Lexington Computer Repair Blog

I talked a customer into upgrading her Dell 1525 to Windows 7 64-bit instead of the 32-bit version yesterday. It’s not that I think the 64-bit version is vastly superior, but it does offer some protection from viruses to I think it is worth considering. The upgrade went fine, between the install disc and Windows Update the machine found all but one of the drivers it needed to run. The one remaining driver just complains about “Base System Device”, as usual, not a very helpful message to figure out what is missing. As it turns out, and as usual, it is the memory card reader that is missing a driver.

Dell’s site does not even list any 64-bit drivers (Windows 7 or Vista) for this machine, but you can download the proper Ricoh diver here. After runnning this, you’ll have all your devices and 64-bit drivers.

I had a computer here today that would not allow me to open the Windows Security Center even though it was showing up correctly in the notification tray. This was an XP machine that had had a virus, so I tried all the virusy things I know but they would not fix the problem.  I then found this post on Tech Support Forum that solved the problem. I’m happy to propagate it here. And yes, Bob is my uncle!

About six weeks ago I had a run of customers coming in with damaged hard drives. After seeing their concern about losing their kid’s growing-up photos, business documents and personal email, I decided to bump up the priority of finding a good online backup service to recommend to my customers. I looked at the services, features, costs and convenience of about 12-15 of them located in the US and Europe. I ended up settling on Mozy which I felt, on paper, had the best combination of these attributes. Subsequent to that decision, I have had the opportunity to use Mozy a couple of times in anger for customers whose hard drives have failed. This is an account of one of those experiences. (Full disclosure: I decided to become a Mozy affiliate after selecting and testing their service, I am also an affiliate with 2 other online services. Trust me, the meager consideration I get from Mozy for people clicking on them from this site does not influence my opinion or the description below in any way. Having said that, if you decide to use Mozy, I would be pleased for you to click the link on this blog)

The General Case for Online Backup

I want to quickly mention the general advantages and issues around online backup.

Advantages

• The software is generally easy to use
• You don’t have to manage space or rotate backups or worry about whether your backup drive is working/full/failed/etc.
• In addition to being protected from disk failure you are protected from fire/flood/theft
• It is (or at least should be) so easy that even a very inexperienced user can set it up (and forget it)

Disadvantages

• Most services (including Mozy) only back up your personal files, not your programs or operating system. However, I’ve never had a customer cry over losing her copy of Microsoft Office to a disk failure, but losing the videos of her daughters first steps…
• Monthly charges (in some cases).

My Experience With Mozy

Installation and Backup

Signing up and downloading the product is a snap. If you decide to start off with the 2GB of free storage, which I recommend, you don’t even have to provide a credit card. This is a great feature of Mozy. The 2GB free is not limited to 30-days as it is on some other services, it’s free indefinitely. This means if you only have a few pictures (less than 100 or so), or you are mainly backing up documents like Quicken files or whatever, you can use the service for free indefinitly – 2GB is a lot of space actually. By contrast, a service like SOS Online Backup, which I think is quite a good service as well, only gives you 30 days of free backups, then you have to commit to buy it.

Once installed, the software finds all your key personal files automatically. Documents, photos, videos, email, all the stuff that you could never get back if you lost it. As far as I can tell, even if you put these files in an unconventional folder (like your secret porn folder) Mozy will still find them and back them up. Note that if it manages to find more that 2GB of files it will take you over your free allotment. You can fix this by starting the Mozy application and telling it not to back up certain folders.

The initial backup will start immediately and run for as much as a couple days if you have lots of files. Be sure to leave your computer running overnight if you want the full backup to be completed ASAP. If the initial backup is interrupted, it will restart where it left off.

Emergency Restore

As I mentioned, my customer’s hard drive failed completely. This happened while I was trying to do a backup of it. Since the backup failed midstream, I had nothing, my customer had lost all his data. When I called him to tell him the bad news, his concern was alleviated by the fact that he knew that Mozy had said that it had a complete backup from only a day earlier. There was hope that it was all there if the backups had worked.

After reinstalling his operating system from the original discs, we logged into his Mozy account and downloaded the latest version of the software. Upon reinstall, we told the Mozy software that we were replacing an old machine with a new one. There are two ways to do a restore with Mozy, you can do it from the application locally or you can log on to the website and do it from there. We chose to try the local method. To our delight, it showed all of the files from the “old” machine. The customer was most worried about his Quicken files so we chose the Quicken folder and told the applications to download that first. It worked just fine but was very slow, recovering a whole machine at that speed would take days.

After we successfully downloaded the Quicken files we took a break. I later went back and started doing some additional restores through the local application however, something went seriously wrong with these restores and after 36 hours we had only restored about 84MB. It also seemed to be repeating the same files over and over. It was a real mess so I decided to abort the whole thing, reboot and start over. As it turns out, while I was trying to do a restore, Mozy had decided to back up the machine (a fresh install with no data files). Alas, when I went into the program after rebooting, the only backup available was the latest empty backup of the new machine and all the customer’s old files and folders were missing!!!

Don’t Panic

I’m not going to kid you, I freaked out. It appeared that the new backup had overwritten the old one that we needed. This happened at about 8:45 in the morning, I got online on the Mozy support website. They have a chat function and after about 10 minutes online with Yves, we had found the old backup through the web interface (for paid customers the live chat support is available 24×7). I’m not sure why it disappeared from the local application but it was definitely online and that gave me a chance to test the web-based restore.

Web-based Restore

Under this scenario, you pick the folders that you want to recover and Mozy packs them up on their servers and makes them available via the web. On the one hand this is slower because you have to wait for Mozy to compress and package the folders which in my case took several hours. On the other hand it appears faster because your downloads will run at the full speed of your internet connection (I’m curious whether the decryption takes place at Mozy or locally when you unpack the files, I’m not sure). I’ve seen people complain about this web-based restore process and I can imagine that a panicking user would find the wait interminable but mine eventually came online and I downloaded the restore files over the next 12 or so hours without incident. Mozy does send you an email when the files are ready for download.

There is actually a third alternative which is to get Mozy to FedEx you DVDs with your files on them. This could be a good way to go if it’s a weekday and you have a lot of files. The cost is around $50 for this.

Recommendations

A few glitches and learning experiences aside, the backup and restore processes for Mozy worked pretty much the way I expected them to. When I had a problem, there was someone available online to help. From my experience, Mozy is completely fit for purpose of disaster recovery and backup. I have found that there are two key elements to having successful backups:

1. You have to actually take regularly scheduled backups. This is harder than it sounds but Mozy makes it easy.
2. The restore process has to work. Again, I think Mozy did an excellent job of this.

In my opinion, the local restore interface appears to be better suited for small recoveries and the web-based restore for whole-machine recovery.

Remember that Mozy is a backup solution only for your personal data such as photos, videos, email and music. For most users, this is good enough, just remember to keep your installation discs around for the programs you use because you will need them. If you are a more sophisticated user who wants a complete backup, I would recommend combining Mozy with Macrium Reflect. You can use Macrium to image your drive (to another drive), which will give you a baseline backup of your operating system and programs, and use Mozy to do automatic daily backups of your personal files.

If you are not currently doing regular backups for heavens sake, click on this link, sign up for Mozy and just try it. Within minutes your backup will have started and in a short time you’ll have a safety net in case of disk failure or some other catastrophe. Whether you get Mozy or something else, just get something now because your hard drive’s days are numbered and tonight may be the night!

Luke 12:19-21

¹⁹And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ‘

²⁰“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

²¹“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

I bought a new Acer laptop for a customer this week. I unpacked it and turned it on only to find the mouse pointer jammed up in the upper left had corner and unresponsive. I managed to fill in all the set-up information using tabs and arrow keys. I figured that somehow the device driver hadn’t loaded properly and once Windows 7 started it would be fixed – it wasn’t. I attached an external mouse and it worked, checked the Synaptics touchpad driver, it was fine, uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, still no luck. Loaded Ubuntu – nothing.

OK, I’m sure this is a case of RTFMS, but I finally figured it out thanks to this Acer Touchpad Thread. The Fn+F7 did not work for me, but it turns out that just to the left of the On/Off button there is a little black button with an icon of a finger on it. This defies logic, at least to me, but when the little light is on, the touchpad is turned off and my computer came defaulted to the touchpad-off position. Go figure.

We’ve been Skype users since 2003 and have used it all over the world to conveniently talk to and see our family and friends back here in the US. We even feel a special bond with Skype because we’ve known Niklas Zennström, the inventor of Skype, socially and even had dinner at his flat in London with he and Janus Friis the Skype co-inventor. But Skype, no longer under Niklas control, has a business practice that I think is worthy of making them “Not Recommended”.

I’ve worked in telephone company billing and software development for many years, I know how billing works. As good as your software is, sometimes you get things wrong and the wrong calls wind up on the wrong bills. This is why, universally in my experience, telephone companies are pretty good about crediting customers with mis-billed calls. But not Skype.

Last week, I got over $100 worth of fraudulent calls billed to my Skype account. I called Skype the very next day, discussed it and they agreed that the calls were fraudulent (they were successive 2-hour calls to a Taiwan mobile number). But they refused to take the calls off my bill. I don’t want to go into a rant on this here (well, really I do, but I’ll resist the temptation) so I’ll try to focus on my concern. If you give Skype your credit card information, and for whatever reason fraudulent calls appear on your bill, you are responsible for them. This gives you an almost unlimited liability if you have the auto-recharge feature (which is selected persistently by default when you give Skype your credit card information) and no recourse if there is a mistake or fraud. That is simply too risky.

We still like the technology of Skype for their free video services, although we will keep a sharp eye out for alternatives. But we are very uncomfortable with giving Skype access to our credit information. You could make this even worse by using their recommended link to PayPal as PayPal encourages you to link that account to your bank account. This is basically a door to your bank account with a welcome mat that says, “Come on in Fraudsters”. For heaven’s sake, please don’t link your Skype account to PayPal!!!!

There are a lot of reasons (apparently) that Windows 7 might not resume from standby. Here is a fix to try but probably only if you are desperate and have these exact symptoms.

My customer brought in a Lenovo X200 laptop, a very nice laptop indeed, that would not boot. In fact after turning on the computer, the dash lights would like but the display would not even flicker, it was completely dead. If it weren’t for the fact that the computer wasn’t booting (and the customer insisted it had not been immersed in water) I would have thought the display had gone bad. However, I knew it wasn’t just a display problem because if it had been a) the machine would have continued to boot and b) we would have been able to see something by connecting an external monitor.

Interestingly, if I removed all the RAM, the machine would provide the beep codes associated with, “Hey stupid, you’ve removed all the RAM”. Replacing one stick at a time did not fix the problem, replace the HDD did not fix the problem. The machine does not have an internal CD, but if it did, replacing it would not have helped.

So, here is a summary of the symptoms:

• Black screen, no flicker or change in state
• Dash lights light but HDD light does not show sustained activity
• Bluetooth light illuminates and stays lit
• No POST
• No BIOS screen
• No beep codes (unless all RAM is removed)
• Same result with battery in and out

This looked like a dead system board and that’s what the repair manual indicated as well. But as it turns out, it was just a hosed CMOS. On this particular machine, the only way to reset the CMOS (that I could find) was to partly disassemble the computer, unplug the CMOS battery then put everything back together. Many machines have a simpler method that can be done using the power button (that did not work on this machine) or some other key combination. If you have a different machine, Google for “CMOS reset” and the model of your computer and you should find a way to do this.

What we have noticed over the last year or so is that the virus writers are making their viruses more and more difficult to extract. We have found that no single virus removal program can do the complete job. Moreover, the virus writers are making it so that an average user often cannot even get the computer booted into a state where they can start to work on it. If you want to give it a go, here are my suggestions.

Required items:

• 1 working computer (not the virused one)
• 1 flash drive

First, recognise that the bad guys have got control of your computer. They essentially are controlling it remotely over the internet so you need to make sure your computer is disconnected from the web. Pull the ethernet cable out of the back if you are connected by a wire. If you are wireless, you need to disable your wireless connection with a switch or button combination (if you are on a laptop) or, if you are on a desktop, by pulling the antenna off or pulling the card (NB: turning off your wireless router will not work as many viruses configure your computer to attach to any network they can find, like your neighbors).

Once the computer is off the internet, turn in on and see if you can boot into Safe Mode. To do this, start pressing and releasing the F8 key about twice a second as soon as you turn the power on to your computer. If you get it right, a text menu, white on black, will appear. If the Windows start screen appears, turn off the computer and try again. From the menu, select “Safe Mode” (no networking). You will see all the device drivers that your computer loads scrolling across your screen. If the computer asks you if you are sure you want to enter Safe Mode, say yes. If the computer seems to stall, give it a few minutes to boot, sometimes Safe Mode takes a while to load. If you are asked to log in, log in with your user name and normal password. If all goes well, you should get a screen with huge icons that looks a little like your desktop. If after 5 minutes you are still stuck on the black and white screen, Safe Mode is not going to work for you.

Once the computer boots into safe mode. Verify that you don’t have any virus pop-ups on your screen. If you do, you may have trouble with the next step but soldier on.

On the working PC, go to www.malwarebytes.org and download Malwarebytes, saving it on your flash drive. Next go to here, and download the latest security definitions for Malwarebytes and save those to your flash drive. Unplug the flash drive from the working computer and plug it into the one with the virus. Use My Computer or Computer or Windows Explorer to find your flash drive, then double-click on the Malwarebytes program to install it.

Proceed with the Malwarebytes installation (some viruses are smart enough to keep you from installing this program, if it won’t install, try changing the name of the file on your flash drive to something random, if that still doesn’t work, you may be beyond the scope of this procedure. When Malwarebytes asks you if you want to update and then run the program, uncheck both boxes (you don’t want to run it yet). After Malwarebytes completes its installation, go back to your flash drive and run the Malwarebytes update program you downloaded. When that completes, go to your desktop and double-click on the red Malwarebytes icon.

When the program opens, select “Perform Quick Scan” and press the Scan button. This will take 10-30 minutes to complete. When it’s done, review the items it has found (there may be quite a few) and tell it to fix the problems. You may be asked to reboot the computer, if so, answer yes, if not, reboot the computer anyway.

With the computer still physically disconnected from the internet, reboot the computer into “normal” mode. If you can log in to your desktop do a little dance, you are about 1/3 of the way home. Run Malwarebytes again, this time telling it to do a full scan, this will take an hour, maybe more. Again, tell it to fix any problems it finds. After it finishes, open the Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall any security or antivirus programs you have been using – consider them broken. This is an important step, if you skip it, and proceed with these instructions you may render your computer unusable.

Now, on the working computer, go to www.free-av.com and download Avira AntiVirus and save it on your flash drive. Next, go here and download the Avira signature updates (keep that page handy because you will need the instructions after you install Avira on the virused computer). Move the flash drive to the virused computer and install Avira. Next, following the directions you found above for doing a manual update, update the Avira virus definitions. Now, double-click on the Avira icon on your desktop and tell Avira to do a full scan of your computer. Go fix dinner or a very large cup of coffee, this will take at least and hour.

When Avira finishes, tell it to repair any problems it found. Now, reconnect your computer to the internet. Start Malwarebytes again and go to the Update tab and tell Malwarebytes to do an update. When it finishes, run a Quick Scan and clean up any additional problems it finds. After that, tell Avira to update itself and run another full system scan. When that finishes, there is a 90% probability your computer is clear of viruses and trojans. You might want to download Hitman Pro and run it for a second opinion.

If these instructions fail

There could be a million reasons why the above procedures might fail. As I said, the virus writers are smart and often over-achieve with their destructiveness and stealth capabilities. Here are some good websites with helpful people that you might try:

• Major Geeks
• Broadband Reports
• Wilders Security

Your other options are:

• Save all your importat data to that flash drive and reinstall Windows
• Call a professional like Hartland Computer Services @ 859.536.4107

Good luck.

I am working on a customer’s computer here that has a fairly serious virus infection. Thinking I had cleared the virus, when I put the HDD back into her machine it would just log me out as soon as I logged in. Things went downhill from there and I ended up having to restore her disk back to the way it was when she brought it in and start all over again. After clearing the viruses for a second time (this time correctly), the machine would not boot. When I turned it on, all I got was a black screen with a blinking cursor.

I tried booting to the XP installation disc (after breaking the Admin password using EBCD from here) and using FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but this was to no avail. I checked the BOOT.INI file which was OK and I tried restoring her drive both with its original MBR and the standard Windows XP MBR – no dice. Then I remembered a tool I had used a while back for a mysteriously unbootable computer that was giving me the “NTLDR missing” error. In this case I was not getting any error message, just the black screen blinking cursor, but the two problems felt the same to me. Sure enough my NTDLR fix CD repaired the problem on the first try. You can download the black screen blinking cursor fix from here.

The author, Mike Comer, does a nice job of explaining how this works technically so I won’t repeat it here. I will recommend that if this fixes your problem that you make a small donation to Mike as I have for his excellent help.

Edit 26 August 2010: I have had a couple of Dell computers here this week with the same problem. I am convinced that it has to do with a failing hard drive. If I am right, the fix for this problem of course is to replace the hard drive. One work-around that has been reported to work is to remove the hard drive and do a defrag on it, then put it back in the problem machine (be sure to run CHKDSK /F both prior and after the defrag). Another work-around is to reformat and re-install. Both of these have worked but I have some doubts about whether they are good long-term solutions. Possibly worth a try though.

We’re huge Skype fans here. First we used it for international calling back to the US when we were living in the UK, then we loved it for its great video conferencing when we were in India. I’ve installed it on two Windows 7 implementations (both on the same machine) and have had problems with the sound card both times. Here’s the problem and fix:

Sometimes, when I would answer a call, instead of picking up, Skype would reject the call and give me a message that says: “No sound – There’s a problem with the sound card inside your computer. Try plugging in a USB headset for this call” It does this even though there is absolutely no problem with the sound card. The problem is intermittent but once it starts it’s hard to get rid of.

The solution I’ve found for this is as follows:

1. In Windows 7, right click on the little speaker in the notification area (lower right of desktop)
2. From the menu, select “Playback devices”
3. On the “Sound” window, disable any sound devices that you don’t have or don’t use then select the one you want to use for Skype, it probably is called simply “Speakers” with the name of your sound card underneath it.
4. Now click on “Properties”
5. Next click on the “Advanced” tab
6. Uncheck the box that says “Allow applications ot take exclusive control of this device” then click “Apply”, then “OK”
7. You should now be back at the “Sound” window, click on the tab that says “Recording”. Highlight the microphone that you use for Skype and click on “Properties”
8. Go to the “Advanced” tab and do the same thing you did for “Speakers”
9. From the “Sound” window, do the same thing for the other microphones on your computer
10. Reboot.

This should fix your Skype sound problem. Enjoy.

After clearing up a virus, it’s not too unusual that you still can’t connect to the internet through your browser even though your computer is connected just fine to its network. For example if you open a command window, and type “ipconfig” you will see that you have a proper ip address (like 192.168.1.x). You can even ping sites, I usually use Yahoo for testing, by typing “ping www.yahoo.com” but still the browser returns something like “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”. Frustrating.

I had this problem tonight on a customer machine and what was more frustrating was that my normal quick-fix didn’t work. Normally on an XP machine I can just run LSPFIX and the problem is solved, that works 90% of the time. If that doesn’t work, then I have used another Winsock Fix you can find here. Tonight though neither of those worked. Just as that bastard little voice in the back of my head was starting to tell me I was going to fail at fixing this machine, I remembered one really simple little trick that these viruses play – proxies.

As the little voice became louder and louder, “Steve, you’re not smart enough, you’re going to have to call your customer and admit it, everyone will think you’re a loser, your wife will leave you and your children will despise you…”, I opened Internet Explorer and did the following:

Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN settings

On the bottom half of the window, sure enough “Use a proxy server for your LAN” was checked and the LAN traffic was being proxied to port 555 on the laptop. I unchecked the proxy server and viola! this machine was back on the grid and that little voice was getting a fail enema.