Friday, January 29, 2010

Friday 29th January

A smash repair company owner had bought a new camera after 12 years, the problem was that the photos produced were 10 times bigger to send to insurance companies and very slow over his slow link. The problem was to find a program to shrink photos that is easy enough for a computer beginner to use.

A customer could not get internet on a Bigpond connection. He gave up after an hour talking to Telstra on the phone. When I arrived I noticed that he had installed the bigpond wall phone faceplate to the wall. He then had a line out of the face plate to a splitter filter near the phone and ADSL modem. So the phone was double filtered and the ADSL was filtered. I connected the line to the ADSL output on the faceplate which is not filtered.

Another customer had just upgraded a Vista machine to Windows 7. The problem was that he could not download anything. It found a site not found error, although web surfing worked okay. After trying the usual - netsh, uninstall/reinstall of network driver/stop antivirus programs. I finally twigged that it was a security issue to do with downloading .exe files. I turned off protected mode and the downloads went forward as usual.

A customer, who I visited the day before rang me because their (very ancient Pentium III) laptop was not booting. It was also making a clicking noise. This was a worry as it means the hard drive had or was about to die! I went to the customer and the computer managed to almost boot into windows. I then shutdown the machine and grabbed it to see if I could grab data off the hard drive before it collapsed completely. I'm also going to put the HDD into a freezer for awhile as this might give the computer a little life.

Final job is a computer that kept on throwing system stop errors 0x0000008E, 0x00000050 to name a few. I had tried a few things and the final thing I am about to try is to replace memory. If this doesn't fix the problem, then it is the motherboard and time for a new computer.

1 comment:

Albury Hotel said...

When this 0x0000008E, 0x00000050 appears is it a memory issue is it?

I defraged my computer again the other day and was seeing similar messages appearing..