Monthly Archives: August 2008

xp filterkeys problem

Computer Aid Posted on by

I sometimes lean on the right shift key for over 8 seconds… usually while pondering how to phrase something.

And then the xp filterkeys menu pops up.

What really annoys me about it is that once you click the cancel button, it still gets activated.

All the special keys (ie number keys on top of the letters, and keys like ,.;’][/ will all be shifted (regardless of the pressing the shift of caps key).

I eventually got so sick of it, that i decided to try and find a solution.

The answer seems so simple: just press both shift keys at the same time.

But by this stage, that wasn’t enough. I wanted to disable it permanently.

The solution:

control panel -> accessibility options -> untick everything

accessibility options

Then click on the filterkeys settings button, untick “use shortcut”.

filterkey settings

hit ok a few times to save the settings… and it should never bother you again!

Bigpond 7.2 home network gateway needs install CD

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer just got a new Bigpond 7.2 home network gateway, and needed some help installing it.

This device is like an adsl wireless modem/router, except it uses telstras nextg 3G network instead of ADSL over a wired telephone line.

What makes it nice is that it also has a wifi (802.11G) network, as well as 4 ethernet ports.

Anyway, I try to setup like any other router (by connecting directly to router web interface), but the nextG section will not accept the customers username/password.

We call bigpond, and ask for a password reset (as customer is not sure about the password). The bigpond tech says there is no “transit” delay in changing the password, so I should be able to try it straight away, and to call back if there are any problems.

I try with the new password, but it still won’t accept the username/password (the NextG page has boxes for username and password, and a connect button, and a (greyed-out) disconnect button).

Every time I press “connect”, the modem thinks for a few seconds, and then the connect button becomes available again.

I call telstra/bigpond, and the tech gets me to enter a “test” username and password. It actually connects this time (connect button greyed-out, and the disconnect button is active), but the PC still cannot see the internet (no web browsing and ping fails).

Restarting the router/modem and PC doesn’t help.

The tech eventually tells me to re-install the software from the bigpond CD, and call back if I have further problems.

I can’t see how installing the CD software will help, but I try it anyway.

I hate it when I’m proved wrong… it worked.

At this stage, I figure the PC needs some kind of telstra “authorisation” software, in order for the PC to talk to the modem/router.

Or the network propagation of the new password took longer than I was told.

Next, I try configuring a laptop… and its able to connect to the internet (by just setting up its wifi settings).

So that proves my “connect software” theory wrong as well.

A possible explanation (at that stage) is that telstra has gone back to the dreaded “heartbeat” software they once used on their cable internet system.

To test the theory, I replaced the initial PC (the one with the CD software installed), with a vanilla PC (no telstra software) this was actually the customers original PC (I had to uninstall 2 sets of Telstra 3G software… one for a usb 3G modem, and one for the “home network gateway”… a possible source of many conflicts.

The “cleaned” PC also works on the internet without any problems.

So, the only real explanations for what happened are either:

– There is a long delay (over 30 minutes) between when a password is reset, and when it is active within the mobile network.

– The install software (which can take over 10 minutes to run) makes some specific changes to the modem, without which, no connection is possible.

myob v17 and vista mail mapi problem

Computer Aid Posted on by

An accountant had just upgraded a customers PC (vista) from myob v16 to v17

So windows mail suddenly stops sending myob invoices (myob has a “send to” -> email option)… it gives a vague mapi error (something about mapi32.dll)

It seems to be a common problem (and might also apply to XP).

Some people suggest a solution is to install Mozilla Thunderbird as an alternative email client (to fix this problem).

I install thunderbird, and myob can send emails again.

A few weeks later, the same customer gets upgraded to myob “v17.5”

And now thunderbird and windows mail won’t work.

The accountant tries to re-install Thunderbird, but doesn’t get very far, as the reinstallation has problems.

I’m passing by, so I stop and take a quick look.

I try uninstalling thunderbird (no problem)

I restart, and then run the thunderbird setup… it completes, but complains about not being able to overwrite mapiproxy.dll

I try the quick way out: rename mapiproxy.dll to something like mapiproxy.lld

I reinstall thunderbird, and this time it doesn’t complain.

I try sending from myob, and its working. Awesome!

I then start thunderbird, to show the customer the send mail folder (with the mail I just sent)… but its not there!

It turns out it got sent by vistas windows mail (it had become the default email client at some point).

I make thunderbird the default email, then send another invoice.

This time it is sent via thunderbird.

But it is strange that windoze mail has started working again.

After doing some research, it turns out that myob might be using extended mapi (and thunderbird and vista mail use simple mapi)… so it looks like many potential problems in the future.

Asus p5gc-mx no sound (and strange usb problems)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I supplied an Asus p5gc-mx mobo to a customer (together with some RAM and an E2160 CPU), a few week later, the customer says he got everything going except for the sound… and he would like me to take a look at it.

There were also some issues with a wireless logitek keyboard and mouse

At first I figured it must be a simple driver issue (particularly since device manager showed a yellow triangle with a “!”).

To be sure it wasn’t a driver issue, I tried booting from pclinuxOS2007… but no sound.

I then tried ubcd4win, but still no sound

As a last resort, I tried mepis, and that worked.

Phew!!

Now that I ruled out a hardware problem, I decided to look at the driver… The customer had misplaced the mobo driver CD, so I just used my universal drivers, and installed a driver for the Realtek ALC883.

But no sound…

I figured I’ll go straight to the source… I went to the Asus website, and downloaded the latest drivers for the Realtek ALC883.

But still no go!

OK, now what?

I download the latest Asus bios (0401), and install it… but still no go.

While puzzling over it, I fix up the front USB ports (they weren’t connected correctly). I also “extract” the XP licence code (as customer has lost the little sticker, and the “usual” software for displaying the license code didn’t work).

The post at: http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/2008/01/06/recover-xp-product-key-from-failed-hardware-motherboard/ explains what to do.

The usb ports were also acting strange: usb drives would work, but not usb wireless adapters.

In the end, I admit defeat, and tell the customer that there might be a problem/corruption with windows XP… otherwise, there isn’t anything I can do.

A few weeks later, I get an email from the customer (saying that he managed to fix the problem!).

It turns out that the customer eventually found the mobo CD, and although installing the CD drivers still didn’t fix the problem, there were 2 hot fixes hiding in a realtek folder. Install the hot fixes, and everything worked (sound and wireless keyboard).

Its rare that a customer can do a better job than me (but it can happen!).

paypal pixel.gif (404 not found)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently added a paypal donate button to my blog (as part of a huge update to my blog).

Since the blog was running slow, I ran the great little utility called Firebug (within Firefox 2 seems like it doesn’t work with firefox 3… yet), to see where any slowdowns were happening.

Well, I found a lot of scope to improve the blog load speed, but one file was a concern: pixel.gif (which was part of the paypal donate button code).

The full url was: https://www.paypal.com/en_AU/i/scr/pixel.gif

And putting that into the address bar returned a 404 not found error.

OK, looks like paypals right hand isn’t talking to its left hand.

Will removing the entry cause any problems?

I tried it out, and it works normally (I’ve received a donation).

So in summary, if you have some paypalcode on your website, you might be able to speed things up a fraction by removing the pixel.gif code (but keep a copy in case you need to put it back):

<img alt=”” border=”0″ src=”https://www.paypal.com/en_AU/i/scr/pixel.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″>

Your code might be slightly different from mine, but its worth a try.

PC microphone wont work (failed sound circuit)

Computer Aid Posted on by

This customer wanted to run Skype, but couldn’t get the microphone part to work (she tried 3 different microphones).

When I get there, I notice the PC is really slow.

I also notice that the sound is “tinny”. I’m told that while fiddling with the microphone settings in windows, the the sound seemed to get altered.

I take a look at the sound settings, and see that some equalizer settings had been altered… change it back to normal, and the sound is better, but still not quite right.

I leave the sound for the moment, and take a look at the microphone settings.

According to windows, everything is normal.

I try sound recorder, but it just records silence.

I note a lot of unusual programs running, and I find 2 spyware programs running. The scan takes a while, so I return the following day to complete the work.

After removing the spyware, I check the bios settings, but everything seems normal there also.

OK, as a last resort, I install a new sound card… and that fixes both the sound and the recording problem.

In cases like this, its difficult to know what is the best order to do things.

From past experience, faulty sound is usually the result of spyware, so I scan and remove spyware before suspecting an unlikely hardware failure.

antivirus will not update

Computer Aid Posted on by

Strange problem… While setting up wireless internet, I also remove norton from a customer computer.

After installing the usual (antivir, defender, spywareblater, winpatrol, I find that antivir will not update.

I don’t want the PC to run with virus definitions that are a few months out of date, so I take the PC back to the office.

Its only then that I notice my own PCs will not update antivir…

I eventually find that the antivir servers had been overloaded (due to an unusually large update)… it all starts working normally just a few days later.

Looks like I assumed the worst, but the problem turned out to be out of my control.

myob accounting v17 wont work with vista windows mail

Computer Aid Posted on by

An accountant needed to setup the latest myob v17 on a customers computer, but found an aspect that didn’t work: the send to… email option (eg for invoices and quotes) didn’t work.

It seems the problem is either with vistas windows mail, or with myob itself.

So I found the easiest solution was to install mozilla thunderbird (to replace windows mail).

The installation and configuration were as easy as most other email clients.

And a test from MYOB found that it could now send emails via thunderbird.

The only problem was that I couldn’t find a way to transfer emails from windows mail to thunderbird (but I managed to transfer the address book by exporting to a CSV file).

Global Warming: get a grip!

Computer Aid Posted on by

“What!?” “Are you out of your mind!?”

This is what Im expecting a lot of people will say when they read my beliefs on global warming:

  • Are we experiencing global warming?: YES
  • Is it a climate change?: I’ll tell you in 100 years 🙂
  • Is the warming caused by us?: nobody knows!
  • Should we worry about global warming?: NO
  • Should we worry about our effects on the environment?: YES

Seems a bit contradictory doesn’t it?

To explain why I think this way, I’ll need to explain a few things first:

– What is climate: Climate is the weather averaged over a long period of time. The standard averaging period is 30 years.
For more detailed explanations, look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate

– What is science: by observing and experimenting, you gain a better understanding of the universe.

– How does science work in the real world: Scientists need funding(ie money) in order to perform expensive experiments (and earn a living)

– Science funding is hard to get. Scientists have to work really hard to convince companies and governments to pay for experiments.

What are some easy ways to get funding:

  • Work on something that can generate mega dollars (eg pharmaceutical research, technology, etc).
  • Work on something that could be catastrophic (eg: effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs, pollution, weapons, climate change)

– What is mass media: information that people find interesting.

– And what do we (as a society) find most interesting: disasters (and sex and scandals). If a reporter can find a news story that combines all 3, then they are sitting on a gold mine 🙂

Now, take a look at the following videos, and hopefully all the pieces will start to come together:

httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=iMDi_u0dcig
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=fr5O1HsTVgA
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=Io-Tb7vTamY
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=xzSzItt6h-s

So: it looks like global warming has become a big business (and if you try to stand between global warming advocates and their livelihood, it seems things can get nasty)

The world is getting warmer… but no one knows how much of that is man made.

I’m sure we have been pumping out massive amount of greenhouse gases for longer than just the last 20 years.

And then there was all the soot from burning coal and wood (no one seems to talk about what effect it had in the time up to around 50 years ago). Some say it blocked sunlight (and caused cooling), while others might say it absorbed radiation (so caused warming). Which is it? I’d like to know.

I started down this strange path when I stumbled onto: http://globalwarming.worldwidewarning.net (although I’m not sure I agree with everything on that site).

At the end of the day, I have faith in nature and its ability to cope with what we throw at it. It’s more powerful and unfathomable that any of us can imagine.

So: does it mean we should continue consuming oil like there’s no tomorrow? No: I’ve always tried to live my life in a balanced way, ie create the smallest impact on nature as I can (small cars, switch off the lights, etc).

I also believe that everyone (particularly the merrycans) should try to do the same.

Because we cannot predict what effect we are having on our environment, then its probably better to minimise our impact, rather than to try to measure the extent of the impact, and then if things don’t measure up, run around screaming: “the sky is falling!”

I have a t-shirt that symbolises my beliefs (in a small way): On the front, it has various African animal footprints. On the back, it has 2 small human footprints, with the words: “leave only these”

Leave only these

superantispyware vs windows defender

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently got an email from Mike Duncan from SuperAntiSpyware. He asked me to become a reseller for superantispyware (SAS).

Well, before I endorse anything like this, I need to try it out, and decide for myself.

I have seen SAS once before, on a badly infected PC, so at the time, I instinctively classified it as either ineffective, or as spyware in disguise (and removed it).

So I download the free edition of SAS, and do a scan of my own system (which I knew was safe). In doing this, I found I had to disable the antivirus (antivir guard), as it would often intervene before WD and SAS could get a look at any infected file.

 

Once the scan was finished, it found 3 minor problems:

  1. A large number of tracking cookies (and here is my first and second gripe with SAS: I regard tracking cookies as a necessary part of surfing the net… not something that should be detected as “bad” (as unsophisticated users can get themselves into trouble with this). In particular, coookies from google and major department stores should not be flagged. And when I decided to mark the cookies as trusted, I had to process all 200+ cookies manually (one at a time). NOTE: I tried this again a few weeks later, and found no problem un-selecting all cookies with a single mouse click.
  2. A false positive: it detected a file from driverpacks.net as an “unknown” infection. (Again, it wasn’t detected a few weeks later)
  3. Another false positive: it detected c:windowssystemdriverwin32.dll as the winup trojan (it was actually a file from the cygwin system that I use… Once again, it was not detected a few weeks later. Its good to see that SAS are really serious about improving how their product works.

Ok, some temporary false positives. That’s not a huge problem for me. Its just something to keep in mind for the future.

SAS portray themselves as a responsive company, which will remove the nastiest spyware. I’m also led to believe that new spyware is detectable/removable soon after it is detected in the wild. Unfortunately, thats not something I can easily test in a week or two… but I’ll see how things go over the next few months.

But in the meantime, I thought I’d test it against windows defender (my current favorite free antispyware program).

I fired up my virtual PC, and deliberately infected it with a small number of nasy infections from the past, plus some extra ones from malwaredomainlist.com. This is not a comprehensive test, it just allows me to see if I should keep going with SAS.

The first difference between SAS and WD, is that WD includes realtime monitoring/blocking. From my experience, non-technical users tend to forget to do manual scans, so thats something in favour of WD.

The second difference is that when WD detects a malware infection, it usually cleans it up without needing a computer restart… whereas SAS seems to always insist on a restart.

So here is the malware I tested, and the results of scanning with SAS and WD:

  • Ultimate Defender: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
  • VirusHeat: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
  • AntiVirus2008Pro: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
  • SpySheriff: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
  • SpyRemover (from spyremover.com): Neither WD nor SAS detect it!

So, in summary:

Both SAS and WD seem about the same, except WD is faster, and has some nice features not present in SAS.

Since I charge customers for my time, then the slowness of SAS is a concern in my day to day work, as infected systems are usually much slower than normal systems, so a quick scan with SAS can end up taking over 1 hour. So I’ll be doing a scan with WD first, and then use SAS if WD doesn’t find anything.

Will I keep using it?

Yes (for the moment).

The reason is simple: In the past, I have often come across “new” infections that my current batch of security software is not able to remove (so I need to wrestle with the infection, and eventually beat it into submission 🙂 ).

If SAS does what its makers say it does (and I must say I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far), then I can save time (ie customer money) by using it as a front-line tool to remove infections that would otherwise take me over 2 hours to remove.

With my own PCs, I’ll continue to use WD for the moment.

ADSL2+ speeds (does the modem matter?)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently switched from ADSL1 to ADSL2+ (both with TPG: I’m using the Narangba exchange).

After some initial problems, I found that the modem you use can make a big difference to the speed you get.

I calculate that I’ve got about 3.5 – 4 Km of wire from my house to the exchange (Line attenuation is 52-54Db downstream, 15.5-31.4Db upstream, Noise Margin is 4-6Db downstream, 6Db upstream).

I initially had an old Billion 5102S, together with an old tp-link wr642G wireless router, but once I got adsl2+, the internet would usually drop out between 1 and 5 times a day, and although it said the downstream speed was about 4000 kbps, It would often feel slower than my old 1500kbps ADSL1 connection.

After a few weeks, I decided to get a newer, all-in-one, wireless modem router. I do some research, and I read good things about the billion 7300G, but after installing it it still doesn’t work right.

About once or twice a day, it would spontaneously reset, and it still felt slow.

I eventually returned it (as I figured it was faulty).

While waiting for a replacement for the 7300g, I decided to install a netgear DG834G v3

I was amazed that the dg834G actually connected at 4700kbps! And, it generated a lot less dropouts, and no resets, and the internet actually felt fast (most of the time)

I wouldn’t have thought that the modem type would make much difference, but there you go!

I’ve since heard that some modems do well close to the exchange (less than 2 Km), while others are better at longer distances.

Once I got the replacement 7300G, I noticed that it would still dropout and reset (but not as often as the original).

After some research, and some experimenting, I found that I could make it much more stable by altering the ADSL settings (configuration -> WAN -> ADSL).

I changed the adsl mode to annex A (was open annex)

I also changed the modulator to ADSL2 (was auto).

I experimented with some of the other adsl modes (annex L, and annex M), but with no difference in upstream speeds.

I also tried some other modulator types (ADSL2+ would cause the modem to reset occasionally, and G.DMT was slightly slower than ADSL2).

With the current settings, the modem resets about once per week, and the adsl sync is lost every 1 to 2 days… Not bad, considering ADSL2+ seems to have a reputation for many dropouts once you are over 3Km from the exchange!