Beaker Net Blog

My Personal and Tech Views of the World

Power Trick

May 11th, 2012 Posted in Hardware
May, 11 2012
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I am kind of surprised I have not blogged about this before, as I have told many people about this trick. Let’s say you go to power on your desktop or laptop and nothing happens, or you get an amber light on the power light. There is one trick you can try, it may or may not work, but what have you got to lose.

  • First, make sure your computer is fully powered off, you may need to hold the power button in until it shuts off, depending on your situation.
  • Next, remove the power supply or power cable. If you have a laptop, remove the battery and unplug the power cable. If you have a desktop just unplug the power cable.
  • Then hold the power button in for 30 seconds or longer. If you do not hold it in for at least 30 seconds the power trick will not work.
  • Once the proper amount of time has passed plug your power supply back into your computer. If you have a laptop, you would also want to put your battery back in at this point.
  • Try powering on your computer, if it still does not come up then the problem is more complicated. If it does, then you are in business.

This trick sounds really weird, but it often times works. Espeically when if your house lost power and your computer crashed. Typically this trick works really well for getting your computer to power back on.  I have used this to fix several computers, and I can say it works a lot of times.

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Corrupted Print Jobs

May 9th, 2012 Posted in Hardware, Windows
May, 09 2012
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Sometimes when you go to print a document you may notice that it does not print and all your printers disappear from your computer. This is typically a symptom of a corrupted print job. Basically the print job gets stuck on your computer and brings your print service, or print spooler to a stop. So let’s take a look at how to check for this problem and resolve it.

Basically the first thing you need to do is make sure the Print Spooler service on your computer is stopped. To do this go into your Control Panel, then Administrative Services, then Services. You will then want to maximize this window and scroll down until you find the Print Spooler service. In the Status column make sure it is Stopped or blank. If it is not already, click to highlight the service then select the Stop or Square icon from the top menu bar. That should stop the service. Keep this window open however as we will be coming back to it later.

Once the service is stopped we can go find, and delete the corrupted print job. Open your Computer or My Computer icon and navigate down to C:\Windows\System32\spool\printers. This folder should be empty, if it is not then highlight all the files in this folder and then delete them, as they are the corrupted print job.

Now that the corrupted print job has been removed we can restart the Print Spooler Service. As before go into your Services window and highlight the Print Spooler service. This time hit the triangle icon to Start the Print Spooler service. The service should start and your printer icons should be back. You can even try sending a print job to your printer just to make sure it is working again.

If this did not resolve the printer problem you are having, then you have a different kind of problem that needs further assistance. So if you come up against this problem, it might be worth trying it out and checking to see if you have a corrupted print job. It might just save you a lot of time, and impress you computer savvy friends.

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Google Chrome

April 28th, 2012 Posted in Browsers & Websites
Apr, 28 2012
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I have been a fan of Firefox for a few years.  I really do like Firefox, but when they came out with version 4, there were a lot of bugs.  I held on as I still really liked the browser, and around version 8 things stabilized.  Then they came out with version 11, and all kinds of problems came up again.  The browser became sluggish, there were lots of problems loading pages.  Even with the new release of version 12, the problems have not been resolved.  And as much as I loved Firefox, I could not deal with all the bugs again.  And going back to using Internet Explorer is not really an option as they lack a lot of security features that a browser on the web needs today.  A lot of my friends had been telling me to try Google Chrome, and I had, but I had not seriously looked at it.  Now seemed like as good a time as any, so I downloaded and installed Google Chrome.  Another main reason I was interested in trying Chrome now, was the Google Chromebooks.  Google Chromebooks basically run the Chrome browser as an operating system.  So what better / cheaper way to try it out, than to just try Chrome first.

The first thing you will notice when you install Chrome, is how much faster it is. I was really shocked just how much quicker the browser launches and loads the initial page. Even surfing is faster, and as I am already a big Gmail / Google user, I was really impressed at how well it handled things like Gmail, Google Docs, etc. The browser really is designed to work with other Google products, which is not surprising since it is created by Google.

Chrome even allows you to authenticate the browser to your Google account, where it will sync your bookmarks, passwords, etc. This is a really great feature if you use multiple computers, as you can basically have the same browser across both systems. I know Firefox has this feature, and I did try to set it up at one point, but it was way too complicated. However Chrome achieved this with something as simple as logging in with your Google account to the browser.

Another thing you will notice right away is the New Tab Page. This page allows you to install extensions that put your favorite apps right up front. Unlike other browsers, Chrome allows you to run some apps right within the browser. This kind of blends the idea of a browser with the idea of an operating system. Kind of a different idea, that your browser runs its own apps within itself. And does Chrome have apps, browsing through the Chrome Web Store you will find apps and extensions for just about anything you want to do. It was not very difficult at all to find a couple of apps that easily replaced the ones I liked in Firefox. This made my transition from Firefox to Chrome all the more easier. For example, in Firefox I used Echofon as my Twitter client. I quickly found an extension in Chrome called Silver Bird that did the exact same thing. Another great extension I found was IE Tab. I have used this extension in Firefox as well, but with all their updates the extension quickly become buggy. In Chrome it works great again, allowing me to open specific websites in a Chrome tab, as if they were in Internet Explorer. Great for compatibility with sites that only seem to work well in Internet Explorer.

Another major reason I went to Firefox over Internet Explorer in the first place was security. Internet Explorer lacks a lot of anti-malware and site tracking preferences. Firefox was able to bring that to me and make it a lot more secure. So naturally this was one of the first things I looked for in Chrome, and it was easily there in the settings. Making another win for Chrome, and making sure I wasn’t losing anything by making the switch.

So if like me, you aren’t willing to risk the security problems of Internet Explorer, and are fed up with the bugs of Firefox, you may want to consider Chrome. In my opinion so far, it has been the best of both worlds. It has the polished feel of Internet Explorer, but with the speed and freedom of Firefox. At this point I can see now reason why I would go back to another browser. It reminds me of earlier Firefox versions, when it was fast and had less bugs in it. I would highly recommend Chrome at this point, especially if you are already a heaving user of Google products.

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Internet Explorer Compatibility

April 27th, 2012 Posted in Browsers & Websites
Apr, 27 2012
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If you use Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 8, you may notice that Gmail and some other sites do not show up correctly. Typically this is shown by words wrapping funny, or loss of scroll bars. This is caused by the Internet Explorer compatibility settings. By default Microsoft has the option checked so that a list of sites, approved by them, are added to be opened in compatibility mode. So the next question is, how do we disable this and make the new Gmail interface work the say it should.

We start by opening Internet Explorer, then go into Tools, Compatibility View Settings. Once the Compatibility View Settings window opens, we want to look at the three check boxes at the bottom. Make sure only the middle box is checked, and that both the bottom and top check boxes are unchecked. You can use the picture below to verify.

Once that is done, click close and try reloading your webpage. If you are using Google or Gmail you will notice right away that the scrolling side bar should appear. If you continue to have problems, I would highly recommend considering another browser, such as Firefox or Chrome. I myself have used both of them, but lately tend to favor Chrome. Hopefully this helps those of you who have seen this compatibility problem in Internet Explorer.

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Time Sync from a BAT File

April 22nd, 2012 Posted in Windows
Apr, 22 2012
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If you have a computer on your network that seems to have trouble keeping its time, you can always use a bat file to force it to sync with another computer.  The code for this is pretty straight forward, you simple have to change computername to be the hostname of the computer you want to sync against.

net time \\computername /set /y

The biggest requirement you will need is to make sure the computers use the same user name and password.  If they do not, you can always set this as a schedule task to run as another user, or make use the run as comment to run the time sync bat file as another user.  So if you had created a file called timesync.bat that used the code above, the run as command would look something like this.

runas /user:hostname\administrator /savecred c:\support\timesync.bat

You will most likely be prompted to save the password when running the runas command above, as the /savecred option is set.  You may also need to change the hostname value to be the computer name that you are running this on, and also the location of the timesync.bat file.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you need to force a computer to sync its time with another computer, these could of bat files could come in useful.

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