Now I can send Texts

I've already mentioned my Nokia N85, which is quite a powerful machine, but with just a few annoyances that I've yet to sort out. The largest of these was the discovery that it had a problem sending sms text messages: it couldn't.

I found out about this four weeks after purchasing the phone, which gives you some idea of how important texting is in my life. Initial research suggested that this is an uncommon, but not unheard of, problem. Fellow sufferers were to be found on Symbian and Nokia forums. Seemed the only solution was to reformat the phone, and risk the problem reoccurring as I put all the settings back to my preferred values. I decided not to bother.

Then last week I was idly exploring some of the phone's lesser used utilities when I found some settings I'd never noticed before. I toggled one of them that looked a likely candidate and tried to send a text. It worked! To prove I'd found the key setting I went back and toggled to the original setting; however, I could still send texts.

So whether changing this setting is the once and for all way of letting me send texts, or whether the problem had fixed itself, I cannot say. But for posterity, here is what I changed:

Go into the Utilities folder and open the Device Manager. Select Options, then Settings. This should show you the 'Default server profile', which for me was 'Nokia'. I changed this to 'Orange', my network provider. That's all there is to it.

And now for something vaguely useful

The principal reason I had for starting a blog (apart from having somewhere to sound off) was to be able to give back a little bit of knowledge to this amazing repository that the internet has become. Now comes my first chance.

I switched to using Mozilla Firefox for web-browsing when it first came out, and haven't regretted it. Apart from its own rich set of features, the add-ons you can download give it a real edge over its competitors. Firebug and Hyperwords are both amazing, when you consider how much functionality they give you, for free.

Last week I upgraded to the latest version: Firefox 3.5. Not a great deal to see in terms of extra features, but the start up time was remarkable, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. It was literally taking several minutes to load. Firefox 3.5 was really slow.

I hoped it might be a glitch, or it might recover by itself. No such luck. So I did the natural thing and asked Google. Bingo!

I started to follow the instructions, but when I went to the Temp folder like they said, there were so many files in there that Explorer just showed the torchlight icon for a couple of minutes, before I gave up. In the end I had to delete the files from the command line. It freed up over 5Gbytes of disc space, and Firefox now loads really quickly again.

I have a suspicion that more than one program is going to be running a bit faster now. The annoying thing is that I've bumped into this sort of issue before, a while back. These Temp folders fill up. It would be nice if the applications that put the files there had the courtesy to get rid of them when they'd finished, but clearly many of them don't. So it's left to the users, and how many of them know to look in their application data folders? I'm one that does, which is why it's annoying.