Things are very quiet at the moment.

I’ve hardly had a phone call in 2 weeks…

It must be murphys law: Everything seems to be going wrong at once:

• The car I bought in January is having engine trouble… I’ll probably need to get a loan to buy a more reliable one.
• The flatbed scanner has broken.
• The government support payments have stopped
• business has dried up
• The battery in my digital camera has just stopped working.

As far as business is concerned, I have used this time to work on my web site (and blog), & I’ll be calling some past customers to see if they need any help.

After that, I’ve got 2 things I can do:

1. Start walking the beat, placing flyers in peoples letterboxes
2. Rent a stall at a shopping centre, to try to get some interest in both Computer Aid, and also Beadmobile

I’m hoping the quiet business environment is just due to the lead-up to the end of financial year, and that things will pick up after 1 July.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:05 PM EDT

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I Recently bought a scanner from ebay.

A scanjet 8250, with outo document feeder (double sided). The document feeder was said to be faulty, & there was no power supply.

For $66.00 it was a good bargain.

Getting a 31V / 2500mA power supply was something else… I eventually built my own (with some help from Jaycar).

I had a close look at the document feeder, & it wasn’t difficult to fix (someone didn’t re-assemble it properly). It worked fine for a few weeks, but one day, it just locked-up.

I pulled out the power cord & plugged it back in, but nothing happened. I dismantled it it looked like the fuse had blown… I decided to try to bypass it, & it seemed to startup ok… so i pulled out the power cord, & re-assembled it.

Then it wouldn’t work start again… I took out the main board & measured some voltages, & the board seemed to have power at various points , so the problem could be something subtle on the board (not being an electronics wiz, I don’t know what else to try).

So I now have a very nice scanner, which won’t power-up, and I’ve no idea what to do.

I’m open to any suggestions.

Update: I ended up reselling it on ebay

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:46 AM EDT

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WooHoo!!!

 After a month of (intermittent) effort, I have finally moved my blog from blogger to Wordpress (under my computer-aid.com.au domain).

A lot of effort went into making it blend into my webpage theme… it aint perfect, but its as close as I’ll be able to get it.

I started off looking for a 3 column theme (not many available for wordpress)… and eventually narrowed it down to 4 contenders. I ended up choosing the gila theme by John Hesch. I made many changes (mostly to the stylesheet), so I could get the colours right. I also re-arranged the sidebars, so that I sould include my site buttons on the left (plus a small ” i dont power blogger” logo

Once everything looked right, I decided to follow the excellent instructions by John Sherman at underscorebleach.net and loaded all my blogger blogs into wordpress (although it took about 30 attempts with the wordpress import function)… It kept failing with a “Zero Sized Reply” error… possibly a php memory error.

I then redirected my blogger blog to point to this blog & hey presto! I’m back and running with no lost blogs and (hopefully) no lost traffic.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 7:56 PM EDT

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I re-visit this customer, as there is some on-going work, as things gradually get fixed up.

This time, I return her laptop, after & do some tuning & make sure it is updated with anti-virus & anti-malware software.

I notice her main computer is behaving sluggish. The second CD drive has its activity light permanently on… not a good sign (particularly with no cd in the drive). Since she already has a dvd writer, I just pull out the power plug from the cd drive, & everything is back to normal.

I try to get the laptop to work on her wireless router, but that doesn’t work (probably a faulty wireless component, as the wired stuff works just fine). She doesn’t rate the wireless as very important, so I just leave it for now.

She also has a mailing list of over 100 people & wants to email these people. This takes me into a new realm: bulk email programs, and the dangers of being labeled (and blocked) as a spammer. I found a few programs & they seems to send emails in 2 different ways:

1. They act as a smtp server & will send emails directly to the destination smtp server
2. They send emails through the local ISP mail server

Now, we spoke to the customers ISP, & they have no limits on how many recipients an outlook email can have, but many other smtp servers “out there” seem to refuse any email that has more that 10 recipients.

Thus I tested a bulk emailer that would send emails directly to the destination smtp server (option 1 above). It seemed to work with my test list or 3 addresses. However, a few hours later, This seemed to stop working… after some investigation, I found that my IP address was “classified” as an open-relay mail server, & regarded as a potential source of spam. Once this happens, most mail servers around the internet start to refuse any emails originating from my PC… Hmmm, this is not going to work for a regular mailing list.

So I look at option 2) sending emails through the local isp mail server. As long as I make sure the “from” address is legitimate (ie if telstra.com is my isp, & I send emails “from” joe@telstra.com, then all should be fine. The nice thing here, is that instead of sending 1 email with over 100 recipients, the bulk emailer sends over 100 emails (each individually addressed). All it is doing, is automating something anyone could do manually: send the same email individually to many people.

I’ll be giving this the acid test in a few weeks time, when I go back to do some “teaching” & also do an office move to a new house.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 3:55 PM EDT

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Customer seems to have had many strange problems (over the years), with his windows 98 pc.

He has had an F: drive appear mysteriously (zero size & 100% full), not able to properly install windows onto his 60Gb drive (he can only create a 2gb partition)… anything larger will work for a while & then “dissapear”. He has had viruses & spyware in the past, but he has fixed up those problems himself. The PC also has a SCSI CD-writer…

He is starting to think that there is a malicious “entity” on the internet, which will attack his computer as soon as he goes online.

He has also had many “experts” work on his computer, reccomending lots of different things (upgrade the motherboard, get a larger hard drive, a faster video card, reformat & reinstall windows).

I take a look & see a 2gb fat16 partition, and about 58GB of unpartitioned space. So after a quick look at the system, I partition up the remaining 58GB… and then format the partition, which give me a 58Gb D: drive.

I restart the PC & the 58GB drive is unreadable…windows allocates it to the D: drive letter, but gives an error when trying to look at the contents…

Some research shows that fat16 is limited to 2 GB max. Fat32 is more confusing: it can support drives up to 125 GB, but windows 98se can only safely make use of 32Gb! but applying a microsoft “patch”, allows it to use 62Gb… and maybe 125Gb (if the wind is NWW & the moon is full .

I try out the patch, re-partition the 58Gb, re-format & re-create the D: drive, & everything works just fine, even after multiple restarts.

I talk to the customer, & he is happy for me to re-format the whole drive (as long as I backup his data… it all fits onto 1 CD: easy)

So using microsofts “improved” fdisk, I create a single 60Gb fat32 partition, boot from floppy, install windows 98, Install antivir & anti-spyware measures. Install a network card, connect to the internet, and I just get the usual (occasional)windows 98 freeze, otherwise it runs just fine.

No bizzare behaviour, so I give it back to the customer & ask him to try it & let me know if anything unusual starts happening.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:05 PM EDT

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A business customer has found that his PC suddenly, no longer connects to the internet. Also as a separate issue, a colleagues laptop is also unable to connect via the office wireless router.

The PC is straightforward: the network settings had been changed from automatically obtaining ip address & dns, to having a fixed (wrong) ip address & dns. I cannot explain why it happened (xp shouldn’t do this sort of thing, and there are no viruses & malware present)

The second issue is a bit stranger, as I had setup the centrino wireless on the laptop just a few days earlier. However, there is something different: a pcmcia card with a cute little antenna. I’m told its a 3G wireless internet card, as they need to use the laptop while out at an airport hanger.

So after some testing I eventually try unplugging the 3G card & restarting the laptop: then the 802.11G wireless starts working correctly.

Without spending hours testing different scenarios, I assume that the 3G card interferes with the 802.11g radio signals.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:30 PM EDT

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I’ve now had a few customers that needed some help, but they are at least 30 minutes away… and for various reasons, I don’t want to drive out to them. I’m starting to find logmein a very useful utility. It allows me to take control of a remote PC over the internet.

 At this stage, I cannot justify using anything other than the free version, so remote installation is somewhat difficult: it involves me guiding a customer, over the phone, to download the software, install it, login using my account (hoping they won’t remember my password!), then taking over & fixing the problem.

If this starts happening more often, I’ll certainly pay for the remote-install option.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:09 PM EDT

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This computer has been having intermittent internet (adsl) dropouts… but always behaves itself when I’m there… The internet did drop out after a few visits & the behaviour was quite strange… sometimes the response to pings was extremely slow, sometimes the connection was just fine, other times the internet was off-air for a few minutes straight.

I eventually realised that someone (before me) had placed a network card into the PC (but the PC had a network card built-in to the motherboard).

There is no indication as to why this was done. So I guess that the built-in network port had developed a fault… I wasn’t going to waste time testing the “faulty” network port… so I just disabled it via windows xp, so that all network services are forced to bind with the plug-in network card.

The moral of the story is to never assume that a pc is configured in a reasonable way.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:32 PM EDT

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A prior customer call saying his sons laptop seems to freeze & is basically unuseable.

Since I setup the wireless on this laptop previously, I know memory was a limitation, together with a lot of software starting while the pc started.

I take it home & disable all the startup rubbish (skype, norton IS, gator / gain). Its still quite slow (it now takes 5 minutes to start, instead of 15 minutes).

I run ewido & I find a mywebsearch infection. Once removed, I uninstall norton IS & install antivir instead. I also install & run winpatrol & spywareBlaster, but things are still slow… I cleanout the 2 windows temporary folders (why does windows xp have 2 different temporary folders? one is a system-level temp, the other is a user-level temp).

 I also clean-out the IE temporary folder… many people try to do this, but what most don’t realise, is that there is a bug in IE, which means that the temp IE folder accumulates “lost fragments”, which never get cleared by the ordinary “delete temporary internet files & delete cookies” buttons in internet options. This is where a tools like cachesentry is invaluable.

To save every last scrap of memory, I also look carefully at the windows services… there are many unnecessary services that are started, which can take up a lot of memory. So I disable what I can… its a bit of a balancing act, as disabling too much will remove utilities that the customer might find useful.

I finally get xp fully started, with a memory “footprint” (ie a commit charge) of about 90 - 100 meg. I have been able to go as low as 45-50 meg, but many tools stop working when all the services are killed off.

I do a disk defrag.

The pc still takes about 2 - 3 minutes to start… unusually long, but I cannot see what else could cause the slow startup times (without delving into registry tweaking… which I don’t want to do on a customer computer).

Customer is not prepared to pay for extra memory, so he gets the computerback in the “Computer Aid” tuned state… antivir takes a reasonable amount of memory, but that cannot be helped, since the pc will be on broadband internet, and it was already infected with spyware).

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:33 PM EDT

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Customer said she can no longer hear computer sounds. Since i rebuilt this pc 6months ago, i suspect its a “configuration” problem. I manage to fit her between 2 other customers, but i’m not equiped as i should be…Once im there, it starting to look like the sound card is faulty… so i replace it with one from my collection of used sound cards, but then it dawns on me that windows 98 doesn’t have the same kind of driver support as xp… and the customer doesn’t have internet access… damn… looks like a return visit is in order (after i download some sound card drivers… i should have made sure i had all the win 98 drivers beforehand!)…I’m finding that windows 98 systems require a lot more work to keep working, compared to windows xp.

So i return a few days later, install the correct driver, windows shows the sound preferences correctly, so i connect the speakers, switch them on, the speaker led comes on for 1 second, then fades away… i pick up the speakers, and there is an ominous rattling sound… and murphy strikes again… i have no spare speakers… i dismantle the broken speakers, & i see an internal transformer has broken loose & probably shorted some other components… The speakers look like they have been kicked around a bit.

Looks like yet another re-visit & a re-stock of small pc speakers is in order… This is starting to become really frustrating. I buy a few speakers, test them to make sure they work, and drop them off as I’m passing by on a shopping trip (ie I have no other computer tools with me)… but when I plug them in, I hear nothing. My sound card could also be faulty… So I apologise & promise to fix everything the next day.

I finally replace the sound card, install appropriate drivers, connect the speakers, and I finally hear some sounds… Phew, what a marathon effort, for what I originally thought would be a simple problem.

 

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Technical at 4:36 PM EDT

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A new customer calls, saying her windows 98 pc is no longer able to connect to her broadband internet. The isp (telstra) tells her she needs to find someone who can re-install the tcp/ip stack.

So I arrive armed with the necessary instructions, but the re-install doesn’t fix anything. She is also using a wireless router, which connects to the cable internet modem, so there are many “points of failure”.

I investigate a few, but start running out of ideas.

She also mentiones that she recently bought a laptop, & was hoping to use that to connect to the internet, as it allows her to work anywhere in the apartment, rather than be shackled to a small room.

Given that windows xp networking is much more robust than windows 98, & given that she prefers to use her laptop anyway, we decide to abandon the win98 PC & try setting up the laptop instead.

Here I start tripping over some peculiarities that are very specific to Telstra.

Telstra initially sent out an adsl install cd (instead of a cable cd). The rectify this by sending out a technician, who installs the appropriate cable software, but doesn’t leave a cable cd. Telstra seem reluctant to send out the correct CD & the customer decides not bother.

about 1 year later, I’m now stuck, as I cannot install the telstra software (no CD & software is essential, as teltra send a “heartbeat” to the PC software & if it doesn’t get an “appropriate” reply, it disconnects the internet.

At this stage, its getting late, so I promise to come back the next day & fix everything.

I install the new heartbeat software from telstra & burn it to a cd.

I then go back to the customer & install the software & setup the wireless (eventually… wireless setups are always somewhat difficult).

The connection is a little strange: when the pc first starts, the heartbeat software gives an error message, but after a few minutes, lets us connect to the internet anyway. The customer says this is normal & has been happening with the old PC for many months.

I also help setup skype & email & then I’m on my way again.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:46 PM EDT

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