You had a virus, drive corruption, or some other OS altering situation. But, being the hero you are, you resolved it and your PC is up and running again. That is, until you try to access the internet or some other network resource. The computer sits there trying to access that web page but nothing is happening... (Much like a MAC and its "spinning wheel of death"). First you check your network connection... Then check to see if you have obtained an IP address and other credentials. All … [Read more...]
Vista SP2: At a windows update near you!
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 was made available today through Windows update. I saw that there were some concerns on the web on installing the update.People having "issues". There was one report of a User having to do a system restore after the update completed because the machine became unbootable. But, I'm brave and need to test the update so, I plowed right along. It was a typical multi-stage update, similar to the Service Pack 1 Installation, but took a little longer. The primary … [Read more...]
Interesting Problem: Snipping tool is not working
I love the Vista snipping tool! I use it probably, every other day. But today I needed it and got this error: The Snipping Tool is not working on your computer right now. Restart your computer, and then try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator. Very odd. Of course I had about 12 tabs open in FireFox and three programs running so I resisted the urge to reboot and turned my attention to my friend Google. I ran across several blog posts about this very error. … [Read more...]
Shared Printer on Vista holding Jobs in Que
I had a customer computer start to die recently and we decided, since it was 8 years old, that rather than fix it we would replace it. So, we got a new PC and I set it up. Everything was a breeze with one exception. The old PC was windows XP Pro had an HP Laserjet 1020 printer attached to it and shared. The new PC is a Vista Ultimate machine and when setting that printer up to share again is when the problem hit. When I tried to test print to this printer from other machines on the network, … [Read more...]
Complete PC Back-up: Pretty dang cool!
A week or so back I got to test the Back-up built into Vista Ultimate. Not due to any problems caused by Vista but, because of some Hard drive issues. I was using the on board Intel RAID controller on my ASUS P5W64-WS Pro Motherboard. This thing has been causing a little trouble for a while. So, hoping it would solve all my woes, I decided to get an above board RAID controller. Anticipating trouble with the transfer, I decided I needed a full back up of my PC. This was too much to send up to … [Read more...]
Vista Shadow Copies
The Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) service is a pretty good feature of Windows Vista. Windows XP offered a similar feature in a "Previous Versions" client that needed to be installed by the user. This allowed users to take advantage of the backups that had been deployed. Vista's Shadow copy is on by default for the "system" drive and is "built-in". What VSS does is to write a new copy of the file. So, instead of replacing an existing file, VSS creates a new file in available space and points to … [Read more...]
The Toshiba A305-S6843 Laptop
The Toshiba A305-S6843 Laptop Recently I decided it was time to replace my laptop. My old Laptop was a Toshiba 4300 series. The laptop came originally installed with Windows 98SE, 800mhz PIII processor, 16 gig hard drive, DVD rom, 128 meg RAM. When I got this laptop originally it was "The stuff" so to speak. When Windows XP was released I upgraded the OS to Win XP Pro. Over the years, I maxed out the RAM (384meg) and swapped the 16 gig harddrive to an 80gig. And now this machine was "the … [Read more...]