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Here is simply a chronological log of bigger and recently common issues. Key items have been included in other pages of the site, such as PC Security, Trouble Help, and Articles.
2008 May
Service Pack 3 for Windows XP was released. So far I have not personally experienced any issues. Honestly, I have tested it on several New build PC’s and only a few existing systems. If you are running any specialized applications, like CAD or PICSA, be sure to check with the software manufacturer for compatibility before installing XP Service Pack 3. Service Pack installs usually run better with your security software (anti-virus/anti-spyware) off or uninstalled.
2008 April
Power surges kill computers - that was fully demonstrated in today’s storms. We had a couple Power Hits at the office where I contract support. The President’s laptop was surged. He had a nice APC Surge Suppressor, but it was very old. The surge fried the suppressor, damaged the laptops power system, and damaged the BlackBerry had plugged into the laptops USB port. I highly recommend replacing your surge suppressors every few years with the biggest, baddest one you can afford.
2008 February
Apparently, some machines running Vista with perfectly good DVD drives may have the drive disappear from within Windows; no drive in explorer, no device in device manager. This occurs after applying Windows Updates and can be very difficult to correct. I am currently trying to determine the actual update.
After connecting to PC’s into a KVM switch, I began having issues interfacing with the one PC. The PC’s and KVM are USB based - none have PS/2 ports. So the troubled PC works fine while it is selected on the KVM switch, but when I change to the other machine the fun begins. Three out of four times, the troubled PC would no longer respond when I return from the other machine; sometimes the machine would hang other times it would simply not acknowledge the mouse and keyboard. How could I tell the difference, you ask? The blinking cursor.
With some playing and guidance from technical support, I found that the Power Management on some computers does not play well with the switch. Through Device Manager, turn off the power management for the USB port in question and the problem goes away. A little more detail can be found in The Hardware section of Advanced.
The automatic Microsoft Update for Windows Vista for KB943899 is impacting systems, most commonly Dell machines. Typically the machines will no longer boot after the change, but on some the Optical Drive (CD/DVD) will no longer be visible in Windows. In either case, the update needs to be removed to reverse the damage --- but there is a caveat; if other updates were installed at the same time, there is the possibility that uninstalling the KB943899 update will not fix the issue and a rebuild is in your future.
2008 January
Here upon the new year - I wish you the best!
2007 December
Intel redesigned the chip and socket for CPU’s probably because of issues with people damaging their processors. The older ZIF, or Zero Insertion Force, socket is named as such for a reason. Full raise the lever to open the socket - if you have to assert any force on the processor to put it in the socket, you are doing something wrong. Reset and try again - Gently!
2007 September
I have known severe variations of clock to cause scripts to fail on systems and web pages. It makes sense that when the Date is wrong on the client PC (or web server for that matter) the scripts will fail too. GMAIL is an example of a web-site severally impacted by this factor. If the system time is off far enough, or the date is completely wrong, logging into Google Mail (gmail.com) will result in an infinite loop. The page will refresh over and over, generating a new URL (Unique ID) each time.
2007 August
Today we installed an Advocet OSD KVM Switch with an HP TFT Rack mount KVM. We couldn’t get mouse control of the servers plugged into the switch - none of them. Originally, we thought the issue was caused by a failed switch. After numerous troubleshooting steps, we accidentally discovered what was causing the issue. The KVM cable was designed for plugging the Mouse into the USB port of the system, so the technician who installed it did just that. Since the KVM switch supports USB, this should theoretically not be an issue. The problem is that the switch is not capable of crossing over - the server was using USB Mouse, the mouse plugged into the KVM was PS/2. Plugging in a USB mouse did not resolve the issue, because other systems on the switch were PS/2 only. Oddly enough, using a USB to PS/2 converter at the server side allowed the PS/2 mouse plugged into the KVM switch to work.
2007 July
Virus and spyware continue to damage systems, especially rootkits which tend to not be removable without reformat and rebuild. It is very important to have a quality anti-virus product running on your PC, along with a quality anti-spyware tool. These products must be light-weight and load at startup. Some of the security suites on the market are very heavy, written for the powerful computers manufactured today and tomorrow - these programs do not run well on systems with less than 512MB of memory and do not contain Hyper-threading or multi-core processors.
Working with a 1GB thumb drive, the drive would not allow any additional files to be written to it, even though over 600MB remained available. Windows management tools and third party tools indicated the thumb drive was healthy and operational. Enhancements to the FAT system since Windows 9x were supposed to eliminate the file limit for folders. Apparently this does not apply to thumb drives. This drive, and several others tested after discovering this, would not allow any new files or folders to be added to the drive once the number of objects in the root folder reached 112. After deleting an object, I was able to create one object - so I created a folder and moved everything else into it. There does not seem to be an issue with a object limit within the folder.
2007 May
Cooperation and communication are critical for any enterprise to survive. When the IT, Business Administration, and other departments refuse to share information with each other the business begins to choke. I just finished a project synchronizing objects within two firewalls used by two departments at a major consumer products manufacturer. It was an extremely difficult task not because of the number of objects and variations between them, but because both controlling parties of the firewall would not cooperate with each other or me. What should have been completed in two weeks took four as a direct result.
Years ago the hard drive manufactures started including SMART within the logic. Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology was developed to alert users and administrators of an impending hard drive failure. This technology can mean the difference of saving your data and paying a phenominal amount of money to have it recovered. Unfortunately, so many people ignore the alerts that appear most commonly during the system POST.
Ewido was an excellent tool for detecting and removing Spyware and other Malicious Software. AVG acquired Ewido and merged its technology into what is now known as AVG Anti-spyware. The program is very good at detecting malicious software, better than many other products. It is a shame that it is terrible at removing the malicious software. After several months of using this tool, and its updates, I have given up on AVG AS.
2007 April
Power Jacks - lots of Power Jacks. In the recent weeks, I have replaced numerous DC Power Jacks on laptops. Though not typical of any one model or brand, there is one thing typical; the replacement requires complete disassembly of the laptop. I can understand each manufacturer having a different assembly than the next manufacturer, but each manufacturer model is dramatically different from even similar models from the same manufacturer.
Word to the World - save yourself money by placing your laptop on a stable, adequately sized platform when using external power. Do not allow the power cable to travel across a pathway. If you can’t do this, run from Battery.
Believe it or not, we are still getting calls about the Illegal System DLL Relocation.
Virus and Spyware continue to present a large amount of service orders on the bench. The typical question from the PC Owner is “I had [whatever brand] Anti-virus/security software; how did I become infected?” No one product can protect you 100%, not even the best. The only true way to protect your computer is to never connect it to the internet and never share files with other computers.
We started receiving phone calls about an error that our clients were receiving on startup. We had experienced it on some systems ourselves, including a new computer, built today including the latest patches from Microsoft. Illegal System DLL Relocation - The system DLL USER32.DLL was relocated in memory...
Earlier in the week Microsoft had pushed a security patch for the HD Audio subsystem on all Windows XP based systems with Automatic Updates enabled. This resulted in an issue on systems with Realtek HD Audio Control Panel installed.
More information and a hotfix can be found on Microsoft’s support site:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935448/en-us
A Pentium-4 based laptop was brought into the shop because it was “dog slow”. The machine had 512 MB of memory and 13 GB of available disk space - respectable for most users. The system startup said it all ... the AOL Client, Norton Internet Security, RealMedia, Quicktime, Acrobat, and some system specific utilities all had fingers in the startup routine. Available memory dipped down to only a few megabytes during startup which meant some serious disk thrashing was going on between the swap file and memory. After several minutes the system stabilized and available memory reached around 100 MB; not fantastic, but not bad. Startup programs, especially these 800 pound gorillas by Real, Apple, and Adobe, are killing machines.
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