Alternative Software

Alternativeto is a great place for options.  Tired of your usual application? Hit up Alternativeto and find a large selection of new programs to try. Replacements for Microsoft Office, Dropbox, other backup solutions, note taking programs, anything.  It’s a great way to find something new to try. It has options for OSX, Windows, Linux distros, you name it!
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.

Firefox/Windows keeps changing my keyboard layout and messing up my symbols

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.

Source here

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.

Dragging and Dropping No Longer Works

This problem typically presents itself in Windows XP when upgrading to SP3.

Things that work!
Can drag out of Recycle Bin to desktop without problem.
Can drag web link from address bar to desktop to make shortcut without any problem.
Can drag a file into notepad and open it.
Can drag icons to the start menu without any problems.
Can right click and copy and past without any problems.

Things that do not work
Can’t drag a file to a folder.
Can’t right click drag (no menu will show)
Holding down Ctrl while dragging will show plus sign but does not work.
And while I drag the, ghost icon appears as normal, with the cursor.  But just does not copy, or move the file as expected.

There might be a variety of things that shift between the columns but these are some of the common issues I’ve seen.

The fix:

The issue becomes that an Internet Zone policy is being checked, but the registry key doesn’t exist for it. No registry entry, no policy, so no authorization to drag and drop.

In regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Internet Settings/Zones/4.
If there isn’t an entry named 180D, then create a new DWORD entry named 180D and set the value to 0.

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

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

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.

Installing Windows XP From a USB Flash Memory Drive

Goal: To be able to install Windows XP from a usb flash drive.
Problem: Windows XP does not like being installed from a usb flash drive.

Requirements:
1) 1gb flash drive  or larger (preferably U3 capable, instructions for non-U3 will be posted however),
2) Windows XP .iso
3) The files contained in this rar file of usb modifier files.

So Windows XP really disagrees with being installed from a flash drive. Typically you can get it to load up and choose what disc to format, but after copying setup files and rebooting it can’t find the flash drive in order to continue install after it’s now booting from the hard drive. The files you downloaded under the third requirement for this post correct this problem.

Instructions:

1) Open up the ISO image in your favorite ISO edition program (MagicISO being my favorite, AVS Disc Creator being freeware)
2) Copy the files from the above rar file you downloaded into the ‘i386’ folder in the ISO, overwriting any files it asks
3) Save the newly modified ISO image
4) If using a U3 capable flash drive (this makes everything so much easier, if not scroll down to the next set of steps) download U3 Customizer and follow the instructions it gives (You basically choose what ISO you want and choose what flash drive it’s to use, WARNING: THIS WILL WIPE THE FLASH DRIVE COMPLETELY)
5) Enjoy your working Windows XP installing usb flash drive! Load it into the computer, boot to it, and let it fly.

****
If you are not using a U3 drive, you can use something similar along the lines of WinToFlash to get the ISO image onto the flash drive ready for install. I have not tested this method, but I have had a few reports saying that following the rest of my steps, this worked for them.

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: install windows, flash drive, usb, xp, blue screen, bsod, winxp, crash

Optical Drives Not Working

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

Broken Internet Explorer Icon

Problem: After updating IE the start menu icon isn’t loading
Fix tested on: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

Quite often after updating Internet Explorer (IE), the icon in the start menu will break and not load properly. The fix is as below

1) Run regedit
2) Browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInter net\IEXPLORE.EXE\DefaultIcon
3) The default value: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-7
Change the value to: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-32528
4) Close Regedit
5) Reboot

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: broken, internet explorer, icon, start menu, ie, ie8, 8, registry, update, updated, regedit, windows, xp, vista, 7, seven, win7, winxp