Monthly Archives: April 2008

office 2007 oem: it really doesn’t exist… you need an opk (OEM preinstallation kit) first.

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer wants me to quote on a high-end system.

She wants (amongst other things) office 2007 professional. I look at the prices from various suppliers, and decide that the OEM price is significantly lower than the retail pack. So I use that price to generate the final quote.

So she decides to buy the system from me, and as I look into getting office OEM, I realise its not like the windows XP OEM.

Either I buy the full retail pack, or I buy the OEM pack (which is just a serial number… I also need to purchase an OPK (oem pre-installation kit)).

But my supplier doesn’t have any OPKs.

I shop around and find a huge difference in OPK prices (from $99 to $350 :-O )

Ok, I feel ripped off (thanks microsoft!), and my profit margin has dropped, but luckily, its still a profit.

computer aid website bandwidth overflow due to 404 errors

Computer Aid Posted on by

When I first created this website in 2005, I got a reasonable hosting package from home-business-host.com .

It only allowed 100MB of disk storage (but I didn’t need much), and a whopping 2Gb of bandwidth (Ie people on the internet could download 2Gb of data from my website per month).

Over the last few months, the amount of bandwidth that computer-aid.com.au would use had gradually crept up to about 1Gb per month… still a way to go before I hit 2Gb per month (or so I thought!).

Exactly on the last day of the month, around 3pm, I noticed I had an email saying my website had used 80% of its bandwidth. There was a similar email (1 minute later) which said I had exceeded the 2Gb bandwidth limit.

Yikes! The Computer Aid website was off the air!

I quickly contacted home business host, and Steve quickly bumped up my bandwidth to 5GB, just to get computer-aid.com.au going again. Thanks Steve, great response!

Looking over the website logs, it looked like my website pages only accounted for about 1GB of the bandwidth.

So where did the rest go?

I eventually found the answer in the http status codes… the 404 “document not found” accounted for 930Mb of bandwidth.

It seems that someone (or something) had been trying to load a non-existent page from my site… and kept trying until my bandwidth got used up.

At this stage, I can’t be sure if it was an attempt at sabotage, or if it was just a web spider that had gone haywire.

If it happens again, I’ll look into the stats more carefully and track down those responsible.

microsoft update generates a 0X80072EE2 error

Computer Aid Posted on by

After updating a customer laptop to XP SP2, doing a windows update generated a 80072EE2 error message.

A quick search showed that it can be caused by a firewall.

Thats odd. The PC had no firewall before I installed SP2, so the “pristine” XP firewall should be fine.

But since I’ve seen the XP firewall occasionally stop working correctly, I decide to reset it (control panel -> windows firewall -> advanced -> restore defaults).

And thats all that was needed to fix the 0x80072ee2 error 🙂

Antivir guard doesn’t automatically start (XP minifilters problem)

Computer Aid Posted on by

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of Avira Antivir. Its a great antivirus, and it also detects many spyware programs as well.

One of my annoyances is the daily advert it displays on my screen (its actually not very annoying… I know I can get rid of the ad by paying for antivir).

The other annoying aspect, is that occasionally, it will be unable to automatically run the “realtime” scanner (avguard). The symptom is a closed umbrella symbol in the taskbar. Usually, a restart fixes it.

But when a restart doesn’t start avguard, I’ve noticed that uninstalling and reinstalling antivir will not fix the problem either.

I also tried cleaning any registry reference to antivir and avira, but the problem persists.

In the past, my “plan B” was to install AVG.

I recently stumbled onto a solution:

http://www.avira.com/en/documents/utils/tools/Fltch.zip

This seems to fix the problem very nicely.

I also learnt a bit about the XP (NT) minifilter system in the process.

Many problems running Office 2003 on Vista

Computer Aid Posted on by

Isn’t it amazing how a reasonably expensive product (office 2003) can become almost unusable in just 4 short years.

A customer purchased (without asking me for advice) a Vista PC. It came with the office 2007 trial, but since she already had office 2003 from her previous PC, I just removed the trial, and installed MSO2003.

Everything seemed OK on the surface, but after a while, some annoying incompatibilities started to surface:

  • The outlook contacts list (imported from the old PC), started giving errors whenever it was accessed. Removing and re-importing the contact list seemed to fix it.
  • Customer changed outlook, so that it would use MS word as her email editor (not something I would recommend, but it shouldn’t cause problems). So now, whenever she wants to reply, or create a new emails, Vista butts-in with: “A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in outlook”. At this point, she has to click on the “yes I’m expecting this” button.
  • Every time outlook is started, it asks for the email password (it forgets the password, even if you tick the “remember this password” box).
  • Certain emails (I suspect html, or RTF emails… ie at least half), will not be formatted correctly, and the customer sees the raw html. No amount of web searching has found an answer to this issue (other than suggestions to upgrade to MSO2007).
  • I try to backup the PST files (using the export function), and I get the a 30 second delay, followed by the message: The office assistant requires microsoft agent 2.0 or later. So I install MSAgent 2.0, and then the export starts giving another error: Export file: the messaging interface has returned an unknown error. if the problem persists, restart outlook.

If it wasn’t for the need to use Outlook, I’d have been tempted to just switch her over to OpenOffice.

Anyway, I go to download the Office 2007 trial, and I get a whole new set of problems (see one of my following posts).

Be careful when dealing with Elizabeth Todd, from Deception Bay, Qld.

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve had my first true non-paying customer (after nearly 3 years!).

A lady called Elizabeth Todd (ph: 0410 067 101), from Deception Bay, Qld, had non-starting PC.

It turned out to be a faulty motherboard, so I replaced it, did a repair install of windows, installed SP2, antivirus, etc etc.

All up, it was $140 for the hardware, and $140 for my time.

When I return the PC, she only has $140, but promises to give me the remaining $140 tomorrow.

Well numerous calls, and 6 months later, I’ve not seen the money.

I only started to call her 6 weeks after the payment was due (Computer Aid payment terms are 7 days)

I’ve heard lots of reasons:

  • I forgot.
  • I get paid on (a day of the week), I’ll pay then.
  • I asked my partner to pay… didn’t he do it?
  • I’ve had a difficult week, I’ll pay next week.

But in the end, I’ve had to write it off.

But I’d like to warn anyone else: if you meet Elizabeth Todd (from Donowain drive, Deception Bay), don’t supply her with any goods or services unless she pays upfront.

Cannot discover wireless networks (ad-hoc problem)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I supplied a new PC to a customer.

He was retired, so he saved some money by getting his son to install a corporate XP.

But once he got it back, he couldn’t get the wireless internet link working.

So I pop over, enter the WEP details (the wireless router had been setup a long time ago, so I didn’t want to go change it).

But no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t see any networks to connect to.

So, I figure I haven’t much choice, I’ll need to connect directly to the router via ethernet, and setup a WPA network… I’ve developed a strong dislike for WEP.

So I setup the WPA-PSK settings in the router, reboot, and so far I can see the router.

I disconnect the ethernet cable, but when I try to connect to the wireless network, it just fails silently. No error messages, and no indication that there is a problem.

I check that XP is managing the wireless network connection, DHCP is running correctly, but after looking at countless wireless networks, this one doesn’t want to work properly.

So I find myself doing what I often do in this situation: I start to aimlessly browse the network settings.

Thats when I stumble across the cause:

In the “wireless network connection properties”, click on the “wireless networks” tab, and then click on the advanced button (not the advanced tab, the button near the bottom of the window).

And up pops a seldom used “networks to access” window.

Ordinarily, its set to “any available network”. If I’m setting up XP, I usually change it to “infrastructure networks only”… but in this case, it was set to “ad hoc networks only”.

Obviously there are people out there who still use ad hoc networks (I can’t see the point anymore. It was a useful a when access points were much more expensive, but not anymore).

ping replies from a different address (destination host unreachable)

Computer Aid Posted on by

Now this was a very strange situation:

While trying to diagnose a network connectivity problem, there was 1 vista laptop on the network that would connect to the internet, but it couldn’t see any shared drives on the local network.

At first, I thought it was a failing network switch (but network switches rarely fail).

I found out the IP address of the server I was trying to see (192.168.1.101)… DHCP was allocating addresses between 192.168.1.100 and 199).

So, from the laptop, I try ping 192.168.1.101, and I get:

Reply from 192.168.1.108: destination host unreachable

But all the other PCs on the net work (and ping) correctly.

And why does 108 reply instead of 101?

A quick search seems to imply that it can be caused by an odd netmask. But DHCP auto-allocates the net mask, so there cannot be a broadcast address between 100 and 199…

I take a general look around the laptop, and I see its running (drum-roll…) Norton internet security.

Its a new-ish laptop, so this is the trial norton, which expires after 90 days.

So NIS had expired a month ago (around when many network problems started cropping up).

So I figure: I might as well fix this up

uninstall NIS, and install Antivir, winpatrol, bhodemon, spywareblaster.

Once that was over, the network problem just disappeared!

Looks like the norton firewall was seriously stuffed.

How to use XP home as a file server (don’t)

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer has a growing business, and role of the main computer grew into becoming the main file server.

Unfortunately, its running windows XP Home. That means a limit of 5 network connection can be served out.

For financial (expansion) reasons, the customer cannot look at a NAS solution, nor have the PC out of action while it is upgraded to XP pro (which still only gives 10 network connections).

Since the office now has a total of 4 PCs, they occasionally hit the limit (particularly if the client PC locks up and needs to be restarted, or if some extra PCs are connected to the network).

Some research reveals that it is possible to hack the tcpip.sys file to increase the limit to 50… but its not “future proof”… it might cause problems with future ms updates.

I don’t want any potential problems, and I’m looking for a quick fix.

I start thinking: there must be a timeout value for network connections, otherwise you can quickly reach the maximum server limit.

A quick search finds that the default value is 15 minutes… and it can be easily changed using:

net config server /autodisconnect: X

the X represents a timeout value in minutes.

So I enter:

net config server /autodisconnect:1

And the “server” now disconnects after just 1 minute of inactivity.

This should improve things slightly… But I strongly recommend the company look into getting a NAS solution… even a cheap $400 NAS-that-looks-like-an-external-USB-drive is better (and more reliable) than what they have at the moment.

How to download office 2007 trial in Australia

Computer Aid Posted on by

I attempted to download the Office 2007 trial for a customer.

I tried both from the MS website (USA and Australian variants), and via a google search.

In all cases, I had to wade through at least 4 microsoft pages, each with lots of nice pictures… looking for the elusive “download now” button.

When I eventually found the button, pressing it took me to another page, etc etc, until I was told I had to subscribe to MS .net passport…. What?

OK, fill in the form, click OK, and for about 4 or 5 times, it would not like something on the form (besides, I had to say I lived in Florida, as there were only USA states available… oh how I hate that!).

Anyway, after jumping through hoops, login using the MSN id, wade through a few more pages of marketing drivel, I’m eventually told:

You are attempting to submit an order without any items in your shopping cart

But I was never given an opportunity to put Office 2007 in my cart!!! grrr. I just want to download a trial, not apply for defence clearance!

After some research, I eventually find (via whirlpool) that microsoft have carefully hidden the download url at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/products/HA101741481033.aspx

At last. I download the trial (without most of the “jumping through hoops”), and it installs correctly, and is also smart (its a relative term) enough to recognise the old version of office, and basically tells me it can:

  • blow away the old office (with no indication of whether it will keep the setup data from the old one… a scary option for most people)
  • leave the old software where it is (but it says something like: office 2007 probably won’t work properly)

Not much choice is it?

I made sure I backed up the outlook data (which was my main concern), and I opted for the first option (exterminate office 2003).

Luckily it did the right thing, and automatically imported the outlook 2003 settings into outlook 2007.

openoffice spell check doesn’t work

Computer Aid Posted on by

Note: if you just want a quick answer to the subject of this post (with no background story), then go to the end.

I had a customer that urgently needed to get his old win98 PC fixed.

It was a very old IBM, and it would get stuck at startup, displaying B4 in the top corner (probably a motherboard failure).

I transfer the data across to a slightly newer XP system… I can edit & print documents, so my job is done.

But I get called back the next day, as wordpad doesn’t have a “page counter”, nor a spell checker (which was on the old PC… I eventually figure out he was using MS word.

Customer doesn’t have any install media (his son set it up a while ago).

So I figure OpenOffice is the quickest solution.

Once installed, I open an existing word document, and I see it does the usual spell check, with the wavy red line under suspect words.

And running the spell check finds some spelling mishtakes.

I open a new office document, make some deliberate mis-spellings, but OOowriter doesn’t flag any of them… WTF?

After some research, I find that openoffice only installs the spell checker for US and UK English.

The problem will happen with any of the following english variants:

  • Australia
  • Belize
  • Canada
  • Eire
  • India
  • Jamaica
  • Namibia
  • New Zealand
  • Philippines
  • South Africa
  • Trinidad
  • Zimbabwe

The easiest fix is to use either USA english or UK english by:

start writer -> tools -> options -> Language Settings -> Languages -> Default languages for documents -> western -> pick either english (UK) or english (USA) -> OK -> restart openoffice.

A more “correct” way of doing it is to install the correct dictionary by:

start writer -> file ->wizards -> install new dictionaries -> english -> start dicOOo button -> English -> next -> retrieve the list -> English (Australia) -> (repeat for hyphenation dictionaries and thesaurus dictionaries -> next (to start the download) -> finish -> restart OOo