Category: My Computer

Walked into the office this morning. Fired up the PC. Tore off calendar pages while waiting for the boot sequence. Turned around to sign in …

Black screen.

Blaaaaaaaack screen.

Checked. Hey, look, I can just barely see the window being painted on the LCD of the notebook. It just isn’t backlit.

Hmmmm. Yeah, heard that one before. Back in November. Indeed, heard it just in January. And had it resolved in January. In freakin’ January.

I’m working, obviously, thanks to a monitor I swiped from an unoccupied cubicle. The rest of the notebook works, just not the backlighting.

I am not, I do not think, rough on my notebook. It does get transported every day in my briefcase, which rides in the trunk of my car in its padded sleeve. If the way I’m treating the machine leads to this problem, I do not think it is my problem, to be perfectly honest. This particular A31 has been a regular pain. Rrg.

And I so do not want to have to shift over to an alternative. Really, truly, ooly.

Lots of news of late regarding Firefox and popups designed to show up in that browser. And here’s a summary of various means of combatting that, for my own reference should I start actually seeing that problem.

Since I was on a phonecon this morning, even as I watched the cable modem blink its lonely, clueless, disconnected way, Margie ran off to the Comcast Office. She walked in, said it was broken, and they gave her a new one.

Different model this time, though. Motorola SURFboard SB5120. I have no idea if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Modem didn’t seem to work at first. All the lights came up fine, except the PC light. Played with normal vs. cross-over cables, played with power cycles, etc. No change.

Okay. Call Comcast to register the modem, just in case. Wait on hold for several minutes. Give the nice lady the modem MAC address. Plug stuff back in, waiting for it to recognize …

[Grotesquely painful long story cut short.]

I suspect it is a line problem. Same cycle of blinking lights. Rrg.

Margie eventually called up. Dude at Comcast walked her — again — through the same three pages of “diagnostic tests” they have scripted, complete with my bringing over my notebook to plug directly in (and then being told not to).

She eventually mentioned that there was still a service call scheduled at the house tomorrow morning. At which point, Dude informed her that, no, it was cancelled when I called to register the new modem (which registration they didn’t actually confirm, and which cancellation was not at all mentioned when I talked with Dudette this morning).

Margie wrangled them into a service call time that was relatively convenient, again tomorrow, and hung up.

So Margie is Disconnected in Denver. I’m WiFied in at DIA (“DEN is Ten!”), waiting for my flight. Which is mildly ironic.

On the other hand, I had no problems connecting to the AT&T Wireless signal here this time, and it will bill directly to my company cell phone, and since I made use of the time to connect into the company mail …

Got home last night from my last official Search Committee meeting (huzzah!) to find Margie cursing softly and fooling around with the cable modem …

After a half hour or more with the line not coming back up, she called Comcast. Dude on the phone called up our records, and suggested it was either a bad modem or a line problem (as opposed to Something Evil We’re Doing). Margie set up a cable man appointment for Wednesday — but, meantime, has gotten a location (Arapahoe and Revere) where we can exchange our current modem, to see if that does any good.

I’ve done some research myself, but need to do more, on a replacement. My primary reluctance in doing so, aside from dropping $150 for a cable gateway, is that I hate to give Comcast another excuse to say it’s not their fault.

More as it develops …

Rrg. Cable modem is down. Again. (This will be posted after we’re back up.)

Last time we called Comcast, they weren’t able to see any system problems. And it’s intermittent enough that the damn thing doesn’t fail long enough for a truck to roll here and see anything (“Sorry, can’t find any problem now, that’ll be $50 service fee). And the TV side of the service seems just fine …

Which really makes me think that it’s the craptacular modem they gave us, the Teryon TJ-715X. Once things are back up, I’ll do a little research, and might make an “emergency” test acquisition this afternoon of another cable modem, to see if that resolves it.

Allow me to point out how frelling annoying this is.

UPDATE: And again with the downage.

Called Comcast. Spoke with “Josh.” Had me unplug the modem, unplug the Netgear wireless router we have atop it. Had me disconnect the cable itself from the modem, and short out the center coax pin to the side. Reset things from the Mother Ship. Had me plug all back in.

After a minute or two of slowly blinking cable light, it’s back up.

Now, his diagnosis:

1. The modem is too close to static-causing equipment, in this case, the TV (which causes static even when turned off, as a rub of the fingers across the screen will demonstrate). When he was able to get into the modem to look at its status, it showed a “transmit power” of 48.7. The “good” number is 30. At 55, the modem shuts down.

   So his solution is, find somewhere to put the modem further away from the equipment.

   Riiiight.

2. Regarding replacing the modem, he said it was certainly our prerogative. He suggested that most cable modems are pretty much the same (all built in the same factory in Singapore sort of thing). He did suggest that a cable gateway (with the wireless hub built in) might be more stable than a two-box solution.

Rrg.

So Margie got all of City of Heroes and its related patches in and …

… got all sorts of errors about how her video card didn’t support functions X, Y, and Z, meaning she was S, O, and L.

Downloaded the latest driver, which took care of Y and Z (and thus O and L), but didn’t do much for X (and thus S).

Hrm.

So she called me, and I ducked over to Best Buy, the Insidiously Convenient Tech Store Near the Office.

Now, I’ve intentionally stayed away from the whole video card thing, which tends to be focused on gaming fanatics who spend zillions of dollars to get stuff with the highest frame-rate-pixel-DDR-mega-buffer-socket bits and argue over it with a ferocious take-no-prisoners passion usually reserved for theologians and talk show pundits.

Eek.

So I really haven’t dealt with anything having to do with video cards since it was my job to crack open cases at the office and put in dual-head video for the CAD stations. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the video card aisle.

That I approached it “backwards” and started with the expensive $350-500 cards didn’t allay my fears.

I’d picked up a CoH box, so I had the minimum and recommended video configurations. And, of course, I didn’t see any thing that exactly matched.

And so I was reduced to seeking help from one of the passing BB Guys, who, frankly, didn’t seem to know a huge amount more than I did (though he knew enough to point out that, yes, one of the cards on the list was up on the shelf).

And then came the question — did Margie’s Sony Vaio computer have an AGP socket? Or did I need a PCI card?

Well … crap.

(Ponder, ponder, ponder.)

Ended up going with a different card than BB Dude recommended — a PNY nVidia GeForce FX5700LE. I went with AGP because, if the Vaio had it, then I wanted to use that, rather than the PCI. And I could always return it, right?

Got back to the office. First off — what Vaio model do we have. Hrm. No reference to it in the blog. Rats. …

… and then I found a reference to the reference page for the Vaio at Sony’s site — for our model: PCV-RX360DS. Where, in turn, I found a completely worthless Users Guide … and some marketing info that shows … yes … an AGP slot!

(And, yes, though a PIII/866 is close to the minimum specs for CoH, it’s still a scosh above that, and the 512Mb RAM should help … and the GeForce FX5700LE is above the recommended spec just a scosh.

Now, as long as it’s the right kind of AGP slot, I should be relatively home free. (He said, with great optimism.) Though, to be sure, the minimum specs include using (!) a 56k modem. Gads. It looks like it should be, though — found one ref to this Vaio having a 4X AGP slot, and the FX5700LE is referred to as being 4X/8X.

Hmmm. Looks like someone has gone through this (or close enough), but didn’t leave much info. This thread on the other hand seems to be full of people who seem quite certain of what the correct course is when dealing with going from onboard video to a video card … not all of which courses are the same. The Sony site seems to indicate for my model that it should autodetect the video card going into the AGP card, which would be the ideal, for sure …

We shall see. We’re having dinner out so we can go a Kindergarten orientation at Katherine’s pre-school tonight, so I’ll have to screw around with this after we get home. Crossing fingers …

(Now I remember again why I’ve usually avoided the whole video card thing …)

UPDATE: And the card is pretty, and has heat sinks a-plenty, and a fan. On the bright side, this should also resolve a problem that Margie was having with another game (SimRestaurant or something like that) she got a while back. Not that she’ll ever want to play another game …

Margie’s hard drive at home is divided between C: and D:. Everything, of course, is installed on C:, and copying over a 900Mb CoH installation Zip file probably didn’t help things any. So the question came up of how to easily shift things between C: and D: without un/reinstalling various applications (bleah).

The three ideas (here described for WinXP Pro) came to mind. Best to have all apps closed during this:

1. Do a Disk Cleanup. This is in the Start menu under Accessories / System Tools / Disk Cleanup. If there’s old installation files, unused temp files, etc., lurking around out there, this is the place to easily clean them up. Doing a defrag afterwards wouldn’t be out of place. (Margie had already done this.)
2. Move the swap file over. Under Control Panel / System / Advanced / (Performance) Settings / Advanced / (Virtual Memory) Change. Use this screen to add a paging space on D: and eliminate or minimize the paging space on C:. There may be restarts involved, or multiple iterations to do so (hard to tell, since it turned out that this had already been done on her machine during a previous space crunch; I took advantage to add a large custom size to support upcoming CoH play). (Official MS KB article here.)

3. Move My Documents over to another drive. Right-click My Documents (off the desktop or the Start menu), then choose Properties / Target. That will show you the current target folder set for your account as the My Documents folder. Click Move …, then choose where you want it to be (e.g., in D:\, creating a new folder called My Documents there). Accept, and Windows will ask if you want to move the contents over there, too. Yup, you probably do. (More info here and here.)

FYI.

In theory, you could some (or, more easily, all) the applications under C:\Program Files to D:\ by doing the move and then tweaking the registry, but, damn, that sounds like asking for trouble.

I like Firefox a lot, but I’ll be the first to admit that some FF zealots sound a lot like — well, Mac zealots, or sports team zealots, or TV show zealots, or zealots of any stripe that probably have one or more serious points in their favor but who go so far overboard that you almost begin to discount everything they say.

On the other hand, Micro$oft seems to have awakened and smelled the coffee, realizing that FF has been getting an inordinate amount of press of late, not to mention a small but increased share of The Browser Market Which Must Be Micro$oft’s (And, Dammit, I Thought We Had It Locked Up Already!). Which is why M$ is trotting out their standard tactic: the FUD Factor, whose tactics (first pioneered by IBM) include pre-pre-pre-announcing stuff way, way, way in advance so as to (a) get some free publicity, and (b) cast doubt on the long-term compatability or viability of a competitor.

First, some basics: we?re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.

Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. We heard a clear message: “Yes, XP SP2 makes the situation better. We want more, sooner. We want security on top of the compatibility and extensibility IE gives us, and we want it on XP. Microsoft, show us your commitment.”

I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.”

Why are we talking about it today? Because our customers and partners have asked us, with increasing urgency, what our plans are. We want to convey our intentions to our customers and partners clearly and in a timely way.

… before our customers decide that some other browser might be more to their liking.

And when is this new star in the browser firmament to arrive?

I’ve gotten questions about the ship date. Yes, we have a date in mind. I’ll talk about the date after we get feedback from customers and partners. We’re going to release a beta and listen, then refresh the beta and listen some more. We’ll ship when the product is ready.

In other words, it may be a long time, and several betas, away, probably out in 2006 or further. But we’ll continue to tout it as the new coming of Micro$oft, and as a present solution to a problem that we opened up by giving the browser so many hooks into the OS to begin with.

Of course, that time lag also gives them time to continue to try and get folks to convert over to XP SP2, which has been a long, slow grind because of various compatibility issues.

M$ had previously said it wouldn’t ship a new version of IE until the new version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) shipped. The reversal — and the reversal of ties between the OS and the browser (at least just a smidge) shows that M$ is facing a lot of pressure, reflected in some degree by the number of folks trying FF (and Opera, and other browsers). As CNet puts it:

Analysts attributed Microsoft’s change of heart to the progress of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser, which has made incremental but steady market share gains against IE in recent months. In a survey conducted late last year, Firefox nudged IE below the 90 percent mark for the first time since the height of the browser wars in the 1990s.

“I think it’s a response to both the delay of Longhorn and the challenge of Firefox,” said NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin, who added that Firefox was probably the sharper spur. “Were there no Firefox, they’d have more leeway to sit on it until Longhorn.”

Which, whether you like Firefox or not, is probably a good thing.

(via J-Walk and Adot)

When you go to the Start menu in XP, it’s very diligent about popping up the submenus when you just run a mouse over them. Which, for me, often meant that a submenu would pop up and obscure the menu item I was looking for, making me click on something else or wait for it to subside or do some other action to get rid of.

Now there’s an answer:

1. Right-click on the Start button. Choose Properties. Choose the Start Menu tab, and Customize, then choose the Advanced tab.
2. Turn off the Start menu setting “Open submenus when I pause on them with my mouse.”

3. Click OK.

It does mean you’ll need to click on Start menu entries to get them to open up, but that’s hardly unusual behavior, and a lot less likely (for me, at least) to end up with delays and the wrong things getting opened. Woo-hoo!

A lot of folks have been touting the New, Improved Picasa 2 from Google, a free photo organizing and editing tool. I decided to give it another look.

Short story short, the general look and feel of the system is very slick. While the use of a database to track picture changes (vs making duplicate files) is interesting (and possibly worrisome, if you lose the db), the system’s fast, and it’s constantly on the lookout for new pictures to add on the hard drive. It is, in essense, a no-brainer to maintain.

As with v1, though, the non-starter for me is that the ap insists on organizing the photos for itself. I already have a HD organization for my photos, thank you, and while I wouldn’t mind Picasa offering its various views and timelines and albums as a supplement to that organization, instead it replaces it (in the whizbang interface) with a flat set of folders, etc.

So I have the My Pictures folder, and under that a “Home Photos” folder (for digital camera stuff), then a monthly folder (“2004-11”), then under that I keep the raw photos, plus a “work” folder for the ones I decide to edit and publish.

As far as Picasa is concerned, though, there’s no hierarchy. Each folder is coequal with one another. And if I have several monthly folders with “work” folders underneath them, then I end up with several “work” folders showing up in Picasa with no indication of what they represent.

Now, that all said, I can see someone like my parents using Picasa for their photo organization. They don’t have much of an existing infrastructure, and could use Picasa in the way that it’s designed. For me, I’d love to make use of its functionality (e-mailing, CD albums, web publishing — all stuff that other programs do, but Picasa looks to do very slickly), but I really don’t want to re-organize my entire photo collection just to do so.

Ah, well. I guess I’ll stick with Windows Explorer and Paint Shop Pro. Your Mileage May Vary.

Two interesting Firefox bits:

1. “Secrets of Firefox 1.0” shows how to look under the “about:config” hood and tweak stuff. Not for the faint of heart, but some good stuff they suggest looking at and fixing (including a nasty memory leak).
2. Getting the Google pagerank in Firefox. Nice.

(via Jottings and Jottings)

The Firefox upgrade (1.0PR to 1.0) was relatively painless, too.

A few UI hiccoughs, though, largely due to my extensive Extensioning of the UI. I know that’s something that Margie finds irksome — the official Firefox party line is that it’s better to have an open community wherein competition for implementation of various features (and the ability of users to decide what features they want to have, and whose) creates the most robust environment. That’s true so far as it goes, but I can also see the point of those who don’t want to have to go searching around for this kind of stuff.

Despite the supposed enhancements to tabbed browsing in 1.0 over previous versions, I find my preferred default — everything opens in a new tab in the same window, dammit, unless I explicitly tell it otherwise — unavailable. I had to reinstall Tabbrowser Preferences, which has a new-and-improved version anyway.

The one thing I’ve lost in the upgrade is my beloved Flowing Tabs, which is not (yet?) 1.0-compatible. Flowing Tabs wraps additional tabs onto multiple tab lines, rather than just squeezing them smaller and smaller. I know I can get around that by opening up additional windows, but it’s a pain.

But … wait … here’s a “repackaged” version on one of the extension mirrors that says it will work in up to 1.1. Which does indeed seem to work, but with breaks TBP’s open Bookmarks Toolbar Folder in a New Tab setting, which is annoying, but only mildly so. So far.

The old Print extension I was using no longer works, so I installed Print It instead (which had stopped working a while back for me, but now works again). This provides context menu print commands.

Aside from all that, so far, so good …

Finally got around to downloading and installing (during a conference call) Thunderbird 1.0. Quick, painless install. Had two extensions (Quote Colors and Buttons!) I had to manually upgrade, but that was pretty trivial.

The only immediately visible change of significance between T’bird 0.8 (what I was on) and 1.0 is that you can do grouped sorts (like in Outlook 2003). That’s nice.

Once I run it for a while and it proves stable, I’ll upgrade Margie’s home machine.

I discovered, in so doing, that MozBackup has been discontinued. This was a clever little widget to do intelligently named zip files of the profile directories for Thunderbird and Firefox. Given the snarkiness of the comments about its demise (“Well, if folks are having problems with profiles being corrupted, they shouldn’t be relying on a backup and restore tool, they should file a bug report!” and “Well, *I* don’t have a problem digging down to the profile directory and making a manual backup, so I don’t see why someone would need a program that does it nicely and neatly for you!”), I can understand why the author has dropped the app, but while the process can be fairly simply done manually, it was a nice tool, and I regret seeing someone driven away due to ivory tower myopia.

UPDATE: As always, I’m on the leading edge of innovation! Not!

I’ve shifted finally back over to the returned, repaired ThinkPad A31p. All’s well so far, and I managed to get by with (a) doing a mass copy of the Documents and Settings folder from the T40, and (b) not doing any big software upgrades on the T40 during this last stint.

Which now means that I can finally upgrade my Thunderbird and Firefox installations, rip the most recent CDs I got for Christmas, etc. Huzzah!

With luck, this will be the last time I need to do anything like this again for quite some time. Which deserves another huzzah!

This year has been remarkably free from the usual tech support calls on my parents’ and in-laws’ computers. Not sure why — no specific complaints, perhaps. I did run through an update of AdAware and Spybot S&D on the Ks’ machine, but haven’t installed Spyware Blaster yet. Should probably do the same with the ‘rents’ computer as well, if I get back back over there for any length of time this trip.

Which was all called to mind by this article:

Went home for the holidays this week, and of course, the annual fix-Mom’s-computer event. This year things on my mother-in-law’s Windows 98 PC were especially bad; it could’ve been used as a software showcase of the latest and greatest in malware.

For future reference, here’s a laundry list of steps I took to get Mom’s computer working and secured from evil software.

It’s a pretty reasonable list. I might argue over some of the specifics (my last few experiences with ZoneAlarm on an XP machine were not pretty), but it’s a good conceptual laundry list, at least, to look over.

I did like this anecdote in the AdAware section:

True story: my mother-in-law heard a Barenaked Ladies song on the radio that she liked, so she Googled “bare naked ladies.” …

Clicking, and massive malware infection, ensue. (It’s rather ironic that both the real-life and virtual sex industries lead to massive infections …)

(via J-Walk)