Blurgh... ...and a real alternative.

[ffutures]

Feeling crap, phoned in sick. Bloody wonderful. Think it's just a cold, doubt it's hay fever (I don't get it badly anyway) since it's raining a little and that usually settles the pollen.

In yesterday's entry I mentioned Realplayer, forgot to mention that there's an alternative for Windows called (not surprisingly) "Real alternative"; this installs a reasonably good media player clone that can play Real Media files and (unlike Realplayer) doesn't monitor your net access etc. or spy on you for advertisers.

Latest (as in 12th June) update at http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It's been pouring with rain the last 3 days up here, and cold with it, and my hayfever has still somehow managed to be quite bad.

I suspect a conspiracy of some kind.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

I usually get affected by tree pollen very early in the season, so I've had few problems for weeks. Suddenly, these past couple of days I've been sneezing all the time despite the rainy weather.
Thanks for posting the link to Real Alternative. RealOne has been driving me round the bend because it starts up every time I reboot, despite my having deleted the Run entries from the registry.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The Scots Pine in my garden, every time the wind blows, great yellow clouds of pollen come floating out of it.

[ggreig]

Autoruns (freeware from SysInternals) is good for hunting down evil things that launch themselves automatically. There are more auto-run locations than you might think.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that looks handy, I'll give it a whirl. I'd only found the more obvious locations such as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run but clearly something else is lurking.

[ggreig]

Looks like Autoruns got a major upgrade last night, so it might be worth downloading a fresh copy.

[thedivinegoat.livejournal.com]

The realplayer you get from the bbc has all the spyware and adware taken out.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's good to know, but I think I'll stick with Real Alternative. Apart from anything else, it loads a lot faster.

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

Hope you feel better soon. There is nothing worse than being sick in the summer. It's insulting that the world outside is full of sunshine and happy vacationing people.