I got a call that seemed very straightforward: Cannot play World of Warcraft because the graphics card is not powerful enough.

So I thought it would be just a matter of getting an off-the-shelf graphics card, and I’d be finished in an hour or two.

Although this was just a 2 year old PC, fairly quick pentium 4, once I opened it up, somethings didn’t look right:

- The height allowed for the card was much less than expected… I’ve not seen that before, but then I don’t keep up with everything on the PC front.

- The slot for the graphics card looked odd: It seemed like an AGP slot, but I haven’t seen any PCI-e slots yet, so it might have been one of those… it didn’t have any of those “spacer” lugs that stop you from inserting the card the wrong way around (they do something similar with RAM sticks).

So after asking at a local store (was told: sorry, we don’t stock those ones anymore, nobody buys them), I go back to the customer & ask to take some pictures of the AGP/PCI-E slot, so I can do some research.

I eventually find out it is an AGP slot, but it doesn’t look like other AGP slots I’ve seen. I also read about how the different 1X, 2X, 4X 8X, etc AGP speeds actually also mean different voltages on slot pins, so I have to be careful about what I buy.

I eventually buy something not too new (I wasn’t sure about the AGP 8X cards, they might not have coped well in this PC), a geforce2 mx100 card with 64MB ram and a half height backplate.

Despite being unsure of wether it would work, I walked in, the card slipped in with no difficulties, the PC fired up ok, & the game started correctly. phew!

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 9:47 PM EST

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A gentleman called saying that he got a new PC, but he couldn’t connect to the internet. He has cable internet a few weeks ago, but his PC broke down & he only just plugged in the PC. He also tried the PC at his brothers place, & he was able to connect without a problem.

I wonder if this is just a faulty cable, or a faulty modem.

Once I get to the house I ask a few more questions & I find his brother has ADSL internet, not cable internet, & his brother also has a router, so he can connect a few PCs, whereas my client connects directly from PC to cable modem.

The ISP is telstra, & I’ve used cable internet before (with Optus), so they should be similar.

After an hour of trying to “ping” the modem , trying different ethernet & USB cables, I couldn’t get to the modem “configuration” web page… unless I unplugged the modem from the “thick” cable… it just didn’t make sense!

I call telstra & I quickly find out that “Telstra does it differently”… You cannot communicate with the modem unless your pc runs a special “monitor” program in the background… So I ask the obvious question: what if I connect the modem to a router… the router cannot run the “monitor” program. But the tech assures me that as long as 1 PC on the router network is running the “monitor” then everything should be fine.

What a strange setup!

Anyway, after some confusion about passwords, everything is working fine. I help setup the email, & then go my merry way.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 10:17 PM EST

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An 80-something year-old gentleman calls me saying he is having some problem with his incredimail junk folder & would also like to save his emails onto DVD but doesn’t know how.

I visit & find out that incredimail had a “junk folder” facility, which would allow you to filter spam very nicely. At some point, customer gets an email from incredimail saying “upgrade to junk folder plus” or something like that. So he upgrades, & then after a trial period, incredimail then disables the junk folder & say something like “to continue using the junk folder, you need to pay $XX” per month”

The customer just wants it back the way it was, but after some digging, I found that incredimail has stopped the use of the old junk folder & only offers the “pay per use” JF plus. They might think its a good strategy, but I reckon lots of people will just change email clients. Sure, lots of people really like the fancy graphics & other bells & whistles, but a quick browse through the forums shows that underneath the pretty exterior, incredimail is bordering on spyware, with a greedy company behind the scenes. Most people in the forums don’t seem to like it.

Getting email attachments onto DVD is both simple & difficult… the emails & attachments can be written easily enough. But explaining that there are many different types of attachments & its not easy to make sure that they can all play on a normal tv with a normal dvd player… well thats something else. Most video formats can be converted to DVD format, & most audio can be converted so it will play, but combining the two, & figuring out what can & what cannot be converted, & how to converted it, all requires some in-depth knowledge about computers, which is not easy to impart to an 80-something year old, in just 1 hour.

So, I just show how to save attachments to DVD, so that they can be re-examined at a later date, & explain that deciphering attachments is something for a future time.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 11:03 PM EST

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Customer calls saying that his computer stops working once windows starts & he thinks its because of spyware.

I think: Hmm, sound like a slight exaggeration. Malware will usually slow down your computer, or break something so it wont start at all.

But no, he was right… windows would start and run (albeit slowly), but once I click on the start button, the start menu would appear, then click on any item and then: nothing! The mouse cursor would still move on the screen, but no more screen updates. The HDD light indicates that something is still running.

I try ctrl-alt-del & run, but anything I ran would only partly start & then freeze.

I try safe mode: same thing!

I try Bart PE, but I don’t get very far…

I get somewhere by: starting in safe mode, start task mgr, select file -> run, then run the Ewido setup program from the CD (I had to remember the name of the setup .exe, as doing “browse” would lock up the PC), once Ewido was installed ( http://www.ewido.net), I could start the long and difficult task of removing a LOT of different Malware software.

What makes this even more amazing is that the PC was using dialup to connect to the internet!

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 9:17 PM EST

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Customer calls, saying he might need a new PC, as it won’t boot up.

Since I’ve dealt with him before, I know his PC is a bit old & rusty, so it might have finally bit the dust.

When I get there, the windows 98 boot logo comes up, but the scrolling line at the bottom stops after a while. So I switch off the pretty windows startup screen & also enable boot logging.

It turns out that the sound driver that loads within autoexec.bat was corrupt somehow. So I disable it, & the PC boots correctly.

Since this only took me 10 minutes, I spend another 20 minutes doing some fine-tuning & disabling HP “additional” useless background programs.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 10:52 PM EST

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