Monthly Archives: September 2008

top 9 things you shouldn’t do on your blog

Computer Aid Posted on by

After having visited many blogs and websites recently, I can see where some people are making mistakes.

If you don’t want your blog to be popular, and don’t care how tasteless it is, then make it private, and only allow your own select group of fans/family to view it… and then ignore the rest of this post.

Otherwise… if you want your blog to be more popular, then don’t do any of the following:

9) Schizo– Blog has a topic, but you don’t stay on topic. OK, I admit it I’m as guilty as most bloggers with this. My computer blog sometimes has posts that have nothing to do with computers. But those posts are in the minority. And I aim to keep it that way. So should you.

8 ) Copycat– copying someone else’s content: also known as shooting yourself in the foot… and then shooting yourself in the other foot :-). You quickly disappear off everyone’s radar, as most search engines will notice and punish appropriately. I only use copyscape to gloat over the poor suckers with too many guns and feet 🙂

7) Annoyingggg – music and/or videos that starts spontaneously. If you like the music, then make your blog private. Few people want to listen to your bad taste. I know few people would be interested in my heavy metal music.

6) Ad overload– too many adverts. Imagine you sit down to watch some TV… you find a show, but it splits the screen into 4  sections: 3 sections show bright, animated adverts, while a quarter of the screen actually displays the TV show. Would you watch the show? Probably not (maybe if its the superbowl, or world-cup soccer, or some other favorite).

5) Imitation – Copying the bigger blogs that make more money than you… This is similar to point 6), except you are trying to make money like the big boys. Remember: only the bigger blogs can get away with too many adverts… to some extent. You might find that by cutting down from 20 ads to 10, visitors are twice as likely to click on the 10 ads. People will only put up with ads if they really love the content (ie your blog is popular)

4) Anybody home? – Not updating your blog. Try to update at least once per week.

3) I wish nobody was home – You feel guilty about not updating your blog every week… but you don’t know what to write about… so you update your blog by apologising for not updating your blog. You know what they say: its better to keep your mouth shut, and have people think you’re an idiot… rather than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

2) Who am I? – Your blog doesn’t have a clear topic… you just write whatever comes into your head. You might find this hard to believe, but there are thousands of blogs like this out there, and millions of people trying to avoid them. Pick a hobby… anything! If you don’t have a hobby or anything you really feel strongly about, then please close down your blog (You’ll be doing the internet a favour).

1) Slowww– you have so many ads and trinkets (widgets), that your blog take 60 seconds to load. animations, calendars, large pictures. Cut out the clocks, calendars, world maps, FireFax download icons, and anything else that isn’t relevant. Almost nobody wants to know the weather/time in Upper Kumbukta West! Also try a cache plugin like “wp super cache” it can speed up a website significantly.

no taskbar, no desktop icons, no right click

Computer Aid Posted on by

This infected XP system was strange.

After starting the PC, and logging in, all I get is a blank desktop (it actually has a backdrop picture, but nothing else).

There is no taskbar, no desktop icons, and and right click on the desktop generates no popup menu.

All I can do is ctrl-alt-del to run task manager.

I then try to run explorer, but I get the message:

windows cannot find c:windowsexplorer.exe blah blah blah

I hit browse, and take a look into the windows folder, and find explorer.exe just sitting there, together with explorer(2).exe

I try running explorer(2).exe and it starts windows explorer, but nothing else… Normally, starting explorer manually, should also start the taskbar, etc… not not in this case.

I use the “currently running” explorer to double-click on explorer.exe, but I still get the “windows cannot find c:windowsexplorer.exe” etc etc

I try reimage.com (I have a trial version, so I’ve been waiting for a stuffed PC to try it out), but it fails to fix the problem.

OK, back to the usual way of fixing things:

I remove the HDD, and scan it from the office PC. I finds about 10 infections, and clean them up.

I put the HDD back in the PC, but the mysterious explorer.exe still refuses to work.

I start searching the net for solutions.

For once, I find many solutions… too many solutions… and none of them work until I eventually find:

run regedit

go to: HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionImage File Execution Optionsexplorer.exe

rename the explorer.exe entry to something like explorer.exx

reboot PC

Problem solved!

Is DVI better than VGA?

Computer Aid Posted on by

Based on my experience from the last 2 video cards I have used, I’m starting to wonder if DVI is actually worth the trouble.

Sure, a DVI signal is better quality than VGA.

I can notice the difference on my monitor (but then the VGA cable feels thin and “flimsy” so I’m sure the analog signal is being subjected to interference.

But to my eyes, its not unbearable.

However, what has hit me the most, has been that many video cards seem to be able to handle analog VGA better than DVI-D.

Having a video card either not be able to display 1680 X 1050 over DVI, or not being able to cope with the data throughput, means that I’m now going back to the analog VGA cables (at least until most video cards can cope with mid-range monitors using DVI).

Given than a 22″ monitor (with native resolution of 1680 X 1050) is both common and relatively inexpensive, then why can’t common video cards cope with DVI output to these monitors?

Tiny iprimus email mailbox size

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer was starting to get warning messages about her email mailbox being full, and people sending her emails would sometimes get the email bounced back.

I quickly find out her ISP is iprimus, and that the email mailbox is limited to just 10Mb.

Hmmm, that might have been ok a few years ago, but with webmail systems like gmail, hotmail, and yahoomail (with mailbox limits of many thousands of Mb), what iprimus offers seems tiny in comparison.

The customer had previously called iprimus, and is seems that they are unable to increase the mailbox size.

So the only option is to open a gmail account.

I then activate gmails pop3 settings; add a gmail account to outlook express, and the customer now has a new email account, with a mailbox size of over 7Gb, and some reasonable spam filtering.

Pepperjam Network: slight problem?

Computer Aid Posted on by

Recently, I’ve been hearing lots of hype about the pepperjam advertising system.

It sound similar to Google Adsense, in that you can place contextual ads on your website.

So I thought: hey, I’ll give it a go.

After signing up (and being accepted), I manually selected who will be able to advertise on my website.

Now this can be both good and bad.

Bad in that either: I might have a limited number advertisers to choose from, or I might have too many (and need to spend a long time vetting them all).

Good in that I can have complete control what appears on my site.

So I selected about 12 relevant advertisers.

Some will automatically allow me to show their ad on my website, while others wanted to check me out first (I presume they check my website, to make sure it isn’t something like a porn website masquerading as a craft website).

I’ve had 2 advertisers reject me (I suspect it might be because they only want US websites, and mine is Australian).

There also seems to be 2 ways I can advertise

  • place the adverts manually on my site (each advertiser will give you the code for the type of AD you want to display ie: anything from a simple text link, up to large animated graphic adverts).
  • Use the pepperjamADS function

Now, pepperjamADS is similar to google adsense, except you select a range of ads (from the advertisers that are on your “partners” list), select the format of the banner (eg 728X90 leaderboard, 250X250 square, etc)

Once you place the code for pepperjamADS on your website, partner adverts are displayed as 1 or more text links (similar to google).

Since I only have 9 partners in my partner list, then I suspect the ads placed in the banner will be more of a random selection, than a contextual list.

So far, its all interesting, and shows a lot of promise.

But I have had one slight problem:

I tried the pepperjamADS vertical skyscraper/banner, and found that the wording seemed to get truncated (or the space allocated for the adverts wasn’t large enough… I’m not sure which).

The upshot is that many ads will end something like: “… for the best service and”

I figure: Its a new service, its bound to have some teething problems… I’m not concerned.

I’ll just send them a bug report, and see what happens.

I sent the report on Saturday, and by Wednesday night, I didn’t get any feedback.

Now, a small bug doesn’t worry me much, but not getting so much as a short email to say “we are looking into it” is a bit more worrying.

When a company doesn’t provide some feedback, then I start to question the quality of customer service.

At this stage I’ve removed all my pepperjamADS vertical adverts, and I’m going to wait and see what happens.

Hopefully, its just a minor hiccup.

GeForce FX5500 won’t display 1680 X 1050

Computer Aid Posted on by

As mentioned briefly in a previous post (http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/2008/09/14/geforce-7300gt-sometimes-blanks-for-2-seconds/), I had installed an AGP Galaxy GeForce FX5500 into my PC, but had a few problems with it.

I thought I’d give a few more details, and explain how I fixed it (by coincidence, the solution is the same as the 7300GT problem from my previous post).

Anyway, after installing the video card, I could only get the screen resolution to go as high as 1440 X 900.

If I tried 1680 X 1050, then I’d get something like a virtual 1680X1050 on a smaller 1280 X 1024 display. I could scroll around the “larger” display, but the monitor would not display the native resolution.

I tried all of the monitors OSD settings, but nothing that really worked.

None of the Nvidia display settings (XP control panel) worked either

It seems the DVI output for the FX5500 is rather limited… apparently, the max resolution is something like 1600 X 1200 (but the analog VGA output can go up to 2049 X 1536

So I connect the analogue VGA cable, and the card can now display 1680 X 1050

Grrr.

Stumbleupon blank page

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve been adding posts from this blog to stumbleupon for a while.

But suddenly, I noticed that when I try to add a post to stumbleupon, I fill in all the required details, and when I hit the “Recommend this site” button, I then get a blank page.

StumbleUpon Logo

At first, I thought there was something wrong, so I tried again.

Then I thought something was wrong with stumbleupon, so I decided to leave it until my next post a few days later.

But that also failed.

But I managed to find the cause: Stumbleupon will block you from submitting too many pages from the same domain.

So, self-promotion will only work about 11 or 12 pages, before you get blocked.

Stumbleupon will (rightly) not divulge the exact rules they use to block self-submitters.

But it would have been nice to get a warning message, rather than a blank web page!

geforce 7300gt sometimes blanks for 2 seconds

Computer Aid Posted on by

I haven’t been having much luck with video cards this year.

I purchased an inno Nvidia GeForce 7300GT a few months ago. And it worked fine.

Recently, I installed an intensive 3d screensaver (hyperspace from http://www.reallyslick.com/).

While it was running, I noticed that approx. every minute, My 22″ LCD display (1680 X 1050) would just go blank, for about 1 or 2 seconds, and than the screensaver would continue as if nothing happened.

My wife also installed “MyVirtualHome”, and that also caused the same problem (but even more frequently)

I figured: its either the video card about to fail, or the monitor about to fail.

To eliminate the video card, I tried another one (a GeForce 5500), but it seemed to struggle to display 1680 X 1050 (but 1440 X 900 worked just fine).

After some digging, I found a mention about some video cards not working well at high resolutions while using the DVI connection.

So I switched over to the (inferior) analog cable, and hey, problem fixed.

Now I need to find a well-shielded VGA cable, as the analogue signal is slightly “shaky”.

Wiped Mac

Computer Aid Posted on by

I sometimes get Mac owners ask me to help them with occasional problems.

I admit I’m not a Macintosh expert, but I can usually figure things out.

This time, customer says that she seems to have lost all her emails, and her desktop icons and pictures have changed.

I say I’ll take a look.

Once I’m in front of the Mac, it soon becomes obvious that the OS has somehow reverted back to “factory default” settings.

There are no old documents, no old emails, and there are no email accounts.

I do a search for some obvious file names (customer has a business, so the business name should show up somewhere… but it doesn’t).

I try to get the email going, but the customer believes that she doesn’t need an email password (she uses an email associated with her business domain… so I can’t call her ISP for a password reset).

All I can suggest is getting the mail details from the company that setup her domain (many years ago).

As a last resort, I give Frank a call (he’s much better at Macs than I am), and ask if Macs have anything like the XP system restore.

It seems that its possible to use something called time machine, but it seems it isn’t enabled by default (and I see no evidence of time machine on this Mac).

What puzzles me most is how a system could get wiped without the customer receiving some very obvious warnings that the system is about to get re-installed, and that all data is about to be lost.

XP SP3: unable to read from or write to the database

Computer Aid Posted on by

While upgrading a PC from SP1 to SP3, I got the error message: “Service Pack 3 Setup Error” “Unable to read from or write to the database”

At first I thought the SP3 upgrade file had become corrupt. But no: I still got the problem after a re-copy.

After a lot of searching around, I eventually found: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3265601&SiteID=17

From that site, I found I needed to download a script from: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/org/hc-tools/files/cryptoxpfix/8-30-2004/readme.html

The fixdb.bat file was exactly what I was needed. After running fixdb, SP3 installed without a hitch.

uninstall / remove CA internet security, then parental control blocks the internet

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer uninstalled the CA internet security from his vista laptop.

During the uninstall process, he is asked to tick the boxes next to which components to remove (so he ticks them all).

He later finds that CA parental control has started to block some websites (but he had never activated parental control).

Out of desperation, he deletes the whole c:program filesca folder

But it has no effect: some websites are still being blocked.

After some searching around, I find that renaming (in the c:windowssystem32 folder) the files winsflt.dll, winsflte.dll and mdmcls32.exe should do the trick.

After I do that, I find I have no internet access at all!

And the winsflt and mdmcls32 files seem to get renamed/recreated after a reboot anyway!

I even try to scan the registry and remove all references to winsflt (it doesn’t help).

A system restore also doesn’t help.

After taking the laptop back to the office I find this great site: http://homeofficeforum.ca.com/homeofficeforum/posts/list/13.page

I must have somehow missed the solution in post by avihs (20/05/2008 ), but using a previous post, I contact CA chat support.

It takes about 30 minutes, but we manage to disable CA parental security by:

  • renaming winsflt.dll winsflte.dll
  • from a command prompt, enter: netsh winsock reset catalog
  • restart computer

Reader John Dawson had further problems:

I suggested:

Just to be sure, rename all 3 files: winsflt.dll, winsflte.dll and mdmcls32.exe

Also: It looks like CA have removed the useful post about how to fix the problem…

After this, John said:

Thanks for your email. Glad I came across your your web site as your suggestion worked – almost.

After renaming the files and rebooting, I found Parental Control was still in the system and the system very slow.

So I ferreted around and found a file CFGMNG32.EXE in C:Windows folder.

It is the exec file that loads Parental Control and sits in the background consuming large resources.

I deleted the file and rebooted. Did a registry clean and got rid of any left overs with a result Parental Control was totally removed.

Thanks John.