All posts by Computers Made Simple

Basics, Computers, Hardware, Safe Mode, Troubleshoot Problems, Troubleshooting, Windows Secrets

Computer Troubleshooting – fixing random problems

Leave a comment

We ran into a problem this weekend with one of our laptops. For some reason, still undefined, we could connect to our central router’s WiFi but could not connect to the Internet. We had good signal strength but no go on the Internet connection. When we’re faced with this kind of situation, we try to look at the problem systematically, running through a series of troubleshooting steps to get to the root of the problem.  Even though we didn’t sort out the trouble, here are some of the steps we went through. If you’re in the same situation, you can try to use a few of these DIY (do it yourself) strategies.

1. We tried to use Windows to sort out the connection problem but, as usual, the Windows troubleshooter was useless. It’s nice that Microsoft tries to help but in all of our years of using Windows, we can’t remember when their troubleshooter worked. You’re welcome to try, but our success rate is dismal, to say the least.

2. Rebooting (restarting) a computer or mobile device is the first thing you should do. Save your work, bookmark any important sites you’re on and restart. Signing out won’t work as well as completely shutting down and starting everything up again.

2. In the case of our WiFi problem, we weren’t sure if it was software or hardware related. Our next step was to uninstall the Broadcom WiFi adapter. While this may sound extreme, it’s not. The adapter is a piece of hardware, yes, but we didn’t actually remove it from the laptop. We simply went into our device manager and uninstalled it from there. Next we rebooted the laptop and, of course, Windows found the adapter and reinstalled it. Why did we do this? Sometimes a driver, the thing that makes a piece of hardware work, gets corrupted. Removing a device then rebooting your computer can sometimes bring it back to life. Windows checks the driver and if it’s corrupted or old, finds a new one or asks you to find one for it.

Photo of Disable or uninstall hardware
This is an example of the ‘uninstall’ screen in Control Panel then Device Manager.

3. Since most laptops can use a wired connection as well as WiFi, we took the laptop down the hall and connected it with an Ethernet cable to a spare port on the router. This bypassed the WiFi connection and we were able to connect to the Internet immediately. Because of this, we knew that our problem was not a virus. On to step 4 to read why.

4. Sometimes a virus or malware can interfere with your computer’s stability. If you’ve downloaded music or a new piece of software from an unfamiliar site, there is a chance that a virus has hijacked your computer. If you do not do a virus scan on a regular basis, and you should, make sure you do one as soon as your computer starts to ‘act’ differently. Here’s a link to a good and reliable online anti-virus scan: Free Online Virus Scan  We’ve used these guys for years when we have reason to distrust our own anti-virus software.

Photo of Trend Micro House Call
This asks you to download a small file with allows Trend Micro to scan your computer online.

5. Windows’ computers have what is called a ‘safe mode’. If you are having problems, try to reboot your computer into this mode and see if you can duplicate the problem there. There are two ways to get into safe mode, the easiest is to tap the F8 key gently a few times just as your computer is restarting, after you see the first letters on your screen.

Photo of DOS Screen
Tap your F8 key when you see the first screen like this.

Choose Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Networking (as we did) if you want to check your Internet connection:

Photo of Safe Mode screen
Use your up and down keys to choose, then hit Enter.

When you are in Safe Mode, everything will look quite different. Manage as best you can to check the problem, free from the many other programs that start when you run your computer. If you find you are having a problem running your anti-virus software or deleting some software, try doing it while you are in safe mode. Some programs defend themselves from deletion but when you run safe mode, they cannot run and cannot stop themselves from being deleted.

Somehow we were able to reconnect to the Internet but we’re not sure why we couldn’t in the first place. Maybe one of these steps solved the problem, who knows? Whenever we encounter a problem that isn’t immediately obvious, we run through these steps one by one until we sort things out. Hopefully, you’ll be able to do the same.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Geocities, oocities

Oocities Revisted – Karma strikes!

2 Comments

We’ve posted about the theft of original, copyrighted material before, here’s the link: Geocities Isn’t Dead  There is an organization which calls themselves ‘oocities’ that’s somehow saved vast amounts of the old Geocities site and have posted this material on their own ‘.org’ site, telling the world that they’re doing everyone a favour by archiving or preserving the old Yahoo site. Well, that would be great except they are making money from the copyrighted material. There are ads on every page and, even though they say they aren’t making enough money to cover their ‘hosting costs’, we think differently.

This week we’ve received two emails from someone named Angelique. These emails came to a private email address, not one associated with this site, and we’re not sure how they got it. Regardless, we’re going to share these emails with you. We think you’ll see the perfect karma here. By the way, this is the Facebook page that they are referring to:

Oocities.org on Facebook   (We have nothing to do with this page but we hope you will like it and support it. If you had material on Geocities, please ask oocities to remove it. File a DMCA request with Google, as we did, and get your stuff removed.)

Here’s the first email, rather cryptic to say the least:

Start

“Hello,
Herewith we kindly ask you to stop hijacking our name on Facebook
kind regards,
Angelique”

Here’s the second, adding a bit more detail:

”

Good morning Mister Mahoney,

Oh well L First of all be ensured:

We are very s o r r y you felt so strongly against “oocities” and other GeoCities archives!

In the past year some people confused your Facebook page with our support contact,
so that their conversation attempts were delayed unnecessarily.
To avoid continuous confusion it will help when you will not use the oooities Header as a Facebook title picture
and slightly change the name of your Facebook page from exactly “oocities.org” into for example “i hate oovities”

Along the way some more details maybe answering some of your complaints:
– Parts of GeoCities were archived and kept online to prevent their loss and knowing that most authors agree.
Those were filtered automatically and manually to avoid spam, copyrighted material and too personal pages.
For oocities the focus originally was a finer screening for scientific material but we only saw demand and positive feedback to keep as much as possible. oocities was carried by 28 volunteers sorting pages, answering some emails and/or donating hosting costs not matched by ad impressions.
Even when >99.9?% users are happy, complex things are hardly completely perfect.
We try to give those who aren’t happy full attention.
Some people request to delete their pages or comments, which we try to solve quickly.
Your page was deleted after 2 days without asking back. It had no visitor in the archives.
– While we don’t understand if/why your cause is to disturb “oocities” particularly(?)
we agree there are unanswered questions about the relatively young topic of web archival that we follow curiously.
And, again, we are sorry it “stressed “ you to find your old page, which surely wasn’t our intention.
When a vast cultural Inheritance, that still has a present and historical relevance is threatened (,since the abandoned GeoCities became commercially toxic to the company that ran it), but a befitting solution to save it is not going to happen – What differntly would you have thought of it if you had felt the opportunity and responsibility in 2009 to save Geocities contents (besides trying to contact everyone if possible)?

All the best,
Good luck blogging,

Angelique”

End. 

We find it ironic that these folks are upset with whoever is using their name on Facebook  while they continue to make money using copyrighted material. This is what we mean by karma.

Thanks for reading. If you had material on Geocities and you happen to find it on oocities, we suggest that you fill out a DMCA removal request to get your stuff taken down. Here’s the link:

Removing Content From Google  This form will ensure that Google, the largest search engine available, does NOT list your material on oocities in their searches.

If you have material that you want removed from oocities, here is the email address that sent us the emails above:  oocities@gmail.com   Some of our readers have found that this account either does not work or does not respond to requests so you’re on your own. Good luck!

 

Free Software, Irfanview

The Best Free Software – Irfanview

Leave a comment

If there is one piece of software that we use everyday, it would have to be Irfanview. We’ve written about this amazing program many times. If you don’t have it on your computer yet, get it. You will never regret it.

Here’s the link to the site. You need two downloads to get the most out of the program. Download the software itself then download the plugins. Install the program first, then the plugins.

The Irfanview Website.  Read about it on the main page then click the download button. Make sure you download Irfanview from the Tucows site, NOT any of the other sites? Why? Some of the others make you download some other software, helpers that don’t help you at all. Stick with Tucows, you can’t go wrong. Here is the link to Tucows: Tucows Irfanview download site

By the way, when you see something like this, don’t click on it. Many sites have these ‘helpful’ links, even Tucows, but don’t download any of this software.

 

Photo of Irfanview 1
The two links on the bottom are safe, the one at the top isn’t.

 

What can Irfanview do? Here’s a list:

1. Once you’ve installed it, Irfanview becomes your default photo viewer. Run through a folder of photos simply by double-clicking one photo then pressing the spacebar to show the next. Hit the backspace key to go backwards. Hit the Enter key to show the photos full-screen.

2. Screen captures. We use Irfanview for most of the screen caps that you see on our site. Here’s how you do it: Multiple Screen Captures

3. If you want to use Irfanview to play videos or music, it will do both. We use VLC for videos and iTunes or Windows Media Center for music but Irfanview works just fine for these.

4. Crop, adjust size, create negative images, rotate, resize….Irfanview does all of these and more. For basic image editing, this is all you need. For more complicated work, download and install GIMP. GIMP is equally as powerful as Photoshop, in our opinion. We’ve written many posts about GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) so search for it in the search box on any page on Computers Made Simple.

5. Create PDFs from photos and documents. There is no need for any professional software for this. Irfanview can save any photo or document as a PDF plus it can create multi-page pdfs quickly and easily.

6. Batch conversion. If you have a whole folder of photos that need to be cropped, resized, renamed, converted to negative, rotated, etc., Irfanview can do it.

7. Adding text to a photo. GIMP does a better job but for simple text, as in the photo above, Irfanview works well.

8. Highlighting parts of a photo or drawing a shape to emphasize something in a photo. Again, GIMP will do a smoother job but Irfanview is quick and easy, plus it loads much fast then GIMP, just because it’s a more basic program.

There are many more things that Irfanview can do but you’ve got the general idea by now. Together with our how-to guides, you’ll be using Irfanview every day, just as we do. If you have questions about it, use the comment space below. We’ll get back to you very quickly.

Thanks for reading!

Computers Made Simple on Facebook: Like our page and you’ll be able to keep up on all of our posts and tips.

 

 

 

Delete Multiple Items, Gaming, GT5

Delete All Items in GT5

Leave a comment

We sometimes write about gaming here on Computers Made Simple. While we don’t play many video games, we do spend much of our spare time playing Gran Turismo 5. Yes, we’ve pre-ordered GT6 which comes out in December. At some point in the game, depending on how often you play it and how often you log in to your Playstation account, your GT5 item list will get full. By full we mean over 2500 paints, hundreds of racing outfits and hundreds of helmets.

Once you hit the limit, and we’re not sure what that limit is, you have to delete these items or you won’t get your 200% bonus for credits. GT5 tries to add items but your storage is full so it lowers your bonus accordingly. We rarely paint a car except for those we sometimes give to online friends so deleting them wasn’t a problem. If you’re in the same situation, here’s how to delete the items in groups, as opposed to one by one.

1. Here’s what you want to see when you start GT5, having signed in to your Playstation account:  (The pics are from a digital camera as opposed to screen caps. Sorry for the quality.)

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 1
We’re not concerned with the items but we do want to collect the 200% credit bonus.

2. There is an error warning that comes up when your item storage is full:

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 2
Time to delete some paints.

3. Head over to your item box:

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 3
Looks like a suitcase on the left side of your screen.

4. Once you’re in the item storage area, scroll down to Paints. You can delete racing outfits and/or helmets too but we had way too many paints and had to delete them. This system works for anything you want to delete:

 

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 3
We only have 252 now but we deleted 2300 earlier this week.

5. Down at the bottom of your screen, you’ll see ‘L1’ and ‘Select Multiple’. By the way, make sure you’re using your controller NOT your wheel, if you have one, to do this.

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 4
Press L1 to Select Multiple paints.

6. If you want to go through and select some, go ahead. We wanted to delete them all so we pressed the square button (purple) on the controller, just as it told us on the bottom of the screen after we pressed L1:

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 5
Press the square button to select them all.

7. Everything has a blue check to the left of it:

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 6
If you have multiples of the same item, this system will only delete the first, not all of them.

8. TIP: This process will not select multiples of the same paint color, right? It will select one only. To get rid of them all, you have to do this trick several times.

9. Once you have selected the ones you want to delete, press the triangle (green) button to bring up a menu:

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 8
The triangle button brings up the Menu below.

10. This is the menu, delete or cancel.

 

Photo of Delete Multiples Items GT5 7
Delete or cancel. We chose Delete.

 

That’s it! We’re back to normal again, minus a few thousand paint items. Now when we log on, we get the full 200% bonus. Let us know if you have problems with this. It’s pretty straightforward but let us know if you need help.

Thanks for reading!