I recently attempted to clone a customer’s HDD to a new SSD. For many years, I have used the excellent Acronis set of apps to do the cloning. I also use the Back up and Recovery tools. These tools are on the RMB “Rescue Media Builder” that you must manually create using your Acronis True Image programme which I highly recommend purchasing.I have created a USB key with the apps installed as it is much easier to clone a drive…
I recently installed Office 365 and could not get the email account setup properly in the Outlook app. I kept getting a SMTP error. I verified that the email password was correct by successfully logging into the webmail portal. I discovered that I could get the account set up successfully by typing “Control Panel” in the search box at the bottom left of your screen and then click on the Mail icon. Select User accounts in Control panel and you’ll…
Give someone you love a Comp-U-Train gift certificate for Christmas and give them the gift that keeps on giving!
We recently attended a tech call to replace the customer’s Wi-Fi router as the existing one had gotten damaged by a power surge. The customer was not happy about the prospect that lay ahead with rejoining her dozen or so devices to the new router. This new router had a new password and Wi-Fi network name also known as the SSID. I was able to gather some information about her existing router which would help me install the new router…
We recently attended a service call, where a customer had bought a new Android phone and after inserting the old SIM card, discovered that the SMS messages had not transferred over from her old phone. SMS messages are not retained on the SIM card for security reasons. If you use the excellent Samsung “Smart Switch” app (application or programme) to transfer your information from your old to your new phone, then the SMS messages are transferred across. However what happens…
Click me for the course information. Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity! The Windows 10 Workshop on Wednesday, 4 December 2019 at 10h00 in Fourways. Johannesburg.
Today we attended an urgent call because a customer could not access their Gmail account on any of her devices. The customer had bought a new Smartphone and set it up for her Gmail account. However she did not take the steps to tell Google that it was her accessing her Gmail account from a unknown and therefore unrecognised device. She was using Microsoft Outlook 365 on her computer; the email app on her iPad and the Gmail app on…
We recently attended a trouble call where a customer was having intermittent problems printing to her Canon Wifi network printer.She had been using it successfully to print from her Windows 10 laptop; her Apple iPhone and Apple iPad.Suddenly one day, the printer stopped printing from any device.Upon arrival at the customer, I rebooted the printer and rejoined the printer to her Wi-fi network, which was delivered by a Nokia ONT (Optical Network Terminal) provided by her fibre company.Suddenly the printer…
If you use the same password for more than one website, please change it immediately. Add an additional symbol such as !@#$ etc. In this day and age where websites get hacked and people’s usernames and passwords getting stolen, you are giving the hackers the key to your city, if you share a username and password across multiple platforms. I notice that new websites ask you if your want to create a new account using your Google or Facebook details…
We recently attended a customer whose domain is hosted by company X. They had received an email purporting to be from company X saying that their email box was full and that they needed to pay some money to increase the size of their mailbox. I logged onto her webhosting company dashboard to see that her mailbox was hardly used, so immediately contacted company X to find out that in did the email was a scam! If she hadn’t have…
I often get asked what is the difference between cloning a hard drive versus imaging a hard drive. Cloning is the process of creating another drive which is an exact identical copy of your original drive. You would clone a drive if you wanted to convert your old mechanical hard drive to a modern solid state drive. It is a one for one copy. Think of cloning as making an identical twin. You would want to make an exact copy…
I recently bought three ADATA 2.5″ SSD drives to install into customers laptops. The reason for this, is that these modern SSD (Solid State Drive) drives are much faster than the older HDD (Hard Disk Drive) mechanical drives. The three laptops were different brands. Each SSD was placed in turn, in a “USB caddy” which allows me to easily transfer the data from the HDD to the SSD. The process is called “cloning” and involves making an exact copy of…
We had a call from a customer to say that the UBTV app (application) on their Android media box wasn’t working. They told us that when they clicked the app’s menu icon, the screen went black for a second or two and then returned to the menu. I was able to fix the problem by going into the “Settings” menu on the Android box and selecting the UBTV app itself. On the menu that appeared, I clicked the button marked…
On our recent trip abroad, I took several 360 panorama photos with my smartphone camera. When I uploaded them to my facebook timeline, the photos were just a thin horizontal strip; rather than an interactive immersive 360 experience. I discovered that my smartphone camera was not embedding the Exif information correctly in the photo; so that facebook didn’t recognise it as a 360 photo. Exif is hidden Metadata information placed in the photo that contains information about the photo such…
We recently stayed in a Hotel and needed to access the Internet using the complimentary Wi-Fi access. Unfortunately, whenever we opened the web browser on our phone, it would not automatically be directed to the Hotel’s “landing page” which is where you enter your guest credentials, in order to be granted access to the Hotel’s Wi-Fi Internet service.This landing page, also known as a “Captive Portal” helps the owner of the Wi-Fi network control who accesses their Wi-Fi. This is…
Today we received a call from a customer complaining that when they had their new Western Digital “My Book” USB back-up drive plugged into their Windows 10 computer, it failed to boot up. Straight away, I thought that the boot-up setting in the computer’s BIOS had been set to boot from a USB HDD (Hard Disk Drive) rather than the internal HDD. Normally though, you would receive an error message on the screen that an Operating System could not be…
We recently received a call from a customer that the brand new wireless mouse that they had received for Christmas, was acting erratically. It seemed to have a mind of its own. The cursor would either lag behind or jump in front of their hand movements and was driving the customer batty. Upon arrival at the customer’s home, I saw that the wireless mouse transmitting device, was plugged into the USB port on the front of her desktop computer. I…
We recently attended a trouble call, where the customer had bought a new Android phone and had correctly joined it to her Google account. She complained that many of her old phone contacts had not populated the contact list on her new phone. Understandably, she was very worried that she had lost many of her valuable phone contacts that she had accumulated over the years and which numbered in the hundreds! To start with, she had transferred the SIM card…
We recently attended a trouble call, where the customer could not run a new installation of Microsoft Office 365 successfully. She had recently uninstalled an older business version of Office, called “Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016”, that had been retired as the company had gone out of business. However, when she tried to run Microsoft Outlook 365, it would only open to the Microsoft Activation Wizard for the retired verson of Office, asking for the new valid registration key. She…
We were recently called to a customer’s home who operates an events organising business, to solve the problem about why a calendar event that she had created in the “S Planner” calendar on one of her Android phones, was not synchronising to her other phone; or showing up on her computer Google calendar, which is stored in the Cloud. This lack of a backup per se, exposes the customer to a potential catastrophe, because if something happens to this one…
When you create a new Gmail account, you will be sent a congratulatory email from Google confirming that your account has been successfully set up. It is vital that you do not delete this email. Please record the exact date and time that this email was sent to you and if possible, forward this welcome email to a secondary email account as a backup. If you ever get locked out of your Gmail account, this one bit of seemingly unimportant…
We have a customer that tells us that when she is writing a long email using the Windows 10 mail app, all of a sudden the text disappears. This has happened on a few occasions and upsets her unnecessarily since she is elderly and all of her hard work that has taken a great deal of her precious time has been wasted. To try to retrieve her email, she closes the message using the “x” at the top right hand…
We’ve been receiving quite a few emails recently containing dire messages, warning us that our email or bank accounts will be cancelled unless we click on a link and verify the account. When the link is clicked, the user is taken to a webpage that looks exactly like the legitimate login page of your email or bank. This type of ruse where you are sent an email or message with a link is called “Phishing“. Once the crooks have access…
Time and time again, we get calls from frantic customers to say that they have forgotten their passwords and cannot access their online accounts. Similarly, email accounts can be locked for various reasons such as the email provider has noticed “suspicious activity” on your account. Other times, companies have been hacked themselves, resulting in customer’s details being stolen. Consequently, the company locks the customers accounts to prevent unauthorised access. Entry to the website is only granted when the customer logs…
We received a trouble call in late 2017, from a customer complaining that their laptop had suffered premature failure on numerous occasions over the year. They had replaced the laptop HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and Motherboard a couple of times during 2017 and wanted to know if we had any advice or idea about why this was happening. This situation was very alarming as a laptop shouldn’t suffer multiple failures in such a short space of time. After some investigation…
In a previous blog post, I detailed how to upgrade to Windows 10 from a previous OS (Operating System) on a notebook with a small storage drive. This procedure required the use of an external USB drive of at least 16GB. In a new development, I was given another notebook that needed a Windows 10 update; rather than being upgraded to Windows 10. I discovered that following my previous blog did not work, because the update still needed to utilise…
We received a call from a customer complaining that their laptop wouldn’t reboot/shut down properly. He got the message. “Task Host id stopping background tasks (Microsoft \ Windows \ Plug and Play \ Device Install Reboot required)” He also experienced the trackpad/mouse behaving intermittently. He would left click something and it wouldn’t open. Rather than use a blanket repair such as running the System Restore repair, for this particular problem, I did a quick google and found a link to…
I recently attended a trouble call where the customer was complaining that there were multiple auto-complete username entries in the various web forms using Microsoft Edge. She explained that she wanted to delete these obsolete entries. Previously, she had managed to delete ALL of the auto-complete entries but that was overkill. If you need to delete a single entry, try left clicking the 3 dots on the top right hand corner of the Edge browser. Next, select the “settings” option…
An Internet address is known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and you will be familiar with the ubiquitous “http:\\www.computrain.co.za” format of a URL. The URL is what you type into the address bar at top of your Internet website browser. If you are dealing with a secure website such as your bank, you will notice that there will be the letter “s” at the end of the http. Incidentally, the “co.za or .com” of a URL is called the…
This morning, I received a panic call from a customer that had overnight, attempted to upgrade their laptop to the latest version of Windows 10. They told me that after they awoke, they discovered that their laptop was only showing a spinning circle at the bottom of the screen. First thing in this situation is not to panic! Windows 10 is incredibly self-healing and many times can fix things when given half a chance. By this I mean not to…
A couple of days ago I visited an innocuous website that had been hacked, albeit unbeknownst to me, by Internet cyber criminals. As soon as the website opened, I was greeted by both a webpage and Windows messenger message. The crooks had also activated my computer voice to read an ominous computer voice telling me that my computer had been blocked to protect the Internet. I would have to call a telephone “support” number to have my computer unlocked. I could…
I recently attended an interesting trouble call, about an upgrade problem of Windows 10. The customer had a Lenovo notebook with only a 32GB hard drive installed. This in itself, is not problem. However, after having the Windows 10 OS and a few other programmes installed, the hard drive has only 5GB of space left! The Windows 10 upgrade needed at least 16GB of hard drive space for the 32bit installation and 20GB for the 64bit installation. This space is…
Today we attended a customer that was having trouble connecting her new laptop wirelessly to her printer. The wireless setup was continuously failing because the software installation gave an error that it could not find the printer on the network. The client also complained that the Wi-Fi speed was varying wildly and was unreliable. Suspecting a neighbour’s co-channel Wi-Fi network, I activated an App on my smartphone that allowed me to look at the Wi-Fi spectrum. I was horrified to…
This morning I got a call from a customer who had tried to do an overnight online in-place upgrade from Windows 64bit OEM 7 Pro to Windows 10. They have a HP laptop i7/8GB RAM and when they checked their “confuser” this morning they discovered that it was stuck in a worrying restart loop! First thing that I tried, was to force a shutdown and then take out the battery. Then I pressed the power button for a few seconds…
We recently attended a call from a customer with a brand new laptop whose fan was running at full speed and quite noisy. This fan noise can sometimes be attributed to a laptop that is overheating because of excessive dust or “fur balls” inside the unit. However, because this laptop was out of-the-box, we disputed this reason. Other customers have reported to us, that this fan running problem only happened after upgrading to Windows 10. Therefore we have concluded that…
Sometimes on facebook, you will see posts on your timeline which you would like to share. Unfortunately you see that there is no “share” button available that you can click on. This is caused by the writer of the post choosing to only share their post with “friends except” or that you are reading a post that is in a closed group. The way around this, is to click the pull-down menu on the top right hand corner of the…
Whilst giving a PowerPoint presentation, have you ever needed to do some research on your computer or the Internet at the same time because you were asked a question but not wanted the delegates to view what you are doing? If projecting your presentation, the following method will allow your audience delegates to carry on watching the slideshow whilst your multi-tasking is hidden from view. During the presentation, simply right click the desktop and choose screen, then “Show Taskbar”. You…
We had a customer who wanted to know if they could see the amount of available hard disk drive space that was being used on a shared network computer. This networked computer was a media server which stored her movies. Even though she could see the networked computer listed in the “File Explorer”, the amount of hard disk drive space does not show when viewed in this manner. Only the folder and file names are visible. To be able to…
We had a call from a customer who’s computer sound was stuttering/skipping/popping when they played their music. As you can imagine this was quite uncomfortable on the ear. Rebooting the computer didn’t fix the problem on this occasion. I verified that the computer had the latest drivers for the sound card and video card installed. Sometimes HD audio drivers are provided as part of the computer’s graphic card drivers. Upon arriving at the customer’s home and hearing the problem for…
We recently attended a customer who was having problems with their SOHO network. She was not able to see any shared folders on another laptop computer. Looking in the “File manager” of the laptop, I could not see any shared folders being displayed from the other laptop. I then went to the laptop that was sharing its folders but everything looked in order. I tried restarting both laptops but that didn’t fix the problem. I then tried rebooting her router….
We recently had a customer call us to complain that their new 320GB USB external drive was only showing a capacity of 32GB. They had tried to use it to create a “system recovery drive” which is to be commended. This drive can be used to start up a computer that has suffered a failure of the Operating System. After creating the recovery drive, they realised that they had a smaller USB drive in a drawer which they wanted to…
We had a customer that reported that they were not able to make online payments to a certain payee using their Internet Online banking service. The payee also used the same bank as our customer. Upon visiting the customer’s home, we discovered that the payee had mistakenly given our customer their ATM card number and not their bank account number. What was confusing was that our customer had been able to make payments to this payee for a few years successfully with…
As your computer’s HDD (Hard Disk Drive) ages, it is prudent to avail yourself of new storage technologies such as the SSD (Solid State Drive). You will notice a huge speed and permformance improvement when you swap to a SSD. As an example, our media server now boots up in half the time! To start with, you will need a programme to help you clone your HDD and I recommend the excellent EaseUS Todo Backup programme. The cloning process literally makes…
WINDOWS 10 START MENU WE CAN SIMPLIFY IT FOR YOU :):)
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR WORD :):) Select the letter to the left of your cursor . Shift + Left Arrow Select the letter to the right of your cursor. … Shift + Right Arrow Select text from your cursor to the beginning of a word. Ctrl + Shift + Right Arrow Select text from your cursor to the end of a word. Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow Select from your cursor to one line above. Shift + Up Arrow Select…
We received a call from a couple of customers saying that they were having problems with their Optical Mouse. One mouse was a wireless mouse that had stopped working and the other was a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cabled Optical mouse that was “acting weird”. Optical mice have replaced the old roller ball mice and rely on emitted light and an optical pickup device to enable the mouse to rely where their position is on the monitor screen. Like any device, things can…
We recently had a customer who brought her laptop to us out of frustration because she couldn’t upgrade from Windows 8.1 to the new Windows 10 OS (Operating System). Every time that she tried to perform the upgrade, the upgrade installation reached 90% and would go no further. She left it overnight but awoke to the same Microsoft spinning progress wheel. We immediately checked her laptop to see if there were any outstanding Windows 8.1 updates. This revealed that there were…
Last week we were called to a customer’s home who had been trying to install their new Epson wireless printer for two hours. They were getting an error and realised it was time to give up and call Comp-U-Train. Upon arriving on-site, the customer told me that they had read the installation instructions which said to press the “Wi-Fi” on the printer for 3 seconds but kept getting a failed installation error message. What is not made clear in the Epson instructions, is that…
A customer recently asked me if they should use the spare HDD (Hard Disk Drive) in their computer to create an image of their C drive periodically, or should they mirror the C drive partition. Note that the OS (Operating System)Â Boot and System files must be on the same partition! Mirroring the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) is also known as RAID 1. “RAID” stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disks. This is a way to provide redundancy of your…
In the new Microsoft Edge web browser that comes with Windows 10, there is no easy to move your favorite links from one folder to another. In Internet Explorer you could choose to organise your favourites and then simply drag and drop the links between folders. In Microsoft Edge, if you want to move a favorite link to another folder, you single left click on the favorite in question (your browser will be taken to that favourite link but ignore that)  and then single left…
Recently we had a client complain that they could not download recent emails to their Microsoft Outlook programme. When they pressed the “send/receive” icon, the emails showed that they were being downloaded but nothing appeared in the inbox. Needless to say she was getting quite frustrated with this, because she didn’t want to keep using the Gmail webmail access portal. A quick look in the advanced settings for her Gmail account in the Outlook programme, revealed the problem. She had…
You’ve all heard the old adage about patience patience patience. Never is this more true then when trying to do Microsoft updates. We’ve had a lot of customers lately who have been getting new laptops and complain that when they try do an update, they receive errors of some sort or another. Newly installed Operating Systems will automatically download and install all necessary updates. Unfortunately this will hog your Internet connection. If you try to do other updates simultaneously, the…
We had a business customer bring their laptop to us who was not able to send mails through her ISP (Internet Service Provider). She was able to download emails as normal. Upon receiving her laptop computer in our repair shop, I established that her outgoing email account had indeed been locked; most probably as a safety guard by her ISP, iburst.co.za After checking with her ISP, she had it confirmed that her account had indeed been locked because of a proliferation…
We were recently called to a customer’s home whom was having problems using the “create disk image” backup utility of their Windows 7 computer. When the utility looked for drives to backup the image to, the second internal HDD (Hard Disk Drive) was not shown under the “Where do you want to save the backup?” dialog. The customer complained that this had been the case from when they bought the computer and were now wanting to create a backup image…
I’ve noticed lately,  that a lot of customer’s laptops that have come into the repair shop, are understandably using the default manufacturer’s setting to go to “sleep” after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, the laptop is not smart enough to know that something crucial is being done such as installing a programme or doing an upgrade or update. The result of this is that the programme suffers a corruption of some sort. Before attempting any such work, Comp-U-Train would like…
Comp-U-Train uses and highly recommends the ICT services of ARM.it here in Johannesburg, South Africa. ARM.it offers excellent value for money Internet data packages, as a bolt-on to your Telkom Internet service. Telkom provides and maintains the hardline infrastructure, that carries the Internet data signal to and from your home. An analogy is to think of the water supply to your home. Your local water supply company provides and maintains the water pipe infrastructure to your neighbourhood. The Internet data is like the…
For some reason, the Google AdSense ads that normally appear on our website stopped being displayed. Please understand that every day that the ads don’t show, means less ad revenue being generated which affects our bottom line. It was therefore of paramount importance that I fix the issue. After following all of the troubleshooting procedures listed on the Google AdSense website I was still none the wiser. Even the Google support team was stumped! After brainstorming the problem for a…
Yesterday we attended a customer’s home who was complaining about not being able to print from Internet Explorer 11 using Windows 7. Every time that they attempted to print, they were presented with an error saying “There was an internal error, and Internet Explorer is unable to print this document”. They could print from other programmes which led me to try the Microsoft resolutions presented in this knowledge base article. Unfortunately none of these solutions worked! The way that the…
We had a customer call us, complaining that they could not download their Gmail electronic mail using Microsoft Outlook. We verified that the correct POP & SMTP servers had been specified in the Outlook settings, as well as the security SSL ports. Despite this fact, they could not connect to Gmail. We have discovered that since July 15th, 2014, Gmail has changed the way that 3rd party clients such as Microsoft Outlook are allowed to connect to Gmail. To resolve this problem, enable…
Do you have a Microsoft Word document containing a table with contacts that you want to export to your Microsoft Outlook 2013 contacts? Open your Word document and click anywhere in the table and you will see “Table Tools” appear above the ribbon Click Layout on the far right of the ribbon. (Note, not “Page Layout”) Next, click the “Convert to Text” button at the end of the ribbon On the box that pops up, choose to convert the table using “Commas”…
If you plug in your USB drive and get an error message that the disk is not formatted, don’t press the “Format disk” button! Don’t do it otherwise you’ll overwrite the FAT data or the data itself (depending on how you did the formatting). Instead, click Cancel. Take note of the drive letter of the USB drive. This error is commonly caused by pulling the USB drive out of the socket on your computer before it has been safely unmounted…
If you’re not able to connect to the Internet using the Wi-Fi connection on your HP laptop, despite the Wi-Fi light being on after pressing the fn+keyboard key, go into the “Windows Mobility Center” in Control Panel and make sure that the Wi-Fi connection is enabled there!
Here at Comp-U-Train, we can’t stress the importance of installing anti-malware software on your PC. The term “Malware” is a portmanteau of “Malicious Software” and includes virus’; Trojans and keyloggers. The latest type of malware to attack is called “Ransomware” and is so named because it holds the victim to ransom. As an example, below is a screenshot of a very serious type of ransomware, which works by encrypting your hard drive, as well as any drives that you have plugged…
If you’re having problems backing up your Samsung S4 apps when using the Samsung Kies software because the programme keeps hanging at that point, try clearing the app cache for each app. You can access this by clicking each app in the “Applications manager” and pressing the “Clear cache” button. Don’t press the “Clear data” button!
Pivot Tables These are confusing to most people. I would like to clear up this confusion and give you some tips on creating a simple, user-friendly Pivot Table. These tables allow us to organise large amounts of data into a table that we can then Filter as well as many other features. First of all we need to start with the data that you are putting into the Pivot Table. It is very important that we use uniform styles of…
I thought that I would offer some tips & tricks gleaned from editing a family video using Windows Live Movie Maker. 1) When you “split” a video, make sure that you also split the audio otherwise the video and audio tracks will go out of sync when you delete a section. The splitting tool is accessed via the Video & Audio tabs. 2) When you add a “Title” to the video, it will not automatically add blank audio so that…
Today we had a curious tech support call from a customer. As Microsoft will soon be discontinuing all support for the XP OS (Operating System) from April 8th, 2014, they wanted to upgrade the Internet Explorer browser version 6 to version 8 which is the most secure. Unfortunately, every time they tried to install v8, they received an error that the installation had failed and that they would have to manually download an update called KB932823. When they tried to…
We just returned from a service call where a customer was unable to play a Brain Training game on their Windows 7 computer. When the game was launched, it kept giving an error that the resolution of the monitor was set too low and must be increased. After checking that the resolution of the monitor was at a nominal setting and therefore should not have posed a problem to the game, we noticed that the customer had enabled the Windows…
Yesterday we received a trouble-call from an anxious customer telling us that they could not boot their XPHome computer as it was stuck in a boot-loop. It was continually showing a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and then rebooting. Upon arrival at the customer’s home, we witnessed the same action. On inspection of the BSOD, we saw that the culprit was a Windows “System” file called “fssfltr_tdi.sys”. This file is from the “Windows Essential Family Safety” feature. The only way…
If you are unable to install Windows Update 2804579 then please read the following: Try the easiest thing first by typing “msconfig” (without quotes) at the start>run “open” field. Choose the middle selection “Diagnostic Startup” and press the OK button. Now try downloading the update. If the update still fails, then please follow this procedure” Open the registry editor by typing regedit at the start>run “open” field and go to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\Packages Backup the Packages keys by…
If anyone is using Microsoft XP with Internet Explorer 8 and experiencing slow window scrolling together with hard drive thrashing (hard drive light staying on); especially when viewing javascrpt rich websites like FB, then Google has a free plug-in. This is a replacement javascript engine which speeds up the webpage rendering significantly. It’s called “Google Chrome Frame” and you can download it from here:
As part of computer troubleshooting, if you need to know which Microsoft “Services” are required to run a Wi-Fi connection, please enable the following Services: DHCP Client Event Log Network Connections Plug n Play Remote Call Procedure Wireless Zero Configuration These Services can be accessed by typing “msconfig” (without quotes) at the start>run prompt and choosing the “Services” tab.
If you need to see the page ID number and are using Internet Explorer, turn on the “Status Bar” from the View>Toolbars pull-down menu. Now log in to your WordPress admin page and view your “pages”. Then position your cursor over each page’s name and the page ID will be shown in the page’s slug shown in the status bar at the bottom of your browser.
If you want a quick and dirty way to play Adobe’s Flash “.flv” files that you’ve downloaded from the web, simply rename the extension from .flv to .wmv When you now double-click this same file you’ll be able to watch it in Windows Media Player!
Windows XP had a very useful icon in the “Quick Launch” Toolbar that let you quickly show the desktop rather than being faced with the chore of closing/minimising open windows. Windows 7 has the same feature but it located at the bottom right hand corner of your screen. To show the desktop click on the horizontal bar on your desktop as shown in the image below:
Are you using Windows 7 and miss the XP or Vista network icon data lights that were in the bottom right hand corner system tray? These lights would flash to show you when you were uploading or downloading something. If so, you can download a free app which will restore this functionality from here: http://www.itsamples.com/network-activity-indicator.html To keep the lights showing in the sytem tray and not being hidden after a while, click on the “Show hidden icons” up arrow in…
We received a call from a customer that had not been able to update their Adobe Flash player. This player enables the viewing of streaming media videos on websites such as YouTube and Facebook. The customer kept receiving a pop-up notice telling her that there was a new version of the player available and to go to a download link. However, whenever she tried to go to link using her cell/mobile phone data connection and initiate the updating process it would…
We stopped by a customer’s home recently who was complaining that their ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connection was slow and unreliable. When visiting webpages, they would receive a time-out message. They also complained that they intermittently had no dial-tone when picking up the telephone handset. This also resulted in people who were calling the customer would still hear a normal ringing tone, but the customer’s telephone would not ring. Normally, we would have immediately referred the customer to their local…
We received a call yesterday from a customer saying that the “Java” icon was missing in the Control Panel of their XP computer. The customer told us that this problem seemed to happen after upgrading the version of Java that was on their computer. We concluded that there was a corruption that happened during the upgrade process resulting in the icon not be restored to the Control Panel. This issue also seems to affect Windows 7 users. The Java “console”…
If you want to find out when your Windows computer was “born”, open a “DOS” (Disc Operating System) box by typing cmd in the start/Run field or in Windows 7 at the start search field. A black box will appear and next to the flashing cursor, type the below text exactly and press the Enter key:  systeminfo|find /i “install date”  Type exit and press the Enter key to close the DOS box.
A customer of ours called us enquiring about the free trial icon that is showing on the desktop of her new laptop computer. The “Free Trial” is just that. It gives you 30 days from when you first run the programme to try it out. After that, the trial expires and you’ll get the opportunity to buy and download the normal version. Please note that you cannot convert the free trial into a normal version simply by purchasing a registration key…
We visited a customer who wanted to use their printer over their home Wi-Fi network. Previously they had connected the printer using a USB connection but had discovered that the printer was Wi-Fi capable. The problem was that they could not get the printer working when connected by Wi-Fi even though they had used the printer’s front display controls to join their Wi-Fi network successfully. The issue is that the computer must be loaded with the correct driver so that it…
A customer called us recently concerned that he was getting low disk space error messages. When he bought his computer a few years ago, a friend had partitioned the hard drive into two partitions namely C: and D: at a ratio of 50/50. The C: Primary active drive contained the OS (Operating System) and the D: drive was for his data. He wanted to know if he could increase the size of the C: partition to 70/30 and how to go about doing…
We had a customer who called us complaining that their new Acer laptop would show the “Acer Empowering Technology” toolbar on the desktop every time they booted their computer. They didn’t like the way the toolbar cluttered up their desktop and were not happy that Acer had not asked for permission to show this toolbar nor offered a way to easily disable the toolbar. For reasons only known to Acer, they don’t offer an easy method to disable the toolbar. Upon arriving at the customer’s…
We have had a couple of cases with not being able to use the Windows Offline CD disc and observe the following error when booting up the computer from the CD: Your PC needs to restart…. Error Code: 0x0000005D Parameters: 0x030F0209 0x756E6547 0x49656E69 0x6C65746E This error is due to older computer CPU (Computer Processing Unit aka the brain) either not having enough RAM (Random Access Memory) or not supporting a feature called “NX”. If you see this error then another…
We recently had an interesting problem that had us scratching our heads. A customer of ours has not been able to watch any streaming videos shown on the BBC.co.uk website on their Windows XP computer using Internet Explorer version 8. When they click on a video link they are presented with a black screen. There is also no audio and it seems that the Adobe “Flash” player has stalled. We initially suspected a corrupt installation of the Flash programme which is what…
According to Microsoft, a SP (Service Pack) is a “Windows update, often combining previously released updates, that helps make Windows more reliable. Service packs, can include security and performance improvements and support for new types of hardware”. Microsoft finishes by advising “Make sure you install the latest service pack to help keep Windows up to date.” This is very good advice indeed but please be advised that some SPs can be quite large and can easily consume the vast majority of your monthly…
