Monthly Archives: May 2007

Helping disabled computer users

Computer Aid Posted on by

I have a few customers that have varying degrees of disability.

A quadriplegic, and various elderly people with varying degrees of mobility problems.

I recently helped a couple with hearing difficulties (he was partly deaf, but didn’t know anything about computers, and she was totally deaf, but was the main computer user).

It was an interesting experience, but somehow, by speaking clearly (and loudly), I was able to communicate, found their prepaid dialup internet gave a “incorrect password” error, phoned the ISP, and managed to find out there had been a payment error, and gave lots of helpful advice along the way.

All in all, a very satisfying result.

Crappy Vista printer support

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve now had a few problems, where a customer buys a Vista computer, and then tries to get either an existing printer, or a new printer, to work (with little success)

It seems that the XP driver CDs will flatly refuse to work, and most printer manufacturers still don’t ship CDs with vista drivers.

That leaves the customer to hunt around the internet, looking for a similar driver.

In one case, I was working on a new Brother inkjet multifunction printer / fax / scanner. It also had usb, ethernet, and wireless capabilities.

So I think: excellent, wireless printing, what a great idea.

Well, the printer drivers on CD refuse to work. I download a huge file with the vista drivers.

I follow the instructions, and setup wireless (802.11G) on both the router, the printer, and the laptop.

I unpack the vista drivers. They get placed into 2 folders, both with a setup.exe file… now which setup do I run? The readme files don’t say… eeney, meaney, miney moe!

I take an educated guess, and I’m right.

As the install proceeds, I’m given the choice of either usb, or ethernet/wireless. I choose wireless. After the install process completes, I need to restart the PC.

After the restart, I can see 2 printers and a fax device under the printers section of control panel.

I do a test print, but the prints just sit in the queue.

I try reinstalling the driver, but it still refuses to print.

I could spend hours tracking down the exact settings for the port settings of the printer, but we eventually decide to just go with the usb connection (and luckily, it works flawlessly).

It seems that printer support is one of my biggest issues with vista (yep, MS will say its not their fault, printer makers will blame MS (or say it will take a while to develop thousands of vista drivers… (I can’t see why they have to develop so many different models…))

ViPowER VPA-3528Net is difficult to configure over ethernet

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer had just purchased a ViPowER VPA-3528Net network hard drive.

Obviously, the intent was to attach it to the network, and then all the PCs on his network (5) should be able to access the drive (without the need for a dedicated PC).

Well, he couldn’t get it to work, and it took me an hour…

According to the instructions, you just connect it to your ethernet router, use your browser to connect to http://landisk and you can then use the web interface to configure your drive.

Well I cannot connect to http://landisk … The manual also suggests (in case of difficulties, to connect using http://storage (or something like that). But that also doesn’t work.

I try a ping, but no luck.

I try a reset to factory defaults, but no luck.

There is nothing unusual about the network (1 dhcp server (router)… all PCs obtain their IP addresses from the router).

Right at the very back of the manual, where it talks about configuring the device without a router, it shows how to setup XP to talk to the device. The IP addresses in the screenshot are just what I needed: 169.254.0.2, and a server of 169.254.0.1

So I configure XPs network settings to ignore dhcp, and use the 169 address range.

I type 169.254.0.1 into the browser address bar, and I can finally connect to this thing.

I quickly see that it’s setup to be a DHCP server. I figure thats the main problem (you don’t want 2 dhcp servers on a network!).

I switch off the DHCP server on the VPA-3528, but it still cannot see (or be seen) on the 192.168.1.X network…

As a last resort, I setup the router to reserve the IP address 192.168.1.111

I then connect to the VPA, and manually set its IP address to be 192.168.1.111

After that, I can finally see it on the 192.168.1.X network, with the PC running in “normal” dhcp mode.

Now I look at formatting the 70Gb drive… I go to the format area in the web interface, click on format, it thinks for about 5 seconds, and then I get an error message (something about operation could not complete).

Never the less, it looks like the drive got formatted anyway… I setup SMB network shares, so that I can do some test file transfers. The “shared” folders appear correctly, and I can copy data to and from the VPA-3528.

This device obviously cannot function in network mode “out of the box”. It might work in USB mode, but there was no point in even trying it in usb mode.

Looking at the vipower website, they seem to be a reasonably large provider of external storage products… so I’m surprised that they’d sell a poor product that has so many bugs

Thinkpad 600 error 00192

Computer Aid Posted on by

When starting, this laptop (ibm thinkpad 600) gave an error: 00192… but just wouldn’t start windows (win 9 8 ) or dos

I could then go to a bios diagnostics area, but a test of the main board just gave more cryptic errors.

An internet search returned the following site: http://www.sharkyforums.com/archive/index.php/t-201688.html

It had the perfect solution. It was a flat CMOS battery.

Replacing the battery ended up being amazingly simple.

I had a spare 3V lithium battery (from another mobo). So I easily removed the flat battery, attached the wires to the new battery (I tried to solder the wires to the battery, but the solder wouldn’t “stick”.

So I tried plan B: packing tape. By pulling the tape as I wrapped it around the battery & wires, the tape stretched and acted like an elastic… forcing the wire contacts to remain in touch with the battery terminals.

Plan B worked… The laptop finally started. Problem fixed.

gecko in the power supply!

Computer Aid Posted on by

Warning: You probably shouldn’t read this, if you have a queasy stomach, or are sensitive to talk about dead creatures.

A few months ago, I came home, and I found the house had no power.

A check of the power meter showed that the earth leakage circuit breaker had tripped. I flicked the switch to reset it. But after a few seconds, it trips again.

By process of elimination, I narrow th problem to an old (pentium 2!) PC in my workshop.

I open up the PC, and I find ants, cockroaches, and geckos… YUCK! I see some yellow stains (that once were liquid).

I brush out all the animal life, spray the ventilation holes with insecticide, and set some cockroach baits around the workshop (which worked very well).

I try the PC again, and it now works fine. I put everything back in its place.

About 2 months later, the same thing happens (no power… the same PC is shorting out).

I open it up again, but this time it looks clean.

I start to dismantle the power supply, thinking its probably dead. As I pry open the PSU case, I see a large gecko inside 😮

I drop the PSU outside, on the grass, and the gecko leaps out.

I then finish taking off the PSU cover, and as I peer inside, I can see a headless gecko body across the 240 volt power terminals :-s

I carefully remove the “short” (REMEMBER: working inside a power supply can be deadly. Don’t do this unless you know what you are doing!). I also carefully look over the rest of the PSU, and I find 2 dead cockroaches (I remove one, the other is inaccessible, so I leave it). I also find the head of the “fried” gecko (at the other end of the PSU!)… Looks like it literally got it head blown off…

Anyway, I reassemble everything, and the PC is working again.

Now, the reason the geckos got into the PSU is: the PSU fan is a “push” fan: Its inside the PC case, and it pushes air through the PSU. Most PSUs use pull fans (the fans pull the air through the PSU, so that the fan is the last device before the air gets outside the PC case).

So, the ventilation holes at the back of the PC/PSU are a little larger than normal, they are rectangular, and there is no fan directly behind them. A perfect home for a wandering “lizard”.

How do I stop this from happening again?

I was thinking extra wires to make the ventilation holes smaller, but it was going to be messy. Then Mandy had a great idea: Use packing tape to totally seal the holes, then poke some holes into the tape. I can now choose how many holes, and their size… perfect!

blocked websites (ISP or hosting?)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I maintain 2 websites hosted with unlimited-space.

One day, these 2 sites suddenly stopped appearing (the usual IE7 web page about a page inaccessible error, but with a suggestion to contact TPG (my ISP).

Since it was Easter Saturday, I didn’t expect much… but I tried to contact unlimited-space, and tpg (via email)

Surprisingly, unlimited-space replied within 1 hour, with a few suggestions.

After 12 exchanges, they believed they gathered enough info to conclude that the problem was not on their end… it must be my ISP.

The odd thing was that I was able to access the 2 websites over ports 25 (smtp), 110 (pop3), 21 (ftp). But over port 80 (http), nothing happened. Ping and tracert worked.

But I managed to use some IE proxy settings to by bypass all this (proxy.tpg.com.au, proxy.cache.telstra.net… ports 80 and 3128)

TPG got back to me on monday, asking that I check that the hosting company isn’t blocking bri-nxg-pr5.tpgi.com.au

After that, unlimited space did admit that they were blocking the IP address of bri-nxg-pr5.tpgi.com.au

although unlimited-space seem a very good value hosting company, I’ve had the occasional problem with them… another problem:

About 1 year ago, I asked if I would be able to have a hosting plan, but instead if the 1 addon domain, I would have liked to have 2 or 3 (and I wouldn’t need to store large amount of data, and the traffic would be modest). I was told: no problem.

But now, after having signed up, I’m told: “sorry, if you want more addon domains, you will need to buy more hosting packages”

Well at $109 per annum, I wasn’t about to spend $327 to get 2 extra addon domains.

Oh well, looks like my search for a good Australian hosting company continues. I currently have a good hosting company (http://www.home-business-host.com), but the servers are in the US, so the website response times can sometimes be slow.