Monthly Archives: June 2008

Laptop with no sound

Computer Aid Posted on by

Sometimes, I really like the simple problems.

This has only happened to me 2 or 3 times, but it can test your troubleshooting skills.

Laptop plays no sound.

Depending on the laptop manufacturer, the control panel sound options are either not muted, or its muted, and the mute tickbox is greyed-out (and cannot be un-muted).

Updating drivers has no effect.

I eventually do what I should have done very early on: carefully examine all the buttons and switches along the front, sides, and top of the laptop.

I usually find a front or side button (annoyingly camouflaged black-on-black, with either black writing, or writing that is slightly raised), that will quietly mute the sound (or worse, directly disable the speakers, so that windows is none-the-wiser!).

Its also possible to mute using blue “Fn” button, but thats usually a lot more obvious.

internet parental control / filter programs

Computer Aid Posted on by

This is not something I get asked about much (I’m not exactly sure why). But this time I decided to look into it carefully.

A past customer just got a laptop for her 10 YO son, so she wanted to be sure he didn’t stray onto any naughty websites… as it had happened a few times already.

As most of you already know, its amazingly easy to stray onto the more “risque” sites… sometimes without even trying.

Up to this point, I had heard of “net nanny”, and I had briefly stumbled onto the IE content advisor.

I decided to take a look at content advisor, but quickly found many problems:

  • It would either block everything, unless it has been classified as safe (even the ninemsn.com website would get blocked under this setting)… so the parent would spend most of their time “approving” websites… ie: a useless solution.
  • it would allow everything, unless it had been classified as “bad”… again useless, as most naughty websites still show up!
  • Using another browser bypasses content advisor completely!

The customer said she had heard the www.netalert.gov.au website was worth looking at.

I asked Mandy to take a look and see if anything was worth a try. She tried filterpak integard, optenet web filter, and safe eyes. We also tried k9 web protection, as it seems to have many supporters out there.

In the end, we found that k9 web protection offered the easiest solution, and it seemed to work well. Its also “free” (you pay by giving them your email address).

I made an effort to disable it by disabling the xp service… but that just disabled all browsing 🙁

Besides being able to monitor and customise which categories to allow/disallow, the main section makes it easy by having just 3 levels of protection: high filtering … 10 – 13 years of age, medium filtering (14-18 years old), and an over 18 section.

Another nice touch is that it locks the google preferences into “safe search”… so a google search for “porn” returns “no documents found”.

My son is 6, so I’m sure I’ll need to revisit this area in a few years time!

blue screen during windows startup

Computer Aid Posted on by

Another interesting problem with one of my own systems…

I was cloning a hard drive (as part of a customer upgrade), and after 1 hour of waiting, I started to suspect that something was wrong…

After all, cloning about 35gb of data from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive shouldn’t take that long.

I decide to start windows normally, just to look at the contents of the 80gb drive.

Well, windows get part way through the startup, and then I see the familiar blue screen of death.

I didn’t look at the actual numbers, but I know a blue screen is caused by either a change in software/drivers (not in this case), or a hardware failure.

Since the most recent change was adding the 2 hard drives, I figured unplugging them should do the trick… nope.

Ok, try memtest86: no memory fault.

Change video cards: no change.

I pull out all the pci cards, and any disks I can. but now it gets difficult to make the problem happen. The blue screen only happens while I’m trying to start from my hard drive.

I can get to the bios.

I can boot bartpe from the cd, and i can run a few system tests… all with no problem.

The system even starts in safe mode correctly…

I then decide to start pulling out the RAM sticks. (I have 3 sticks of 512Mb).

After pulling the first one out,the system started normally!

After some swapping, I found the RAM was not faulty, but a particular socket was to blame… I wonder why memtest86 didn’t detect a problem…

Another strange yet frustrating problem.

windows cannot find ‘(null)’

Computer Aid Posted on by

This computer had lots of strange problems (including no internet connection)…

  • When starting XP, a window would popup, saying: “windows cannot find ‘ (null)’ make sure you typed the name correctly and then try again”
  • ipconfig returns: “an internal error occurred: the request is not supported. Please contact Microsoft product support service for further help”
  • I notice the ICS service is stopped… I try to manually start it, and I it doesn’t start… the event log shows: “error 2001: the specified driver is invalid”.
  • The event viewer sometimes (maybe every few days) shows a disk error… device harddisk0 has a bad block.

A careful disk check shows no real bad blocks, so it could be a red herring.

I try to fix the networking with the usual:

  • netsh int ip reset reset.log
  • netsh winsock reset catalog

After some research, I take a look at c:windowssystem32driverstcpip.sys … and I see its missing!

The solution ends up being quite simple:

sfc /scannow

(followed by a whole swag of windows updates).

A few weeks later, I’m told that there are still a few problems with the PC (the USB printer won’t work)… I fix it by putting it on another PC, and setting up network printing.

A week later, I’m told the PC will not recognise USB thumbdrives anymore…

Its probably a windows registry problem, and I can only see one solution: A clean install of windows XP 🙁

simple problem with office 2007 outlook filtering

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had a customer with 2 problems… first, she couldn’t start her laptop, and second, she was having trouble with outlook.

When I tried restarting the laptop, it would resume from hibernation, then display a blank screen… but there was disk activity, so it seems to be busy doing *something*.

I eventually hold the power button for 5 seconds, and that forces a shutdown. I then pull the power and battery out, press the power button a few times, plugin the power and battery again, and restart the PC. This time it starts normally.

Once in outlook, I notice it doesn’t seem to have many emails. I rearrange the view to suit the customer (she like to have the email preview enabled).

outlook downloads about 20 emails. I take a look at a few, and as I view them, they seem to disappear from the inbox… that’s odd.

I figure there must be a filter thats processing the inbox, and moving the emails to other folders.

After a long time searching, looking at the inbox filtering, and sending countless test emails, I eventually notice a subtle (blue writing on slightly darker blue background) message, near the to of the main outlook window, that says something like “filtering enabled”.

That leads me to find an easily overlooked filtering option, which will hide any emails that have been viewed…

Grrr, it seems so obvious (in hindsight).

trend pc-cillin rivalling norton in quality…

Computer Aid Posted on by

Trend is starting to annoy me almost as much as norton.

I saw another customer, whose internet connection dropped out. I ask if he installed anything new, or changed any settings… nope.

I look at a few things, but I just cannot connect to the modem to see if its connecting to the net correctly.

Ping doesn’t work, and vista is falling back to the 169 ip address.

He is connecting using a usb cable… so I try ethernet, but I get the same problem.

He happens to have a work laptop (which he couldn’t connect to the internet, since he hadn’t installed the usb drivers… well, with ethernet, that is no longer an issue.

The XP laptop connects to the internet perfectly.

Back to the main vista PC, I decide to disable everything within Trend (firewall, spam filtering, the lot). But still no internet.

At this stage, my only options are: either uninstall trend (and maybe run a cleanup program), or reinstall vista.

I uninstall trend, and after a reboot, the PC can finally get to the internet. I reinstall Trend pc-cillin, and everything is working normally again.

We briefly discuss creating a business website, and I’m on my way again.

I’m starting to encounter so many trend problems, its starting to look like trend is trying to out bid norton in the bad-quality software stakes!

CD in the floppy drive!

Computer Aid Posted on by

A new customer calls, saying he is trying to connect to the internet, but the disk is stuck in the drive.

When I get there, he points to the floppy drive and says he put the disk into the drive, but he can’t get it out…

I take a close look into the floppy drive (it has one of those spring-flap doors that keep the drive internals a bit less dusty… I eventually see that there is a small 8cm cd in the drive!

Every time I open the floppy door, it catches onto the bottom of the CD, so that I can’t get a good grip.

I end up delicately applying some brute force… and the CD emerged unscathed 🙂

I then place the CD where it belongs (in the CD drive) and setup a dialup internet connection (after some password problems… the CD software refused to accept passwords shorter than 6 characters, yet the ISP created an account with a 4 letter password…)

I install an antivirus, test the internet, setup and test the email account, and that’s the end of an interesting session of disk wrestling 🙂

Computer aid blog is 3 years old!

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’m amazed.

3 years ago, I made my first attempts at writing blog articles.

At first, I had 2 purposes in mind:

  1. it was a way for me to log strange computer problems, so that I could “remember” how to fix something, if I encountered it again, many months later.
  2. it was a cheap way to advertise Computer Aid, and implement some SEO

It has been useful in both ways.

I’ve been able to avoid “reinventing the wheel” a few times.

And I’m currently getting about 20 – 35% of my new customers from the internet.

At first, the traffic for computer-aid was low… about 200 – 600 visitors per month.

But then, I was using blogger.

Around July 2006, I switched to using wordpress (directly under the computer-aid.com.au domain. By the end of 2006, the website was getting around 3000 visitors per month.

And now, I’m getting around 10000 visits per month (http://www.computer-aid.com.au/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=computer-aid.com.au).

Clicks on my sponsors are currently earning me a bit over $400 per year, which covers the cost of the domain and website hosting… but not the huge number of hours I’ve spent writing blog articles.

I’ve also found I quite like writing my blog … so its nice to know that over 300 people per day actually read it also.

So, where do I go from here?

Ideally, I’d like to more people to click on my sponsor links… but I won’t hold my breath on that one.

For the moment, I’ll just keep going, with no major change in my routine.

Due to some recent events, I’ve deliberately slowed down my work schedule (from insanely hectic to moderately busy), but that shouldn’t affect my posts by much.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Its been an interesting 3 years, and who knows what will happen in the next few years!

wrong pdf association within vista and office 2007

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer (English is not her first language… hence I have some difficulty communicating) has a vista laptop, and needs me to setup her printer and fix a problem with viewing pdf documents.

The printer is simple enough: she had already installed the printer drivers from the CD, installed the toner cartridge, but it kept putting out blank pages.

A closer look at the toner cartridge showed that she hadn’t removed the toner seal (no toner = blank page).

The pdf documents was a bit trickier.

I find I can start adobe reader, and file -> open shows me some pdf documents, and I can load and view a document no problems.

So she explains about double clicking the document… ok… I use explorer to navigate to a pdf document, double click on it, and office 2007 word tries (and fails) to display the document.

I figure: word has somehow decided to become the default application for opening pdf documents.

Simple enough: I just go into adobe reader, and under preferences, I should be able to tell it to take over the pdf association again…

I spend the next 5 minutes scouring the adobe reader menus and preferences, but there is no way to set the default pdf association… hmmm.

I eventually find that using windows explorer is the best bet: folder options -> file types -> Click on the pdf extension, and use the change button to pick the correct application.

I run a few tests, to make sure the association isn’t changed back.

job burnout

Computer Aid Posted on by

I can’t believe this happened to me!

One day, around the beginning of May, I just didn’t want to help anyone.

I stopped answering calls, and I didn’t want to do this work anymore.

In hindsight, I can now see it had been building for a few weeks…

  • i’d often work 10 or 12 hour days, for 6 days per week.
  • I have very high expectations of myself, and the quality of my work.
  • Mandy would book anyone who called… which would sometimes mean 5 or 6 customers per day.

Luckily I managed to not let my apathy show, while I was onsite… But a few minutes after leaving a customer, I would have an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

The weird thing is: I couldn’t understand why.

Well, me and Mandy managed to get over it.

As soon as possible, we arranged for me to take a week off (although I still had to do some “catchup work)… I spent a lot of the time sleeping, feeling depressed and withdrawn. By the end of the week, I was feeling better.

The week after was “reduced” duties (max of 2 customers per day).

The week after, I took another break, and did a lot of things that I had been meaning to do, but just kept putting off, as my workload had gradually increased.

Taking a “step back” as I did, I can see that Computer Aid is now a successful business, and it provides a high quality service, at fees lower than the industry average.

So we had to decide where to go from here…

There were many options:

  • Sell Computer Aid (not what I really want to do).
  • Work less (and increase my fees, but accept a lower income)
  • Just shutdown Computer Aid
  • Go to a purely contractor model (I do the occasional job)… but this option has its own set of headaches.
  • Franchise. I don’t believe this works well with this type service industry

At this stage, I’ve reduced my hours to something more normal, and I will consider my future options carefully.

From now on, I’ll be sure to take regular vacation time… it doesn’t matter how much I like my job, its still possible to overdo it.

And for those of you who really like my blog, and might be worried that I might start posting less frequently: I don’t think so. I usually “buffer” my posts, so that they appear regularly… so they can take up to 2-3 months from when they are written, to when they get posted.

An avi annoyance with XP SP3 !

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve just noticed something really annoying about XP SP3

It constantly wants to make Windows Media Player the default application for AVI files.

Since I use winpatrol to monitor for changes to default file associations, I just click on “NO, don’t allow the change”.

But a few minutes later, I’m asked again!

I’ve never seen WMP so keen to change default file associations.

To fix it, I go into WMP, and go to tools -> options -> file types -> and then untick avi (and anything else I don’t want (ie: most things).