Yesterday I encountered a very strange behavior in Microsoft Office 2007. I was about to save a document I was working on in a particular folder in my D: drive, and I found that the save file dialog box was taking forever just to show me a list of folders in my D: drive.

Once that list loaded, it took equally long to show a list of subfolders within a particular folder I double-clicked on. This kept happening until I reached the folder in which I wanted to save my file.

It would take about a minute or two for the screen to display the contents of each subfolder. Frustrated by the delay, I did a quick search on Google and discovered that the delay can be caused by network drives which are not currently available.

I then realized the source of my problem. I had recently purchased a HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni color laser printer, which comes with a built-in memory card reader. The printer driver had automatically created a mapped network drive to the card reader on my computer with the drive letter X:.

Each time I would explore the folders on my computer through the file save dialog box, it would try to connect to the network drive. This was the cause of the delays! I right clicked on the mapped network drive and clicked on Disconnect, and voila, the file save as dialog box begun working speedily again.

Hopefully this will help you save time and frustration if you ever come across this problem. By the way the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni is an excellent color laser printer which I purchased for RM 1200 from Sri Computers in Low Yat Plaza.

Firefox helped redefine the rules of web standard compliance when it first came out, fighting a David and Goliath battle against IE 6 then. It has come a long way now, and is the second browser in market dominance today.

Firefox 3.5 was released recently, promising double the processing speeds of Firefox 3.

I breezed through the upgrade process and hastily tried navigating around in Gmail. Decidedly faster.

Then, I realized the Offline Gmail feature was not working. I figured I needed to reinstall and resync the whole thing again, so I tried downloading Google Gears. That’s when I bumped into an error message and after Googling it up, I realized Google Gears has not been released for Firefox 3.5

This means users who rely on Google Gears (eg GMail Offline and Wordpress) are left in the dark. People have been complaining on message boards but somehow Google has yet to release an update for Google Gears on Firefox 3.5.

The Solution:  Geza Kovacs from MIT has released his own plugin for Firefox 3.5 which works perfectly well! If he could build it, I’m sure Google could have too. Perhaps they are trying to get people to switch over to their browser, Google Chrome. Anyway, Geza Kovacs’ solution is here : http://groups.google.com/group/gears-users/msg/70f164020c0f8f4e?pli=1

Just click on the appropriate link for your operating system, and you’re good to go!

Hello, and welcome to hargopal.com. My name is Hargopal, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and have been in the Computer/Software Development field for over a decade. As the tagline of hargopal.com – Around the Web with Hargopal – suggests, the purpose of this blog is to share my experiences and discoveries of the lastest websites, software and technologies from around the Web.

Happy New Year 2008!

Hargopal.