Computer Tips -Tech Info

I haven’t had much time to look into this, but one of the mailservers I administer is typically configured to relay through mail.lig.bellsouth.net, with mail.averyjparker.com as a fallback. Sometime overnight, mail.averyjparker.com started getting heavy use and on checking this morning was getting all of the outbound traffic. So, I did a bit of investigation mail.lig.bellsouth.net […]

F-secure has information on a fairly aggressive new email virus. Their name for it is VB.bi although it’s aliases are…. W32.Blackmal.E@mm, WORM_GREW.A, W32/Nyxem-D, Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi depending on which AV vendor you check with. It’s a worm as well, in that it tries to spread through remote shares. It attempts to disable antivirus software as well. Here […]

There are a lot of elements to a good disaster recovery strategy…. knowing where offsite backups are located, keeping the offsite backups fresh. Knowing where any ON-site backups are. Having a plan for quick access to replacement hardware. One that probably is easily overlooked is very low-tech. That’s a system log. I don’t know that […]

How many times have I had this kind of phone call…. “my computers not working”… “the light on the monitor is on, but there aren’t any lights on the keyboard. everything seems connected, but there’s nothing on the screen.” Usually, my first question is along the lines of… “have you tried turning it off and […]

I’ve run into this in the last few days too. (In spite of the fact that it’s an OLD update (April 13, 2004?) MS04-013…. I think on the last visit (and my first one to this machine) we had probably forced a visit to Windows update (which I think it may not have seen before…) […]

I ran into strange problems accessing a shared Novell Netware (5.0) folder. Everytime the folder was attempted to be accessed from multiple machines the window would freeze and if you waited long enough, there would be an error message along the lines of “Netware Alert Message”… NIOS.NLM Call to NIOS page unlock by module unknown […]

When Google Talk first came out, many people were excited that they were using the protocol that jabber is built on. There were also disappointments that ALL of the protocol hadn’t been implemented. In fact, the biggest disappointment many had was that a jabber.org instant messenger user could not IM with a gmail.com user. That […]

Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there….) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft’s AVG and so I tried to force an update. I was greeted with an error message… “Cannot Launch AV internet […]

Saw this today…. “Error while aging folder “Inbox” in store “Personal Folders”. File access is denied. You do not have the permission required to access the file C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\archive.pst.” It was on an older Outlook 98/Windows 98 system, but it was something that might be applicable to others as well. Basically, this system has two […]

This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it over and clean out the lint from the “ball” area…. The good […]