Downloads keep Disappearing?

Usually it is the result of an improperly installed Anti-virus program. Often it is AVG that was not entirely uninstalled. What happens is whenever the browser downloads a file once it is finished it runs the systems Anti-virus program to scan the file. If the program is not working properly the browser fails to run it and thinks something screwy is going on so it deletes the file.

Clean up Anti-Virus programs

Usually this can be fix by running the clean up tool for your anti virus product. For AVG 8 or 9 run AVG Remover . For Norton run the Norton Removal tool . For McAfee run McAfee Consumer Products Removal tool.  Once the clean up is done your downloads should work fine. If not keep reading.

How to disable virus scanning of downloads in Firefox

Usually this is only necessary if FireFox stalls at “Scanning for Viruses.”  Go to about:config then search for “scanWhenDone“. Click on it so it says false. Your downloads should now work fine.

Unfortunately there really is no way to disable scanning for IE so you might have to reinstall windows if things are really screwed up.

Related posts:

1. Spyware Scanners
2. Spyware Prevention
3. On-Site Computer Services

Windows in notorious for needing Device drivers for each and every piece of hardware a system has. Sometime it can use generic drivers but to get the most out of your hardware you need the driver that were written by the hardware manufacturer.

If you are lucky you know the model number of the device you need a driver for and you know the manufacturer. If this is the can you can usually go to the manufacturer’s website and find the drivers in the support section. A good example would be an HP Printer. HP printers always have their model number printed on the outside and HP’s website is pretty easy to navigate. Just go to HP.com and click on the “Software and Driver Downloads” link near the bottom left, than enter your model number (let’s say you have a deskjet 932c. A list of search results will come up, click on Deskject 932c, select your operating system and then click the file you want to download. In this case we will probably want the full feature driver. That’s all you have to do, installation should be as simple as running the executable.

Unfortunately, things aren’t always that easy. Sometimes you’re not sure what the model number is, or who the manufacturer is. If this is the case I have some tips that will help you find the right driver.

Finding the manufacturer

In a perfect world this will always be printed clearly on the piece of hardware. But we don’t live in a perfect world, Adam sinned and now manufacturers don’t want to claim their hardware. For addon cards such as a PCI modem or a PCI ethernet card, it is usually possible to look at the main chip on the card to determine the manufacturer. Sometimes the chip doesn’t tell you the manufacturer but it tells you what chipset the card uses. This can actually be more useful. For instance there are many manufacturers of video cards that use the Nvidia chipset but you can download a driver that will work with all those video cards. Let’s look at a few examples. I have a sound card that has one large chip on it. The first line has the line ENSONIQ. It is pretty obvious that this is the manufacture because it has the little tm symbol by the word. In this the model number is directly below it, ES1370. Let’s look at another example, I have a network card that has one main chip on it. The chip has a sticker covering it, fortunately it is pretty easy to peel off. Under the sticker I see a logo that means nothing to me and several lines of what looks like random alphanumeric characters. The first line is RTL8029AS. If you googled this number you would quickly discover that it is the name of a chipset made by Realtek, specifically RTL8029, Finding the drivers would be easy once you know this.

Searching the Internet for your driver

Ok, so hopefully you’ve determined your manufacturer by now, now you need to find the driver on the Internet. The best place to find the driver is your manufacture’s website. Type the manufacture’s name into google and you’ll be able to find them pretty quick. But what if the manufacturer is out of business, or they don’t support the hardware anymore? There is hope. If you go to Driverguide.com you can find almost any driver for every device ever made. Free registration is required but it is well worth the 2 minutes that it takes. I have used driverguide for finding tons of different drivers, it is an invaluable resource. In addition to drivers it has a comprehensive list of manufacturers and their websites!

Installing the driver

Most drivers come in zip format so you will need a program such as Winzip to open them, unless you have windows xp which has built in support for reading zip files. (Although it is really slow.) Once you get the file extracted from the zip file (I usually put them in C:\drivers) look for an exe file like setup.exe or install.exe. If it has one run it. Most newer driver come with an auto installation program like this that installs the driver for. If it doesn’t or if it fails to automatically install we’ll have to do it manually. Go to the control panel and click on the “System” icon. Click on the Hardware tab than click Device Manager. You should see a yellow exclamation mark by the device that needs a driver. Double click the device then click reinstall driver. A wizard will start up. Select specify location then enter C:\driver (or where your driver is located) the wizard should find the driver and install the necessary files. If it doesn’t you’ve probably downloaded the wrong driver.

More help on finding the model number

If the device is integrated in the motherboard it is a bit more challenging. Most motherboard have a model listed on them and you can sometimes go to the motherboard manufacturer’s website to download the driver. Motherboards need many different drivers. Most require a sound card driver, a video card driver, and maybe a VGA driver and IDE driver. You’re computer will work fine with out any of these driver but if you want sound you will need to find the sound card driver. That can usually be found on the manufacturer’s website or Driverguide. If your motherboard does not have it’s manufacturer printed on it, it may be possible to determine the manufacturer by looking at the post screen when your computer boots up.

Still can’t find the model?

You probably should be using Linux anyway, but if you want to find out your model number you can boot off of a Linux boot disk such as Damn Small Linux open a terminal and type “lspci” (or lsusb if you have a usb device). You will receive output like the following:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:00.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:00.3 System peripheral: Intel Corporation 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
0000:00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 81)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
0000:02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03)
0000:02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller

That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know but lets say for example I wanted to know the model of the network card on my motherboard I can look at this list and see that it is a Broadcom BCM4401. I hope you have found this Windows Driver installation Guide helpful. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any positive or negative feedback.

Related posts:

1. SL-modem in Linux
2. Run OS X in Linux with qemu

Did you forget your windows password? Or maybe you never knew it Whatever the case to use the procedure I’m going to show you, you will need physical access to the computer so I doubt you are actually a hacker.

The process I am about to describe will work in any windows NT based system. So you can reset your password in Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2003 and even Windows Vista possibly but I havn’t tried that one. Using this method it is not possible to find the password just reset it to something else or make it blank.

What you need

The first thing you need to do is download the Emergency Boot CD (EBCD) from ebcd.pcministry.com you will need a CD burning program such as Nero to burn the CD image. Refer to your programs documentation or the EBCD website for information on buring .isos.

Booting from the CD

Once you have the CD created you will need to configure your BIOS to boot from the CD before it boots from the Hard Drive. This is done using the setup program. You enter that from the very first screen you computer shows when you turn it on. Usually it will display a message such as “Press F12 to enter Setup.” Sometimes the key is del or F1 or something entirely different. The Setup option you want to change is boot priority. Change it so that the CD is the first on the list.

Resetting Window’s password

Once you get booted from the CD resetting the password is a piece of cake. Simply select the NT password recovery option from the first screen. Press “Enter” a bunch of times until it asks you important information like which user’s password do you want to change. For the most part it is pretty obvious what you need to do.

I have gone through this process many times on many different machines and it has worked every time. The only times I could imagine that it wouldn’t work would be if the windows was installed on an encrypted file system. If you have a encrypted file system on your computer you probably shouldn’t be resetting passwords anyway.

Related posts:

1. Windows XP Won’t Boot
2. Spyware Removal Guide

If you are like me you grew up always being interested in Computers. I was always reading thick computer books for fun and tinkering with all the computers we had at home and started collecting more and more until I had enough to setup my own home network. I felt like I could fix anything with the computer and I was not too far from the truth. Then it started, my friends and family and acquaintances started wanting help with their computer. Being the generous guy that I was I help them out and didn’t charge them anything. But then it started happening more and more and I thought about charging but had no idea how much
or when or anything. If you feel like you are in the same place I might be able to help you start your computer repair business.

Like most things in life to get anything out of it you first have to put something into it. You can’t expect to start a business without putting any effort or capital into it. So you might have to spend a little money on marketing and promotion. I would say the first part about making your business is making it look like a business. The best way to do that is by making some business cards. I don’t know why but somehow a little piece of paper with your name and number on it and maybe a little eye candy has a way of making people take you seriously. After you have a business card print out a thousand or so (after all you are
serious about this, right?)

Most people try to promote their computer repair business by word of mouth. That’s all well and good if you want about 1 job every month. The best marketing techniques I have found are putting a small 4 line ad in my local newspaper. Most papers have a services section on the classifieds page. To do that it only costs about $60 a month and it is well worth it. The majority of my has come from that ad in the paper.

The vast majority of people that I have helped have been old retired people. That is why my major selling point is that I come on site. Retired people, especially those that live in the boonies don’t want to have to go into town just to get their stupid computer fixed.

Since I have started I have fixed many different kinds of problems. Most of them have been related to spyware. I don’t know about you but spyware is the greatest thing that ever happened to the computer industry. It keeps me employed. Probably the next most common thing I do is just windows installation. Recovering a unbootable computer. If you expect to start a business just upgrading and replacing broken hardware you’ll find that there’s not much of a demand for it. In the year and a half I’ve been working I’ve had about 5 actual upgrades. Most people are just want a computer to get on the Internet and check e-mail. So I’m always prepared to setup a new computer on the Internet. To do this you need a good fast, easy-to-setup provider like Aceweb and a few good reliable modems. Most of my customers aren’t really interested in paying lots of money for DSL. They just want to get on the Internet, not download movies. I’ve found that setting somebody up with Aceweb and Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail and Mozilla Firefox for Internet is a pretty fool-proof system. I’m working on an even more fool-proof system using Linux but I havn’t perfected it yet.

I get most my parts at Newegg, the older ones I get from EBay. As a mentioned before most of the time new parts are not necessary to fix the problem but it’s a good idea to have some handy. The most failure prone part is power supplies. You might not think so at first but I’ve replaced more of these than any other part, having a few of these around is a good idea, and make sure they are at least 350 Watts and have the P4 connector and a 20+-4 pin connect that way they are much more versatile. As far as modems go just get any hardware based 56k modem. Most of the parts I sell are only a little over retail prices. I’m in the computer repair business not the retail business so I don’t charge way to much for parts just for installing the parts.

By now you should have some idea of what it takes to start a computer repair business. If you still think you can do but aren’t sure if you know enough to handle all the problems you might come across I am working on a series of articles on how to fix the common problems with computers. Listed in order of importance.

• Spyware removal
• Operating system Recovery
• Finding and Installing windows device drivers
• Installing/Upgrading any piece of hardware

Once you read those articles you should know all you need to know to fix most of the common problems with computers. If you feel you are ready and live in the Treasure Valley in Idaho and you don’t want to bother with the trouble of starting a business give me a call at 899-6665 and I will see if I can hire you

Related posts:

1. On-Site Computer Services
2. What to do with a cursed computer
3. Spyware Removal Guide

If you’ve worked with windows for 2 minutes you’ve probably been exposed to the Blue Screen of Death or BsD. Usually Blue Screens are rather harmless and go away after a reboot. But when they don’t, when they stick around and keep reoccurring after every reboot, then you have problems. The first thing you should do is try to boot into safe mode. You can do this by pressing F8 after you hear your computer beep while it is booting up. If it boots into safe mode all is well and good and you just have a start-up program gumming up your computer. (See my Spyware Removal Guide for information on how to manage start-up entries.) If safe mode generates the same blue screen you have more work ahead of you.

If you can’t boot into Windows XP, not even into safe mode, and you’re getting a message like, “unmountable boot volume” on the blue screen they a simple chkdsk might fix the problem. The tricky part is booting your computer so you can run chkdsk. The easiest way to do that is to use a windows installation CD. To do boot off of a CD you first need to configure your BIOS to look for an Operating System on the CD before it tries the hard drive. Usually this is done by pressing ‘del’, ‘F2′, or some other key to enter setup and adjusting the boot priority so that the CDROM is first. When Windows setup finally loads (it takes several minutes) all you have to do is press ‘r’ to enter the recovery console.

Sometimes it will prompt you for the administrator’s password. Most people I encounter don’t know this or think they don’t have one. See the Password Recovery Guide to find out how you can reset your administrator password.

Once you are in the recovery console you will be greeted with a friendly command prompt. The first thing you are going to want to try is chkdsk. Simply typing “chkdsk” should scan your hard drive and fix any problems it finds. Sometimes it is necessary to use “chkdsk /p” and if you want to be really thorough and have several hours to burn you can use “chkdsk /r” that causes it to do a surface scan of the disk. If chkdsk get’s hung up for more than an hour, as in the percent complete doesn’t change for a long time, there is most likely something physically wrong with your hard drive it will have to be replaced. Once chkdsk complete restart the computer by typing “exit” and see if windows will boot now.

If windows still doesn’t boot go back to the recovery console and run “fixboot.” fixboot will copy certain files needed for your hard drive to boot onto your hard this will fix the problem if your computer was complaining about a missing ntldr or something like that. If fixboot doesn’t fix the problem then you should try fixmbr. fixmbr recreates the master boot record of your drive, it usually is only needed if you installed some other boot loader like grub and you want to revert back to using just Windows XP. However sometimes the master bot record becomes corrupt and it is necessary to restore it using fixmbr.

If you are getting black screens with messages like “Windows could not start beacuse following file is missing or corrupt \windows\system32\config\system” then you have a registry problem. Also if you are getting Blue screens with the stop 0x0000007E or similar messages then you might be able to fix by restoring your registry using the recovery console. Microsoft wrote a very nice article on how to do this called How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting It involves booting in to the recovery console as described above and copying the registry files from a backup.

If windows still does not boot after using all the above methods then you’ll probably need to reinstall it. There are basically two ways to do this, a repair install or a new install. A repair install is usually preferred because it does not reset your settings or programs, the registry remains intact for the most part and when it is finished your computer will work just like it did before. With a new install windows will be like a blank slate and you probably have to reinstall most of the programs that were previously installed. Both of these can be done without loosing any information. To do a repair install you need the same edition of Windows XP that is installed on the computer. So if you have Windows XP Home you need the Windows XP Home disc or the repair install will not be an option for you.

If you are still getting blue screens or other errors after doing a reinstall of windows I would verify the integrity of my hard drive. There are many ways of doing this and most hard drive manufactures provide diagnostic software on their website. OEMs such as Dell have their own diagnostic software that they ship with their systems. However, there is an option that works with any system and any hard drive, that is the Ultimate Boot CD or UBCD. You can download it at the ultimate boot cd website.

If at this point you are sure your hard drive is functional and windows XP still does not boot you will need to reinstall windows. Or you could just use Linux.

Related posts:

1. Windows Password Recovery
2. Spyware Removal Guide
3. Spyware Scanners