Lexington Computer Repair Blog

I think I’ve mentioned here before why I got into computer repair, it’s because I like helping people. I’ve got a skill for fixing computer problems, people need help – it works. Trust me when I tell you that you shouldn’t do this for this money, let’s just leave it at that.

I normally get one or two calls a week from people with problems that can be solved pretty simply over the phone. If it’s something that I can spend 5-10 minutes with someone and get their problem fixed, why have them schlep their computer into the shop and charge them a service fee for a simple issue? I just can’t see it; and I know the way I’d like to be treated if it was me, so if I can I will just walk them through a quick solution. Honestly, I don’t know if this idea scales. That is, if I started to get 20 non-revenue calls a week like this, would I still feel so eleemosynary? I’m not sure, but I have increased my advertising emphasis on “free advice” so we’ll have to see what happens going forward.

Actually, after only a few hours I got some feedback on this strategy. At 11:30 last night my business phone rang. I hesitated to answer it, but I was so curious about who would call me at that late hour and what would be on their mind I couldn’t help myself so I picked it up. It turned out that it was a guy named David from Oklahoma who had a problem with the sound on his computer. I think he had just spent his last cent on a new Hard Drive and his computer wasn’t working and he was desperate. I guess he had called some of the 24/7 services and they of course won’t help you with anything until you turn over your credit card. Who knows how many repair shops he had called before he found me. I helped him find the drivers he needed on the web and heard back from him the next day that everything was up and working.

A steady diet of these kinds of calls won’t put bread on the table or get baby a new pair of booties, but I was happy to help David out of a pinch. As I said, that’s why I do this job.

When we get calls here from computer users, the three most common questions we get are:

1. How do I tell if I have a virus?
2. Should I buy a computer that runs Vista?
3. How can I speed up my computer?

I recently sent these tips about the last item to Hartland Computer Services customers (some suggestions on the first question can be found here, and the quick answer to the second question is “no”).

Speeding Up Your XP or Vista Computer

1. Add more memory -
When Windows runs out of RAM (Random Access Memory) it starts moving programs out of memory and onto the hard disk, this slows down the computer – often considerably. Here is a very general rule of thumb, if you are running Windows XP, use at least 1GB (one Gigabyte) of RAM, if you are running Vista, 2GB is normally sufficient. To find out how much RAM you have, go to the Windows Start Menu, open Control Panel then click on “System” (“System” may be under something like “Performance and Maintenance” depending on how your menus are set up). You’ll find your RAM listed there next to the speed of your processor.

2. Get rid of those dumb toolbars –
The latest trick of hardware and software manufacturers is to sneak a search toolbar into your browser. These toolbars, by Yahoo, Google, McAfee, Ask and others take up screen space and, if you get more than one of them, often fight with each other, slowing down your internet experience. To stop the madness, open your browser and go to “Tools” then choose “Add-ons” or “Manage Add-ons”, look for entries like “Yahoo Toolbar” and “Ask Toolbar”, highlight them and then click the “Disable” button. When you restart your browser they’ll be gone and quite often you will feel a noticeable improvement in browsing speed.

3. Ease up (a little) on security –
The level of security provided by many of the commercial software “suites”, for example Norton 360 and McAfee Security Suite, is quite high. The real-world equivalent might be like living in a gated community with 24-hour police patrols, door locks, bars on the windows, a moat a drawbridge, surveillance cameras, a helicopter above…well, you get the point. I’ve seen the processing overhead of these suites drag the performance of an otherwise decent computer to the ground. Personally, I prefer a just a good anti-virus program (most of my customers know I prefer Avira AntiVir, Kaspersky has a good reputation as well) and Windows Firewall (you should probably add an on-demand spyware checker like SuperAntiSpyware as well). Whatever you do, do not run two anti-virus programs on the same machine, they will tend to fight each other, miss viruses and slow your computer to a crawl.

4. Test your internet connection –
For most people, “slow internet” and “slow computer” are one in the same because they have the same impact on you as a user. It might be helpful to know if your slow computer is actually a problem with your internet service. For those with Insight Broadband, you can go to their test site, found here, to test the speed of your connection. Personally, I suspect that Insight’s test always tells you that your internet connection is great (and I have some evidence to back that up) so you might want to try an independent site like www.speedtest.net as well. If your results are less than say 9Mbps (that’s 9 Megabits per second) you might want to call Insight and have a chat with them (I’ve generally found them to be pretty responsive).

5. Scan for viruses –
No advice on speeding up your computer can be complete without a recommendation to scan for viruses. I won’t belabour this point here. Make sure your Antivirus program is up-to-date – that means virus definitions from today- and run a full scan of your computer (as per my last email to you, you should make sure you are not running a bogus Antivirus program as well).

When I was responsible for software development teams I used to often say that sometimes it was good to know when to give up early. Most good software developers that I know are ambitious problem solvers and if you manage to give them an “impossible” task they will work on it until the cows come home trying to fix it “Impossible” tasks have a virtually unlimited set of rabbit holes, false solutions and sub-problems to be solved, these erata often conceal the true solution which is to give up and try something completely different. Such is the advice I should have been giving myself in trying to repair the HP Pavillion 533w that’s been on the bench here for several days.

I’m not sure what the machine has been through in getting to me, it appears to have lots of Windows updates but is in pre-SP2 state. The two key problems I faced were:

1. Non-destructive recovery install stalls after setting keyboard and language
2. After problem 1 was solved, Windows update stalled at “Checking for latest updates for your computer…”

For Problem 1, it turns out that some HP Pavillions have a bug in their non-destructive recovery solution. This bug causes the install to report that it cannot location the file c_20127.nls on the recovery drive and then eventually seizes up.

To fixed this, I used a modified version of these instructions:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericSoftwareDownloadIndex?lc=EN&cc=us&softwareitem=pv-9155-1

(also referenced here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q329450)

As you will note, these instructions call for the use of a floppy disk, they might just as well have suggested that you use your keypunch machine to type the solution onto Hollerith cards – who uses floppies anymore? As it turns out, you can modify the instructions to use a USB flash drive by changing the references in the .BAT file for “A:” to “D:” (there are 2 references), copying the files to the root of your USB Flash drive, and ensuring that the flash drive is plugged in to the problem computer when it is booted. Follow the HP instructions but find your files on d: instead of a:. In my case I had to do the install again to get the fix to take.

Once Windows XP Home was loaded back on the machine I was disappointed (to say the least) that the system would not access Windows Update. I think this problem was related to some spyware that had been on the machine previously.

Broken Windows Update that results from viruses and spyware can be very difficult to fix. Here is where the wise and experienced computer tech will probably decide to do a clean install. But not me. There are a lot of reasons why Windows Update fails. There are hundreds of things to try. In the past, I have found that the registry keys for Automatic Update Service or BITS had been altered from %SystemRoot%… to %fystemRoot%. That was not the case for this machine.

What finally did work for this machine can be found here:

http://taurarian.mvps.org/WU_XP/0×8024402f.htm

By the time I got to Step 4, the problem was fixed. Hallelujah!

P.S., oh and I also renamed the SoftwareDistribution folder to .OLD, don’t know if that impacted the solution.

A lot of initial calls we get here in our computer repair business in Lexington are about viruses. Generally people have a vague notion that they might have a virus, but they aren’t sure, can we take a look? I thought it might be helpful to describe the quick triage we do ourselves to make our assessment.

First let me mention that their are a number of different kinds of infections you might get, we lump them into 2 categories: Viruses/Trojans/Spyware/Adware/Worms are in the first category (generally known as “malware“), the second category we call “crapware“. You can read more of the detailed definitions of viruses and trojans here or here. For all intents and purposes, to the computer user it’s all about the same, malware is responsible for  making your computer slower, changing the data that is coming into your computer and possibly taking information out of your computer. Once they are in there they typically replicate, sometimes until the PC becomes unusable. The second category, crapware, is software that either the computer manufacturer has put on your computer, or some legitimate installation program has sneaked on there because the user wasn’t paying 100% attention. Similarly, they slow down your computer and make it operate less efficiently.

So, what are the signs that your computer is infected?

1. Your computer starts very slowly – As computers that are running Windows operating systems age, they slow down (just like people) the disk and registry get full of remnants of programs long forgotten and no longer used. However, when your computer starts exhibiting signs of extreme slowness that comes on quickly, over the course of a couple weeks or less, be suspicious. If it’s taking more that 2-3 minutes for your computer to become usable be very suspicious.
2. Your Anti-Virus software reports that your virus definitions are out of date – One of the things that malware programs do first is disable your Anti-Virus program or interfere with your internet access to keep them from updating themselves. If you find that you can’t update your AV, you’ve got a problem.
3. Windows update doesn’t work – Malware takes advantage of defects and holes in your Windows operating system. Microsoft runs along behind the malware creators patching those holes and encourages users to update their systems through Windows Update. Malware creators try to stay a step ahead of Microsoft but then must prevent you from plugging the holes they are taking advantage of, they do this by disabling some of the underlying services that facilitate MS Update. Open Internet Explorer and go to Tools/Windows Update or Safety/Windows Update and update your computer with the latest security patches, if this fails, it could very possibly be due to a malware infection.
4. Control-Alt-Delete doesn’t work – Some malware disables this popular function because it is useful in seeing what programs are really running on the computer.
5. When you are browsing, you get unexpected “pop-ups” – Pop-ups are windows that open on your desktop unexpectedly, almost always trying to sell you something. Sometimes, they cynically tell you that you have a virus and you need to download their program to fix it (the download actually is the virus).
6. Your internet access is stopped or seriously curtailed – If this behaviour is combined with any of the above, you probably are infected.

All of the indicators above could indicate some other problem with your computer, but if you are experiencing two or more of them, chances are you’ve caught something. If the infection is bad, you are going to need to budget a good bit of time to repair it. There are some good resources out there, one place to start is the Security Forum at Broadband Reports, lot’s of helpful people there. You can also contact me here on this blog, I’ll be happy to help if I can.

I’ve never seen the comparison in writing but I can’t be the first person to compare Microsoft’s Windows Vista to the Ford Edsel. Wikipedia says of the ill-fated Edsel:

There is no single reason why the Edsel failed, and failed so spectacularly. Popular culture often faults the car’s styling. Consumer Reports cited poor workmanship. Marketing experts hold the Edsel up as a supreme example of corporate America’s failure to understand the nature of the American consumer. Business analysts cite the weak internal support for the product inside Ford’s executive offices. According to author and Edsel scholar Jan Deutsch, the Edsel was “the wrong car at the wrong time.”

Reading this today, I couldn’t help thinking of the comparison with the equally ill-fated Vista. Maybe it’s the workmanship, maybe it was the design, I don’t know; but I do know that I get a significant number of customers who say that they want their current computer running Windows XP to be fixed because they don’t want Vista. What a nightmare it must be to be the Vista product manager in Redmond.

A former colleague of mine, David Craig who is now Chief Strategy Officer at Thomson Reuters, always liked to compare building software to building cars. I think using computers is a lot like using a car, there are certain things you want:

• Familiar and easy to use – don’t fool around with the controls, put the steering wheel and the brake and the clutch where I expect them. Don’t make me have to learn to drive all over again just so you can prove how clever you are.
• Works as expected – when I turn the key the engine should start when I push the switch on my door the window should open, when I reach under the seat I should find that thingie that lets it move up and back (right next to the old Coke can and stray Cheetos)
• Is dependable – always starts, never stalls, doesn’t make funny noises.

This brings me around to Windows 7. I’ve been using it as my main OS here at Chaos House* since the beta became available earlier this year. I can report that it is not nearly as annoying as Vista and makes some nice improvements over Windows XP. It has been very stable, although the Release Candidate I am using now has ironicly been less stable than the beta. I would be very hesitant to recommend to a customer that s/he use a beta version of software, especially something as important as an operating system, but for a customer that really dislikes using Vista, I would say that help is on the way (toward the end of 2009).

* Referenced with a tip of my cap to Jerry Pournelle who I think was the first, best blogger ever.