Replacing dead power supplies
Soon after I upgraded to broadband, I bought a wireless access point and a PCMCIA card for the laptop from Office World. Compared with dial-up from the desktop upstairs, the freedom to work anywhere in the house on a permanent connection was a revelation.
The access point failed after 18 months - the separate power supply wasn't supplying any power. Cheaper and faster than sending it back for repair was to order a new mains adapter from
RS Components (previously Radiospares). I ordered on-line - an
unregulated supply with enough power to do the job - and the replacement arrived in 48 hours for under £17.
Recommended.
Saving streaming video
In my job (college lecturer) you might want to show a video clip from the Internet but, for lots of reasons, you can't guarantee to have Internet access just when you need it.
My fallback is to save the clip to your hard drive or memory stick, but this option is often disabled in Windows Media Player and other players.
A successful (and free) solution is Net Transport, a download manager which will download using FTP & HTTP protocols but also MMS (for Windows Media Player) and RTSP (for RealMedia). It runs standalone and also adds an extra right-mouse menu option into Internet Explorer so that you can download streams without leaving IE.
The download link at
Exciting Software is temperamental (think it's in Shanghai) but it's worth persevering. Kevin Wang's done a very professional job.
Browser taken over - fix found
My wife clicked on a button marked "Click for a faster Internet". If you've waited ages for Royal Mail's complaints site to open, you might be tempted too. The browser (IE5.5) was immediately taken over by ClientMan, a browser helper object (BHO), that fakes a page on Google and tries to sell you software to remove the BHO it installed.
This is akin to a con-man changing the locks on your house and then offering to sell you a new key.
Fortunately there is a brill team of volunteers at
www.spywareinfo.com devoted to getting you out of trouble - donations welcome. Used the recommended (and free) SpyBot to find and remove the infection but kept coming back till I used AdAware (also free) instead.
Cost to me - 5 hours of research and experiment and two very late nights. Grrr!
It's ActiveX that's the weak point. When IE is allowed to use ActiveX programs they can do anything to your PC. Trouble is lots of sites use them - even Sainsburys - so once you've followed the recommendations to tighten security, you end up being prompted time and again as you browse.
Microsoft Word crashes after startup - fix found.
Bought a super new HP printer cum scanner cum copier this week. Copy performance is outstanding, very much better than separate scanner and printer. But when MS Word started having serious problems, I never dreamed the two events were connected.
Microsoft Word has been used across networks for over 10 years but the Office XP version still contains a bug which can cause it to crash a few seconds after loading.
Word checks the default printer, probably to find the current size of a printed page. If that printer exists on another computer on the network and that computer is inaccessible (eg switched off), then Word doesn't report this problem but just says it can't continue.
Spent a long time re-installing software before I found this explanation (on microsoft.public.word.application.errors). Hope it never happens to you.
