Generally, when I get a phone call about a computer problem it’s something like “Word won’t load”, or “the network icons don’t work any more”, or “the printer won’t do landscape.” Nine times out of ten the problem is software-related, and doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to fix. Not, however, this weekend.

In the last five days I’ve had four computers Just Stop Working. The first went down after a power cut, refusing to boot from a cd, let alone the hard disk. I diagnosed a motherboard b0rked beyond all hope, and put in an order for some replacement hardware. On Sunday my sister’s laptop abruptly stopped booting with “load needed dlls for kernel”, which was a new one on me. With a bit of luck that’s some kind of massive software cockup, and a repair install will fix it up. This morning one of the office PCs didn’t even get so far as booting, simply beeping like a demented droid. To be fair, it’s nearly six years old and is due for death fairly soon, so I ordered a replacement motherboard / cpu / ram for that too. This evening I’ve been told that my uncle’s laptop - only six months old - is stuck in a nearly-get-into-windows-but-conk-out-and-restart-just-before-anything-happens-loop, even in Safe Mode. First thoughts are that it’s a dying hard drive, but I’ll need to take a look.

It’s really not all that common to have such major problems. I must have upset the electron fairy.

I’ve finally been forced to buy a new motherboard, and it arrived yesterday. It’s an Asus A8R-MVP, and features include:

• Use incredibly complex USB devices like webcams / iPods / card readers without taking down Windows!
• Plug in firewire drives without completely kakking up the boot process, requiring a keypress on every restart!
• No ridiculously broken¹ hardware firewall!

The above problems were inherent in my Abit nForce4 KN8 motherboard, and seem to be quite common in the nForce4 line. I’m staying well clear of that particular brand from now on. The new mobo is an entirely different chipset, and is reputed to Actually Work Properly.

Motherboard replacements are probably the most annoying operation to perform on a computer. The whole case has to be taken apart and reassembled, and then Windows must be completely reinstalled. It’ll certainly be worth it, but will take a fair while, so I’ll leave it until next week.

1. some have claimed that it is possible, with windows reinstalls and all sorts of software manipulation, to get this working properly - even if true, it’s still crazy [↩]

I have a cold at the moment, except I don’t. I keep sneezing, coughing sometimes, my nose is stuffed with blended frog and I seem to go hot and cold in the evenings. The problem is that I don’t feel unwell at all. Which is no fun. How can I get any sympathy if I don’t feel bad?

Today was exhausting, mind. Lots of driving too and from various addresses, plus trying to fix desperately-needed computers and picking up new hardware. Hopefully I’ll sleep well tonight, though. That’s if I don’t wake up at every unexplained noise, of course…

Incidentally, if you want any RAM, buy it online from Crucial. I paid £70 in a local shop for a stick of 512mb PC2700 that would be £35 online. I had to bite my tongue not to make a comment when they told me the price - that’s just crazy. I suppose I could have bartered…but it might not have gone down well, and it always pays to get on with local computer shops

For more than a year I’ve been coming across a problem with Windows XP, USB drives and mapped network drives. Each computer here has four mapped network drives, which are assigned the letters F:, G:, H: and I:. When I plug in a USB key Windows tries to assign F:, fails and gives up. Disconnecting the network drive and reinserting the key (or going into device manager and hitting ‘populate’) was the only way to fix it, and this was tiresome. However, it’s one of those problems that you forget about as soon as you’ve solved it.

I finally remembered to look up a solution today, and there isn’t one. The official Microsoft response says that you should use as high letters as possible for mapped network drives. I’ve moved them to W: onwards, and the USB key can now happily use F:.

The problem apparently occurs with all types of removable media, so hopefully somebody will find this useful.

My sister’s wireless network has been playing up for a few weeks, and looking at it today I found out why. She has a BT ADSL modem, into which is plugged a Linksys router¹. I originally helped her set it up over the phone, and after finding that the BT modem IP was 192.168.0.1, told her to configure the Linksys as 192.168.0.2. She had all sorts of problems with random disconnects, and it turns out that the BT modem demands the use of 192.168.0.2 as well. Weird. Setting a higher IP for the Linksys has, I hope, solved the problems.

1. odd setup I know - she was originally on cable so just needed the Linksys, but then moved to an ADSL-only area [↩]

A client’s computer problem has been hanging over my head for a few weeks now, and this morning it was finally sorted out. I worked on the system over the weekend and had it back to their office for eight this morning, and as far as I know it’s still working ok. It’s amazing what a relief it is not to have it at the back of my mind!

As far as I know I’m still completing on the flat tomorrow, although I haven’t had any instructions. I’m nervous! I keep thinking about how I only saw it for seven minutes on a sunny happy bouncy August Saturday…It’ll still be good though, I’m sure I’ll see how much needs decorating and try to do as much as possible before the weekend. I can also get the phone line installed and broadband ordered, plus a washing machine.

Then I’d best start packing boxes. That frightens me. You have no idea how much kak useful stuff I have stuffed into cupboards.

I chased up the “delivery before the end of november” sofa and it’s apparently in the UK and on the way to the warehouse. It should arrive there late this week or early next - it is clearly being transported via rolling logs - and they’ll give me a call then. In the meantime I’ll steal a deckchair from Mum & Dad

Dad found this in the loft yesterday:

It was typed by my grandmother, at some time during the second world war. I guess that ‘txt-speak’ is the result whenever people communicate frequently, quickly and informally. You certainly couldn’t say that it affected her writing in years to come - she used to send immaculate handwritten letters by the dozen! She died in 1997, just a little too early for her to get into email and instant messaging, which I bet she’d have found fantastic. She’d definitely have loved being able to see her Australian grandchildren via webcam.

I used to have a good number of clients who I’d describe as little-old-ladies, without being derogatory in any way, who were really clued up on email and the Internet generally. They were definitely the best type of clients: they were always friendly, always admitted if they’d been playing around with settings or clicked something they thought they shouldn’t have, were always eager to learn new tricks or methods of doing things faster, I was always offered tea and biscuits…I used to like them a lot. Far better than smelly businesses
There used to be a 90 year old lady in Knowle who advertised her services for computer support. I was told of a time that she helped somebody out via mobile phone while passing through the checkout at Tesco. That’s just brilliant. Imagine being the person standing behind her!

Update: Dad tells me that my grandmother was in the RAF and worked at Chicksands Priory as a telegraph operator. He said she was in codebreaking, and according to this site Chicksands was a listening station that supplied Bletchley Park with raw data.

This video of bleeding-edge work on CGI water and fire effect is amazing. Fire’s still not quite there imho, but water is very impressive indeed.

Last night I remembered that my webcam had caused the computer to keep restarting last month, and at the time I’d blamed the drivers. When I moved the computer upstairs I plugged in a USB wi-fi adapter, and things started going wrong. Replacing it with a PCI version has solved all the problems, or at least taken me back to the previous state So it looks like I have a USB problem as well as SATA, but for now I’ve gone all day without a crash, and that makes me a happy bunny

I turned on the television at 1745, and was confronted by the image of woman bending over in the bath. The camera angle wasn’t directly behind, but was showing enough genitalia as to surprise me. I checked the channel and discovered I was on Discovery Home and Something. At this point the woman began moaning, and moments later a baby’s head popped out. Which was graphic. Baby was apparently still receiving oxygen through the placenta, and we weren’t to worry about his head being submerged for the next forty-five seconds. Eventually the rest of him squelched into the world, and mother and child met each other properly for the first time. I’m not squeamish about these things, but it was somewhat surprising to see on an early-evening show. Not that I actually think anybody would be disturbed by it, but you know how people like to complain. Mind you, I remember seeing a video in a secondary school science lesson with the same scene shown directly from in front. Some images you don’t forget in a hurry.

I’m currently ahead of schedule writing-wise, which is a pleasant feeling. I’m sure I’ll fall behind at some point - week 2 is meant to be a killer - but for now I’m going to relax. After months of trying and failing to convince others to see it with me, I’ve picked up Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events from the rental shop, so am heading downstairs to watch it.

I’m planning toffee apple raids for tomorrow.

[peeks betweek fingers]

Is it working?

It’s been half an hour without a crash. Is it working?

Three random restarts later, and I’m 1070 words in. Not the best of starts - I have to average 1700 words per day to hit the target now - but I had to spend much of the afternoon and evening trying to get the computers working. I haven’t even looked at the major b0rkage going on with my own machine. See, this afternoon I wrote 400 words in Writely, and it then popped up with a ‘Writely has a problem’ message. Then I saw that the rather-low-anyway wifi signal had dropped out entirely. It came back, and the next time I hit ’save’ in Writely it worked ok. 600 words and half an hour later I closed the document, and when I went to re-open it no changes had been saved since the initial error.

Wow, was I pissed off.

I then decided to boost the wifi signal with a repeater, so picked up another WRT54G router¹ on the basis that I’ll be able to use it in Stratford too, should I ever get there. I figured setting this up would be a two minute job, until I discovered that the WRT54Gs routers, as opposed to the WAP54G access points I’ve used before, don’t actually support repeating the wifi signal. It can be done, but only by using third-party firmware.

So, I flashed the firmware, and bricked a router. I resurrected it after removing the case and shorting two pins on the flash chip, then promptly bricked it again. Haven’t yet managed to fix that one. Happily, the new router is a good replacement, and actually seems to have a better range² so the signal in the spare room was passable late this evening, when I managed to get something done.

I’ve used more bad language today than I have in rather a while. And I haven’t even mentioned that I drove into a hedge…So I’m going to watch a Scrubs episode, then go to bed. Tomorrow will be much better, I’m sure.

1. which PC World didn’t have in stock, despite it being the router that’s sold everywhere [↩]
2. although it could just be something atmospheric - wifi connections are sensitive to so many things! [↩]

So far today I have had:

• One guitar lesson
• Two trips to the post office to send an eBay item (once for packaging)
• One bread-buying expedition
• One blue screen in Windows
• One failure to boot into Windows
• Four ‘System is in fail-safe mode, press f1 to continue’ messages
• One random reboot
• One system freeze

…and no writing has yet been accomplished. I think it’s best to now take Megan for a walk, before I throw my computer through the wall.

Got back at midday yesterday, and have spent the time since trying to get my computer up and running properly. Early last month I installed a Maxtor SATA hard drive, and had some problems. Sometimes the computer wouldn’t get past the bios loading screen, other times Windows wouldn’t start…it was annoying. Some hard work by Ed revealed the problem to be an incompatibility between the Maxtor drive and the motherboard. Maxtor blame the mobo manufacturers, but there’s no fix other than a bios upgrade, which never materialised. I’d removed the Maxtor and switched to a spare IDE drive, and last week finally decided to sort things out. I grabbed an external firewire enclosure for the Maxtor and a compatible Seagata SATA drive. The Maxtor’s now happily sitting in a glowy blue box on top of the computer and the Seagate is plugged in and working.

The problem is that I’m having major problems copying my data across to the new drive. Normally swapping a hard drive is very simple process: boot into BartPE, copy the data over to the new drive, unplug the old, and you’re done. Windows will not boot properly on the new drive, however - it logs me off immediately after ‘loading personal settings’ and gets stuck in a logon/logoff cycle¹. I can’t find anybody with this exact problem, but I’m guessing it’s to do with SATA drivers and XP having a strop. I could reinstall XP on the new drive, but I’d really rather not. Back in the day reinstalling Windows was a fun job - everything worked so much better afterwards - but with XP not needing the same six-monthly clearouts as 9x, it’s just a chore. I now have so many programs and happy little settings that it takes weeks to get things back the way I want them. I’m at a loss as to how to solve this as XP should be able to cope providing the SATA drivers are installed pre-transfer. I’m currently trying a drive imaging program, on the off chance that simply copying the files over isn’t sufficient².

Once things get back to normal, and Windows relaxes from being confined to a bursting-at-the-seems 80gb drive, I’ll start work on all the photos from the weekend.

UPDATE: Got it. Phew. Acronis True Image 9 imaged the drive, and it all works fine! I don’t know whether it messed around with drivers (seems unlikely) or if the ‘configuring drive letters’ message was the fix I needed, but I’m just glad it’s all sorted. Sure, I could try to figure it out, but quite frankly I can’t be bothered…True Image has a demo that’s fully functional for 15 days. I was tempted to leave it, but it wouldn’t be fair to use the software for free, so I picked up a copy - I’m sure it’ll come in useful in the future!

1. playing the associated sounds repeatedly, which gets old real quick [↩]
2. a bit of a dodgy premise, I admit [↩]

I’ve been experiencing worryingly RSI-like pains in my fingers for a few months, and after trying a friend’s ‘natural’ keyboard I decided to pick one up. A day later I saw an Engadget preview of the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, so figured I’d wait for that. It arrived from Microdirect last Wednesday, and since reviews are thin on the ground I figure it’s worth writing my early thoughts.

First impressions on removing it from the box: it’s big. Much bigger than ‘normal’ keyboards. The effect is increased dramatically by the tilt: the front of the keyboard is raised a fair distance from the desk surface, for a ‘more natural wrist posture’. It’s not clear whether this allows you to rest your wrists while typing without it being bad for you. The wrist rest is leather and is much more comfortable than the waste-of-time plastic rests supplied with other keyboards.

The styling is black and silver, with a Microsoft logo in the top-right corner. It’s certainly eye-catching, and I think it’s very smart. It’s much heavier than your average keyboard, which gives it a solid feel. It’s corded, with a good length cable.

The keyboard is in the familiar ‘natural’ format, with a split after 6, T, G and B and both sides angled away from each other. I find this extremely comfortable. It’s a large change from the normal elbows-against-sides, arms straight forwards posture, but is immediately a much more pleasant experience. Usage is another matter, but I’ll come back to that. This keyboard is the first time that key sizes are different depending upon their position, with very wide N, T , G and H keys. Not having used the previous style of natural keyboard I can’t comment on how much easier this makes things, but I will say that I can easily reach every letter without excessive stretching - however my fingers are particularly long and thin, so your mileage may vary.

The top row contains multimedia keys. On the far left are Home Page, Search and Mail buttons. These are followed by five customizable Favourites buttons, then Mute, Volume Controls, Play/Pause and finally, bizarrely, Calculator. Below this row is a ‘My Favourites’ button, which brings up the interface for configuring the Favourites buttons.

The most important thing to note is that these keys are entirely configurable, and can each be set to open web pages, any application, a function (from a a pre-configured list) such as ‘minimize all windows’ or even be disabled entirely if you like. My previous Logitech keyboard had a Sleep button that wasn’t at all accessible, and when you have a computer that crashes on trying to enter the Sleep state it’s really not a button you want to hit accidentally!

The volume controls work straight out of the box, and the Play/Pause controlled iTunes without further configuration, although does experience problems if the iTunes window is in focus (attempting to pause a track causes it so stutter and continue.) It’d be nice to have a Next Track button, but I guess that’s do-able with the Favourites buttons.

The F-keys also have dual functions, which are toggled by the F-lock key located to the right of the F-key row. My previous problem with this functionality was that the F-lock setting would be reset on restarting the computer, but USB keyboards apparently don’t suffer from this problem (I’m told there is a utility to set the f-lock on Microsoft PS/2 keyboards, but no Logitech equivalent.) Again, the functions are all configurable, although descriptions are written on the keys.

There are four extra buttons above the number pad: equals, open and close brackets, and another backspace. I guess these are for people who work with the number pad for much of the day, and probably explains the Calculator button too. I can’t see these coming in very useful for me, however.

Below the spacebar are Forward and Back buttons for web browsing. These fall nicely under the thumbs, and are slightly easier to reach than backspace and, um, whatever Forward is normally.

Finally, between the keyboard split is zoom slider, and this is the keyboard’s only major failing for me. The zoom slider does exactly what you’d expect, and allows you to zoom into Word documents, web pages or digital photographs. However, you can’t reconfigure it to scroll. The zooming is of limited use to me, but a fast way to scroll would be very useful indeed. Yeah, there’re the arrow keys, but the placement of the zoom slider allow surfing with with very little movement of the wrists. I hope the next software release adds this functionality.

So, it may have all of these features, but how is it to use?

The first thing I’d say is that you need to know how to type ‘properly’, if only in theory. Keeping the hands on their respective sides of the keyboard is a major feature of typing courses, but is a rule that can happily be broken on standard keyboards. The natural shape, along with the slant downwards, forces you to keep your hands in place, and this is surprisingly challenging! I learnt from my sister’s copy of Mavis Beacon about 18 months ago, but didn’t get much further than the intermediary stage and have slipped back into bad habits since. I’m not bad at the characters, but never got the hang of the number row and the associated symbols.

The height of the keyboard forces you to sit correctly. I’ve tried slouching backwards, wrists heavy on the rests, and this starts hurting quite quickly. You can’t sit at any kind of angle, either. The keyboard is basically forcing you to sit straight on, with a straight back and your arms angled inwards. As far as I’m aware, this is an excellent position for minimising RSI effects and back problems.

It’s definitely a keyboard for the serious typist. Typing with one hand (get your minds out of the gutter, people) gets annoying very quickly, and you really need two hands on the keyboard at all times. I also have to remove my watch due to the size of the wrist rest, but that’s not a big issue
The sound of the keys is surprisingly muted, but the keyboard doesn’t suffer from spongy keys. The tactile feedback is enough to be certain you’ve pressed the key, without being excessive. The height of the keys differs, dropping in the centre of the major key blocks, and I think this works very well. Your fingers should default to A, S, D and F on the left, and J, K, L and ; on the right. Because of the rise in the rows above and below this centre row, every time you reach for a key above or below the centre row you’re not pushing any further down than you would be on the centre row itself. Combined with the slanted keys, this makes for extremely easy typing.

Pros:

• Very comfortable
• Completely customizable buttons (with the exception of the zoom slider)
• Stylish
• Great for RSI and posture
• Solid and of good build quality
• Quiet, but responsive

Cons:

• The zoom slider is less useful than a scroll slider
• The keyboard takes some getting used to
• Typing skills are a must
• A little expensive (mine was

If you’re anything like me and are frequently called upon to help solve computer problems, you might be interested in UltraVNC SC, in which the SC stands for single-click. Configure the program with your details, send the 166k file to the person with the problem and in one click it initiates a connection to your VNC viewer and displays the remote desktop, helpfully avoiding all firewall problems at the other end. You configure it using a small utility and provide an IP address for connections, so a dynamic IP (edit: I meant dynamic DNS, as Nod points out in the comments) might come in handy. I haven’t actually tried it out yet, but it sounds more useful than bread. Spotted on the always enlightening Lifehacker.