This morning I was at a Doctor’s office where the computer system was a complete afterthought. No central “data” room, not even a central location for the cabling to hub together. (Which was quite confusing to the phone guy there to install a couple more data runs.)
Since just the other day the Doctor had to [...]
Archive for March, 2007
Cleaning Pays
March 30, 2007USB Flash Drive and Windows 98 – Just Say “No”
March 29, 2007Yesterday I was duty bound to try to get USB devices, a USB Flash Drive and, if successful with that, a USB printer, to work on Windows 98SE (second edition – the good one!).
First, I tried an older Kingston 512MB drive. I downloaded the driver from Kingston’s website, installed it, rebooted and inserted the USB [...]
Upgrade Hard Drive – Clone it with Acronis True Image
March 27, 2007My new Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB hard drive came in and it was time to replace the temporary drive I had setup my new PC with.
Since I eat my own cooking, I chose Acronis True Image to do the job. I added the second hard drive, and with SATA drives, no jumpering is necessary. I [...]
Hard Drive Problems – Disconnect, Reconnect Fixes It
March 23, 2007Hard drive problems over the last couple of months have been way high and out of proportion.
What happens is that the computer will start acting up in Windows, the user decides to reboot, and upon booting the system cannot find the hard drive. On occasion, it’s when first powering up the unit in the morning.
The [...]
Dualview – Buy a Second Monitor and Double Your Desktop
March 22, 2007Today I had some people really excited. It wasn’t the new Dell Laptop (see my Laptop Buying Guide), but the Samsung 940n that I set up as a 2nd monitor and configured for nVidia’s Dualview option.
With Dualview, the second monitor is an extension of the desktop. Just grab a (non maximized) window’s title bar and [...]
Bootdisk for Windows
March 21, 2007Today we were updating firmware on some Intel Servers and needed to boot via floppy to an MS-Dos prompt. (Ok, head hurts, think!)
That’s right. Both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have a check box in the format dialog for “make MS-Dos startup disk”.
But another option is to go to bootdisk.com. There you will find [...]
Save Your Work – Better than losing it
March 21, 2007In the course of my work, I am often at a users workstation with either a problem to fix or software to install.
Naturally, I need the user to exit out of all programs since, anything can go wrong and the probability of that happening increases in direct proportion to how much they have to lose [...]
Blue Screen of Death – Inaccessible Boot Device
March 20, 2007I received a call late yesterday from a client who had been aggressively burning files to CD and deleting. This system was running Windows 2000 Pro and equipped with only 128MB RAM.
Things started acting a bit weird, but she kept going until she received a registry error message. This got her attention, but she wasn’t [...]
Blog Activated!
March 19, 2007Setting up the blog to share daily insights that you can find useful in working with your Windows PC.
