Monthly Archives: January 2009

Acer 4920G will not start

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer says her Acer 4920G laptop will not start.

Sure enough, when the PC boots, Vista complains about missing system files.

A system recovery should fix the problem, but it turns out she didn’t make a Vista recovery disk.

This is a common problem, as most people don’t have the technical knowledge to realise that a recovery disk is important (and good insurance against an expensive repair). I still cannot understand why computer manufacturers cannot supply a system recovery disk… it probably adds an extra $1 to the cost of the PC… yet manufacturers are more than happy to add webcams, fingerprint readers, and other expensive peripherals that many users never use…

Anyway, all she can find is a microsoft office CD.

I take the PC back to the office and take a closer look at the hard drive.

From within the Acer BIOS, there is a section that says the HDD is frozen…

Hmmm not much info out there on what a “frozen” hard drive actually means, but it doesn’t sound good.

I try the SATA drive in another PC, but given that the drive is one of those annoyingly incompatible AHCI drives, I have no choice but to plug it into another Vista PC… but even vista will not detect the drive.

I plug it back into the acer laptop, and then try installing vista from scratch… but no go: vista say “you might not be able to boot from drive”.

Its looking like the drive has failed. I update the BIOS, so that I can run the drive in IDE mode (not AHCI). I then try an XP install, but that also fails (no drive detected).

I try a different HDD, and that works perfectly.

I talk to the customer, and she says she wasn’t happy with Vista anyway, so she is happy pay for an XP licence, a new HDD, and the time for me to install XP, etc.

Luckily, finding XP drivers for this laptop was not as difficult as with some other laptops!

New Google tab icon (favicon)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I went to google today & saw an odd icon on my browser tab:

I think it looks awful.

It took me a long time before I realised its actually a white “g” on a colourful vomit background.

OK, personal artistic feelings aside, I also don’t like it from a marketing and branding point of view.

Most good marketing people know that you need to maintain consistency with your logo, and use it everywhere you can.

Mcdonalds is a good example. They use the golden arches everywhere (including their favicon).

I’ve tried the same with the Computer Aid logo (black name on a yellow oval, with a red oval border). For my favicon, I decided to only use the letters “CA”, since anything else would have been unreadable.

If I were google (don’t we all wish for that!), I would make use of their logo from their home page… but since its too big to fit into a favicon, then the first letter (maybe with a circle around it), would be the next best thing.

So, I would use the letter “G” (uppercase) as the favicon…

Hold on!

Thats what Google originally had as a favicon!

So, it looks like the new icon fails on a few fronts.

Even the slightly older small “g” failed, as they picked the second “g” from their name… not the first.

What do you think?

Word 2003 only starts in safe mode

Computer Aid Posted on by

Most Office 2003 applications worked well except for word.

Word would just silently refuse to start… no error messages.

Sometimes the word window would appear very briefly, then disappear.

And looking at the processes in task manager, I can see that Microsoft Word (winword.exe) is not running.

OK, it looks like word starts, encounters a severe error, then exits.

Depending on how you started word (double click on an existing .doc document, start word directly, use word to open text documents), then sometimes I’d get an error about normat.dot.

Other times, Word would only start in safe mode.

I try a few ways around this, and eventually find the solution: rename (or delete) normal.dot

To find it: start -> search -> for files or folders -> all files and folders -> enter normal.dot in the file name box -> click search

The real serenity prayer

Computer Aid Posted on by

I can’t remember where I saw this, but I found it funny:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
the wisdom to know the difference.

Also grant me the ability to love those who are nice;
the strength to strangle those who are annoying;
and the wisdom to know the difference

changing printout font size in outlook express

Computer Aid Posted on by

Recently, I’ve had a few elderly customers buy new computers.

Often they will need to have the screen fonts made “larger” due to poor eyesight.

Usually this will involve a combination of running the screen at a lower resolution (800X600 or 1024X768), and changing the “font size” in display properties to large or extra-large.

At one point, I was told that despite the screen font being large enough, printing out emails resulted in tiny fonts (which were difficult to read).

I started looking into various outlook express options, but nothing seemed to work.

After some research, I found the solution:

It turns out that Outlook Express uses Internet explorer to handle the print rendering.

So, as strange as it might seem, you can increase the printout font size for both outlook express and internet exploder by running IE, go to: view -> text size, and select Large, Largest, Small, Smallest, or Medium.

Simple, yet obscure.