Solving Wireless Computer Networking Problems

January 4, 2012 By

I received an email recently from a subscriber who was having problems with his wireless networking from his computer, but his wife’s computer was working fine.

Unfortunately, that’s all too often the type of problem that happens with wireless networking. When it works, it works nicely. When it doesn’t work, figuring out what’s going wrong is a challenge.

My first step would be to open a command window and try
ping www.google.com
and
ping 173.194.64.99
which is the IP address that I get for www.google.com.

Sometimes the networking problems are specific to particular protocols – you may not be able to use your web browser or email, but find that ping actually works. That would be a hint that your software was part of the problem.

You can try …

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Filed Under: Uncategorized

PDF Converter Professional 7 – A First Look

January 2, 2012 By

PDF Converter Professional 7 – A First Look

Program: PDF Converter Professional 7.0
Publisher: Nuance Communications, Inc.
License: Commercial
Price: List $99. Price on Apr. 3, 2011 at Amazon: $48.59
.

Every once in a while, a program that’s designed for business use is so helpful and priced so reasonably that it’s useful for home users, too. That’s the case with PDF Converter Professional 7. I quickly bought my own personal copy.

I use it at the office to convert PDF documents into Word documents so that I can do redline edits ("Track Changes") to them.

I had been using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 for this purpose until recently. However, for some reason, Adobe Acrobat Pro was starting to convert documents using Word’s text boxes. If you haven’t ever dealt with them, text boxes are some of the most frustrating and useless functions in Word, at least in my opinion.

I found that some other people were using PDF Converter Professional, so I decided to give it a try.

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Filed Under: Software, Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Computer Fans Rev Up Periodically

October 20, 2011 By

Subscriber Don Newsham wrote recently with an interesting question…

Terry, thanks again for the tips you gave me a few months ago.

Recently ,while on the computer it will “rev up” for a couple of seconds and then be quiet. It will stay quite for 5,10 , minutes and then rev up again. Is this anything serious?

The computer is 6 years old, e-machine, Vista

I quickly answered Don, telling him that the rev’ing up sounds like it is probably a fan. The typical system fans are the CPU fan, the chipset fan or the power supply fan.

The chipset fan is usually a small, high-speed fan. It’s sound, as it starts to have problems, would tend to be a high whine. The sound would be constant — it would not stop and start, as the chipset fan runs all the time. Note that all computers have heatsinks on the chipsets, but not all have fans on the chipsets’ heatsinks.

The power supply fan will tend to make noise when its going bad, but they’re usually variable speed fans. Some power supplies have variable speed fans, though. It could be the power supply fan, but I don’t think that’s it.

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Filed Under: Hardware, Tips & Tricks, Upgrading

A Look at Acronis True Image Home 2012

October 19, 2011 By

Acronis has released their latest version of their hard drive imaging backup program, Acronis True Image Home 2012 (ATIH 2012). I wasted no time in purchasing my new copies. Although I could have upgraded at a significant discount (40%), I preferred to purchase new licenses for ATIH 2012, so that I had copies for additional computers.

The new version has some neat new features — I’d read about the new features, but, even then, I really didn’t realize their impact until I started to use the new program.

Of course, there are also the bug fixes and optimizations that make existing functions better -— like the new function for setting “credentials” (user ID and password) to be used when backing up to a network drive. The function was there before, but now it’s in the right place, is much more obvious, and it worked smoothly. Yes!

New features include the ability to synchronize files and folders across multiple computers, multiple hard drives, or even to flash drives. Obviously you wouldn’t do this for the entire hard drive, but for critical files, it should be a nice feature.

The Non-Stop Backup function seems a lot friendlier now. It will make backups of changed files every five minutes. With some common programs like Outlook, it will back up the changes in the .PST file rather than the .PST file itself (which might be huge). However, the key is that you’re…

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Filed Under: Backup, Data Security, Storage, Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Don’t Deleted Emails Appear in the Recycle Bin?

October 18, 2011 By

Subscriber JPB had a question about deleting emails, and why they don’t get recycled:

When you delete files (normally) they go to the recycle bin. How come E-mail doesn’t work the same way. it get’s compacted? I’m using Thunderbird and Windows 7.

The reason that deleted emails don’t show up in the Recycle Bin is that the Recycle Bin stores files after you delete them (note that some programs will delete files without putting them into the Recycle Bin). This is sometimes a problem with older programs or programs that are simplistically ported from another operating system.

Most Windows email programs store emails as data in large files containing multiple emails. They’re not stored as individual files. Email “folders” are actually files, in most cases, although some email programs may not create separate files for the folders.

Thunderbird is one such, as is Eudora OSE (which I use), which is based on Thunderbird. Thunderbird stores all its emails in a database file called global-messages-db.sqlite.

JPB still had some concerns, though:

Filed Under: Communications, Email, Software, Tips & Tricks

Adding a Computer to an Existing Home Network

August 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

OK, you have a new computer and you’ve made the decision to keep your old computer, and you want your spouse and children to be able to do email and surf the web without demanding your computer.

Let’s assume you already have an existing home computer network — if you don’t, the first article in this week’s online newsletter is for you…

There are two basic ways that computers on home networks can get the IP addresses and other network data they need in order to communicate with each other: we can enter the data into the configuration screens, if we want to use static (unchanging) IP addresses, or we can set the router to assign IP addresses dynamically using DHCP.

DHCP is the default setting for home routers, it’s the way most Internet Service Providers assign IP addresses, and it’s the way Windows has networking set up by default. Let’s assume you’re using DHCP.

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Filed Under: Communications, Router, Tips & Tricks

Router Encryption — Increasing Wireless Security

July 20, 2010 By

I answered a question recently from someone who was using WEP (the so-called “Wired Equivalent Privacy”) encryption on their wireless network. They were considering changing to WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). The real answer is that they need to change to the second generation of WPA — WPA2.

The biggest question in their mind was whether they’d have to change the wireless passphrases on all their computers (quick answer: yes).

Why change? WEP is old, way, way old in computer terms. When it was first released, it was effective.

But, by 2004, second-generation WEP-cracking tools were widely available. In an article, SmallNetBuilder reports on a 2005 demonstration by a team of FBI agents who were able to crack a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes.

WPA replaced WEP as the choice for encryption. Then, it fell prey…

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Filed Under: Communications, Data Security, Network Security, Router, System Security, Tips & Tricks, Wireless
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