tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11137280326653485092011-11-28T11:54:01.455+11:00I am a computer specialist living on the South Coast of NSW in Australia. This is a blog about the day to day work of repairing, upgrading, building computers. I am also a programmer and build websites. I have been dealing with the things for almost 30 years but there is still something new every dayComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.comBlogger411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-4774432288620874742010-02-08T22:27:00.002+11:002010-02-08T22:35:49.153+11:00

A business has 3 computer/registers at their checkout. When any of the registers printed an invoice the middle computer would shutdown. Now whether a computer shuts down or shuts down and restarts is important. The former is always a hardware issue and the later can be a hardware of software issue.I initially thought that the middle computer was connected to the printer via a USB port but the

computer guyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11754693961439608025noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-54615141270181466492010-02-07T15:19:00.003+11:002010-02-07T15:31:00.027+11:00

Laptops get all kinds of things spilt on them and they come in regularly. I recommend the following to give the laptop of fighting chance to survive a dunking or a spill. First is disconnect power and get the machine stopped as soon as possible. Don't worry about saving anything, hold down the power button until the laptop turns off. The next thing to do is to flip the laptop over, remove the

computer guyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11754693961439608025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-38624782166499691922010-02-01T10:24:00.002+11:002010-02-01T10:30:44.097+11:00

A customers computer would not boot. It came up with an error NTLDR not found press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. The harddrive wasn't making a noise which was good for a change and could be seen in BIOS. I set up BIOS to boot from a BART partition on my thumb drive. Most BIOS have two boot places. One to pick the device type order and another for the Hard Disk device order. When I restarted the

computer guyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11754693961439608025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-87534983932173871272010-01-31T08:22:00.002+11:002010-01-31T08:34:44.117+11:00

Most times technicians fix a problem but do not really know the cause. A customers computer was shutting down. The first thing to ask is if it reboots itself or does it just shutdown completely. In this case the computer (A Vista machine) restarts. If a computer shuts down completely then it is a hardware issue. If a computer restarts then it is probably a blue screen (BSOD) that flashes by too

computer guyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11754693961439608025noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-24476344251088939092010-01-31T08:16:00.002+11:002010-01-31T08:20:46.384+11:00

Ahh Saturday. This computer's lights came on but it would not boot. We can't test motherboards directly but we can test them by a process of elimination. First I remove all peripherals - Memory, data cables to the drives, graphics cards and any other cards. Then I attach a new power supply (PSU) to the two power connectors on the motherboard. 80% of the time I'll get the computer to boot. This

computer guyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11754693961439608025noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-77191935553592757262010-01-29T21:40:00.003+11:002010-01-29T21:59:02.129+11:00

A smash repair company owner had bought a new camera after 12 years, the problem was that the photos produced were 10 times bigger to send to insurance companies and very slow over his slow link. The problem was to find a program to shrink photos that is easy enough for a computer beginner to use.A customer could not get internet on a Bigpond connection. He gave up after an hour talking to

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-46856532030050633562009-12-08T07:34:00.002+11:002009-12-08T07:36:20.465+11:00

For a RDP session to send CTRL ALT DEL just use CTRL-ALT-END. If you have a RDP session within a RDP session just use CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-END.

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-20515238721338082752009-12-07T08:51:00.004+11:002009-12-07T08:59:54.696+11:00

It is an ongoing battle with Viruses. I seem to go for a month without finding any and then suddenly I find a stack of them. The latest is another version of the Fake Anti-Virus virus. It gets cleaned up with the usual tools. You do need to go into safe mode as it disables running any other program while in normal mode.A new twist however with a computer I had to go and revisit a week after I had

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-44003323390482674022009-04-29T13:11:00.002+10:002009-04-29T13:19:09.690+10:00

I ran into what is probably not a unique problem. I designed a CE database thinking I could export the structure as a SQL script as you do for SQL Server. I googled and didn't manage to find any exporters (I found a few that export from SQL Server to SQL Server Compact Edition). I ended up writing my own. The enclosed version is far from complete and will only export tables with standard fields

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-14174035267515424482009-04-09T11:39:00.002+10:002009-04-09T11:55:06.110+10:00

I had an XP computer that immediately logged off once the user logged onto the computer. I slaved the drive to my workshop computer and found that the userinit.exe was missing from c:\windows\system32. I copied the file over from c:\windows\system32\dllcache and the computer rebooted.The fact that this file just disappeared was interesting. I think that what happened was that their anti-virus

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-29279045890674092292009-03-28T03:37:00.002+11:002009-03-28T03:43:38.365+11:00

Microsoft with it's update cycle has released an update which checks to see if the version of Office on a computer is genuine. This is similar to what is happening with the operating system. A lot of customers will be surprised, especially those who have had the computer setup by a well meaning family member of friend who "borrowed" some office disks from their work.The biggest shock will be the

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-28274363770390212492008-11-12T18:37:00.002+11:002008-11-12T18:44:33.215+11:00

I have just finished writing a program that involves a dispatch program that starts and manages sub programs. The loop was using OpenProcess to find if the process was still alive. The OpenProcess function returns a handle. The handle is supposed to be zero if the process doesn't exist. However, I found that after the process died, it still returned a valid handle (and many of the functions using

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-62861790860599271822008-09-19T19:38:00.002+10:002008-09-19T21:15:55.966+10:00

I have a customer who wants me to do some programming in 'c'. It is like back to my childhood again and I am thoroughly enjoying. The job involves sockets data transfers and the best samples I can find are unfortunately on hacker sites. Their code is pretty ordinary and you get the sense that they are particularly young. Their coding style is pretty average but I suppose that if they were good

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-28058440361588008332008-09-02T16:27:00.002+10:002008-09-02T16:55:09.286+10:00

I have been using AVG to successfully remove this virus but the last machine I de-virused caused some problems. I started as per normal, I took an image of the hard drive using Acronis. While the hard drive was slaved to my workshop machine I removed the XP Antvirus directory under program files (You can do this when you are in safe mode but you still may have to kill some processes). Before they

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-72725733268789461082008-08-18T16:10:00.003+10:002008-08-25T10:00:29.647+10:00

I ended up reimaging the computer incase this was the problem. This actually fixed a lot of problems I had with the eee-PC. I don't know whether the original install was faulty or I got overexcited uninstalling things from the eee-pc.The main problem was the eee-pc freezing, even using the various speed ups I have found on the web.Anyway the modem still disconnected when plugged into the right

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-59344517914863181032008-08-18T16:08:00.003+10:002008-08-18T16:10:14.425+10:00

I just had anothe computer with the XP Antivirus 2008 (the customer actually bought it as well). After cleaning the obvious junk out of the computer, I still had a problem with the desktop icons and taskbar not appearing and when you tried to run explorer.exe the system tells you it can’t find it (even though it is still present). I found the following reg keyHKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-82283375635555614102008-08-09T07:12:00.002+10:002008-08-09T07:22:25.352+10:00

My eee PC arrived yesterday and I have been busy getting it ready. One thing I absolutely need is to get Bigpond's NextG wireless working on the computer. I downloaded the complete installation files. I tried to run the setup.exe but I kept on getting permission denied errors. I ran the HTML files directory and found that the problem was with IE. I dropped security to a minimum in IE but I still

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-83091589272005468502008-08-07T12:12:00.004+10:002008-08-07T12:18:12.337+10:00

This virus has been popping up a lot lately with a number of variants. Up until my last clean I had been pretty lucky and a combination of a few of my favourite bug killers has cleaned it up and any other nasties that have infested the computer.The latest one cleaned up okay but it trashed the network connection. The computer would connect for awhile and then give up the ghost.On the internet I

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-55244089087353475352008-08-07T11:59:00.002+10:002008-08-07T12:09:00.057+10:00

Sometimes the problems are simple. A customer called and could not connect to the internet. I started the usual by going to Control Panel->Network Connections. I noticed that the network connection was set to disabled. I reenabled the connection and it restarted. It's not often that you can solve a problem in 5 minutes. Although like most customers she got her money's worth with a few "while you

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-46664205287601571602008-07-28T22:35:00.005+10:002008-07-28T22:55:23.075+10:00

Now I have your attention! It surprised me when I started to get into doing SEO work for myself and others and looking at Addsense to make a few dollars (cents) how many sharks are out there. I use the IBP program to help me optimize sites and it is a good product. There is one option that allows you to submit your site to web sites automatically. Unfortunately, some of the websites are a bit

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-44572837709437545952008-07-14T17:03:00.000+10:002008-07-14T17:03:56.506+10:00

Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google RankingThere are a lot of words being written around how to achieve good Google results. I think that sometimes you need to go directly to the horses mouth and see what they say. This link is to the Official Google blog and is the first part of a discussion around ranking and is a reminder how you can be penalized for doing the wrong thing.However, the

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-50420333105488326032008-07-09T16:56:00.003+10:002008-07-09T17:58:16.219+10:00

Further to my fan boy posting from yesterday. I tried to restore a HP image back to a new computer using Acronis Universal restore. The restore just froze. I tried backing up to another computer. I actually moved the backup to another hard disk and installed this as a second hard drive on the computer. These all failed to complete the reinstall. Now HP put an extra partition onto their computer.

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-66613163488277038292008-07-08T15:14:00.003+10:002008-07-08T15:45:12.937+10:00

On the recommendation of another tech, I have been using this product. Any computer that comes back to the workshop gets imaged to a 500Gb drive on my workshop computer. This means that I can play with the computer to my hearts content knowing that I have an image to restore. With Acronis I put a CD into a drive and get it to backup over the network. No removing harddrives, no mucking around with

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-22823815162695523762008-07-04T21:29:00.003+10:002008-07-07T20:35:21.858+10:00

Creating a domain with keywords in it set the site to the top of page two of the Australian Google almost immediately. This shows how important the keyword selection is over all searches.The next part was to change the website. This was made more difficult by the fact that the web designer had used frames. I have heard that google gets confused by frames. As google had nicely indexed the site

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-15990146055567822062008-06-29T18:04:00.002+10:002008-07-03T15:23:05.172+10:00

If you have a computer with a corrupt registry that wont even start in safe mode then start the computer in safe mode with command prompt and type:C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exeThis will start the gui and enable you to restore.If you can't get even get into safe mode with command prompt, the easiest way to fix the computer is to slave the drive to another computer (You can do this using

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-42542496706603524802008-06-26T20:14:00.004+10:002008-06-27T22:38:52.758+10:00

I have just started my first optimizations for somebody elses website. My friends web-site was originally http://www.pci.cx. The cx indicates Christmas Island, which wasn't so hot for Australian searches. I think Christmas Island was where the spammers go not to be found.The domain name is one of the key areas to get right for search engine optimization. If a search term is in your domain you get

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-84386154015001608782008-06-11T21:34:00.002+10:002008-06-11T21:47:58.021+10:00

Configuring SambaSamba is Linux's file share program. The file to change the configuration is smb.conf in /etc/samba. So to edit the filecd /etc/sambasudo nano smb.confOnce the edit is done then restart sambasudo /etc/init.d/samba restartOne thing I have been trying to do is to setup a share within a windows domain that doesn't require a password. No luck as yet.

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-23013351564635719352008-05-23T21:56:00.004+10:002008-05-27T20:17:40.493+10:00

I'll get back to setting up the Linux Server later. I'm going to jump ahead and discuss the steps in placing images in the Tiki Wiki. In Tiki you can put normal html href commands to link to an external image but I think the better way is to upload the image into the wiki itself. This is a two step process.The first thing you need to do is to enable image galleries, this can be done by logging in

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-51494402376666619232008-05-18T14:40:00.005+10:002008-05-18T20:15:22.446+10:00

I teach twice a week at my children's school. One is too stage 2 children (7-9 year olds) and this is the basics around understanding emails, internet and using tools such as PowerPoint and movie maker. I add value because I have been using these tools for decades, where for a lot of teachers it is fairly new. Although, there are exceptions teachers as a rule are behind on technology. Where I

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-41066074364271427012008-04-14T22:05:00.003+10:002008-04-14T22:11:13.101+10:00

I was originally an ASP programmer but always lamented it was difficult to make well organized code in ASP, it always looked like a dog's breakfast. ASP.NET has come along now and it is difficult to do any ASP programming with the current Visual Studio tool set. We are supposed to use ASP.NET now but unless you are making a major client/server solution ASP.NET is overkill.Also I most clients I

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-7430470829211221032008-04-11T22:39:00.003+10:002008-04-11T22:50:19.109+10:00

I have a laptop that had gotten wet. The hard-drive was corrupted and also the DVD driver was not working and it couldn't boot from a USB drive (or the ports weren't working).I tried to install XP on a new drive by putting it into a USB harness on one of my desktops. I found that this didn't work (For some reason it works but it puts the boot information on the 'C' drive of my desktop not the USB

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-84959087065551439562008-01-26T21:22:00.000+11:002008-01-30T22:42:05.689+11:00

I had a customer today ring up about cheap laptops. They were $600 and she wanted to see if I could match the price. The computers were celeron M processors with 512Mb of memory running Vista Home Basic. Hardly the fastest machines, in fact running them would be downright unpleasant.I think that the minimum for a Vista laptop would be a T2*** cpu with at least 1Gb of memory. I'm writing this in

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-59368010665802946282008-01-21T11:16:00.000+11:002008-01-21T11:37:59.159+11:00

I've been playing with adwords. One of the advantages is that you can play with keywords and look at the popularity of certain search terms. Getting clicks is a bonus. One of the the most popular search terms was Linux and coincidentally, I have a customer inquiring about Linux as an operating system.I have been interesting in Linux for quite awhile. I'm still in two minds about the value of

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-89293665971023304122008-01-12T22:52:00.000+11:002008-01-15T16:02:52.606+11:00

The worst thing to happen is when a customer has a problem with a computer but you can't replicate the problem. Worse in this case was that I sold the computer. The customer in this case had a computer that stalled in startup for 15 minutes and then stalled for another 15 minutes during Windows startup. Unfortunately, during visit number 1, the computer worked perfectly for me. I restarted 3 or 4

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-12726826291848758632008-01-09T18:48:00.000+11:002008-01-09T19:42:21.623+11:00

I remember when Norton's Utilities were the best and we all bought them to make Dos and then Windows usable or save us from deleting files when we shouldn't. It is a shame now, how much trouble this software now causes.I had a laptop in to add some memory and to install two iPods. It really annoys me how companies can sell computers with not enough memory to run comfortably. This laptop had 256Mb

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-7035769622525571882008-01-05T11:58:00.000+11:002008-01-05T12:04:14.684+11:00

I just built a new computer and I couldn't the front headphone jacks to work. This was strange because I had the same complaint from a customer that I just sold a computer (I didn't build this one). I spent three hours updating drivers but to no avail. I ripped the cover off the computer to check that it was plugged in and it was. It was a solid plug so it couldn't have been plugged in wrong. I

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-53766572126655041532008-01-02T21:50:00.000+11:002008-01-02T21:54:25.117+11:00

I restarted a project and stayed away from the data designers and have found the experience a lot better. I managed to do in a day what took me weeks to get working using the designers. What finally made me give up when the project decided it couldn't find the sql ce file anymore.I am going back to hand rolling connections, commands and recordsets. I'm writing a lot more code but it works first

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-23716403588017642992007-12-31T09:20:00.000+11:002007-12-31T13:00:50.590+11:00

I've spent the last 27 years programming in various languages. I started with Fortran and moved on from their. Almost any language after a break I can pick up again pretty quickly. I don't know if it is just me but this isn't the case with .NET. I always seem to spend hours doing the simplest kind of stuff (Making a grid update a database). You have table-adaptors and datasets and grids and all

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-15267058694356762702007-12-27T10:55:00.000+11:002007-12-27T10:57:13.002+11:00

Next Windows Version after Vista. He He He

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-30951647157990436182007-12-24T23:03:00.001+11:002008-07-14T13:39:50.427+10:00

A customer has an XP computer that just switches itself off after running for a little while. My first thought was a dusty CPU cooler. The CPU protects itself by shutting the system down.I went to the site and the computer would not even switch on. I took the covers off the tower and disconnected the microswitch. I shorted the pins with a screwdriver to try and start the computer but no-go. I

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113728032665348509.post-69218449138394948262007-12-24T07:55:00.000+11:002007-12-24T08:04:13.926+11:00

I recently had a customer who had just gone through a divorce. She had gotten the computer but the husband had changed the password on the computer. We do have password changing tools but I got in through a common error people make. If you log into XP using safe mode the Administrator account appears. In most cases people don't password this account. Logging into this account enables you to

ComputerGuyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17729401545831315403noreply@blogger.com0