Problems and Solutions Work Log

01/21/2012 - Customer claimed to have the same virus as below. Xp Security Update. I never saw it, because I went straight into F8, Safe Mode. System Restore. Restored it back about 10 days. Installed Malware Bytes. Found a Chameleon and Trojan.FakeWS. removed those and ran a virus scan. No virus was found. All is working as normal now.

01/17/2012 - My wife was complaining that she was getting an XP message and that she could not do anything on her corporate laptop. The message was Xp 2012 security update, wanting her to click on it and update it. Since there is not such thing as XP 2012 Security manager or whatever, I immediately did system restore to a week earlier and then ran Malware Bytes and Symantec Endpoint to clean it off after the restore brought it back up to normal. Even though the system was functioning correctly, you still have to go back and pull off the adware or virus.

01/14/2012 - Ran into my first windows machine that just would not repair itself. It happens. Only thing to do was to reload windows 7. No data was lost in the process. Why? Because I always copy the data off to an external hard drive before I format anything.

01/08/2012 - Someone brought a desktop that was a Pentium 4 with 1 gig of ram and was running Windows 7. I got the pc running, but I would suggest that you not run Windows 7 with only 1 gig of ram. Especially if it is not a Dual Core or higher.

01/05/2012 - Had a laptop that would not open AOL mail page in IE. the first thing I checked was AOL in Firefox. No problem. IE gave a message that the page could not be found. This was not true. What it was, that the AOL mail page is a SSL. The settings in IE had not be check to allow SSL pages. That is all it took to fix this.

09/01/2011 - On a three month contract with a company in Houston. Will be back logging jobs January 1st 2012.

08/27/2011 - I spent the last of August doing many wireless printer setups. They can go one of two ways. It can take 10 minutes and you are done, or it can get screwed up if the customer tries to install it and gets the order wrong. In some cases it can take a couple of hours to straighten it out.

08/16/2011 - Yes I move Pc's also. In the corporate world, I moved several thousand myself. I helped move a customer's mother's pc setup to her new digs.

08/10/2011 - Received a desktop with a bad video card which was on board. The problem is that you have to get into the bios to change the on board settings to a Pci adapter. The password was not know. Sometimes you can get lucky and crack the bios, like I did on this one.

08/04/2011 - Replaced a bad hard drive on a Samsung laptop. No big deal. Just pop it in and load it up.

08/01/2011 - Had an opportunity to go out and actually build a clone desktop for someone. It's been a long time, but like riding a bike, you never forget.

07/29/2011 - Well I had the experience of building a clone from the ground up the other day. I have not built a clone piece by piece since 1998. I did it in 30 minutes. It went together easy and it was light as a feather.

07/22/2011 - A man brought a HP desktop, fairly new, and said that 6 months ago he had a virus and took it in for repair. They fixed it and a few months later he had to take it back for virus repair again. They tried to fix it and now he said that it is back.

I was very curious is to how that could be considering it had been eradicated 2 times. I did all my normal virus stuff and ran updates and did maintenance. I never had an issue with the PC acting up the whole time I was working on it. I did remove a browser hijacker and that was it. So with no issues and all my testing coming up clean, I figured I would go ahead and take out my top secret virus fixer. And sure enough, there was Tool.Prockill.3. Never seeing it before I did not know if it was a virus or an ad ware remover. I went ahead and removed it 2 times and it seems to be gone. Only time will tell.

07/15/2011 - A lot of new installs lately. A lot of people buying new desktops. The HP seems to be a hot item.

07/10/2011 - I took down an old desktop several months ago at a customers house and setup a new laptop. Three months later, they call and want the old desktop put back up. Its not that the laptop does not work. It is a sharp learning curve for some people and they just can't make it all at once. So consider leaving your old system functioning if you get a new one. just in case!

07/02/2011 - Monitor connection come in several kinds these days. there is the old stand by VGA. Then there is the DVI which came along in the last 8 years or so and no there is the famous HDMI. The last HP desktop I set up, we had to make the DVI the primary monitor and the secondary HDMI. Why this was, I don't recall, but we were having problems getting the icons on the left side monitor using the interface, so we had to change the cables.

06/27/2011 - Be careful changing font size in Windows 7. especially using the custom size. If you make it too big, like over 175% or so, you may not be able to see the icons on your screen to change the font size back. It takes experience in doing this sometime to get it back to normal.

06/06/2011 - I was brought a destop that was not getting a video signal. Plain and sinple the PCI express video card had gone bad. I put a new one in and it is working just fine.

05/25/2011 - I went to setup a dual monitor system for a guy who had just bought the latest and greatest Hp Desktop with two wide screen monitors. He was trying to hook up the second monitor to HDMI. The reason there was no signal is he did not change the input source on the second monitor. Auto detect should have worked but it did not so I set it and it looks great.

05/10/2011 - I have been to this gentleman house 5 times. He does pc support like me also. The thing is, he is half way around the world and he uses Skype and a webcam to show me what he wants done. I replaced two mother boards in two clone machines. Its been a long time since I worked on a clone but, it is like riding a bike. All is up and running.

04/23/2011 - A lady brought me a laptop that had been sitting in 3 inches of water for a day, when a pipe broke in her house. To my surprise the unit turned on, although the monitor was ruined and the fan was hissing and the hard drive was no good. Time for the trash can. All you can do.

04/19/2011 - I went to a womans house that had a small network installed. She used two companies and spent $3000 and her network was messed up. I spent about 6 hours over two days and got everything working for $300. She could have saved $2700.00 had I been around at that time. 04/15/2011 - I went to a customers house that had spent thousands of dollars on setting a new laptop and a back up system. She was complaining that her brand new laptop was hanging and doing strange things, and she thought it was something to with the backup. It was very simple. the new CMS external drive that she was using to backup to had failed. Anytime you have a program that is looking for a drive that is not present it will keep trying and tie up your system causing multiple problems.

04/17/2011 - I went to a customers house that had just bought a new laptop with a finger reader. the problem is she logged on with her fingerprint and did not put in a password. She was not home when i got there so, I did not have her finger so I could not log on to setup her dsl. Even after she got home the finger reader malfunctioned and we could not log on to the laptop. I have facial recognition on some of mine and it works 1 out of 10 times. Take my advice and use a regular password and forego the recognition software. It sucks!

04/05/2011 - A girl brought me a Sony Vio and yes it had windows Vista. She said it would not let her install any programs. I logged on and created a new profile and ran all my scans and updates and then logged on with her profile and I have had no issues at all. So I will have to call her and ask what the heck she was complaining about. It is in tip top shape now after I tweaked it down. Its ready to roll.

03/31/2011 - I received a interesting machine this week. A HP Tx2 Smart screen laptop with the swivel LCD. The lady bought it on QVC and used it about 20 hours and did not use it for many months. When she went back to use it, it kept shutting down. These units are known for over heating. When I got it, I was able to get it to stay up, but there was no visuals on the LCD. The screen would glow but not bios information came up. I pulled the memory, hard drive and ala and it still would not display the bios. I actually took it completely apart and re-seated the processor and let me tell you, that was no easy task. Wither the video card is fried or the mother board is. So I was not able to fix the unit, not having spare parts to troubleshoot with. She will have to take it to HP.

03/23/2011 - Someone brought a Toshiba laptop to me saying that all the people in their address book were receiving virus emails from my account. So he was thinking it was coming from his computer. He uses AOL email In cases like this, where you are not using Outlook, Outlook Express or Lotus Notes, your email is being processed on a external location. Yes, he activated the email by clicking on it, but the damage was done, because the virus got his AOL account information and after that, no longer needed his laptop. Was his laptop infected? Probably not from that virus. He did have things I removed, and I cleaned it up a lot, but I do not think it did any lasting damage to his operating system.

03/12/2011 - Its been a bad month for a success rate in getting rid of virus's or adware without reformatting. The last 2 laptops had to be reformatted. The last one was a Dell 1525. It would boot to the Windows Vista starting up screen. But, this case was not a virus. After taking the drive out and hooking it up to my big bad dad machine, I could not access the hard drive. Although the folder structure was there, it would not drill down. I put it back into the laptop and ran the hard drive diagnostics, which maybe I should have done in the first place and it erred out with a code 70, which basically means the drive is fried. So after replacing the hard drive and loading Xp, it is up and running like new.

03/11/2011 - I installed a new hard drive into a Dell Inspirion and loaded a fresh copy of Windows 7 pro. Although the laptop screen did not work, I hooked it up to and external monitor and assume the guy will eventually replace the lcd??

03/09/2011 - A lady brought me a desktop and said it was running slow. It was no wonder because this machine had 256 megs of ram. I have not seen that low amount of memory in 10 years. Although there were other minor issues with the desktop, the memory obviously is the main issue. Add memory and problem solved.

03/05/2011 - A man brought me a Fujitsu Laptop. I have never worked on one of the or seen one. Explorer.exe was crashing and windows would not start except in safe mode. I have fixed systems like this before that had a virus. I took the hard drive out and hooked it up to my desktop. I ran several scans on the drive and it was one of the cleanest I have seen in a while. The bottom line is that explorer.exe was corrupted and it was not going to be fixed. So it was time to reformat and move on. All fixed now. Whenever I have cases like these last two, I always copy the owners data to an external drive and then copy it back after the rebuild. Never count on anyone to have a backup of their data.

03/02/2011 - Received a Dell 6000 laptop. It appeared to be infected with adware and viruses. AVG anti virus would not uninstall or install. This left no option other than to format the hard drive. After formatting the hard drive and loading Windows, I started running Windows updates. At one point it could not right to the drive. I ran a hard disk diagnostics to find that the hard drive was failing. That is what caused Avg to fail. Put in new hard drive and all is fixed.

02/06/2011 - I received a Dell 2400 desktop that was blue screening every time you booted it up. Not only were the profiles corrupt, there were a few adware items but not anything I felt should cause a blue screen. After trying several fixes it occurred to me that with a memory dump on a blues screen, its simple. It s got to be bad memory. After taking one stick out at a time and booting, it would only boot to the good stick. The other was defective. Though the old profiles were corrupt, I just created a new one and left it with one memory stick and it is working fine.

01/15/2011 - Hey! My first Gateway since my days at Harris County Housing. I did not catch the model, but it was a Gateway Laptop about 2 years old. Dual Core Duo and 4 Gigs of ram. The owner said that it has virus's and just runs slows and shuts down. When I first booted it, the first thing it did was to run a Chkdsk. So right there, that tells me the Operating system is corrupt or the hard drive has a lot of errors or is failing on some sectors. But not so fast!. Now. The rest of the story. After logging in, there were about 6 pop up errors for, Adaware. The event viewer system log showed Side by Side errors. Evidently some software was clashing creating a unstable system. Judging by the the Lavasoft Adaware errors, it was going to have to be removed. The only problme is that it would not uninstall. So now I will just install a newer version. No luck there either. So I went into services and disabled it. Now the errors are gone and the systen is functioning correctly.

01/06/2011 - A gentleman brought me a Dell Inspirion laptop. The goal was not to get the laptop in shape, but to fix is Outlook email problems. The machine was still running Vista, no service pack! I ran Malware on it and it located 256 infected items. So as I proceeded to see why his email was giving errors, I discovered he was not using a pop mail account but an Exchange server connector. This presents a whole other types of problems. Usually exchange email problems are administered from the server side and not the client. There is not a lot I could do until I talk to the Exchange server administrator. What was strange is that when I tried to copy his Outlook .pst or .ost file to a secure location, it would fail every time. Even from a command prompt and going to the same hard drive. This has to be a pre service pack bug in Vista. So at this point I am waiting. The best thing to do, is to get a new laptop and setup the email and pull all the email down to a new .ost file. So it remains to be seen the outcome of this fix.

12/31/2010 - I had 2 laptops brought to me by one person today. One was a IBM Think pad t42 and the other a Toshiba. they complained of virus's causing problems. I really did not see any bad effect of any virus even though there were 2 or 3 removed from both laptops. What I do now as kind of a standard operating procedure for pc's with virus's, is to boot them up and log in with the owners user account. As soon as it is up, go to computer management or user accounts and create a brand new administrator profile. Then log off real quick and log back on with the new profile. What I have found is some of these virus's are profile specific. Meaning they only effect the account you are logged on with. If this is the case, you bypass the virus loading by using a new account. From there you run all your, virus and adware scans, windows updates and general maintenance tools. then log back on with the owners account and check everything out and if all is well, delete the account you created.

12/13/2010 - Someone brought me a Dell Inspirion 1525. It was shutting down unexpectedly. After researching the issue, I did find that there is a problem with some 1525's and 1526's models, as far as over heating and shutting down. Although there is not a lot you can do about the over heating without replacing a bunch of hardware, I approached it from the other angle. Cut down on the amount of processor being used. Looking at the system, I discovered that a version of Webroot Anti Spyware software was installed and was running in the background. The CPU was at 70 and 80%. It was in part due to this software and the fact that Windows update was constantly running and erroring out. This is a known problem with Vista. The Microsoft Module Installer would not start causing update problems. In turn it was writing error events to the system log ever 20 seconds. The system log had become corrupt. I emptied the log and it restarted and is now running. I turned Windows updates to manual and removed the webroot software. The system no longer shuts down and the fan is not constantly kicking on at high speed. Even though Windows Updates is still a little unstable, mission accomplished!

12/04/2010 - A customer called and had a Hp All-in-One printer that was no longer connecting to her laptop. I don't think she had used it in a while and it just disappeared. She no longer had the installation disk. So you can just download the software from Hp. Once it is downloaded, just click on install and follow the directions exactly. I find if you take a misstep with Hp, you can be in for a real mess with a wireless printer. the software is not user friendly if done incorrectly.

11/07/2010 - A customer called and said her husband had clicked on an attachment to an email and ever since the clone desktop would not allow them to do anything while in Windows. The man said that he thought that the file got saved to the My Documents folder, which I found strange. I did find the infected file in the documents folder. Once again, McCafee Antivirus fails again. I am totally convinced it is a piece of junk at this point. Why I did to fix it on this Windows Xp machine, was first booted into safe mode and do a system restore from a point in time before he clicked on the email. Although the profile was still screwed up, it would allow me to create a new user at this point. Now I logged on as the new user, and when I did, everything functioned fine. Then I copied all documents and pictures to the new profile just in case the old one was beyond repair. From the new profile I installed and ran Malware Bytes and Symantec Endpoint. Symantec found the infected file and I removed it from the location. Rebooted and logged on with the original profile and everything was fixed. So don't go clicking on an attachment that you don't know what it is. Even if you know the sender. This zip files said "Dhl Mailing Label".

10/30/2010 - A customer brought me a Dell 3100 desktop. It would not boot. I mean the F1 & F2 will not boot. So that means either the hard drive is dead or Windows boot sector is corrupt. at the boot menu, I ran the hard drive diagnostics and it checked out fine. I tried several of the rebuild boot.ini and boot partition fixes but to no avail. I know for the last 15 years myself and others in the business always parton the hard drive in one big parton for personal desktop's. We never use multiple portions unless there is a specific reason for it. Pc manufactures love the multi portioned hard drives, so they can put their recovery and company management software on one parton and then one for windows and one for data. The idea behind this is to be able to recover a corrupted operating system or an infected one with little or no damage. I think I have utilized this feature a few times in 15 years, but I hate it. This guys 80 gig hard drive had 4 partitions, leaving 30 gigs for storage. That sucks. Now he has 70. After failing to recover the boot sector, I just format and loaded Windows Xo and ran updates. It took about 90 minutes. I spent that much time trying to fix the boot sector. So keep in mind, if you have your data backed up somewhere it is cheaper to reformat and reload instead of trying to fix a corrupt or infected pc.

10/27/2010 - A customer emailed saying her dvd/cd would no longer function. She failed to mention at first that her laptop also would not boot and was getting a Windows error message that windows would not boot because of a missing or corrupt file. So this is a big problem, because to run a repair or reinstall Windows, you are going to need to use the cd or have a flash drive big enough to copy the disk to or use an external drive, via usb port. I told her to set the bios to boot from cd and put in the Windows disk and see if it would boot to it. That right there will tell her if the DVD\Cd is bad or not. I never heard back. I assumed something worked.

10/21/2010 - There was a family that had a Toshiba laptop that the lcd was going off and on. they took it somewhere to get it fixed and spent a lot of money for a new monitor to be installed. The laptop was probably only worth $300 or $400 and I would bet they spent at least $300 to repair it. Well, a few weeks later the monitor starts doing the same thing. So the man just wanted the situation fixed, whatever it took. I had a Dell Xps 1530 gammer with Windows 7 Pro loaded on it. I researched and going price from new to used online was $700 to $1200. I took his old laptop and copied his data over to the Xps 1530 and got it all setup at his house for a grand total of $950! Now that's a bargain!

10/15/2010 - This is the 3rd time I have worked on this mans Hp Pavilion 6700 laptop. Its seemed to be malware and viruses. But this time, it would not boot into windows. After 3 days of jacking with it (that's an IT term), it booted into windows but there was no mouse. I hooked up an external mouse and it would not work. So I went into the bios to see if the mouse was disabled and I ran across the hard drive test. I ran that and about 1 second into it, it said 'replace hard Drive". Come to find out the man had a 3 year warranty on the laptop and never needed to call me in the first place. I am glad to be done with that one.

10/08/2010 - A customer brought me a Dell Inspirion that was having a virus problem. After booting up an seeing what was going on I was ready to call him and say, instead of spending 10 hours like I did on the last pc, I will have to reformat this one or give it back. Then I thought of the trusty windows restore point. I went back 2 weeks and restored windows. from there I loaded Symantec Endpoint and ran that with McCafee and all is operating normally. A quick fix for one hot mess of a problem. I will say at this point from what I have seen, is that McCafee is a dog!

10/06/2010 - A friend brought me a Dell desktop. McCafee keeps popping up saying virus found. Something like "Generic PUP". According to the tech sites, this is an HP Kill file. It is not a virus. Just tell the antivirus to ignore this file. But besides that, this machine has a hot mess of ad ware. the browser is being hijacked and redirected. After running ad aware and Malware I resorted to hacking the registry myself. It is getting better, but I do not know at this point if it is salvageable. The data has been removed already.

Come to find out after running, Adaware, Malware Bytes, McCafee, Symantec Endpoint, Spybot-Search & Destroy, all was working with the exception of Windows update. Something was blocking Microsoft and antivirus websites. After doing some research, I took a gamble and downloaded something called, Dr. Web Cureit. At this point, I did not care if it was bogus or not. To my surprise it found 2 backdoor trojans and cleaned them and everything is working. Kudo's to Dr. Web!

10/05/2010 - Lady had a Dell desktop that would not boot. She let some kid work on it and he took the drives out. This Pc had two identical hard drives. It came set up as Raid 5. Mirrored drives. The pc was trying to boot to a failed drive. Once I disabled the failed drive in the bios, it booted right up. But she has Spy ware issues. There is way too much of this going around right now. Almost every machine I get, has this issue. I always tell the customer, if it were my machine, I would reformat and reload. even if you get it all off, chance are good that something is left behind. But most don't want to spend $75 to have a complete rebuild done. They want to spend $50 just to get it up again. Makes no since.

9/16/2010 - I received a Compaq laptop with Windows Vista and 1 gig of ram. Not ideal to say the least. It would boot to the desktop and freeze. The mouse was movable but it would do nothing else. I took the hard drive out and hooked it up as an external on another laptop. I scanned with Malware and found about 120 items which is not necessarily bad, depending on the items and ran Symantec endpoint and found no virus. I put it back into the laptop and same problem. I went and did a restore form 30 days earlier and got it up and running. This thing had so much stuff in start up that its a wonder it ever booted. After booting 10 times and clicking and deleting before it froze each time, I finally got enough stuff deleted out of start up to boot and work. It was still locking up after sitting, so I ran all updates including Vista sp2. After Sp2, IE no longer would connect to the internet. Neither would Firefox. I tried Skype and it connected fine. I have tried everything I know and can not get IE to connect. It is still locking up also. Plain and simple this is a format and load. There is a possibility that the hard drive has a bad sector causing the lock ups. The customer is going to take it as is, because I burned all the data to a cd and if the laptop does not function, then she will buy a new one.

9/12/2010 - A man called that had two wireless printers that needed to be hooked up. I ask him who his carrier was and he said, Comcast. This had me worried because I had a friend that has Comcast and tried to hook a laptop up to it on wireless and it would not cooperate. So I went and he had a older Lexmark and a New Brother 2170. The Lexmark went right on like it is supposed to. But the Brother was a nightmare. He had already tried hooking it up and loading the drivers and if you don't do it just right, you create a printer hell. The instructions in the manual did not work. Everything I tried did not work. The 2170 has no digital read out, so you have to do it with a GUI. In short, if you run into one of these, do this. I found this on a tech site. Turn off the power switch on the side. Hold down the blue light button on top. Turn on the power switch on the side. A soon as the 3 lights on top blink, let go of the blue button. Now, real quick, push the blue button 6 times. I hope I remembered right. If not 6, try 7. This should make it visible to the GUI software you loaded. Your printer should be online now. This took me about 5 hours to figure out. Needless to say, a guy called this week and said he had 2 wireless printers to hook up. I ask him if one was a brother with a blue light on top. He said yes. I said, I am booked this week.

9/03/2010 - A man I knew from little league and he brought me a Hp desktop. It would not do anything when he powered it up, is what he said. He took it to the Geeks Squad at Best Buy and they looked at it and told him his Motherboard was dead. He bought a new motherboard and brought it to me to install. I plugged it in and he was right. Nothing. But the nothing I found was no fan sound and no power light. Clearly indicating that the power supply was dead. Its a wonder the Geek Squad could not get the motherboard cranking! So he ordered a power supply, I installed it and wha la!. Like a new pc! Now he has a brand new motherboard to sell on Ebay.

8/31/2010 - a guy called and said his house had been struck by lightning and blew out his modem and router. Comcast replaced his modem and told him he needed to buy a new router. He said it worked for a few days and then all his network connection failed. Wireless and Ethernet. I ask him to look at the lights on th Comcast Modem and see if the line in had a green light which it did not. I told him that if I come to fix it, I will be arguing on the phone for hours with Comcast and costing him $25.00 an hour to do it. I told him, that he would save money if he called them himself and told them that there are no lights on their modem. I can normally resolve that issue for someone. Why should I when it is Comcast obligation. So I never heard back from him.

8/31/2010 - I went out to a ladies house in the fancy part of the Woodlands. He Dell xps 210 was totally bogged down and she would get pop ups and it would lock up. I ran Malware Bytes and deleted about 15 infections. She had so much stuff starting up at Windows load that it was just ridiculous. I removed some of it, but to solve her problem she needs to upgrade from 1 Gb to 2gb of ram. Imagine running Windows Vista on 1Gb and having all that in startup. It is unnecessary. Please clean up your start up programs!

8/30/2010 - A Man brought me a Hp M7000 and said that a year ago the computer just quick booting up. He took it to Geek Squad to get his data off for $100.00. They told him that the motherboard was bad and that the power supply was good. He decided he wanted to get it back up and running. He bought a new motherboard and brought it to me to install. Well, all I did was plug the pc into the wall and no power light. No power supply fan turning. So right there I knew his power supply was shot. His mother board is probably just fine. I hope he can get his money back on the MB. So I am waiting on him to buy a power supply or decide what he wants to so.

8/18/2010 - A young man brought in a Hp Laptop about a year and half old. When he logged on, he kept getting pop ups saying a file was corrupt and to click yes to run virus removal. It was not a windows pop up. It was some type of spyware. To get it cleaned off, I created and second profile. Logging on with the second profile, the virus did not load. I ran Malware Bytes and cleaned off 3 infected files in his profile. Update the antivirus and ran it and there were no actual viruses. That's is all it took to get his off.

7/30/2010 - The same gentleman that had the virus on May 18th called and was going out of town on vacation in two hours and he was reinfected. I went and looked at it and all the .exe were infected so IE and windows management consoles would not work. So I wanted to do a system restore, but with windows console broke, it would not come up. So I booted into safe mode and opened Windows Restore and went back about 2 days and did the restore. When it came back up, IE was working again. Symantec Endpoint is still messed up and there are still virus's on the laptop, but at least he will be able to use it until he gets back and I complete the job.

7/12/2010 - A customer needed a new All-in-one Hp 4500 installed. They could not get it working. I went and started installing the HP software and made the same mistake they probably did. I installed the software with the printer hooked up. It is best you do not do that. What will happen is the install will get corrupted. Hp's software is buggy and it will get to a percent of the install and say, some files need to be deleted and then your computer will reboot before install can continue. I went through this loop about 10 times, trying everything I could to get it to continue. Next I looked online to find out how to remove the bad install and there was nothing that worked. Finally I went to Hp's website and to my surprise they had a live chat and it was free. They walked me through some registry edits and file deletes and then the install completed.

6/09/2010 - I had a call that involved a printer that used to be fast but was no longer. It was an Hp 1200 LaserJet. It was not the printer or computer but most likely the 9.3 version of Acrobat Reader. I set the printing preferences from 600 dpi to 300 dpi and checked a radio button that was unchecked. It was the new version of Acrobat that has probably changed the default print settings or possibly windows update. If you are printing a large PDF and your printer takes a long time to start or stops between pages, check the DPI setting of your printer. He also had a problem with pop ups not popping up. That is because he had a Google toolbar installed with the pop up blocker tuned on. Remember, if you want pop ups to pop up, you must turn off the IE pop up blocker and any IE tool bar you have installed, such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, ect. The CTRL key won't work on some of these. This customer also wanted and Ip Mask, to hide his identity while surfing the web. There are several options for this. For free is free Proxy servers.

5/18/2010 - A man called and said a friend had sent him an email with a file attached. He clicked on the file and after that he could no longer get on the internet. Some friend!. I looked it over and tried the browser and i blew up with an error. Also Microsoft Management Console would not start. That told me right there that a system file is corrupt or has been infected with a virus. I installed Symantec Endpoint and during installation it went out to the internet and downloaded the updates. I knew then that it had network connectivity and it was just the browser that was corrupt. I scanned the hard drive and found a trojan virus. It was removed and the internet came right up. I had held a .dll file hostage causing IE and Management console to crash.

5/15/2010 - A gentleman called in and said his dad's computer was running slow. He said he thought there may be a virus or ad ware on this system. So I went buy to see why it was running so slow. First of all, for the hardware it was running, it was pretty fast. But the issue was evident right off the bat. Looking at the performance, the memory was steady at 60%. It only had 1 gig of ram. It is not that the system is slower. It is that the computer is 3 years old and when it was built, the software was designed for that speed. As you do window, java, flash, adobe, and antivirus updates, the software changes being designed for faster systems. So it makes it seems like the pc is getting slower, which it is in a manner of speaking. I added 2 gigs of ram and problem is solved.