ve seen the Apple ads, then I’m a PC makes sense and show that PCs are not dull and boring but that they are used for many exciting and worthwhile things across the globe; however, many people in the UK have not seen those ads.

As far as I know, Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads didn’t run on TV here (although there were some UK versions produced which may have done for a short while) – either way they are more of an Internet thing for geeks/Mac fanboys and so most people miss the point entirely – resulting in a confused response to I’m a PC.

Access denied when echoing files using SyncToy

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Whilst Windows Live Mesh and FolderShare provide me with an effective means to keep files and folders in sync, some of my devices do not run Windows or OS X (e.g. my NetGear ReadyNAS) and I’ve been using the SyncToy v2.0 tool for data that I just want to copy from one location to another (e.g. backing the file data on the notebook PC that I use for work up to a file share).

Unlike FolderShare/Live Mesh, which automatically keep folders in sync, SyncToy is intended for performing on-demand tasks (e.g. backups), as described by Gina Trapani at Lifehacker (and by yours truly a couple of years back when it was still at v1.2).

A few days ago, I was echoing the contents of a large directory to a remote share, but was mystified by some files which would not write to the remote volume. I had full NTFS access to the files but SyncToy produced an error which said:

Error: Cannot write to the destination file. Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) Copying C:\Users\username\filename

After a while, I worked out that the problem files all had the read-only attribute set and that removing this allowed SyncToy to copy the files successfully. I can only assume that the problem was the echo (i.e. file copy, rather than two-way sync) and that the file attributes were being written before the file copy took place, resulting in insufficient permissions to write the file contents.