Recently in Computers Category

Yesterday I received an email from a friend asking if I could play an mp3 that his computer had disabled. It was Rex Hunt going off at a cricket match and it played perfectly. I zipped it up and returned it by email to my friend.

Later, when I was in Firefox, I noticed that YouTube videos were taking an extraordinarily long time to load, as did web pages. I fired up System Explorer, a brilliant program for information about Tasks, Processes, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files, to check what I had running that shouldn't have been. System Explorer lets you check running files online at Virus Total to analyse them, and I found a file called svghost.exe that got the thumbs down from 11 of the 33 virus checkers they use.

Removing it was quite easy, just stop the process and delete the file. While searching for the file I came across a couple of other suspicious looking file called msupdte.exe and 17PHolmes1749.exe. I searched online for references to them and discovered they were associated with a rootkit virus, and the site recommended downloading a little program called SDFix to check system files in safe mode, which I did, and after a couple of hours of running various virus and trojan checkers I got a clean computer again.

Videos still wouldn't work though and I read that using MS Update would solve the problem, and after updating it did. Everything is now back to normal.

I'm running Spyware Doctor with built-in anti-virus on it's own now after AVG8 warned me about installing it with another anti-virus program installed. I should have ignored the warning and ran them both, because looks like the "Doc" missed this one.

I have a music collection on my computer that is in excess of 30 GB and tonight I discovered a way to access it from anywhere. Orb streams songs straight from your PC to nearly any Internet-connected device -- including some mobile phones. This free service turns your PC into a media server, streaming not only songs, but also video, photos, and even TV, to just about any Web-connected device. That means you can tap your music library from your work PC, your Palm Centro, your Nintendo Wii, or your iPhone -- to name just a few of the supported gadgets. Orb is also compatible with all major gaming consoles -- the Wii, PS3 and Xbox -- so you can now enjoy your media on your TV screen as well!

The Orb software client requires Windows XP or later and a broadband Internet connection. (If you want to add TV to the streaming mix, you'll need a TV tuner as well -- check Orb's FAQ page for a list of supported models.)

Once Orb is installed, configure the software to monitor the system folders containing your music (and, if desired, photos and videos). The software will also help you sign up for an Orb account, which requires nothing more than a user name, a password, and an e-mail address.

With the Orb client up and running, you're ready to stream. The hitch, of course, is that you'll need to leave your computer on at all times. To listen to your tunes, fire up the Web browser on the device you're using and then head over to mycast.orb.com.

When you install the software and create your account, your content is indexed on your personal Orb page. It is then accessible anywhere that has an Internet connection; you simply log in and access your files. After downloading the software, it took about half and hour for my whole collection to be available online. Orb even lets you invite friends to share your collection and you can blog on the site. A very cool tool indeed!

I'm using Vista all the time now, and have most of the hardware updated with new drivers. Alas, I lost my surround sound, and although I've installed new drivers from the manufacturer, only 4 of the 6 speakers are working. This seems like a downgrade from XP, because they all worked beautifully on that version. But it's better than the single speaker that was working on the initial Vista install. Perhaps in time the driver will catch up with XP and it will sound the same. Still no printer or scanner, but for the moment I can live with that.

The best way to enjoy Vista would be to buy it with a new system, that way everything would work and you wouldn't go through the frustration of looking for updated drivers. I came across one site that suggested it had updated drivers for lots of the hardware, but I had to pay to download them, and decided against that. Forums have been the best resource for problem solving, and in the case of the sound driver, there was links to an update (unfortunately not compatible with mine).

I haven't noticed any performance improvement at all. The cosmetics are nicer in Vista, and plenty of help is available online for tweaking and customisation. Once you know where to look for the settings, it's not so different to XP.

Installing Windows Vista is not for the feint-hearted. This morning I decided to upgrade, after yet another backup (just in case), and after getting the list of programs that would no longer be compatible with Vista, I went ahead with the install. All seemed to go well until Windows wanted to reboot, then I got the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" with a Stop: 0x0000007B error. Something to do with being unable to recognise the boot device. Perhaps this is another issue with using a SATA disk, I'm not really sure. Even tried booting into Safe Mode caused the BSOD error, so I had to restore the C drive (thank God for the backup!!!!).

Upgrading wouldn't work when I booted into the Vista disk. So I decided on a clean install on another partition (the second partition on the SATA drive, a logical drive). That didn't work either, with Windows telling me that it was incompatible with the install. Maybe I'm just not meant to install Vista. I'm trying something else now though. Moving everything off the first partition on an IDE drive to the second partition on the SATA disk, then I'll try a dual boot. Windows sees this IDE drive as the first in the list, so when it's empty I hope this approach works. Partition Magic comes with a handy utility for mapping drives, and it looks to references to a drive letter and can change it to a new drive letter. Since all my music is on the drive that I'm moving I'm hoping it will update all the links it finds. Probably another lengthy process. Nothing is ever quick when you're playing around with large disks.

I've downloaded update drivers for everything I need to work:

• Netgear 108Mbps Wireless PCI Adapter
• Lexmark 510 Series Printer
• nVidia Display drivers

It'll mean reinstalling all the programs I'm using but that's probably not a bad thing. I think I'll be able to see what's on the old C drive from inside Vista, (thinking ahead here - I haven't even got it installed yet). One piece of hardware probably won't work anymore: a Plustek USB Scanner that is fairly old, even XP sees it as outdated but it can be installed on Carly's computer so we still have the use of it. No biggie.

I've been preparing for this all day, and once again, am getting increasingly frustrated when things aren't going as planned. Nothing new about that though.

I've had some fun and games today, and it's taken me all day to resolve more computer problems. I'm definitely not meant to have a hassle-free user experience if my track record for problems is anything to go by. Last night I finally got a copy of Windows Vista. Now isn't that an experience in itself? This image sums it up beautifully.

Before I put my foot in it big time, I decided to do a backup of the C drive just in case the install/upgrade didn't go smoothly. I've used Norton Ghost plenty of times in the past and the backups have got me out of trouble more times than I can remember. I had no idea that this time would be any different. So I set the task for Ghost to back up C, and the computer shut down and rebooted into the Ghost screen, but all I got was a static hourglass and a progress bar going nowhere. So I did a three-finger salute, the computer restarted the Ghost job and the same thing happened. When I chose to skip the Ghost job and to boot in to Windows nothing happened either. I couldn't get out of the Ghost loop that I was in, couldn't get into Windows and was getting more steamed up by the minute. Talk about a disastrous situation.

I think the problem was the SATA drive I was backing up, which also hosts my operating system. I put Hiren's Boot CD in the computer, which has numerous tools for troubleshooting and after trying several partition and recovery tools I was none the wiser. I ran Partition Magic and deleted the "virtual" partition that Ghost had created and made active, but then I couldn't set my OS drive back to C. It's been a nightmare.

I read a post from Jaybee with the exact problem, after I set up the modem on the laptop and decided to look online for some inspiration, because by that time I'd run out of ideas. If only I'd done that to start with, instead of deleting things. Anyway, I tried a couple of the Symantec recommendations that didn't work either.

In the end I resurrected the "old" PC, which I had only retired yesterday after getting a new power supply back from the "new" computer manufacturer, and since it had a working copy of Windows, I swapped a couple of the drives and managed to boot into Windows. I reinstalled the new OS drivers, and suddenly my original C drive was back. Thank the Gods, I nearly fell to my knees crying, I was so relieved.

I did manage in the end to back up my C drive using Ghost, but this time from a floppy disk. Ghost does work with SATA drives and the problems only occur when you reboot from Windows. That's when it messes with the boot files on the hard drive and can cause the OS hard drive to be unbootable.

And so to the question... to upgrade to Vista or not? I have a backup now in case it all goes to hell, and I'm over my rage (yes, I had steam coming out my ears and got more frustrated as the day wore on), so I may take the plunge, but not today. As I said, I only got the new computer up and running again yesterday so I think I'll enjoy it working properly for for few more days before I make any more major changes. Perhaps I'll even consider setting up a new partition for Vista, that way I don't stuff up this install and can test the compatibility of programs as I install them.

Last Friday I spent most of the day at the hospital with Alex, and was downloading a movie on my computer. I got home and found that the computer had restarted, but as usual, nobody did it. Later on Friday night, the computer shut down and restarted while I was laying in bed reading, and nobody did do it. I was quite perplexed, not sure why it had happened. This is my new computer we're talking about, less than a month old! Anyway, just in case it happened again, I loaded the download program into the startup folder, so that I could continue to get the movie during the night. Next morning the computer was off and wouldn't restart.

I seem to be plagued by computer problems. I did learn how to remove the power supply from a computer, and to diagnose whether that's what the problem was, or whether it was a motherboard problem. I guess that's a bonus!!!

Meanwhile, I'm back to using the old computer, which has problems of it's own, though I did manage to solve a problem that's been plaguing me for months. The icons on the desktop used to jitter out of control, the CPU usage would go from 0 to 100 erratically, web pages kept reloading, the email would download constantly..... I started unplugging a few things to see if it was a hardware problem, and it turns out that the keyboard was the culprit. It was a HP keyboard, not very old, but it didn't want to play with the rest of the gear. Since replacing it the computer is working fine. It still has a noisy fan, but I can live with that.

Okay, another three hours this morning pulling my hair, with the blue screen of death popping up after every reboot, and finally we have an internet connection and the computer is clean. Talk about a marathon. This morning, as luck would have it, I got an email telling me about the new version of Spyware Doctor.

When I installed this version it managed to find 315 problems, and needed to reboot to uninstall them. BSOD. Then I used AVG to do a virus scan and it found 23 Trojans, and after cleaning and deleting them the computer just turned off. I rebooted to Safe Mode and checked that every file AVG had detected was removed. All were, except in the folder Documents and Settings\Local Service\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content\IE5\ etc... were html documents that instructed the computer to download the offending installers. I deleted these files and after rebooting the computer again, with fingers crossed, everything loaded properly, I was able to download updates for the anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, and we had the internet.

The offenders:

• Deskbar BHO
• Trojan-Proxy.Wopla
• Backdoor.Agent.ALM
• Hijacker.DosPop-Toolbar
• Trojan-RPCC-Spammer
• SpamTool.Agent.U

Talk about a nightmare trying to get rid of these nasties. The trick is to have the latest versions of anti-spyware and anti-virus and make sure the definitions are up to date. I know this is hard after the nasties have stuffed the internet connection, but perseverance and stubbornness win in the end.

I spent the day at a friend's house fixing his computer and had a very frustrating afternoon. The anti-spyware and anti-virus were both out of date, the internet wasn't working and the computer would shut down automatically if you tried to get online. I tried one thing after another to get things to work, and at one stage did get the computer online. I installed the latest Spyware Doctor and AVG and the doc managed to find over 260 problems, but couldn't get rid of 5 of them, they kept coming back. AVG tried to clean a few viruses (trojans) and the computer kept shutting down, after a small tmp file was added to the C drive, making the damn thing come back after every re-boot.

I had a headache that just got worse as the afternoon went on, and left there with a windows repair going on, I'll have to go back tomorrow and see how that went. I wrote down a couple of the registry entries that the doctor couldn't delete and got no hits on Google, which is unusual, because generally you find the same problems with someone else.

I should have written down the names of the trojans and would have had better luck finding out how to delete them, and if I have no luck tomorrow that's what I'll have to do. I don't enjoy working all week just to have my weekends taken up with rotten little trojans that can't be removed!

Yesterday my new computer was delivered and I was up till 1:30 am installing XP and all the software that I use. Tweaking it just so was also a priority and I'm so thankful that I've documented all the changes I've previously made.

Yesterday lunchtime I ran a Ghost backup so I'd have all my recent email and documents, only to discover later that it didn't work, I was shattered, losing everything for the last two months. Thank God I had a backup from June, so it wasn't so devastating.

The new computer is so fast, I'm rapt. It has double the ram of my old one and that makes all the difference. Multi tasking should be a breeze with the dual core processor. I'm happy now with my newest toy. We'll reshuffle the computers around for Alex and Carly, both will get an upgrade and Alex is excited because his old computer was running Windows 98 and not up to playing alot of the games he wanted. It will take some time though, there's hardware that will need swapping around, and first I have to get my old computer looked at: there's definitely something wrong with it. It makes a terrible noise when booting up and I think the fan is all but shot. It will be the second time I've had to replace it. Worth getting fixed though, it's a Pentium 4 and has been a good computer.

I'm running a Geforce 7200GS 128mb video card in the new computer and finally the 19 inch monitor I bought a few months back has the right resolution. It's an odd size, 1440 x 900, but the video card picked it right away, and no more fat pictures from widescreen LCD. The integrated 5.1 channel audio is perfect for surround sound, so I'll be making the most of the 30 GB of music I have on the computer.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has implemented the SpamMATTERS reporting and forensic analysis system to help fight spam. This program was initialised in May 2006 and by 31 August 2006, over 102,000 members of the general public had submitted in excess of 7.3 million items of spam. That's alot of spam.

A SpamMATTERS reporting ‘button’ is available for download and installation into the Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email programs. Once installed, users can simultaneously delete their spam and report it to ACMA with one click of their mouse. You can also submit spam anonymously via ACMA’s anonymous online spam submission form.

Spam reported using the button is forensically intact and contains the information that ACMA needs to track down spammers and take action against them. All information gathered by ACMA is passed on to the police for further action. I haven't noticed any reduction in spam, and if anything it's gotten worse, so I'm not sure how effective this fight against spam is.

If we all participate it might make a difference.