Computer Tips -Tech Info

I had a machine that I picked up to test internet connectivity. They were able to do email, but not visit web pages. My first thought was that internet explorer may have been a bit sideways, but when I got it to the workbench I figured I had solved the problem. No ethernet port. They’ve […]

For quite some time I’ve been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I’m out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly […]

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I’ve had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would […]

I’ve seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They’re about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It’s nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony […]

I’ve run across this a few places, where a webmaster actually BEGS users NOT to use a firefox plugin or addon when visiting their site. So, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of those plugins that will have webmasters really disliking you, hating you, banning your ip because of abuse and […]

Sometimes you see a malware implementation that you have to have respect for the cleverness/ingenuity of the design. These pests can be dastardly to get rid of, but essentially this pest was occasionally popping up a “windows integrity scanner” installer. It wasn’t frequent, but it was persistent and the user was afraid that it was […]

Ugh…. you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as follows An Exception OE has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01) + 0000019A. … Was Called From 0028:C004BD2E […]

Some time back I did an article here about leaky capacitors and linked to some really great photos of a “healthy” mainboard capacitor and “bulging” capacitors. The long-story short version is this… Once upon a time there was some corporate espionage among capacitor manufacturers. Someone had a really good electrolyte formula (the goo inside a […]

I’m usually a bit leery of new antispyware products. I do a first look at the rogue antispyware lists and just try to be as cautious as possible when moving away from the tools that I’ve tried and tested. I downloaded malwarebytes anti-malware very reluctantly to clean up a machine with “virus isolator” that nothing […]

I use Google Calendar for most everything I do. Since I have a number of different jobs I have a tendency to break things down into individual calendars. So I have my personal calendar events, my computer work, my piano schedule, Church. Each of these are in separate calendars within my Google Calendar account. So, […]