Monthly Archives: March 2009

Bastard power supply from hell!!!

Computer Aid Posted on by

I have a few motherboards floating around at any time.

They are useful if I need to make up a cheap second hand PC for a customer. I also happen to have 3 identical motherboards(d865glc), that are also the same as my main system… OK, a pentium 4 system is getting a bit old by todays standards, but it works well for me.

A while ago, I used a d86glc to make a second PC at home.

It worked well for a few months, then I needed to mothball it for a few months.

A few days ago, I needed it again, so I started it up again (it started OK), and left it running updates while I went out for a few hours.

When I came back, the PC was off.

Thats strange.

Anyway, hit the power button, and the lights come on for a few seconds, then go out.

OK, maybe the power supply has had it, so I plug in another PSU, only to see the same symptom: PC starts for a few seconds, then stops.

OK then, the motherboard has died. So I dig up one of my 2 spare (identical) motherboards, and being paranoid, I first connect it to the new power supply thats currently on the bench… It starts OK.

Good, now I swap motherboards, and connect everything up again, start the PC, go to the bios and check the settings.

I’m almost finished adjusting the settings, when the PC suddenly stops… all power is lost.

Hmmm, can I have a faulty motherboard and power supply? Highly unlikely.

Maybe the RAM? I pull out all the RAM, unplug all drives, etc, switch on, and the PC beeps (its saying it wants RAM)… OK, I plugin only 1 stick or RAM, but the PC won’t start.

I swap RAM sticks, and this time the PC starts… aHa, maybe it was just faulty RAM causing startup problems.

OK, back to the bios again… and again, I lose power before I can save any BIOS settings.

Whats going on?

The original motherboard won’t work with the new PSU, so I’m sure the motherboard is stuffed.

But why would the “newer” motherboard also fail?

I try swapping and reseating everything (including CPU), but nothing seems to work.

I sleep on it, and the next day, I decide to try the third motherboard on the bench with the new PSU… it works.

I plug the RAM into a test PC, and do a memtest… the RAM has no faults.

OK, I now plug the 3rd motherboard into the first PSU (thats still in the case). Nothing happens…

Hold on! As my fingers brush past some mobo capacitors, I sense some heat.

Capacitors shouldn’t heat up like that.

I cut all power to the PC, and check the mobo… the wires that go to the 12V, 4-pin plug on the mobo are also quite warm… a lot of components in that area are warm… why?

psu

I decide to test the first PSU… I rig up my multimeter, and I expect to see the typical 5V and 12V, but instead I see values shifting between 100 and 230 Volts !

Maybe I’m having a bad dream… I plug the multimeter into the new PSU, and the voltages are normal… back to the original PSU: more high voltages.

My heart sinks: The semi-faulty power supply just fried 3 motherboards in less than a day.

Damn you, bastard power supply from hell!!!

Computer Aid: The Movie

Computer Aid Posted on by

A few weeks ago, I read a great article on how to make a company mission statement.

Take a look at seo review

Instead of the boring and meaningless one-liners that most companies use, this guy suggested something like a movie trailer.

So, following the cookie-cutter approach, I came up with a “movie trailer” for Computer Aid.

And it was real fun to make (even my wife had a laugh when I read it to her)

movie

Now read this like you’re a movie voice-over guy:

In a town where computers slow down and freeze, one computer repairer comes to the rescue. When Internet connections fizzle and stop and all hope is lost, Computer Aid springs into action, and gets you surfing again. Computer Aid will impress you with their professionalism, experience, competence and efficiency. When things just don’t compute, someone can fix your computer and show you how to tame the internet.

You’ll laugh, when you see how easily they fix your problems. You’ll cry, when you realise you didn’t need to spend days trying to fix computer problems yourself.

Computer Aid: We can help you.

 

I was tempted to make the last line: Computer Aid: Coming soon to a theater near you!

🙂

Billion 7300G secret menu (less dropouts)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I seem to have a speed / reliability tradeoff with my Billion 7300G ADSL modem.

If I enable ADSL2+, the internet drops out many times a day.

If I enable only ADSL2, then I get slightly slower speeds (I’m quite far from the exchange), and dropouts happen every few days.

I then stumbled upon a “secret” menu:

http://{modem IP address}/iptv.asp

The “noise margin” drop down list gives you options of: Normal, IPTV, Maximum line rate, test lab 18, IPTV2, Others

Its currently set to “others”

I try a few settings, and these are the results:

Normal: 4093 kbps, noise margin (downstream): 7.2db

Maximum line rate: 4594 kbps, noise margin (downstream): 6.3db

test lab 18: 4775 kbps, noise margin (downstream): 6.1db

others: 4824 kbps, noise margin (downstream): 5.2db

This explains why many 5200G owners say its a very fast modem, but it works best if you are close to the exchange.

As the speed increases, the noise margin decreases and (I assume), the chances of a dropout increase due to changes in line characteristics.

So I decide to move from “others” to “maximum line rate”, and also change from ADSL2 to ADSL2+ (although I haven’t noticed any difference between ADSL2 and 2+).

After a few days, it looks like the modem is much more stable… no dropouts at all… its worth it for a slight drop in speed!

exitjunction: How to get penalised using adsense (and not know it!)

Computer Aid Posted on by

After a prior “experiment” with exitjuction, I found myself with half the traffic I normally have. This was because search engines don’t like exitjunction somehow.

About a week after I ended the experiment, I noticed something unusual:

Yahoo traffic bounced back to its normal levels immediately, but google traffic only improved slightly.

 

See the graphs:

ej-3

ej-4

Why? Maybe google is a bit slower to respond… but maybe not.

I remember adding 2 youtube video ads to my pages with adsense (one in the sidebar, and one at the bottom of individual posts).

Do I have too many Adsense ad units running at the same time?

I kinda remember that there might have been a limit, so I investigate.

Oops, looks like there is a limit of 3 ad units per page… and I had 4… but after some more searching, I find that there are different limits on different ad units:

  • Max of 3 “content” ad units per page
  • Max of 3 link ad units per page
  • Max of 1 youtube video units per page (oops again!).
  • Max of 2 adsense search boxes per page

Weird: you get hit if you have only 2 video units, but its ok if you have 3 + 3 + 1 + 2 = 9 units in the right proportion!

So around the 22 Feb, I removed the second youtube unit, and the results were:

ej-5

What a relief!

It took over a week for my google traffic to recover, but its now back to normal.

So there you go: you can get penalised by google without even realising it, but by correcting your adsense mistake, google will (eventually) trust you again.

For those of you who might wonder: my (tiny) adsense income also took a huge nosedive during the penalty period.

How to bleed for your customers

Computer Aid Posted on by

Yep, working on computers can be dangerous 🙂

While working inside a case, you can get electrocuted with a deadly amount of 12 Volts and 10,000 Ohms 🙂

Or you can do what I do: I keep cutting my hands on these @$#! sharp case edges!

Until now, its only happened in my office (ie no public embarrassment).

But the other day, I was replacing a damaged front panel in front of a customer, when I noticed a dark red smear on my hand…

No pain, but a fair amount of blood.

I ask the customer to get me some tissues, while I try to figure out where I’m bleeding from…

B*gger! I see I’ve dropped about 6 – 8 drops of blood on their carpet! I hope they don’t try to charge me for cleaning costs!

Anyway, using about 10 or 15 paper tissues, I discover that the tip of a finger has a deep cut.cutfinger

I try a band aid (adhesive bandage for you non-Aussies), but blood leaks through the bandage.

I use a second band aid, and the bleeding slows a lot.

So I also wrap my finger with a wad of tissues, apologise for the mess, wipe some blood from the PC (and my shirt and pants), and finish fixing the PC.

I never realised how difficult it is to work with a heavily bandaged left index finger… and I’m right-handed!

Seriously: I think I was more embarrassed than hurt, but I’d like to know if anyone else out there has had embarrassing “accidents” at work?

Exitjunction, Yahoo, Google, and Adsense

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently heard of an interesting advertising company called exitjunction.

I liked the idea, as the advertising doesn’t take up space on my website.

The way it works is: someone finds your website via a search engine, they take a stickybeak, then decide to press the browser back button to look for something else. Instead of going back to the search engine, they get taken to an exitjunction.com advert page (that looks like search results).

At this point, you can either click on an ad, or you can click the back button once again, and end up back at the search engine.exitjunction1

Now, I did a bit of research, and I found some people saying it could interfere with google adsense. But nobody had any positive proof… it was all: “maybe”, “it shouldn’t”, “it might”.

OK, I’ll try it out.

I also decided to try out the new google youtube ads at the same time (I should know better by now: never do multiple changes, as you don’t know which one is causing the problem).

My adsense income is so low, that I figured that it won’t matter if I get penalised for a while.

At first, everything seemed fine, but after 6 days (15th Feb), I noticed a huge drop in traffic (from around 1,000 unique visits per day to about 500). See the graph:ej-1

I took a look at my website stats, and I could see that the traffic from google, yahoo and MSN search results, had dropped almost immediately after implementing exitjunction, but this drop was masked by an increase in direct and referred traffic (until all traffic dropped after 6 days). See graph:

ej-2

So, I decided to take out exitjunction, and the search engine traffic started improving, but only slightly.

Luckily, the overall traffic didn’t drop to almost zero… thanks in large part to entrecard traffic… Thank you EntreCard!

Maybe it will take a few weeks for traffic to return to normal… I hope!

The income from people clicking on exitjunction ads was lower than what I get from adsense, so removing exitjunction was an easy decision.

I can only hope that at some point in the future, google and exitjunction will play together nicely. But for now, I’m putting exitjunction on the back burner.

Why does exitjunction affect search traffic?

Stop ringing me with great deals!

Computer Aid Posted on by

I find it amusing (and also annoying) that sale droids will call me offering great deals on internet and mobile phone.

So I tell them the truth: I currently spend less than AU$100 per year on my mobile (Virgin), and I get high speed ADSL2+ , 200Gb of downloads, for AU$80 per month (TPG).

Its amusing to hear them flounder for an explanation, and eventually admit that they cannot do better.

And the reason they cannot do better is that I’ve shopped around and deal directly with the ISP/phone company, while they have to pay phone consultants to drum up more business.

Otherwise, I like to string them along, as I mentioned in a prior post: annoying marketing phone calls

realtek device co-installer is invalid

Computer Aid Posted on by

Sometimes, replacing a broken motherboard is easy… other times its not.

This PC would sometime only work for a few minutes before shutting down… mostly it just wouldn’t start… other times it would complain about the CPU temperature…

So I look at cleaning the fan first… no change.

While the side cover was off, I see that fans would spin for about 20 seconds before stopping… Sometime they would stop while the PC continued its boot sequence! Now I understand the temperature message.

I change the power supply, but nothing changes.

I eventually notice (I should have seen it sooner!), that a few motherboard capacitors were bulging… OK its a motherboard fault.

Customer agrees to get a new replacement PC, and I get started cloning the old 40Gb hard drive to the newer 250Gb drive.

I then plug in the drive into the new PC (intel DG31PR motherboard)… and XP starts with no BSODs :-O

I was expecting to do an XP repair install, but it looks like I’ll just need to install some drivers! I wish all upgrades were this easy.

But I spoke too soon…

While installing the various drivers from the supplied intel CD, I get an error with the sound card: the device co-installer is invalid.

I look at device manager, and it shows it has some generic audio device installed.

I try to uninstall, but I’m told: Failed to uninstall the device. The device may be required to boot up the computer.

What? The computer might not boot if the sound drivers are missing! If you believe that, then I’ve got some land for sale 🙂

I try a quick and dirty solution: delete the device driver files… but after that, I just can’t get the sound to work.

While trying to fix the sound, I saw in XPs add/remove programs, that there is an entry for the CMI sound (on the old PC), plus an entry for the Broadcom LAN (also from the old PC). That gave me an idea:

I re-clone the drive from the original.

I then start XP in safe mode.

Ignore (cancel) all “found new hardware” prompts

Uninstall CMI and Broadcom applications

Reboot into safe mode… ignore all found new hardware prompts again

run the intel driver CD… and I was relieved that the sound driver installed correctly.

If it didn’t work, then my only option would be to install a separate sound card (not an elegant solution).

wizz kids

Computer Aid Posted on by

A long time regular customer called saying she needed me to fix a few things on her PC.

She runs a business, so needs the PC running reliably.

wizzkidWhen I get there, I’m told that a 20-something year old “wizz kid” had worked on her PC about 2 months ago…

Apparently, the PC was very slow to start, so he enthusiastically volunteered to fix it.

The more I worked on the PC, the more I wondered about what had actually happened.

First, I noticed that the RAM had increased from 512Mb to 1500Mb. In this case, an unnecessary RAM upgrade, as 512Mb is plenty for running outlook, word, and some very rare web surfing… and I’m sure it wouldn’t have fixed the slow startup.

Next, I see XP only has SP2. I’m sure I installed SP3 about 6 months ago…

Customer also tells me she cannot understand “godzilla”, and wants google back… OK, reading between the lines, I go to make ie7 the default broser (instead of firefox)… but the PC has IE6 🙁

So I spend the next hour installing SP3, then IE7, and various other microsoft updates, so that the PC is less likely to be hijacked.

All this detail would be over her head, so I explain it as “I had to do a lot security updates”.

Along the way, I see my automatic backups to the external USB drive no longer happen, and there is no antivirus nor any antispyware. So I also install antivir, windows defender, and re-install logmein (which I use for remote emergency maintenance).

Now for the main reason for my visit: Customer is only getting some of her emails… for the last 2 months, people have told her they sent emails, but she never receives them…

The customer has 2 main email addresses: her ISP address, and her website address (which is redirected via gmail, to minimise the amount of spam she gets).

The wizz kid had only setup her ISP email (ie he took the easy way out), so all her website emails were building up on gmail.

Teaching her how to use gmail was not an option, so I had to re-do the outlook settings.

By this stage, its looking like wizz kid probably re-installed windows.

I ask the customer if she knows what he did, and she says he had to return a few times, as she couldn’t use the PC at all.

This customer has a sharp tongue, and won’t take cr*p from anyone (ie a “challenging” customer to deal with).

So I reckon wizz kid probably got what he deserved, and will be staying far away from this customer… he might even give up on computers and become a monk 🙂

But it still makes me angry, given that it was unnecessary. Its probably the same feeling you would get if you spent a month buiding a wooden fence, then hand painting it, then a truck destroys it in just a few seconds.

Anyway, I went to re-do the gmail account, followed googles instructions on setting up gmail on outlook 2003, but found I could receive, but not send emails.

After trying a few combinations of settings I eventually decided to just use the ISP account for sending emails (until next time when I’ll look at this more closely)

Setup thunderbird email to use gmail (incoming and outgoing)

Computer Aid Posted on by

As part of my process of moving from TheBat! to Thunderbird, I had some pop3 gmail accounts to setup in thunderbird.

thunderbirdAt first I just tried to copy the settings from TheBat!, but it didn’t seem to work.

After a look at googles configuration help, I see that Thunderbird needs to use SSL for incoming emails. That was quick to fix.

Next, I thought I’d setup gmail for outgoing emails as well.

So I followed googles instructions for this (the main point is to use the “TLS if available” setting). It sounds simple enough, but it didn’t work.

Thunderbirds account settings are arranged a bit different to most other email clients… particularly when it comes to configuring outgoing connections.

Yes, most people will use their ISPs SMTP settings for outgoing emails, but I figure if I can I’ll use googles outgoing  mail server if possible.

So, With Thunderbird, all outgoing SMTP connections are configured in one place (“outgoing server (SMTP)”).

Then, within each pop account settings, there is a section where you select the outgoing server from the list that you created previously… It feels backwards to me, but then not many people setup their email client with 6 different email accounts.

Anyway, after some quick experimenting, I find that I just need to make the outgoing gmail settings use SSL and port 465.

google chrome vs chromium

Computer Aid Posted on by

For those who don’t know, there is a new browser out there called google chrome.

What even fewer people realise, is that chrome is based on a browser called chromium.

I really like how chrome operates (but not the user interface, nor the lack of / difficulty in loading, useful plugins.

At first glance, both Chrome and Chromium look identical, except chrome has a small google logo on the top bar.

But dig a little deeper, and you notice a few minor differences:

  • chromium has an extra “customize” menu: “new window in profile”. This seems to allow you to create different profiles (eg a “news” profile, with different browser settings)… although this gave me an error when I created a new profile. Yet the new profile got created & worked fine.
  • chrome has a lengthy google “terms of service”, which concerns some people.
  • Chrome is currently at version 1.0.154.48, while Chromium is at version 1.0.156.0 (ie its newer)
  • The Chrome logo is a colourful metallic ball of blue, green, red, yellow, while chromium is a bland metallic ball of grey, blue, blue, and blue 🙂chromiumchrome

 

Both are very quick.

Both have a pleasingly simple interface (too simple for me, but I think most people will like it).

Personally, I prefer Chromium, but there is hardly any difference between the two.