I’m Just Sharing

So, the continuation of the story of some of my computer issues. When I last wrote, I’d had to contact customer service to reactivate my cable connection. I got that, but I was still having major problems with many webpages.

I thought maybe the problem was with the Panda software that I now have as my virus protection, as well as my new firewall. I disabled the firewall and tested it; nothing changed. I disabled a couple other things and tried it; nothing changed.

I then decided to open IE, as I’d been doing everything on Firefox. Everything was working on IE, so it made me rethink what I was doing. I went into the tools of Firefox and kept looking at everything there; I couldn’t find anything else I could do that I hadn’t already done. I even reloaded Firefox 2.0.0.16, which I was surprised I could even still find, and that didn’t fix anything.

Then, for some unknown reason, I started to wonder if it was the cookies. I’m not sure why I thought of it but it seemed to be one thing I hadn’t touched. I went into Firefox cookies and deleted those that were associated with webpages I was having problems with. Then I opened those pages; there it was! Every page was suddenly working again, and life was fun once more. I went back in and deleted some other cookies, which I have rarely paid attention to, because I’d noticed that some of them are tracking cookies, and they really don’t need to be on my computer.

I wish I’d thought about the cookies before I’d gone through all that other stuff. I put it here so y’all can check them out from time to time. I’ve done some research since then and have found that, indeed, cookies can sometimes get corrupted for one reason or another. But they’re easy to check, easy to delete, and easy to get back; just go back to the page and they’ll come back.

Now, life is almost back to perfect; I still need to figure out this buffer issue that seems to happen from time to time, but otherwise, I’m happier than I’ve been in awhile.

I now have my main computer back. I brought it home Friday, and started putting stuff back onto it Friday night. Through most of the day Saturday, I started adding more stuff, but I was testing each thing I put on just to see if it was all working. I even felt comfortable enough Saturday night that I decided to play a little bit of online poker. This was after we got home from an art show that a friend of mine, Isaac Bidwell, had in Oswego, NY at the Arts Association (this link will probably go to something else once his exhibits are over).

Around 1:30 in the morning, when I was nearing the end of my poker tournament (and sitting in 4th place, no less), I started to notice that my browser wasn’t working properly. Rather, none of the pages I was trying to load were coming up. I was irked, to say the least, and ended up bombing out of my tournament in 3rd place (it still paid off; play money, but hey, I’ll take what I can get) because I was distracted by it all. I made an assumption that I was having problems because my wife, who would normally have been asleep, was on the laptop in the other room checking email, and maybe we were on the same ISP. But when she finally shut down, I still couldn’t get on, so I shut down for the night myself, thinking maybe the computer would be better this morning.

Nope; didn’t work. So I start doing all the stuff I know how to do: unplug and re-plug back in the modem; cmd - ipconfig stuff; turning off firewall from new Panda software. Nothing worked. Then I decided to make sure it wasn’t just my computer, so I hooked the laptop up to the other cable (I pay for 2 ISP addresses) and it wasn’t working either. Now I knew it wasn’t my computer, but something with Road Runner instead.

I called them up, and the first woman was no help at all. She kicks me up to technical support (who was I talking to the first time, then, since I thought she was technical support?), and this woman has me disconnect both the cable modem and my Linksys router. After 30 seconds she asks me to hook everything back up and turn on the computer; wa-la! Internet is back and all looks great. I go to the other room and all is successful; yay!

One still always should do some of their own diagnostics before calling the company first, but sometimes it really doesn’t have to do with anything of ours. I’m glad also; I need that Panda firewall.

Winter Grandeur Revealed by Curt Walters Price: $600.00

For those of you who read my initial story about my meeting with the Computer Guy, there’s an update, of sorts. At this point I still don’t have my computer back, but today I decided it was finally time to call him.

On the phone, he didn’t sound quite as convincing as he did when I’d met him in person last Thursday. He said that they’d had to try to find all the drivers for the machine because I’d forgotten to give them that disk (my bad, but I’m only around the corner; they couldn’t call me?), and that, for the most part, everything seemed to be working great, except for the one game I took them, which I’d said had never worked on the computer. He couldn’t get the blue screen of death to come up, but he did say that it initially ran bad, then the screen went black, and that wasn’t good at all. He asked if I had any other games that I’d run on it and I told him I did have another game, but never tried to run it on that computer since the other one had never worked. He asked me to bring it in so they could test it.

I had to stop at home first, since I was heading out of town, grab the game, then drove to the store. He had the doors wide open, and I asked him if he hadn’t heard it was supposed to get up to 87F. He said it wasn’t there now, but he had some nice beads of sweat on his head, as did I, so he was feeling it, even if he was ignoring it. He took the game from me, The Sims, and loaded it onto the computer. It loaded fast, even faster than it had on my previous computer, and it looked pretty good, though neither of us could remember how to play the thing.

Still, I had kind of the same gripe I’d had with Comp USA when I took it to them; there wasn’t anything on the computer so of course there weren’t going to be any problems. But he had no programs to load, so I was stuck there. Actually, for a guy deeply into computers, it’s amazing just how much in the dark ages his own stuff is, for the most part. For instance, he doesn’t use any USB items on his computers; can you believe that? He stated that USB is one of the worst technologies he’s ever had to deal with because it allows so many items that turn out not to be compatible with each other and then causes lots of crashes. Thus, he has nothing wireless; he doesn’t even use a mouse with a wheel!

So I told him that whenever I watched a few .WMV files in a row that my computer sometimes shut down. He asked where I got them from, and I said people send me little .WMV files here and there. He said that he doesn’t ever accept any email that has attachments, and immediately deletes everything. I asked if he was serious and he said yes, because he didn’t know how many other computers any of those files might have touched, and therefore he wasn’t entrusting anyone else’s motives on his own stuff. I was kind of stunned by that one, but I guess I shouldn’t have been, since last week he told me that he doesn’t download any email to his computer, preferring to use the online email program that comes with his ISP. I’d never known anyone who wanted to do that, as most of us download email so we can save stuff we want for later and for the convenience; not Bob, though.

Then I looked around and realized that he also doesn’t have any flat screen LCD monitors for his own usage. He said he doesn’t trust that technology either, and prefers having the large, stable monitors to work on instead. Good thing he has lots of workspace, but still,… Then I remembered that, last week, he said that when people have these things he’ll ask them to bring in all their other components so he can test them against each other, including their monitors if the problem has to do with their video cards. Talk about your throwbacks!

Then we talked about motherboards. He said that if he couldn’t produce a blue screen then he couldn’t even say whether it was the motherboard or not, but that it really didn’t matter. He said he couldn’t get a motherboard that any of my present components would work with, including my hard drives, because technology has pushed forward; after all, I did have it put together in 2004. He said that if I added anything new to the mix that it would probably bring my computer down, since it wasn’t built for many of the things today, and this came about because I asked about the TV emulator he had on his own computer. He also said that the Radeon video card I’d put into my computer was one of the worst in the world, and when I said that both PC World and PC Magazine had rated it high, which is why I’d bought it, he said that, for true gaming professionals, Radeon is terrible because it basically emulates technology that other video cards actually create, and therefore is considered garbage among these folks. Of course, I’m not a gamer, but still,… And, as a throw in, he also said that Dell computers aren’t close to being as good as what people think they are; I couldn’t argue with him on that, never having a Dell.

Anyway, he’s going to have my computer one more night, and that’s it. I said that I’d be coming in around 11AM to get it, as this was kind of my vacation week, and next week starts my real work again, and even though I have to load a bunch of stuff back onto it, I need to use that one more than my poor laptop, which has worked like a champion over this past week, but is four years old itself, actually older than my other computer, and really isn’t meant for the kind of power work I put into a computer on a regular basis. I have no idea how much any of the work I’ve had done is going to cost, which my friend Kelvin thought was a pretty stupid thing, but hey, I don’t think I’m going to get hosed on the deal, based on my memories from the past; we’ll see, though.

Maybe I should have followed my first mind and just bought a new computer, eh?

John Louis Home Deluxe Closet System Price: $470.00

Thursday I had two appointments. The first was to take my wife’s SUV to have the brake pads replaced. The second was to take my computer in for servicing. My wife actually made the appointment, though I hadn’t known she’d done it, but I figured she was so tired of hearing me complain about my computer shutting down and not working properly that she did what she had to do.

Lucky for me, both places were right next to each other, so I had no problems getting my computer there, even though my wife did schedule them an hour apart, so I had to bother the brake people to lower the vehicle so I could get my computer when it was time to take it in.

First, a little bit of history, and I’m naming names. Back in 2004 I decided, because I work so much with my computer, to have one put together. I went to Comp USA and I picked out all the separate components, based on their recommendations, and had them put it together. Overall, it cost me around $2,500, but I figured I was putting together my version of a monster computer, one that would work well for me over a long period of time.

Almost immediately, when I got it home, I started having problems with it. I should have seen it coming, because, while it was being built, they had called me to tell me that they were having problems installing the second CD drive I’d wanted to add, as in they couldn’t get it working, and I told them not to worry about it, since I hadn’t had one before. I got the blue screen of death on the very first day; of all things. I did what I could for a few days, since I do know some things about computers, but it just wasn’t happening, so I took it back for service.

In essence, I ended up taking it back for service six or seven times. Each time they would say they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They said they tested everything; they kept wiping out my hard drive and reloading the operating system, and nothing. Of course, I griped because I would show up, they’d actually let me go into the back room with them, and I would say “you haven’t loaded anything on the computer, so how do you know it won’t lock up?” By that, they said they’d put on the operating system then let the system run for 48 or 7 2hours to see if it would lock up; what the heck was that? However, I also had bought from them a new game, at the time, Civilization IV, and it wouldn’t run on the computer; most of the time it shut the computer down with that same error message, and these guys saw it also. weird.

Anyway, after paying even more money and going lots of time without my computer, and being dissatisfied with Comp USA (I’d even sent a letter to the corporate office, but of course never heard from them), I decided it just wasn’t meant to be, so I stopped taking it in and decided to just live with it. The shutdowns kept coming, and I stopped using more and more programs that would shut it down. However, within the last couple of months, it would start shutting down if I’d been doing a lot of things without a reboot in a couple of days; lucky thing that Word and Excel save everything, but that was the final straw. I started thinking about buying a new computer, but didn’t because I don’t want Vista just yet, and hence, the appointment my wife made.

The name of the place where I’ve taken my computer is Comp-U-Soft, and they’ve been in the same location for about 11 years now. Where other computer repair places have opened and closed within months, these guys have stayed viable and right in the same place. I pass by it all the time, and I even took a computer in there about 10 years ago for repairs. They do good work, but it doesn’t seem to be fast work. That’s because they’re thorough; they were back then, and they are now. I will admit that, because of how long it seemed to take back in the day, I decided to learn more about computers myself, which is how I learned to fix a lot of things, but I’ve never wanted to mess with a motherboard, knowing how sensitive they can be.

The computer guy, named Bob, took the computer and hooked it up to an old CRT 17″ screen; these guys, for all their technical expertise, are really throwbacks to the old days. If you look at their website, you’ll see what I mean; they certainly could use some SEO on the site, that’s for sure. Heck, maybe I need to make a pitch. Anyway, he hooks my computer up and types up the invoice that I have to sign so they can start working on it. Over the next hour we talk about theory of safety and online security, email, virus protection, and computers in general. I told him my story, and told him I’ve always thought my problem was the motherboard, and he was dumbfounded, especially after I mentioned what happened with the CD drive. He said that any computer business worth its weight in salt would never allow a computer to leave their shop without passing all certifications, and if they couldn’t even get two CDs working, then it was their problem to diagnose and fix, period.

Then, because we were talking about Comp USA, I told him about the time I bought a hard drive from their Westchester NY store that was supposed to be 100GB and, when I installed it myself, turned out to not only be a 4GB drive, but a used one as well, as it booted up before I loaded the operating system and someone else’s information and all his files were on it. He said that was the most incredible story he’d ever heard; that is, until I told him about the time my plane hit a deer while trying to fly out of North Dakota (yup, that actually happened). It wasn’t computer related, but every once in awhile you want to top yourself.

So, at this point, they still have my computer, but there are many differences between 1998 and 2008. For one, I have a laptop now that’s quite capable of running as my main computer for a long as I need. Two, we have external hard drives now, and I was able to copy over every single thing I wanted to from the other system; nice having 300GB of extra storage. And three, even at this juncture, these guys don’t charge a lot for service, no matter how long it may take them to figure it all out. The guy even said he would quote me on a new system, just in case, and that it wouldn’t be more than $1,500, probably less than $1,000; that works for me. Technology has been kicking my behind this year (don’t ask about the cell phones for awhile), but maybe this time around I can get on top of it in some fashion.

Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that our knowledge stops at a certain point on certain things; I’m glad guys like Bob are still around to handle the big jobs.

Apple MacBook Pro, 17-inch, 2.5GHz

Two weeks ago, while sitting in a hotel room, I was having problems getting onto the internet from my laptop. It was irritating me because I’d had no problems getting on the day before. Nothing was working, and I was already irritated because the internet connection in the hotel is much slower than what I’m used to.

I was talking with the customer service people over the course of a couple of hours, when one of them suddenly asked me if I had a firewall program. I don’t know why I thought that was an odd question, but I said yes, and he asked me to turn it off. I thought it was a stupid request, but I did so, and lo and behold, I was online again.

I was stunned, because I’d always run the same firewall program, Zone Alarm. Now I didn’t know what to do, because I wanted that extra level of protection. I decided to load the firewall to the same program I’m using for my antivirus, CA Security Suite, which comes free with my Road Runner subscription. So I did, it worked, and I figured that was that. At the same time, my wife called me and said she was having problems getting online, and I figured she was having the same problem I was having, but since she’s not technically savvy, I told her I’d have to take care of her computer when I got home, and I did.

However, that wasn’t the end of it. Over the next couple of weeks, things started happening that didn’t make sense. I couldn’t sign into sites with my passwords anymore, as everything kept telling me I’d turned off cookies, but I knew I hadn’t. Then I started having problems with my music files, which wouldn’t play through Media Player anymore, even after upgrading to version 11 (which I hate); that just didn’t make sense.

A friend recommended I run CCleaner, which helped some, along with my Error Doctor program. It brought back my music files, but I still couldn’t sign onto any sites. The odd thing about all of this is that my main computer at home was fine, for once; not a single issue.

Now, during this time I had learned that Microsoft had sent out a patch on the same day I started having problems that, in effect, killed Zone Alarm for everyone who was using it, and put through a fix a couple of days later. I had already switched to the different firewall program before that happened, so it missed me completely. I just figured to stick with what I was running and that all would be just fine.

Finally, Saturday morning, back on my own turf, I decided I was going to get to the bottom of all these problems. And I finally did, after lots of research. Turns out that the CA Firewall program is automatically set on the highest level, which blocks all cookies; what the heck is that? And, at least on the laptop, even when I figured out how to lower it, things didn’t work. So I removed it from the laptop completely, and everything finally came back. And, since Zone Alarm and CA Security Suite don’t like each other (in more ways that one, but I’m not getting into it), I had to uninstall the antivirus program, load Zone Alarm again, then reload the antivirus program, and all is right with the world once more.

Sort of. There’s a couple of things about CA Security Suite. One, it seems to be hinky. Every time I start any of the computers anew, some of the programs has decided it’s inactivated itself and I have to start from scratch again; not sure I like that much. Every once in awhile it’s the antivirus; that’s irritating also. I have had that problem with McAfee, which I actually used to love, and may go back to. Two, I learned that CA can’t be loaded onto a computer or laptop running at 64-bit. I learned that yesterday after trying to install it into my wife’s niece’s laptop 5 times, then finally decided to do more research on it. By the way, Zone Alarm can’t be loaded onto a 64-bit laptop either, and they’ve said they have no plans on making it available for it either, even though they did do a trial run of it about a year ago.

And there you are. I need to learn, from now on, to start off with the firewall and work backwards, instead of starting off by running my antivirus and working from that angle. I could have saved myself a lot of time; hopefully, I’m going to save someone else some time also.

I need a new computer. That’s pretty easy to state. I want Microsoft XP; that’s not as easy at this time and place.

It seems that I missed the deadline. As of 6/30, all new PCs with a Microsoft operating system has to come with Vista, no questions asked. Some computers, if you order online, can come with both Vista and XP, but Vista is the big dog now, plain and simple. Suffice it to say, I’m not overly happy.

The Microsoft people have done a lousy job of convincing us why we want Vista loaded computers. They initially came out and said we wanted it because it had all these capabilities, and that it was prettier than XP. Then we heard the reality, that not only was the version most people were getting lacking the “pretty” part of Vista, but most of the computers being sold were deficient in power, so they couldn’t run the new operating system properly. And let’s not forget that it wasn’t compatible with an overwhelming number of hardware or software products that the masses already had. In other words, Microsoft had a massive customer service issue, which I wrote about on my other blog. It’s such a bad problem that, oddly enough, when most companies are advertising their computers these days, they don’t even mention the operating system until later in the descriptions; that’s a shame, and it’s somewhat disingenuous since the release of Windows 7 is pretty close to only being a year away.

So, what do I do? At least these days most computers are being loaded with Home Premium with the first service pack; that’s a step forward, but from the normal consumers position, is this much more improved than what we initially heard? I could buy the sucker, erase the operating system, and load my own XP professional version, which I purchased for another ungodly $300 a few years ago. I could go the route of trying to put together my own computer components and loading it myself, or better yet hope to put together a component package that still ran IDE drives so I could slip my own drive back into it; nope, that doesn’t make sense, since the reason I need a new computer could possibly be related to the drive (I don’t think so, but who really knows, right?). Or I could pay big money through a company that puts computers together independently such as Falcon Northwest, but at the moment their computers are a bit pricey for me. Or I could just take my present computer to the shop up the street to see if they can overcome a problem that Comp USA couldn’t for a year or so (before they skipped town, along with the $299 I paid for 3 years of maintenance) for under $500, which, as a friend of mine said, makes little sense when I could probably buy a budget machine for less than that that’s more powerful than what I have now; that’s a shame.

Decisions, decisions,… who to trust, how to trust, what to do,… I sometimes wonder if it’s better to not have any knowledge at all about computers, so I could walk in and just pick either the nicest looking one or the cheapest one and get on with life. Luckily, I don’t have to buy it today, so I have more time to think about it. Other than looking at RAM, what does anyone else think is the most important thing I should be looking for, and would you be balking at Vista right now, especially since it’s being forced on us?