Archive for the 'Computers & Technology' Category

The truth about reparing computers

Published by Sean Et Cetera on March 4, 2008 in Computers & Technology. 0 Comments

While perusing the Consumerist, I came across the following quote:

Drive past the big box stores when your computer breaks. Their employees are trained to upsell, not repair computers. Instead, seek out the young, the ones who aren’t old enough to hold advanced degrees or a driver’s license—those who can be paid with extended curfews are ideal. Then, watch in amazement as they sprightly get your computer back to checking AOL so you can forward us that hilarious email Snopes disproved last year.

Isn’t that the truth? Read the article here.

Always having to be right

Published by Sean Et Cetera on February 28, 2008 in Computers & Technology. 0 Comments

At work, when the (college) student workers cannot resolve an issue, I’m the last stop in our support line.  As a result, I sometimes get computers for which there is nothing we can do about it.  For example, I had two Acer desktops a couple weeks ago, nearly the same model, crash and these came into the office.  Everything I tried didn’t get the computers working, but part of that is due to the fact that the CDs provided consistently encountered errors; all other hardware appeared to function correctly.  I had to tell the students that the computers needed more work than we could do, and fortunately, one of the computers was still under warranty.  Today I had a student pick up another laptop which had, from what I could tell, a dead hard drive, as a spare hard drive was detected by the system in BIOS, whereas the original was not.

That’s one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with when working on someone else’s computer: having to be right about what I’m telling them.  I mean, I don’t have to be right, but I don’t feel right telling them something that might be false.   It’s part of the reason that fixing a computer with an issue, or even correctly diagnosing the issue, is such an accomplishment; it gives me something to push off of.  At least I’ll be 1-1 this week, as the second computer is working, and should be back with the student tomorrow.

Ars Technica’s Green Computing Guide

Published by Sean Et Cetera on February 25, 2008 in Computers & Technology. 0 Comments

While glancing over my feeds at work, I saw an article on Ars Technica titled Ars System Guide: it’s easy being green, and I found it to be a worthwhile read.  In the future, when Meghan finally needs a new computer for real, and not some Frankensteinian computer that’s been brought back from the brink of death multiple times, I’ll re-read this article and then go find some more up-to-date ones to read.  Since her HP Pavilion is going on seven years or so, it probably is not very efficient at it’s power usage, and it does use a wonderful CRT monitor and, due to the cobbled-together parts, it has two internal hard drives and also uses an external one as well, so those use power and create heat.  On a related note, she was trying to find some files that weren’t on the backup I had made, and so I plugged in the old hard drive that was suffering from the click-of-death.  Apparently, leaving it alone for a handful of weeks has made it work, or at least it worked for the 10 minutes I had it connected.

One thing we’ve been doing is trying to find ways to re-wire some of the electronics so they go through surge protectors so that a switch can kill the entire power draw of those items.  While we’ve done this with the computers,  we just did this with most of the items in the “entertainment center” in the living room.  Personally, I consider my computer to my entertainment center, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the DVD player, Wii, and television are now on a power strip so that they can be turned off to stop any power draw when not in use. Another minor thing that we’ve been making sure to do is to unplug any power adapters that are not being used to charge a device, namely the cellphones, but also for the battery charger and iPods.

Now that we have our IRS return, I’m debating whether or not to get something like the Kill-A-Watt to help determine other ways to decrease power usage in our apartment.  Fortunately, there aren’t too many items in the apartment for us to worry about, and the skylights really help with keeping the place lit up through most of the day.

Computer issues: When drivers go bad

Published by Sean Et Cetera on January 30, 2008 in Computers & Technology. 0 Comments

To start with, I’m not quite sure how this particular incident happened. The explanation from the student was that their computer was on, they left the room or went to sleep, and when they next went to use the computer, the USB keyboard an mouse suddenly no longer worked, and that they had to restart the computer a number of times before they were recognized. This was the computer that was given to me. However, I hadn’t initially heard the explanation of what happened; I just had a computer that wouldn’t connect to the network for some unknown reason.

When I began to work on the computer, I could not get the USB keyboard and mouse I have for desktops that come in to work either. At first, I was trying to figure out what was wrong with the computer, as they would work fine when I was using the UBCD, but when booting up normally, the keyboard and mouse would go unresponsive sometime after POST as the Windows XP Professional loading screen/progress indicator appeared. Then, for no apparent reason what-so-ever, the keyboard and mouse suddenly worked. I’m not sure why, nor do I really care at this point. I was able to get to the login screen and actually take a look at why the comptuer couldn’t connect to the network. It had to be something with the system, as the UBCD could connect just fine.

Between using the UBCD and logging into the computer, I knew that formatting and re-installing Windows was not something I wanted to do; there were far too many programs installed to want to try and find every directory that needed to be backed-up. I tried some of the same things my staff had tried, only due to the fact that sometimes, things just work for me when they didn’t for others, but such was not the case. The issue seemed to be that Windows had something corrupt that was affecting it’s ability to connect to the network. The biggest indicator that something was fubar was the following message (or something very similar) when you tried to use ipconfig:

Windows IP Configuration

An internal error occurred: The request is not supported.

Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services for further help.

Additional information: Unable to Query host name.

However, as far as error messages go, it really isn’t helpful. As I said, I had tried stuff my staff had already done, such as the winsockfix we use, but to no avail. When using a USB NIC, the same error occurred and I could not connect to the network. Not surprisingly, that meant that I was going to have to do some research and keep throwing fixes at it until it worked.

I noticed the the 1394 Net Adapter in Device Manager was not correctly installed, which is when I started to suspect it was a driver issue, as the firewire port is on-board, and I would find it odd that Dell would ship an XPS 200/5150C without it correctly installed, or the drivers for it. Every time that I tried to update it, it would fail. I really didn’t want to deal with drivers, but apparently I had to.In the process of trying to resolve the issue, I attempted to boot into safe mode, but never succeeded at doing so. Part of this was due to the system very quickly telling me to press escape to bypass loading sptd.sys, and if I didn’t, it would hang. I decided to check this driver out first. I knew that Daemon Tools was installed on this system, and that this process is related to it, so I tried to update this file from the distributor. That didn’t seem to do the trick.

After goign to one of the sites listed at the end of this post, I eventually started to review services that were running, and found that DHCP was not. When I tried to start it, I got the following error:

Error: Could not start the DHCP Client Service on local computer

Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start.

Searching for the first line of the error brought me to an article of the same name, which listed a number of ways to trouble shoot this issue. It was during step 3 in that article (Verify that the dependency service/components are running) that I found a number of issues with this computer. When I ran Device Manager and set it to show hidden devices, a number of the items in the Non-Plug and Play Devices section had exclamation marks on them. I tried to delete/re-install AFD (the first item listed with an exclamation mark, as well as the first listed in that step) when I couldn’t get it to start, but I could not get it to come back once it had been deleted. While that component was not working before, I knew it needed to be there, so I went looking for how to get it back.

That’s when I came across the article Fixing Winsock on Icrontic.com. As a resource for dealing with winsock, it seems to be rather complete. From the article, they listed a number of issues and fixes, and I went down the list. The abbreviated items, and my conclusions are as listed.

  1. Norton Internet Security or other bloatware installed. - Not an issue from what I could tell. McAffe Security Center was installed, but this was not causign any issues.
  2. Winsock is corrupt. - It wasn’t, and I ran the fix an extra time to be sure.
  3. Protocols need to be re-installed. - Nope, they were there and it didn’t help.
  4. Issue with Non-Plug and Play devices. - As listed previously, there were issues, but I couldn’t delete all items, and there wasn’t any way to bring them back.
  5. Replace C:\WINDOWS\INF\ and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ - YES!

I got a hold of the two directories from an installation of Windows XP my co-worker had up and running at the time I was doing this. After I backed up the current files, I copied the copies over the existing ones and rebooted. Once the computer started up again, running ipconfig from the command prompt returned not just information, but the correct IP it should have as well. After updating Windows and McAfee, the system was still connected and running fine.

Additional Notes

In the process of researching this issue, I came across a number of sites that seemed like they could help, but the issues were either just a little bit different than what I was facing, or the resolution to the problem did not, well, resolve the problem. They are listed below in case others need them.

Learning something new: re-installing Windows XP with I386

Published by Sean Et Cetera on January 30, 2008 in Computers & Technology. 3 Comments

Recently, I worked on a student’s computer, a Dell desktop of some kind, that had issues starting up. It could begin to load Windows XP (Professional I believe) but would hang prior to the login screen. After some malware cleaning and whatnot, I managed to get past that point, only to then hang at an empty desktop. After reviewing the system even more, I found plenty of remnants of previous malware infections (100s of files) and decided that a format/reinstall would be the best option to make sure everything was taken care of. The big issue, of course, was that the student couldn’t find the installation discs that came with their computer.

Previously, this hadn’t been much of a concern, as we would direct students to the bookstore to purchase a new copy of Windows XP Professional (if they hadn’t already purchased a copy) and then use that to reinstall the operating system. Now that Vista is out, there are either very few or no copies of XP to be found at the bookstore, and some computers come to us that installing Vista on is simply not an option.

I thought I was out of options, but then I recalled that the UBCD has a program that could be helpful, Windows XP Setup Launcher. What it does, is allow you to pick a path to install Windows XP from. You cannot pick the Windows directory itself, as these are the post-installation files, but the computer did have an I386 directory, which has the compressed files that are used in installing Windows. I copied that directory to an external hard drive and ran Windows XP Setup Launcher. Using another UBCD program, Keyfinder, I got the computer’s Windows product key, which I needed to complete the setup process.

There were some issues along the way of course.

At one point, I was getting an error message of some kind because mstask.ini could not be found in the I386 folder. Now, for creating the UBCD, I have the contents of a Windows XP installation CD stored on my computer, and it just so happened that mstask.ini was already there. The contents were simply:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={d6277990-4c6a-11cf-8d87-00aa0060f5bf}

However, in case this was a file that was or needed to be different per computer, I searched for the entire second line shown above. While there were a number of sites that came up, this was the first site listed, and the inline comment for that CLSID of “Makes the task folder work” was enough for me to assume that this was something standard that could be copied over. Sure, most of the information that initially comes up is for Windows prior to XP, but it my assumption was correct, as I was able to continue on to bigger and better errors.

The next error was a pain to deal with, as the installation would through the following message at me:

Windows cannot load internet configuration utility ICFGNT.DLL. The specified module could not be loaded.

This is where I, unfortunately, get forgetful. I wasn’t taking exact notes on this, and as the case was, there were multiple errors going on at the same time that I was trying to resolve. Always remember: fix one thing at a time. In regards to this, I’m sure I did the following, and as listed later, I tried some of these multiple times:

  • I will say that this site/forum post offered the most assistance. I applied the edits to txtsetup.sif that are listed, even though I was not using the exact software listed. It didn’t appear to harm the system and I do believe it helped. These were as follows:All added to the [FileFlags] section of txtsetup.sif
    BNTS.DLL = 16
    TSHOOT.DLL = 16
    SNIFFPOL.DLL = 16
    SSTUB.DLL = 16
    SSDPSRV.DLL = 16
    SSDPAPI.DLL = 16
    UPNP.DLL = 16
    UPNPHOST.DLL = 16
    UPNPCONT.EXE = 16
    UDHISAPI.DLL = 16
  • I downloaded a copy of icfgnt.dll, as I could not really found a copy in the I386 folders I had access to.

Something there did the job, as I was able to get the computer up and running. I had also saved the drivers and dell directories to the external drive so that I would be able to install the hardware Windows couldn’t, and fortunately, everything was there as needed. You’d think that would be the end of it, but you would be wrong; so very, very wrong.

Sure, the computer was running, but one of the Windows Security Alert balloons that pops up after a fresh install caught my eye. If I’m correct, it may have been telling me that the computer did not have any antivirus software installed. I don’t know for sure, as the message was not in English; in fact, it was definitely a Middle Eastern language, but I’m not sure which. For the purpose of listing it, I’m going to say it was Arabic. I didn’t think this was going to be an issue, but then I started to use Windows. Here’s what I remember finding in Arabic:

  • All of the Windows Security Center
  • The Start menu item for setting default applications and settings
  • The Hardware and Remote tabs of System Properties

So, I try the re-installation process again, making sure to do an attended install and not an unintended one, which of course, did not solve the problem. This was starting to bother me, as I could find no real reason why it was happening, then it hit me: everything that was showing up in Arabic was something that had been changed with Service Pack 2. I grabbed one of the SP2 discs we have from a couple years ago and “installed” it on the computer. One reboot later, and all but one item (default applications and settings) was in English. I connected to the Internet and initiated an update of 90-some items, and following that reboot, the computer was, as far as I could tell, all in English again.

Was this computer a pain to deal with? Yes. Did I enjoy working on it? You better believe it. It was nice to have a computer come in that was fubar and find a unique way to solve the problem, which I can now tuck away as an option for further issues I may face. Also, since nothing jumped out at me when I was searching for this, I’m more than glad to add it to the collective knowledge of the web. Just be sure to leave a comment if you find this useful.

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