TechBlog
A collection of computer fixes gathered in one spot.
Tag Archives: 7
Firefox/Windows keeps changing my keyboard layout and messing up my symbols
Posted by on March 30, 2011
Problem:
I’ve had this problem for a while and only thought to ask about it now. Just upgraded to Firefox 4, but I’ve had the problem in the past as well. Doesn’t happen all the time but it’s really annoying when it does. To fix it, I simply restart Firefox and it’s fixed. I haven’t been able to link the problem occurence with any sites I visit.
Anyway here`s some examples of what happens when I try to type symbols:
`apostrophe
É question mark
” at symbol
/ number pound sign
? exponent arrow
é forward slash
‘ less than
. greater than
^ open square bracket
¸ close square bracket
< backslash
^ open curly bracket
¨ close curly bracket
It doesn`t seem to be anything to do with the language settings of my keyboard as only Firefox is affected. For example right now I can type question marks in notepad but in Firefox they look like this ÉÉÉÉ
Solution:
Turns out it was a Windows problem, not Firefox (but for some reason it would only change the keyboard for the program that was being used when the sequence was pressed). Went into my Keyboard Language settings and disabled the CTRL SHIFT hotkey that cycles through languages.
Brought to you by: Your Information Technologies of Kalamazoo, MI. Serving the Comstock, Richland, Portage, and Kalamazoo area’s needs for computer and laptop service and sales.
Driver Collection Packs
Posted by on March 26, 2011
Ever get so annoyed trying to find a driver for your system you want to rip your hair out? Driverpacks.net can fix that for you.
They have a large collection of drivers sorted by OS, and lumped by category. This allows you to essentially download one giant repository of drivers for a given device (say, wireless network cards, or touchpads) for easy use later in imaging setups or such.
Brought to you by: Your Information Technologies of Kalamazoo, MI. Serving the Comstock, Richland, Portage, and Kalamazoo area’s needs for computer and laptop service and sales.
Passing a printer through RDP
Posted by on March 26, 2011
So the issue we were running into was as such. The client is set up for terminal services logins (RDP environments using server 2008) and had a printer shared on a separate computer from the one we were logging in from. Should have been simple enough as connecting to the machine the printer was hooked to, right clicking it and choosing connect, right? Sadly wrong.
Ultimately, we had to go into Devices and Printers and use the ‘Add a printer’ wizard. We added the printer as Local Printer, not a network device or anything. On the port selection screen we chose to create a New Port, and in the name field we put the full network path of the printer we wanted to use (‘\\<ipaddress>\<sharename>’). This solved any problems we had and allowed the RDP session to pass the printer through no problem.
Whenever we added it as a network device, RDP would not send the printer into the session, therefore not allowing us to use it. This was for an old Okidata ML490 printer onto Windows 7 as the ‘host’ machine we were RDP’ing from.
Brought to you by: Your Information Technologies of Kalamazoo, MI. Serving the Comstock, Richland, Portage, and Kalamazoo area’s needs for computer and laptop service and sales.
Optical Drives Not Working
Posted by on March 25, 2011
Problem: Optical drives no longer read discs
Fix tested on: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
So your optical drives (DVD drive, CD drive) are no longer reading discs. One quick way to check if it’s software or hardware is to grab a bootable disc (UBCD is a great choice and gives you a lot of tech tools that will come in handy during your time as a technician) and see if you can boot the computer to this disc. If you can, you know it’s software. If you can’t, you know it’s hardware.
The fix I tend to throw out early and often is as follows, it’s 98% harmless to do (I have seen it mess up Roxio and Sonic Foundry burning software, but only certain features of them, and a reinstall of said application fixed it) and only takes a few moments to finish.
1) Run regedit
2) Browse to : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}. (The easy way to spot this key is just look for the first registry key 4d36e965. Of the dozens of 4d36e’s, it’s the only one that ends in 965 so it stands out)
3) Look for any keys in here named either ‘UpperFilters‘ or ‘LowerFilters‘. If you want to be safe, rename any appearing keys with ‘.bak‘ on the end of them. Otherwise, just delete them (that’s all I ever do now).
4) Restart the computer and verify functionality.
5) Double check any programs that use the optical drive (burning software like Nero, Sonic, Roxio, etc as well as things like iTunes and Windows Media Player). Typically I don’t have problems, but it’s good to make sure.
Brought to you by: Your Information Technologies of Kalamazoo, MI. Serving the Comstock, Richland, Portage, and Kalamazoo area’s needs for computer and laptop service and sales.
Keywords: windows, xp, seven, 7, vista, win7, winxp, optical, drive, dvd, dvd-rw, cd, cd-rw, dvd-ram, can’t burn, nero, roxio, sonic, itunes
TechBlog 