Monthly Archives: November 2008

AVG 8 firewall won’t switch off

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently installed AVG 8 onto 2 PCs on behalf of a customer.

This was the paid-for version… not the free one.

After it was fully installed, I couldn’t see the other networked PC, and I couldn’t print over the network. From either PC.

From experience, I know this is a firewall issue. I spend 5 minutes trying to figure out the AVG firewall, but It’s just too complicated.

So I decide to just disable it from the AVG control panel… but I still can’t see the remote PC.

Ok, I’ll restart both PCs, but still not go… Hold on: are my eyes playing tricks on me ? ! The AVG firewall switched itself on again!

I try a few different options, but the firewall disables the windows firewall and enables itself.

Even uninstalling and re-installing AVG doesn’t fix the problem!

Ok time to get heavy-handed: I go to control panel -> Administrative Tools -> services

I find the entry for AVG firewall, double click, change the startup option to “disabled”, hit OK, restart, and luckily, AVG doesn’t try to restart the service.

Just re-enable the windows firewall, and everything works great!

Computer Aid blog outage

Computer Aid Posted on by

As many of you will have noticed, the Computer Aid blog (and even the main website) stopped working for a few hours today.

The joys of changing hosting companies.

I was originally with http://www.home-business-host.com/ for over 3 years.

They were great while Computer Aid was small: very helpful, and very reliable.

But over the last few months, it seemed that Computer Aid had outgrown the capacity of the shared hosting.

After a quick look around, I decided that a clustered hosting seemed like an ideal solution, but it was a more expensive solution.

It looks like when it comes to clustered hosting (like with many things in life), it becomes a case of: fast, cheap, reliable … pick any 2.

So I reluctantly went with: netfirms

They were cheap, but I read about many peoples bad experiences with Netfirms (mostly from 2006… so I hoped things had improved since then).

Well, I can’t comment on the speed yet, but as expected, customer support isn’t fast (so I had to really struggle to transfer my blog across.

My forum is still not working (and if me and netfirms cant fix it, then I might just dump it).

It seems that most problems arose from trying to transfer my site in a standard way: copy the files and copy the databases.

This worked to some extent, but it seemed that the .htaccess files I copied caused problems. But removing them didn’t help much either. Many people have complained about netfirms non-standard implementation of apache/.htaccess, I guess I’m another victim.

In the end, I created a blank blog using the netfirms control panel, then imported my original database, THEN copy my gila theme!

Anyway, I apologise for the outage.

I still have many plugins to enable, a forum to resurrect, and a re-installation of aw-stats… Looks like I’ll be busy for a while yet…

review of ie8 beta

Computer Aid Posted on by

I did a quick test of ie8 beta 2.

I was hoping that microsoft had learnt something from their ie7 mistakes.

My biggest gripe with ie7 is that the most used buttons (back, forward, refresh, stop, home) are scattered around the window, instead of being grouped together (like in ie6 and other mainstream browsers).

Well, guess what:
ie8 looks almost identical to ie7.

It looks (to me) like Microsoft are just not doing good usability testing. So they are not delivering something that customers find convenient to use.

Instead, it seems like they have taken a “we know whats best for you” attitude (which is also evident in their Vista / Windows 7 user interface).

I’ll be trying it out some more over the next few weeks, but so far, I’m not impressed with the update.

To me, the upcoming update from ie7 to ie8 has a very strong resemblance to the upcoming update from vista to windows 7.

Neither warrant the change in version numbers.

For me, windows 7 should be called vista 1.1

and ie8 should be called ie7.1

And another annoying aspect of ie8 is the multiple favorites.

  • There is a favorites menu in the menu bar
  • There is a favorites toolbar… you can try to disable it under view -> toolbars -> favorites bar… but that just shrinks the bar to just a favorites button, which is then placed to the left of the tab bar.

On a positive note, ie8 is more standards compliant than prior MS browsers (about time)

ie8 also includes “accelerators”.

After figuring out what accelerators do, I reckon its a crap name. Its like buying a “microsoft” car, where accelerators are the headlights, radio, indicator stalk, etc

So whats an accelerator?

You can highlight some text on a web page, and then send it to an accelerator “plugin” (eg google search, blogger blog, etc).

Accelerators sound kinda cool, but at this stage, they seem more complicated than they need to be (eg: I can’t see the need for different “sub” categories).

Of course I reckon the most useful accelerator, would be to highlight a url, so that you can then open it in another tab (without the hassle of using copy/paste). Of course this type of accelerator doesn’t exist (yet), even though its been a standard part of Maxthon for years.

Whats amazing about accelerators, is the standard list of accelerators, which includes, google maps, yahoo maps, and various other services from Microsofts “competitors”. Its highly unusual for MS to acknowledge a competitor in their products (unless forced to do so). Is this is the start of a “nicer”, more open, microsoft?

My summary: Microsoft ie8 is still playing catchup on all the other browsers out there.

I’d say the IE family of browsers (including IE8 ) will continue to lose market share, until MS realises that just copying some features of other browsers just doesn’t cut it. Microsoft need to truly innovate (if they know how).

firefox 3 doesn’t do multi core CPUs

Computer Aid Posted on by

I occasionally need to open about 50 websites in one hit… !!!

Firefox 3 is great, in that its quick, and doesn’t chew up my system RAM.

But sometimes I open up some badly written websites. I suspect they have a script error that causes an infinite loop (and thus use up all the CPU time, and cause a huge web slowdown).

So I take a look at task manager, and I see firefox is sitting at 50% (on my dual core CPU). That usually means that its using only 1 core, while the other core is idle.

If I try the same thing using IE7, I find both cores are at 100%, and ie7 feels noticeably more responsive.

It looks (to me) like firefox is not a multi-threaded application.

I’m surprised that in this age of multi core CPUs, the firefox developers haven’t developed a truly efficient product for todays CPUs.

The good news is that I recently tested googles Chrome browser… and it is amazingly good at using multiple CPUs… so much so, that if one website crashed the browser, any other tabs/websites you have open, will not be affected.

Once google irons out the security bugs, chrome will be a fantastic web browser.

The risk of using bigpond webmail within outlook (0X80070057)

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer was using outlook (NOT outlook express), as his email client.

I’ve not yet seen outlook configured to download from a webmail account before.

The account information seems simple enough, but every time outlook goes to download emails, it throws up the error: 0x80070057

The net doesn’t have any answers, so I decide to try the webmail directly vie ie7.

Thats when the bigpond login repies with: incorrect email or password.

OK, looks like a wrong password. But the password within the modem is correct (as we can still get to the internet).

Oh well, a password reset should fix it.

Once contacting bigpond support, we find out that the broadband was setup by my curtomers son (who is overseas, and unreachable)… and only his son is allowed to do stuff like request a password reset.

Nevertheless, the tech support lady is helpful. She explains that bigpond webmail will lock the email account if it receives more than 3 failed password attempts.

Now that explains why the internet still works, while the email doesn’t.

I try setting up a pop account within outlook, but doesn’t work either.

Looks like the customer doesn’t have any choice, but to wait for his son to get back in touch with him!

Windows cannot find soundmon.exe

Computer Aid Posted on by

Just after XP starts, once the desktop icons appear, I would get a popup window saying: “Windows cannot find ‘soundmon.exe’ “.

This is after cleaning yet another infected system, so I figure I’ll take a look at the startup places (registry, services, etc), and disable anything not needed.

After a restart, I once again get: “Windows cannot find ‘soundman.exe’ ”

I search around in the registry, and find I can fix this by going to:

HKLMsoftwaremicrosoftwindows NTCurrentVersionWinLogon

look for the entry: Shell

Shell should contain the string: Explorer.exe soundmon.exe

Edit the string so that it just says: explorer.exe

Restart the PC, and you will have no more annoying popup.

Entrecard and Computer-Aid.com.au traffic

Computer Aid Posted on by

Around the end of July 2008, I placed an Entrecard “advertising widget” on my blog, and also started pushing the Computer Aid blog on a few web2.0 sites.

The interesting thing about Entrecard, is that you can advertise on other blogs, but you also need to advertise other blogs on your own blog. All this mutual advertising is done via a virtual currency (EC)

Whats also nice, is that a blog owner can choose to be “active” to whatever degree they like. ie you can go around “dropping” up to 300 virtual business cards (per day) onto other blogs (you earn 1 EC per “drop”). You can then spend your earned EC by buying ads on other blogs.

I started off slowly, and gradually increased how active I was, over 6 weeks, until I was spending 30 – 60 minutes a day “working” on Entrecard (dropping cards).

I eventually thought: Am I getting any benefit from doing all this work?

So I decided to try an experiment:

Since I was very active with Entrecard, I would suddenly stop doing anything on Entrecard (for about 8 days). I would still display adverts on the Computer Aid blog, but I wouldn’t buy ads (although I still had about 2-3 days of pre-purchased ads), nor “drop” cards on other blogs.

After that, I’d go back to being partly active for 8 days (“drop” my maximum allowed cards every day, but not buy any ads on other blogs)

After that, I’d also start buying ads as well.

I’d then look at my traffic stats (alexa, google analytics, and awstats), and see what effect Entrecard is having.

Here are some Entrecard graphs, which clearly show that dropping cards onto other blogs actually affects the number of cards that get dropped on me, and the number of clicks from the Entrecard website to my blog. What doesn’t show, is that the entrecard”popularity” rating was also affected, dropping from 923 down to 211… but after a month of lots of dropping and advertising, I managed to get an EC popularity rating of 1662.

Drops onto Computer Aid EC advert

Drops onto Computer Aid EC advert

 

Clicks To Computer Aid via ads purchased on other blogs

 

Clicks to Computer Aid from Entrecard website

Clicks to Computer Aid from Entrecard website

 

Daily drops I did on other blogs

Daily drops I did on other blogs

 

And a few days later:

Since I already have a healthy amount of traffic from other sources, the lack of Entrecard traffic actually had a small (but noticeable) effect on my overall traffic. The only exception was Alexa: my Alexa rank dropped rapidly, followed by a rapid rise.

Given that the Alexa rank is well known to be inaccurate at best, I wasn’t worried.

At the end of it all, I’d say dropping cards has a greater effect than “EC” advertising on other blogs.

So, I’ve tuned firefox and bookmarked a select group of EC blogs, so that I can drop 300EC in 20 minutes. To do this, I’ve found that having fast internet and a fast CPU are both important, as many blogs somehow chew up the CPU power (probably due to badly written scripts).

I’m now going to scale back the time-consuming task of advertising on up to 200 blogs per day… I find its just not worth my time.

entrecard, CTR, and pages per visit

Computer Aid Posted on by

Some people get too caught up in their website statistics, and end up doing things that are actually worse for their website popularity.

I find people who want to “make money” from their website/blog will often give up on sites like entrecard, stumbleupon, etc.

The reasons they give seem reasonable:

  • They get an increase in visitors, but also a huge decrease in the number of pages per visit.
  • Visitors increase, but the adsense CTR (Click through rate for adverts) decreases.

The implication is that extra traffic doesn’t generate any extra income, thus the extra traffic is bad traffic.

Recently, I also noticed the entrecard and stumble effect directly:

  • approx 20% increase in visitors (over many weeks) from entrecard.
  • a sudden spike (tripling) of visitors from stumbleupon (over just 1 day)

And sure enough: the extra visits did not result in any extra clicks on my ads.

Yet I still think Entrecard and stumbleupon are worthwhile.

I look upon these services in a similar way as traditional classified newspaper advertising… or even yellow pages directory advertising.

My experience with classified ads has been that despite paying for a weekly advert, I get between 0 and 5 calls per week from the classified. Often it can be a few weeks of nothing: no calls via the classifieds.

When the newspaper has a circulation of 80 000 , then the clickthrough callthrough rate is incredibly low. Why would anyone bother. Yet many do. Why?

The answer is: it works in the long term.

You might find the vast majority of website visits from stumbleupon/entrecard are just 5 second visits. But you do get the occasional visitor that actually likes your site, and who becomes a regular visitor (who would not have done so otherwise).

For Computer Aid, I’m also aware that I am also building better brand recognition (without spending anything).

I think I’m doing well, when I think that many companies spend obscene amounts of money to build better brand recognition for their companies.

So… I’d say don’t worry much about stats like CTR, as long as your ad clicks/sales remain the same, then the extra eyeballs on you site will have good long-term effects.

outlook synchronizing with each email received

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had setup a new PC to replace an older one. The old PC had office 2003, and customer had agreed on Office 2007 Home and student… This meant I needed to get outlook, publisher, etc from office 2003 onto the new PC.

The solution is simple: first install Office 2003, then Office 2007.

Well, it mostly worked.

Copying the old emails across was easy, but when I setup the POP account details, I hit the send/receive button, it got weird:

An install window would appear for a few seconds, then an outlook synchronization icon would appear in the notification area of the taskbar for a few seconds.

Since this happened with each email, downloading 50 emails took a long time.

While the emails were downloading, I searched for a solution, and I found many suggestions at techrepublic.com

What worked in this case was:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=206501&messageID=2178299

put simply: right click on the inbox -> properties -> untick “Automatically generate Microsoft Exchange views”

Simple huh?

update and defender error 0X80072EE2. email socket error 10053 0X800CCC0F

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer was having many strange problems with his PC.

He also needed a second PC connected to the net (thus I needed to setup his new dlink di-524 wireless router).

After a marathon effort, I got everything plugged in, and fixed most problems… except:

Running windows updates and updating windows defender, the PC would give a 0x80072EE2 error.

Also, email (thunderbird) would work fine, except attempting to open attachments would generate a socket error 10053 , error 0x800CCC0F

The email problem was most unusual, so I tackled that first:

I reset the xp firewall back to its default setting, but no go.

I tried setting up outlook express, and it gave the same error message.

I tried webmail, and that worked.

OK, at this stage, I’m starting to suspect a problem with the ISP (hotkey).

I call hotkey support, and I’m surprised to hear that they have seen these problems before.

The cause: the dlink di-524 router.

I’m not sure exactly what, within the brand new di-524, is causing the problem, but all the problems vanished after replacing it with a similar netgear wireless router.