Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

Although it’s a widely popular idea that the Apple Macintosh is “secure,” there are vulnerabilities that could lead to intrusion. Most Mac users live in a world in which they believe their computers and laptops to be impenetrable and therefore not susceptible to outside viruses coming in. This is a common mistake that can be detrimental for the health of your computer. By simply keeping in mind a few easy tips, you can help safeguard the security of your computer and continue to live your blissful existence without fear of viruses.

Devise and memorize a good password

Passwords are, by nature, not the best way in which to protect our data, but they beat the alternative of outside USB devices and the like. Most users additionally cannot be bothered to devise a password that is any better than their initials followed by their date of birth. Not too hard to guess for someone who may have access to that information. About 3 in 5 users also have their password written down near their computer, if not on a Post-It on the monitor. On most home computers and networks, this is not a big issue if you have an environment in which there is limited access to the computer. However, in office environments, individual offices are accessed after hours by custodial personnel or maintenance personnel. Therefore, it is integral to come up with a good password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and a couple of characters that are neither. Use a helpful mnemonic and MEMORIZE it.

Bad password: jdoe1965 (username + birth year of user)

Good alternative: jAyD33!6t5 (mnemonic: “JD65” spelled with phonetic sounds and numeric substitutions)

Separate your account from the admin account

Most users we support in our environment want to be administrators, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do that. As soon as you unpack your Mac, the first account created turns into the master administrator. Use “Mac Admin” or some other name to fill out the form for the first account. Use a different password for your regular account and turn off the automatic log-in. Since you know the admin account info, use it anytime you’re asked to authenticate updates or installations. When you have serious maintenance or troubleshooting, you can also log into the admin account.

Do NOT enable services

The “sharing” tab in System Preferences can be the downfall of many Mac users, with most of these services listed as Personal File Sharing, Windows Sharing, Personal Web Sharing, etc. Most of these you will probably never need to enable, and never should. Most users additionally misunderstand what these services do once you turn them on, and do not realize they literally turn your desktop into a server. Many problems relating to Macs in office locations occur because someone enabled remote login and had a poor password; additionally, many hackers make their way into the admin account which made further penetration into the system all the more trivial.

This post was contributed by Megan Jones, who writes about the online college. She welcomes your feedback at Meg.Jones0310 at gmail.com

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I recently got an ECS G31T-M7 motherboard to replace a failed motherboard.

But when I try starting it, I just get a blank screen.

OK, it has an intel E1400 CPU, so I try a different CPU: same problem.

I change power supply: same problem.

I test both power supplies: they are ok.

Maybe the RAM… I replace the 1GB DDR2 with a stick of 512MB DDR2: same problem

I remove the RAM, and I get a series of beeps (motherboard is complaining about no RAM…

So I take it back to my supplier and ask for a refund.

They test it and it works!

Besides the embarrassment, I can’t see what went wrong.

Back at the office, I try again… with the same results!

Is my KVM switch failing? No (I try connecting directly to another monitor).

I try a third stick of 2GB DDR2 RAM… and now it works!

I look more carefully at the RAM I’m using, and I then realise the problem:

I was using some old DDR2-533Mhz RAM (which doesn’t work with this motherboard), while the newer 800Mhz RAM worked.

Another one of those “I’m an idiot” moments

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

This PC suddenly started to give an error message whenever an outlook email link was clicked:

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer

Hovering over the link showed it began with the word: “BLOCKED:”

After some quick research, it seemed the solution was to check outlooks security options:

tools -> options -> security -> Secure content -> Zone

I changed the Zone from “Restricted sites” to “Internet”

Now when I hover over the link, I don’t get the “BLOCKED:” prefix, but clicking on the link still gives the “cancelled due to restrictions” error.

Another poke around the internet gives this suggestion: reset the IE  settings to default… ie:

Tools -> internet options -> advanced -> Reset…

But this didn’t fix the problem either.

Next thing to try was:

Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> set program access and defaults -> at this point, “custom” is normally highlighted… click on “custom -> choose default web browser -> pick the specific web browser you want to use (probably Internet explorer) -> OK

I close IE7, and outlook, restart outlook, and links will now open IE7 when they are clicked on. Hooray!

The customer that had this problem asked if it was possible that a past technician had deliberately caused this problem.

Since I had no way of being sure, I told her so… It would be both a very low thing for a technician to do, and something that required some good knowledge to implement… knowledge that can be used for good instead of evil… but who knows, there are some strange people out there.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

For a long time now, my blogs RSS feed would generate a summary (the first 200 characters), rather than the full article/post.

I decided to change the feed, so that it would generate the entire article/post.

I also use feedburner to “redistribute” my feed (feedburner republishes blogs RSS feed, and adds extra utilities like email feeds, etc)

So I thought all I had to do was change wordpress thus: settings -> reading -> full text

But feedburner was still outputting a summary… not the full post.

At first it wasn’t obvious what was truncating the RSS feeds, but it soon became obvious it was feedburner.

I eventually found that all I had to do was change where feedburner was reading the RSS feed from… ie:

Within feedburner: click “Edit Feed Details”

then change “original feed” from something like:

http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/feed/

to something like:

http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/feed/rss2

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

Here is an interesting idea for those of you who have a popular blog that has a large readership.

Its now possible to publish your blog via amazon.com

What so special about this?

Well, it means people can pay to read your blog using the Amazon Kindle (the cool, yet somewhat expensive, gadget from Amazon, that lets you read e-books, without the glare of an LCD screen… its almost like reading normal paper, and it can also download books over the mobile phone network… so no fiddling with USB connections)

Every person who subscribes to your blog will pay a small amount for it, and you, as the writer, will get a certain percentage (I think it something like 35%)

How much money can this generate? Well, probably not much… So far, I’ve not had a single person subscribe to the Computer Aid blog via Kindle.

If you are interested in trying this out, go to:

https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes it seems that technology just conspires against us.

And often, it seems to happen the most, to those of us who have a good grasp of most things technical.

Most recently, I just noticed someone had replied to one of my posts.

The reply was in Russian, so I fire up google translate so that I could copy and paste the comment, translate, and then I could reply.

I then login to my website, write a reply, hit “submit comment”, and I get a page not found error.

Grrr

Ok, I’ve been getting quite a few “page not found” errors recently, and I figured it must be my hosting company (Netfirms). Why? In the past, when this happens, I navigate to netfirms.com, and I would get the same error, yet other websites would work just fine.

This time, I thought I’d also try viewing netfirms and computer-aid.com.au from a “different location”. Easily done using proxify.com

Proxify shows my website without any issues…

OK, back to by normal web browser, go to computer-aid.com.au and netfirms, and now they work.

Ooooh, I hate intermittent problems.

I hit a navigation button on my website, and I get a page not found error…

Hmmm

I try FTP, but that fails, as does ping and ssh. Its as if netfirms and all their hosted sites have suddenly disappeared…

Then I start to wonder: I’ve seen similar problems in the past.

It could be a DNS problem, or a hosting problem, or a transparent proxy problem with my ISP.

Just as I’m about to write some “please explain” emails to any possible culprits, everything starts working again…

sigh

I then go to my main blog page, and I get a “bad behaviour” error (my browser is behaving like a spam bot)… I don’t like where this is heading…

I re-check everything, and suddenly everything starts to work again… except:

I notice that only my home page is generating an error (everything else is fine)

Since the home page has some dynamic content (a short summary of my last 4 blog posts), I figure that maybe the script (runs once per day) that generates the main page, has gone haywire (it does that about once every 2 months).

OK, back to SSH, and I can’t login again.

Time for a 5 minute chocolate break (I love the Cote d’Or 70% & raspberries dark chocolate… yum… I really do need to exercise more… )

OK, back to SSH: now I can login (it must have been the chocolate )

yep, my index.html is only 243 bytes (it should be over 10,000 bytes).

I re-run the script to generate index.html, but the file is still 243 bytes.

I look at the contents of the file, and I see an error message about “cannot read RSS feed”

OK, I point my browser at http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/feed

Sure enough I get: Access is denied. Error processing resource

I also login to my wordpress admin panel, and I see my scheduled post for a few hours ago didn’t get posted. A “missed schedule” error under the failed post.

OK, I post it manually.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes, index.html

I disable the script and go back to a purely static home page.

Now, where was I before that?

Oh yes: failing RSS feed.

Thats possibly due to using feedburner, and the “possible” netfirms outage (which I can’t really confirm… I wish netfirms had an outage “bulletin” so I could at least confirm my problems are not some strange blocks on my end.

Anyway, I’ll give it a few hours and then see if it fixes itself.

Now, back to replying to the blog comment.

I write the blog comment (for the second time), and this time it works.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has these time warps… a two minute job take an hour or two to complete.

I sometimes wonder if its worth it.

And whats worse, I still don’t know where the problem is, nor if it will happen again.

Grrr

PS: I have since disabled “bad behavior” and my website seems more reliable… I’ll keep monitoring and see what happens.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve recently been moving to using both Google Contacts and Google Calendar as my main storage for appointments and ”address book” information.

For anyone contemplating this move, I must say my experience with these applications has been (for the most part) really positive. I really like the way google maps integrates with the contact addresses.

However, I did come accross something unusual recently.

I noticed that some of my contacts had an image next to them.

Mandy probably added the pictures, and they also appeared on my windows mobile “smart phone”.

OK, but, the main contact number for Computer Aid didn’t have a picture… Hey, I’ll just add the picture myself.

But when I get into google contacts, the entry for Computer Aid has no way of adding a picture… Strange.

I look through other contacts, and I see something even stranger: some contacts have an “Add a picture” link, while others don’t.

How do I add a picture to a contact, when there is no “add a picture” link?

Luckily, I have over 100 contacts (mostly Computer Aid customers), so I soon noticed a pattern:

I could only add pictures if the contact had an email eddress

Even a non-valid email address, meant that I could then add a picture.

The question then becomes: why?

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I have about 7000 emails (including sent emails) stored on gmail (in about 200 folders).

So I figure I’ll setup my smartphone to synchronise with gmail using imap. So that I don’t overload the phones tiny memory, I decide to download only the email headers (not the main email body).

This should let me see the structure of my email account, and only download the actual email if/when I need to.

It shouldn’t be hard, right?

Well,  my sent email folder has about 2500 emails, and in the process of downloading the headers, I get an “out of storage space” error.

A bit of research later shows I can actually move the downloaded headers to the 2Gb micro SD card in the phone. Of course you can’t do this without a registry hack… not something most users can do. Why does Microsoft insist on putting roadblocks in its operating systems?

Anyway, using the SD card will be a bit slower, but should prevent the out of storage memory problems.

While researching, I find something interesting: pocket outlook seems to store each email header in seperate file in the \windows\Messaging folder… all up, over 3000 before I got the error message.

Now thats really inefficient. A perfect way to slow down the whole phone: dump thousands of files into 1 folder. I can’t see why pocket outlook can’t use a database file like outlook, thunderbird, and any other decent email system out there.

Now that emails are being stored on the flash card, the process gets much further (take a few hours longer to download headers), until I get another error. This time, I see the “Program memory” has dropped from about 25Mb free to less than 1Mb, so its another memory problem.

After this, pocket outlook will refuse to download any more emails, so its a case of delete all the stored emails, and try again.

I eventually get tired of trying to work around pocket outlook, and decide to try a third party email solution.

I tried flexmail, and it seemed a bit better and faster (at least it stores the emails in a proper database), but it also ran out of main “program” memory, despite flexmail (and the emails it synchronises with the server) being installed on the storage card.

However, as I download more email headers, flexmail slows more and more. I suspect its due to the flash card being slow.

But the nice thing about flexmail, is that it can be tailored.

So now the only path left to me it to trim down the number of emails I download. So I set flexmail to only download the last 60 days.

I clear all the email headers from the sent folder, and then configure only that folder, so that it downloads just the last 60 days… and then flexmail works beautifully.

Since Pocket outlook has similar functionality, I set it up to do the same thing, and then ditch flexmail… why?

Well, certain email shortcut buttons on the phone will start pocket outlook, even while flexmail is the default email program. So I go back to using whatever came with the phone, even if its not “efficient”, its a hell of a lot more convenient.

I cant help feeling like i’m in the old days of MSDOS, where you could only run programs in 640Kb, and to use any more memory, you needed to do all sorts of tricks, and even then you couldn’t be sure any application would work correctly in the expanded memory…

Many smartphone users are not technical, and they don’t care about the difference between internal 64Mb ram and a flash card… they just want it to work.

I havent tried any of the other smartphones out there (iphone, android, webos), so I hope they handle things better.

I’d say an average user won’t be able to use many of the wm6 features (particularly if they have a lot of emails), without hitting the “limits” of the wm6 architecture.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

A few days ago I visited a client because they were about to begin installation of a new industry specific stock control and ordering database system onto their computer.

They wanted to replace their existing system with new hardware and in the process, upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional, as the new software required Professional.

The client wanted to retain all customisations and installed programs etc but on new hardware with the different XP version.

This is usually very straight forward…….however…

I could in-place upgrade from home to home onto the new machine when migrating the license but cannot in-place upgrade to professional, even after going from XP home to XP home on the new hardware without entering Windows to begin the upgrade. (ie. cold boot)

While technically possible, according to Microsoft documentation, I could not follow through. In order to initiate the upgrade to Professional I would have to do it from within the windows environment as opposed to cold booting from the XP Pro Retail install CD.

During the install where the time estimate was at 34 minutes, I would get blue screen messages that differed on each attempt.

A clean install of XP Professional worked fine along with a variety of other program installs, but the In-Place Upgrade would not complete.

This was not a faulty hardware issue or a SATA driver issue :-/

A clean install with manual transfer of documents and settings is what the customer ended up with, an acceptable compromise I guess.

The Computer Whisperer

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

Microsoft just has a certain way with words.

First it was windows 2000: based on NT Technology.

Since NT stands for “new technology”, they were actually saying: based on new technology technology.

Well, here is another example:

Vista laptop with a mucked-up (or forgotten) password.

Easily cleared to a blank password… But when I click to login as the user, I get:

The user profile service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

Should someone tell microsoft that using the word “service” as part of the name of a service is not a good idea… Nah, they probably won’t listen anyway.

So, to fix this corrupted user profile service service :

• F8 to start in safe mode
• login as Administrator
• At this point, you can try a system resore… or:
• run regedit
• go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
• make a backup copy of all the profiles
• Make sure the user profile doesn’t end in “.bad” or “.bak”. Rename if required.
• Make sure the RefCount value is 0 (zero). Rename if required.
• Make sure the State value is 0 (zero). Rename if required.
• close regedit and start normally

And after all that, to top it all off, the CD drive wasn’t detected by Vista… deleting upperfilters and lowerfilters quickly fixed that.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

A customer purchased a HP M3027 multi-function printer (model CB416A) for his home office.

I was called, as he was having some problems getting the scanner to work.

I figured: how hard can it be? (famous last words…)

When I take a look, I can see that the printing part is setup (via usb)… fine… most people use usb.

I go to install the scanner software (the main reason this printer was purchased), and I get asked for the IP address of the printer…

But… its not using ethernet… its doesn’t have a meaningful IP address… why am I being asked for an IP address?

And I can’t hit next until I give it a valid IP address (ie the PC must detect a M3027 printer at that IP address).

Sorry HP, but to my mind, this is a major failure.

If you put a usb port on a multi-function printer, then you need to have full support for it.

I call HP, and they confirm that the scanner component cannot work over USB… the scanner must be on ethernet.

Since the customer only has 1 ethernet connection in his office, I provide a switch/router, so that the printer can also join in on the ethernet fun.

After that, I re-install the printer driver, and setup the scanner software… It installs without a hitch, but asks some unusual questions (like the username and password for the windows account on the PC… I can see some people being suspicious about this part, and not wanting to give out their PC details, when the software doesn’t explain why it wants these details…).

Once the software is installed, I do what anybody else would do: I go to run the scanner software… Except I can’t find it!

I find the software from the older scanner, but nothing that works for the M3027

Whats going on here?

After some head scratching, I realise that this scanner seems to have everything backwards:

You use the printer front panel to scan the documents, and also indicate the PC (and folder) where you want the scans to go.

Then it dawns on me: its not backwards… it actually makes sense (particularly in an office environment with more than 2 or 3 people).

Of course its overkill for my customer (a 1 person office)

If you want to scan a document, then you walk up to the scanner, put the document(s) into the scanner, and since you are already at the scanner, you might as well use the scanners touch screen to do the scanning.

Once you finish scanning, you take your documents back to your desk, and you auto-magically find the scanned documents sitting in the scanner folder on your PC… its a nice idea.

So, its becoming obvious that some salesman shouldn’t have sold this printer to a “sole trader” business.

Anyway, after this I find another problem:

I scan a document, but a zero (0) byte file (ie empty file) appears in the PCs scanner folder… after 10 minutes of waiting, its obvious that the document isn’t going to arrive…. but the scanner seemed to go through the motions of scanning the document.

So it looks like the document is “stuck” in transit.

Another call to HP, results in having to download a firmware update.

Of course the firmware executable doesn’t work (maybe its not vista compatible…).

So I need to download the firmware binary, install filezilla, and FTP the firmware file to the printer.

After about 20 minutes of “thinking”, the printer is ready to scan, using its new firmware.

Of course the original scanner folder on the PC no longer works, so I now need to re-install the scanner software on the PC, and create a scanner folder with a different name (because the original name is being used)… sigh…

Now, at last,  the scanning works well !

There is NO WAY the customer would have had the technical knowledge to do all this work, and I’m sure it will have taken days of “telephone tech support”, to get everything working without my help.

So the bottom line is: If you want to buy this type of printer, make sure you have access to an IT “expert” to set it up.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I recently noticed on some computers (it seems to affect both Vista and XP), that sometimes one or more folders will appear straight under C:, and have a random name… something like:

c:\1ad29fe78456acc5b26351428709

The only pattern I can see is:

there are between 18 and 28 characters in the folder name, the name is only made of hex characters (ie numbers 0 to 9, and the letters a,b,c,d,e,f).

Looking closely at the contents, and I can see that the files seem to belong to a microsoft update that most likely crashed before the folder structure could be cleaned up (I still don’t understand why subsequent updates cannot tidy up after prior failed ones… how hard can it be?).

Anyway, if you notice that a strange folder name with 18 to 28 characters, that has been “hanging around” for a few weeks, then its probably safe to delete it.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

Mike Hansell asked me to test a utility he is developing.

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but I liked the concept of DJF (delete junk files).

It sounds like it does a similar job to something I’m currently using: emptemp2 (empty temp folders).

Here is a screenshot of DJF:

I ran it on an XP virtual machine I (rarely) use for testing potentially unstable software. Since I don’t use this PC much, I didn’t expect DJF to find much, but it managed to free up over 900Mb. On a high-usage PC, this could be even better (and you might get a performance boost as well, particularly if you do a defragment after running DJF).

Keep an eye out for DJF, as it will become available via computer-aid.com.au in the near future.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

PC with Vista, and customer can no longer click on a link in outlook.

Instead, a window pops up, saying: General failure. The URL was: {the url you want to see.html} Application not found.

I ask: “when did this start happening?”, and the customer admits he had installed google chrome, but didn’t understand what it did, so he “removed it” (intending to go back to IE7).

I wan’t going to ask the details on how he removed it, as it sound like a simple fix.

A quick looks around the net show an easy fix for XP, but all sorts of registry changes, if you are using vista and IE7.

I found a simpler solution, that also works with Vista:

• Within IE7, go tools -> internet options (or within control panel: internet options)
• Advanced -> reset internet explorer settings -> reset -> reset

Please note that this will disable toolbars, reset cookies, reset home pages, search providers (most people won’t notice if this happens anyway).

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

This laptop would (at seemingly random times), generate a blue screen (BSOD), with the error: Stop 0×0000008E

Customer tells me that a few days ago, norton found something bad, and removed it.

So I figure: I’ll install MBAM, and do a scan.

While Mbam is scanning, I check whats auto-starting, and disable anything that doesn’t need to start.

Part-way through that, I get the BSOD 0×0000008e

I decide to check for hardware issues (laptop is used in a footy club, so its probably not treated nicely at times). Ram test finds no problem, but the CPU (core2) seems quite warm at 48c, but nothing too bad. The hard drive is not low on space.

Back into windows, I restart mbam, while I check the net for error 0c0000008e, after about a minute of browsing, I get another BSOD.

I try 2 more times, but mbam just cannot complete the scan.

But I do manage to find out that the BSOD could be caused by a rootkit.

So I boot from my CD (UBCD4Win), start superantispyware, run an update, then scan the PC.

Sure enough, it finds and removes:

• Rootkit.Aagent/Ggen-Loader
• Rootkit.Agent/Gen-SoftV
• Trojan.UnknownOrigin

After that, I restart into windows XP, and mbam finds about 180 infected components (mostly registry entries, but also a handful of infected files).

Once the laptop is totally clean, I remove norton antivirus 2005 (!), install antivir and windows defender (ie some modern protection), and then tell the customer of the possible consequences, if she doesn’t change the internet banking password ASAP.

I started wondering why an infection would cause a BSOD. It could be bad programming, but it might also be deliberate. Why?

It could be, that if the infection detects anything that seems like an attempt to either remove it, scan for it, or even search the net for anything related to anti-malware, then it generates a BSOD, in the hope of distracting the PC user.

It certainly had me guessing for a while.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been investigating the possibilities of integrating most of my office activities by using a smartphone.

Until now, I’ve been using Palm PDA’s so I didn’t want to go to windows mobile in a big way, only to find that I might regret it. So I decided to start “small”

By small, I meant cheap, which meant I got an ipaq H6365 with pocket PC 2003 (big, heavy, but I can see if its suitable)

I managed to setup gmail, google calendar and google contacts, import data from the palm, and then active sync to the ipaq.

It would work for a few days, and then I started getting error 0×80004005 during an active sync (and no contact/calendar items would get updated)

I’m syncing about 15 appointments and about 475 contacts.

I’d disable the contact syncing, and the calendar would work fine. I then re-enable contacts and 0×80004005 happens again (and only 100 contacts will get transferred).

I disable contacts again,

In google contacts, i export all the contacts in google csv format (note: group associations will be lost), delete all the google contacts, import contacts from the csv file, enable contact syncing on the ipaq, and everything is fine again.

For a few days, then it all happens again.

It seems like an obvious bug with google contacts and/or their sync software.

Sure, I really shouldn’t expect much from a beta application, but I’d like it to work better

Then I find the real problem: seems that google mobile sync is only tested to work with windows mobile 5 & 6 (not pocket pc 2003 and earlier).

Luckily, I’m happy enough with using a windows mobile device, that I’ll be looking at getting a more modern HTC smartphone… maybe the original HTC Touch.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I had setup internet access on a laptop using a USB 3G modem via Virgin

Then I setup a gmail account and enabled pop3 access so I could download emails to windows mail (Vista).

I setup windows mail with the  google pop3 and SMTP names (like I’ve done many times before).

But this time, I seem to receive emails, but sending emails gives error 0×800CCC0B

I double check everything, but still no go.

No help on the internet, except for the obvious stuff like check the SSL settings, etc etc.

There is only one explanation I can think of: Virgin are blocking port 465.

So I take the quick and easy way out: I use the virgin SMTP server and port.

Sometimes its just not worth wasting much time making something work “just right”

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

After replacing a faulty ADSL modem, the main PC worked fine, but the wireless laptop would either lose its connection to the internet, or websites would be very very slow to load.

A quick way to test this was to ping google.com.au.

Sometimes ping would say something like “connection unavailable” or it would timeout, or give return times of over 2000 ms.

I know ping return times are normally between 150 ms and 400 ms, so something is wrong.

The wireless signal strength is excellent.

The laptop is a fairly new core2duo, and it hasn’t had these problems in the past.

As I’m taking to the owner, I mention that Norton might be interfering somehow… its expired, so I’ll probably need to remove it.

He says that Norton shouldn’t be running. He had a mate tell him Nod32 offered the best protection. So this friend installed nod32, but couldn’t remove norton…

Ahhh, I’ve been here before… back in the days before dual-core CPUs.

So, it looks like running 2 antivirus programs doesn’t appear to slow down a multi-core CPU much, but it does drive the internet connection haywire.

Something to remember for “next time”.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

An Acer laptop got an infection that prevented it from connecting to the home wifi access point.

I cleaned up the infection… the laptop was very slow, even for Vista, given that it had 1Gb RAM.

After a while, I noticed that it would occasionally (every few hours) freeze, or produce a BSOD, with the error: Stop 0×00008086

I try a RAM test (all ok), HDD test (all ok).

I also download all the latest drivers via windows update, but that doesn’t help either.

There is not much info on the net about this error, so after a futile couple of hours trying fix it, I decide to give up and allow the customer to keep using it for as long as she can, and eventually get a new one if deemed necessary.

I hate giving up on problems, but in some cases it becomes obvious very quickly, that there is no point in trying to to find a solution, if its either unlikely to exist, or its going to take many hours to find.

Originally published at Computer Help. Please leave any comments there.

I find I spend a lot of time “on the road”. Its the nature of a “to your door” computer service.

As soon as Computer Aid grew to having more than 1 person running the business, it became obvious that communication would be an important part of making sure everything ran like clockwork.

So for the past 3 years, me and my other half, have struggled with SMS, MYOB, and an awkward way of synchronising calendar and contacts between 2 Palm devices and MYOB…

Except for MYOB, I’ve found switching to a smart phone and google applications was a great solution.

In my case, I’m going with a windows mobile smartphone, but this could work just as well with the iphone, a blackberry, or an Android phone.

The “glue” that hold all this together is Google. I find it amazing that I can enter an appointment on google calendar, and if its a new customer, enter the details on google contacts… then the information quickly finds its way to any smart phone that I’ve setup for this.

On top of that, I can also check my google emails without needing to get to to office to read them.

And of course telephone and SMS are all well integrated, so I just need to lookup a contact, click on the phone number, and I’m dialling them. Quick and easy.

I would never have thought I could do all that, for free, without implementing an awkward outlook server system.

The smartphone also offers many other “features” that I probably won’t use (camera, mp3 player, messenger client, video player, games, spreadsheets, etc

Now I just need to get used to the “quirks” of windows mobile…