A customer(s) calls me out, as he is having problems connecting to the internet.

When I get there the modem router has power connected, but just the power light comes on…

Looks like a fault modem router, as I cannot connect to it from either PC.

The couple tell me they have another modem router, from before they met…

But it doesn’t have a power adapter. I’m told “you can just plug it into the power adapter of the other modem… Hmmm I don’t know… the modems are 2 different brands, so voltage differences could be a problem… but I’m told they have done it before.

When I connect it, all its LEDs blink at the same time…

To eliminate the possibility of an ADSL line fault, I bring in my known good modem, and it works just fine. But I don’t have a modem router with me. So they decide to get a new modem router from dick smith.

I get called again when they have the modem, so I go around again to setup their internet… This time, the new modem just shows a blinking power LED. The instructions say to run the installation CD, but the CD software say something about a hardware error.

I do what I normally do (connect to the modem directly using IE… but that also fails.

an ipconfig shows that there is no dhcp running…

I can’t believe this, but that makes 3 faulty modem routers!

Just to be sure, I bring in my modem again, but this time it cannot get an ADSL signal…

I tell the customers that they first need to call optus and get them to fix the line/exchange fault… But they will probably need to get dick smith to exchange the faulty modem…

What a nightmare… its been problem after problem. Sometimes problems will compound themselves like this (which make me look incompetent), but if it happens, it happens.

I leave my modem with them, so that once optus fixes the line, they can use the internet until they get the faulty modem router exchanged.

After a day or two, I’m asked to pickup my modem, as they now have everything going.

He tells me that they were a little concerned about me, as I seemed to be blaming the problem on an unusual amount of faults… but in the end, everything I said was correct: Optus admitted to a line fault (and they fixed it), Dick Smith replaced the modem router (which they tried and were surprised to see as faulty). And the customer was able to setup the new modem router, based on the information I gave them previously.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 4:53 PM EDT

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I have just realised that Compact Flouro light bulbs are actually worse for the environment (and carbon emissions) than ordinary incandescent globes!

Many years ago, I decided to try a CF at home. It cost me $25, and it was intended to run at least 12 hours per day, so the 5000 hour lifespan was very tempting…

The 8watt CF replaced a 40watt globe

The CF was $25, the equivalent 40 watt globe was $0.50, so I needed to save over $24.50 to make it worthwhile.

I figured I would gain about 4000 hours out of the CF(compared to the incandescent globe) , so 4000 X 32Watt = 128000 watt hours… ie 128 Kwatt hours… at $0.15 per Kwatt hour, I’d save $19.20

Hey! Wheres the saving in that!

And then the CF stopped working after just 2000 hours!

Recently, with all the hype surrounding “green energy”, I’ve started thinking about the “total” carbon footprint of supposedly green items.

With CFs, you cannot just look at how much electricity they save you, you also need to consider how much energy and resources went into making them in the first place.

An incandescent is cheap because manufacturing it has a low environmental impact (and a low carbon footprint)… think about it… whats an incandescent made of? Glass, steel, a tiny tungsten filament, and a bit of “glue”

A CF, however, needs: a carefully manufactured, vacuum sealed glass tube (with a special coating on the inside), a circuit board with various electronic components all soldered together (so you get lead and lots of other toxic stuff)…

And as most engineers will tell you: the more components, the more things that can break down.

So, I reckon any carbon “savings” from a CF, will be lost in the extra carbon costs in making them in the first place.

So is there a way to be truly green with household lighting?

Not yet, but LED lighting is the way to go… it has hardly any disadvantages…

You can switch LEDs on and off thousands of times, and they won’t burn out (CFs and incandescents will burn out in a week if they are constantly switched on and off).

LEDs will eventually start to fade after a few years of use.

LEDs also don’t heat up like CFs and incandescent bulbs.

Its a pity that LED technology is not quite ready for illumination purposes. Hopefully, LEDs will be commercially viable soon!

Posted by Computer Help as Musing at 12:23 AM EDT

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Heres an example of a weird laptop design.

Customer says he lost the power button (it broke and disappeared into the laptop).

I think: so whats the problem??? Just press the switch that the buttom would have pressed. But he says that there is no switch.

Ok, either the switch has been damaged, or there is something weird going on.

Once I get the PC, I see the hole where the button should have been, but it only has a small blue LED inside…

Hmmm, where is the switch?

After dismantling the top of the laptop, I find the power button, and I can now see what happened (and why some people should never be allowed to design laptops)…

The button is actually an “L” shape.

The top of the “L” is supposed to be anchored/glued to the top plastic case, just above the hole for the visible button… this is the bit that broke.

The visible button is where the vertical and horizontal lines of the “L” meet. This is also there the blue LED can shine through the power button.

The other end of the horizontal line in the “L”, is where button actually makes contact with the power switch (about 5 mm to the right of the “hole” from where the power switch was missing).

Its all a convoluted lever system, which falls apart as soon as the anchor point breaks (which will happen eventually). Without an anchor point, the button assembly just floats around inside the laptop.

Its all fixed with a careful application of some glue.

But I can’t help wondering why make the power button so complicated (particularly when its likely to receive some brute force when people cannot start/stop the laptop).

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 1:16 AM EDT

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At the start of this year, me and my other half, went to a seminar by onsitedirect, and decided to buy an investment property…

After years of not wanting to borrow money for anything, I have eventually realised that borrowing money correctly is the best way to increase wealth (I wish I’d realised that 20 years ago!).

Anyway, we buy an apartment, borrow lots of money, and later (after settlement) find a few inconsistencies:

The body corporate fee is a lot higher than what onsitedirect told us.

A “sister” company to onsitedirect (growingequity) assisted us in getting a line of credit with macquarie bank, telling us that the interest only loan was “indefinite”, but we only found out after settlement, that the interest only part was for 5 years, which could be extended by another 5 years by paying a fee…

Well, despite the negatives, the important thing is we now “own” an investment property.

The income from rental actually works out a lot lower than we expected (due to the higher than expected body corporate). Thus the “out of pocket” interest repayments are a lot higher than expected.

But in the long term, it just means that it will will take longer before we can afford to borrow for a second property.

And I’ve re-learnt a valuable lesson: caveat emptor… verify everything you are told independently.

Posted by Computer Help as Musing at 11:26 AM EDT

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A customer had an Optima laptop, but it wouldn’t boot into windows.

I looked at this laptop a few months ago, and removed a lot of spyware… so there might be some leftover effects of an infection.

At first glance, I see a brief blue screen.

I try safe mode, but I get the same problem.

After Pressing F8 and then selecting “don’t automatically restart”, I see its complaining about: 0×0000007B (ie a problem with the boot device).

I plug the hard drive into my desktop system, but it Slows down the normal XP startup (from a 1 minute startup time to over 10 minutes).

This normally indicates a failing HDD… or a severely corrupted one.

Using Xps disk manager, the disk shows up, but it has a partition type of “unknown”.

On top of that, the HDD makes continuous clicking and “startup” whirring noises… usually the kind of noises I come to expect from a failing HDD.

OK, I decide to try a repair installation using the Optima recovery CD… but it also reckons that the disk is unformatted, and only gives me the choice to format the drive, and then do a clean install of XP.

I call the customer and he say the important data has already been backed up, so I can go ahead and reformat.

At this stage, I’m still thinking that the drive is damaged, and it probably won’t complete the format… yet it formats correctly, and XP installs without any problem.

I do all the autopatcher updates, install antivir, windows defender, winpatrol, spyware blaster, and bhodemon… then do a disk defragment.

After all that, I’m sure there is no fault with the drive.

Yet the mystery remains: how did the drive get into such a strange state in the first place?

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 2:11 AM EDT

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I was wondering which vista services are really needed (for a 512Mb vista PC).

I thought: wouldn’t it be nice if the Black Viper website was back.

I did a google search for vista services, when I noticed that the Blackviper.com website seemed to be back in the google SERPs!

Well I went there and found that Black Viper (Charles Sparks) was back, and he has a list of Vista services. Welcome back BV!

Although his info on XP is probably not so relevant in this age of Gigabytes of RAM, I still find myself using his info to tune 256MB XP systems, so that they run a little faster.

So now, I might be able to tune Vista to run acceptably with 512Mb (I hope)

For those who don’t know about BV, he has a very comprehensive list of standard windows services, and what they do, and he also gives you an indication on if you will notice if they are disabled.

Update:

After having looked at BVs vista settings for a while, it looks like he hasn’t done much research into each service yet… it looks like his vista services need a bit more work. I’m sure Charles will do his usual magic over the coming months!

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 12:55 AM EDT

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I recently got a call from a customer from the southside of Brisbane.

I had passed her on to Stephen Jones (at the time, he was my contractor on that side of town). And the (very brief) feedback I got from him was that he fixed her problem within 1 hour, so I paid him his share (he collected cash, so he actually paid me “my” share).

Well, she says that her PC is displaying coloured squares and lines, and isn’t starting correctly. She also says that Steve replaced the motherboard and charged her $385 and $110 labour. And she also asked for a second DVD writer to be installed… but she got the new one, while the old one was removed (and not returned)…

This sound odd. And now that Steve isn’t working for Computer Aid anymore (mostly because he is impossible to contact), then it looks like I’m up for a long drive, and possibly the cost of some parts (since I cannot charge her for something she already paid for).

When I get there, XP starts, but after 1 minute, it locks up.

I also see that Steve replaced the mobo, CPU, RAM, and power supply… That must have been a lot of work, but I cannot tell what the original problem was (although the symptoms sounded like a faulty power supply to me).

I’m also told that Steve took the PC away twice, and needed to be constantly contacted, in order to ask for progress on the work. This is starting to sound like a “stereotypical” bad computer technician… not what I would have expected from one of “my” guys

Anyway, after a few tries, I’m sure there is a RAM fault. The RAM is a stick of 1GB DDR2… OK, At this stage, I don’t carry around any spare DDR2 RAM, as PCs that use it are still thin on the ground.

I take it with me, and at the office, I manage to get the PC to run long enough to do a RAM test (I don’t have any DDR2-capable mobos either!)

The RAM test starts detecting faulty memory straight away, and locks up after just 30 seconds.

Removing the RAM gives the usual beeping to say there is no RAM.

On the DVD writer front, I can see why Steve didn’t install the old DVD burner: the mobo only has 1 IDE plug (ie a maximum of 2 IDE devices (1 hard drive and 1 dvd burner)… He must have obtained an new IDE burner (where he probably should have got a SATA burner instead).

So it looks like I’m up for the cost of 1Gb DDR2 RAM plus a new sata DVD burner, plus another trip southside.

In the end, its not the cost that bothers me (much :-|). Its the bad reputation that I’m getting due to someone else’s unprofessionalism.

Sure, during Steves first 2 months, I rang all his customers, and all were happy with the service, and what they paid tallied with what Steve said he charged.

Every 3 - 6 months after that, we would ring a few random customers, just to make sure everything was still going to plan, but things seemed to have done downhill before we got a chance to pick it up.

I guess its just a risk I need to accept, given that calling all “contractors” customers is too time consuming… and I’d also like to give my contractors a certain amount of independence and trust.

If this pattern starts to repeat too often, I might start considering “franchising”. I hate the idea in principal, as a franchisee digs himself into a “financial” hole, and then has no choice but dig himself back out again, but I do like the idea that franchisees are using their own money to indicate how committed they are to working to my rules. I guess time will tell.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 11:05 PM EDT

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As mentioned in a previous post, I decide (for stability and throughput reasons) to change my main system from a “newish” AMD Sempron 2800+  to an old Intel P4 2.6Ghz.

I swap the motherboards, run the XP repair install, and the intel system is up and running (mostly).

I do the usual search for drivers, and I get the ethernet going, but the onboard sound doesn’t work… and the PC freezes at some point.

Being the eternal optimist, I reboot and give the system another chance.

But the lockups keep happening.

I try using linux, but still no sound… the drivers are setup correctly, as the system goes through the motions of playing, with equalisers pulsing, showing what the sound would “look” like… just nothing coming out of the green plug.

And the system cannot run for more than 2 hours without a lockup… looks like a trip back to [censored] for a replacement.

So I look at temporarily reinstating the sempron system.

I put the AMD mobo back, do a repair install, but after the initial copy of files, and the necessary reboot into a GUI install to complete the XP installation, I get a glimpse of a blue screen of death (BSOD), and the system restarts (where the process repeats).

Pressing F8, and choosing “disable automatic restart on system failure”, lets me get a good look at the BSOD:

STOP: 0×0000007E (0xC0000005,0xBA278750,0xBA4C7430,0xBA4C712C)

A search finds a few tentative solutions.

I try the chkdsk /f c: … but it doesn’t help

The strange thing is that linux and bartPE work just fine, so there isn’t a hardware problem.

I eventually get an answer that works:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic21621-2.html

In particular, the solution by alisvolat on the 25/04/2007 is exactly what I need… from bartPE, I rename  c:\win\system32\drivers\intelppm.sys

And the repair install can finally complete.

I used to be a strong supporter of AMD, but lately, I’ve really started to like the stability of Intel.

I have seen so many AMD systems with impossible to fix “peculiarities”, that I now prefer intel.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 3:03 PM EDT

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Since the start of August 2007, I’ve noticed the number of spam comments being captured by my blog spam blockers (akismet and bad behaviour) has decreased significantly.

Bad behaviour would easily block 500 - 1500 spam comments per week… now it seems to block 200 - 300 comments.

Akismet is similar: from 20 - 30 per day, down to 5 - 10 per day.

Admittedly, my website traffic has decreased slightly (about 20%). So, all I can think is that the spammers are busy brewing up some smarter spam bots. The drop in spam activity is also resulting in a drop in my website ”traffic”… but then, it was traffic I never really wanted anyway.

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Musing, Technical at 11:20 AM EDT

1 Comment »

I’ve started noticing that VISTA seems to refuse to correctly react to the ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew commands.

I’ve noticed this with both wireless and wired connections.

A typical situation happened the other day:

Customer has a new ADSL modem, and a new VISTA PC, but cannot get it to work.

She paid Clive Peeters an extra $100 for a “tech” to install the new PC, but he couldn’t get adsl to work, so he suggested she go back to dialup.

Her brother also had a go (he tried to connect the modem to the PC via USB (folks: don’t do usb broadband unless you absolutely have to).

So, I connect the modem to the PC via ethernet, but VISTA says its got a 169.x.x.x address.

OK, I start an administrator command prompt, and do ipconfig /release, then ipconfig /renew

but the address is set to 169.x.x.x again…

I restart VISTA: hey it now gets the correct DHCP address!

I know XP is sometimes reluctant to notice network changes (particularly with workgroups), but it seems that VISTA is worse.

Although I must admit that someone had also disabled UAC, so who knows what else was done to the PC before I got there.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 7:06 PM EDT

2 Comments »

With my line of work, (due to the amount of travelling I now do), I’ve noticed many smoky vehicles.

Maybe I’m just getting grumpy in my middle age, but it really bugs me to see an old 4X4 diesel at the lights, right in front of me, with smoke coming out the back.

And then, when the lights go green, the 4X4 takes off, spewing out a huge cloud of diesel smoke.

It feels like every time I go somewhere, I know I’ll see at least one smoky beast.

Well, I’ve decided to do something about it.

It might not have any effect (you just never know with government departments), but I’m going to start reporting the smokers (particularly the big 4X4 and trucks) at: smoky vehicles queensland

The main reason for this is health.

The fine particulates emitted by bad diesel engines are very VERY dangerous.

Yes, I know, “modern” small-capacity diesel engines are a lot cleaner, but there are still so many bad diesels out there, its frightening.

I reckon the Government needs to introduce a compulsory annual emission test for all vehicles. Your vehicle won’t get registered unless it passes the test.

Not only will it clean the air, but it will also improve fuel economy (which means more money in the pockets of the people that actually do the driving).

Posted by Computer Help as Rant at 1:29 PM EDT

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