Ian's techie tips blog

Each time I started my PC, one of the boot-up screens was showing an error (edited):

Since my PC was still working, and I my hard disk was showing more than 465.8GB full, then the second physical drive must be working OK, despite the error message.

Although there is a control panel associated with this screen, there is not an option to fix the problem.

Our radiators needed bleeding to remove excess air (they were hot at the bottom, and cooler towards the top). But we need to get more water into the system via our Greenstar 24i junior (or 28i junior) boiler, as the panel was showing a pressure of around 0.5. Here's how.

We had the installation instruction manual, which explained how to first fill the system, but had too much detail. We also have the User Instruction Guide which mentions nothing.

• On the bottom cover of the boiler is a plastic tray with a recess that holds a white plastic tubular key. The tray comes off.

From: "Scholar Support"
Subject: Meta data help

Thanks for your email regarding Google Scholar. In order to improve
coverage and citation accuracy for your content in Google Scholar, we
recommend that you provide us with article-level metadata for your
publication(s). The easiest way to do so is by embedding "metatags" of
your bibliographic information within your website's HTML pages. Once the
tags are in place, our crawlers can re-crawl this data and add it to the
Scholar index.

http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#elements-publisher

bid4vouchers.co.uk is a site that auctions store vouchers, with the winner typically winning a voucher at 75%-90% off face value.

Each bid cost money, which is how the site says it makes its money.

I discovered, for example, that of the last 7 auctions, the winner averaged 6 bids (max 13), for vouchers averaging just over £60 a time (max £150). If this is typical, it should be easy to pick up a bargain. And this seemed typical of the last few days.

A reoccurring issue, is to change the a colour in an image to another, but retaining the color gradient. For example, changing a greyscale image to green, but the light greys change to light green, the dark grays to dark green. The image is greyscale because the black drawing is anti-aliased with varying shades of grey.

Corel Paintshop Pro includes the Color Replacer, which is supposed to do just this. Either I do not understand how it works, or it does not quite do what I was expecting, and it ignores the lightest pixels, or changes all pixels to the same shade of colour.

I run a small PHP script that uses $HTTP_HOST to return the current host URL name, usually "127.0.0.1". Today is stopped working. My suspicions are a new Microsoft Windows Update (KB951748), though I don't think it has fully installed yet.

Symptoms

After installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), my Plustek OpticBook 3600 stopped working.

Detailed description

On restarting my PC, and while the system tray is being populated, an error windows pops up with the message:

"AM32 Plus was unable to find some components of the software"

...with a suggestion to resinstall the scanner software (which I tried without it resolving the software)

The Solution

Our son's computer became infected with these adware programs.

Symptoms

The PCs Internet Explorer browser would pop-up new browser windows containing Web sites we were not interested in, including directing us to www.Zestyfind.com and www.look2me.com

The Solution

You get use to the feel and responsiveness of your computer. So it was a surprise to find that my system started running slowly.

Symptoms

• On selecting various items on my desktop, there would be a slight delay before anything would happen. For example, on selecting a menu from the menu bar, or clicking the red Close icon in the top-right corner of a window. The delay was 'only' about half a second, but enough time to be noticeable.
• Drop-down windows would appear gradually. For example, if I selected the Edit menu, the menu would appear to fade-in gradually, making it look animated. If I moved from drop-down menu to menu, the delay would make it frustrating to browse through them.
• Moving windows around my desktop was very slow. If I clicked on the blue title bar of my browser, and held down the mouse button, on moving the window fairly fast, I would see 'comet-like' tracks behind the window's movement, as the PC struggled to update the display. Every few seconds the display would freeze for an extra half second, making the movement of windows seem to jump across the screen.
• On playing videos, the video would occasionally freeze for a fraction of a second.

The Solution

Definitions:

• Spam is unsolicited email.
• A virus is a computer program that usually arrives with your email as an attachment, AND, which you have inadvertently opened, and by so doing, causing it to infect your machine.
• Adware is software that delivers adverts to your computer, but may be required by some software to run.
• Spyware is software that sends information from your computer to another, for example, for advertising purposes.

Solutions: