Posts Tagged ‘fix’

Instructions from the I.T. Department

1. When you call us to have your com­pu­ter moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of post­cards, baby pic­tu­res, stuf­fed ani­mals, dried flo­wers, bow­ling trophies and children’s art.
2. Don’t ever write anything down, espe­cially the error mes­sage that was on your screen.
3. If we ask what the last thing you did was, always res­pond with, “I didn’t do anything.”
4. When we say we’ll be right over, imme­dia­tely find a rea­son to leave so you won’t have to ans­wer silly ques­tions from us, like “what’s your screen saver password?”
6. When desc­ri­bing your pro­blem, just tell us what you were ulti­ma­tely trying to do. For exam­ple, just say, “I can’t get my email”. We don’t need to know that the com­pu­ter won’t even turn on.
7. Feel free to ignore any email sent from us, espe­cially those mar­ked with high impor­tance. You don’t really need to know about the latest virus that wiped out your neigh­bors hard drive.
8. Always send impor­tant and urgent emails in all uppercase.
9. When the copier, or anything else remo­tely elec­tro­nic, doesn’t work, call us. Heck, if we can fix com­pu­ters, we must know all about copiers too.
10. If the docu­ment you sent to the prin­ter didn’t print, send it at least 20 more times. One of them is bound to work.
11. Don’t ever learn the pro­per name for anything tech­ni­cal. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.
12. Don’t waste your time using the built in help files. We already had to learn the hard way, why should you?
13. If any of the com­pu­ter cables are in your way or keep moving, be sure to route them across the top of your por­ta­ble hea­ter or set something big and heavy on them to hold them in place.
14. Never bother rea­ding any mes­sage that pops up on your screen. Just click the X to close it or the first but­ton your mouse gets to.
15. Don’t ever try reboo­ting the com­pu­ter your­self. Call us imme­dia­tely. Only expe­rien­ced, highly-trained pro­fes­sio­nals should attempt that.
16. Feel per­fectly free to say things like “I don’t know anything about this com­pu­ter crap”. We love hea­ring our area of pro­fes­sio­nal exper­tise refe­rred to as crap.
17. When you receive a huge movie file that’s really funny, be sure to for­ward it to all your friends. We have plenty of disk space and bandwidth.
18. Don’t bother brin­ging a radio to work, just lis­ten to music over the inter­net. Like I said, we have plenty of bandwidth.
19. Don’t even think of brea­king large print jobs down into sma­ller chunks. Some­body else might squeeze their one-page docu­ment into the queue.
20. When an I.T. per­son is carr­ying heavy equip­ment, worth thou­sands of dollars, that’s the best time to ask why your screen saver quit working.
21. Don’t bother to tell us when you move com­pu­ter equip­ment around on your own. We cer­tainly don’t need to keep track of those things.
22. Your com­pu­ter case makes a great flat sur­face for sit­ting drinks or pot­ted plants on.
23. Do wha­te­ver you can to cover up those ugly open air slots in the com­pu­ter and monitor.

Find drivers for unknown devices

Have you ever been given a com­pu­ter, or bought an old fixer upper PC that didn’t have all the discs or infor­ma­tion for the components?

I know this is frus­tra­ting since I too have had this pro­blem.  Espe­cially when it invol­ves key equip­ment (Net­work card).  There is nothing more irri­ta­ting then loo­king at your device list and seeing the yellow ques­tion mark.  Well tech­ni­cians, as with almost everything com­pu­ter rela­ted, there is a site setup to help with this.  PCIDatabase.com

So how does this work?

You will want to go to the ques­tion mark in the device mana­ger and right click on the entry (there maybe more then one on a rei­mage or a cus­tom built machine).  For those that may not be fami­liar on how to get to the device mana­ger here are some sim­ple steps.  Find the My Com­pu­ter icon on your desk­top (upper left by default).  You will want to Right click on the icon and you will get a menu like this:

After you left click on the pro­per­ties entry a new win­dow will pop up:
If you do not have the tab shown, you will want to click on the Hard­ware tab.  Once here, click on the device mana­ger and you will see a list of ins­ta­lled devi­ces.  You will scroll down for the yellow ques­tion mark.  In my exam­ple there are none, but I am sure you will find them rather quickly.

Read more…

When is an antivirus really a virus?

Today I recei­ved a call from one of my exter­nal users that was una­ble to access any web­si­tes because some new anti­vi­rus was saying he was unpro­tec­ted and every web­site had mali­cious code.

Since I know that we have McA­fee 8.5 deplo­yed to our users, I knew that this was not a McA­fee issue.  As we dis­cus­sed it a little further he was men­tio­ning that the Anti­vi­rus wan­ted him to purchase the software.

This isn’t the first I have heard of this.  There is a soft­ware com­pany Inno­va­gest 2000 that is pro­du­cing this soft­ware.  They adver­tise it as an antispy­ware appli­ca­tion, but it is the spy­ware.  On some less then savory web­si­tes you will get a pop up that says that your com­pu­ter maybe infec­ted and they offer a free scan.

The fear of being infec­ted moti­va­tes a lot of peo­ple to run this free scan.  Unk­nown to them this appli­ca­tion ins­talls under­neath and now you are stuck.  On that note, I do recom­mend only doing the online scans from repu­ta­ble sites.  I per­so­nally recom­mend the follo­wing: Syman­tec, Panda, and McA­fee.

This appli­ca­tion is extre­mely hard to get rid of.  It rere­gis­ters and ins­talls if it is not com­ple­tely unins­ta­lled correctly.

I hate pro­grams like this.  But it is a fact of life out there.  The modern day snake-oil salesman.

While the pro­gram is run­ning you will see the follo­wing unde­si­ra­ble behavior:

• A “Win­dows Secu­rity Cen­ter” sta­ting that you should purchase Per­so­nal Antivirus.
• Nume­rous alerts sta­ting that your com­pu­ter is under attack or that you have mal­ware run­ning on your com­pu­ter. If you click on these alerts, Per­so­nal Anti­vi­rus will be ins­ta­lled, or you will be brought to the purchase page for the program.
• Your Inter­net Explo­rer brow­ser will be hijac­ked to show secu­rity war­nings when brow­sing the web that stop you from reaching your desi­red page.

As I men­tio­ned before this bug­ger is very hard to get rid off.  But not impos­si­ble.  I found these ins­truc­tions at BleepingComputer.com.

Read more…

Keep that Software up to date

If you are like I am, you have a lot of soft­ware ins­ta­lled on your com­pu­ters.  So much in fact it seems impos­si­ble to keep them all up to date.  I know a lot of peo­ple think, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

The sim­ple ans­wer is…Because you should.

Though you may not be expe­rien­cing pro­blems, it does not mean that errors are not going on.  Some­ti­mes it’s even new com­pa­ti­bi­li­ties such as new Flash ver­sions on some web­si­tes.  Not only are there the com­pa­ti­bi­lity pro­blems to keep often there are new fea­tu­res or secu­rity upda­tes to be installed.

Because you have all of these pro­grams ins­ta­lled, some you may not even remem­ber having ins­ta­lled, guilty on my part I know, it makes it very hard to know what to look for upda­tes for.

For all of us users, there is a great appli­ca­tion out there pro­vi­ded for free by FileHippo.  This appli­ca­tion will scan your PC for your ins­ta­lled soft­ware and check the ver­sion num­bers.  When you recieve the results, it even pro­vi­des links to down­load the update.

As an exam­ple, when I was tes­ting this soft­ware, I found that my Flash ver­sion for IE was out of date (I admit I use Fire­Fox almost excu­si­vely).  It also told me that there was  a  beta ver­sion of IzArc (which I use as my file com­pres­sion uti­lity) more on that later.

I have added this file for direct down­load, but the link can be loca­ted here.

Direct Down­load:

  FileHip­poUp­da­ter (153.2 KiB, 134 hits)

Export to Excel

One of the nice things of wor­king IT Sup­port is that I get to learn of new fea­tu­res I would not nor­mally use. This actually occu­rred the other day with a func­tion the Mic­ro­soft Excel adds.

We have all loo­ked at web­si­tes that has rows and rows of data that you would like to be able to use a dif­fe­rent sort (Fan­tasy Foot­ball Stats come to mind) or even your Cor­po­rate Intra­net sites that use a lot of tables for data.

Since I never knew it was there I never loo­ked for it, but if you are on a web page and would like to export, you can right click on the web page and when you get the drop down menu, look for the Export to Excel item (usually toward the bottom).

If you do not have the option, there is a registry fix that I have found on the Winhel­pon­line
web­site that is extremly help­ful and keeps you from having to manually edit the registry.

REG Files

To auto­mate the above set­ting, down­load the fileand save to Desk­top. Unzip and run the appro­priate REG file (exporttoexcel07.reg or exporttoexcel03.reg) for the ver­sion of Mic­ro­soft Excel ins­ta­lled. To remove the option, run the file undo.reg.

  Export to Excel Fix (971 bytes, 159 hits)

The full article can be found here.