1:08 PM December 30, 2006
Recently this area experienced an Internet Outage, it went down for a full morning, luckily these incidents are rare but they happen. After service was restored I got a call from a woman. Her internet didn't come back on.
I got her to check out a few things to determine what the problem was but to no avail so I ended up making a trip to her home.
One of the first things I noticed was that the indicator lights on the cable-modem was not blinking properly, I was familar with the modem because it was like the one I use to have until it gave out and I had to have a new one installed.
I just assumed that the modem did not initilize properly when the internet came back on. You can fix these problems simply by unplugging the power from the modem for about a minute and plug it in again.
Did Not work! My next instinct was to check the Network connection.
Do this by clicking on Start then Settings then Network Connections or go through Control Panel. You should see your connection there listed as Local Area Connection.
I checked under the Status column and see if it was working properly only to discover it was disabled. How it happened is still a mystery but the solution was simple. I just Right-clicked on it and click on enable in the menu that poppred up.
I then the next day got a call again, same person same problem or so I thought. I tried to talk her through what I done before but no luck so trip number 2. Again the first thing I noticed the modem lights were not blinking right. It did not occur to me that it might be a modem problem but as soon as I unplugged it and plugged it back in again it worked just fine.
I am now 99.99% sure that the cable-modem needs repairs or be replaced and i suggested that she call the cable company.
If you have a CD burner capable of using CD-RW or rewitable cds then you can usually setup the CDs and burner to act like an extra hard drive or floppy drive (remember those). To do this you need some packet writing software like Direct CD usually integrated into Easy CD Creator from www.roxio.com or Nero Incd from http://www.nero.com/enu/index.html .
Basically you format your CD-RW disk through the prgram and then you can copy to and from the CD. You can also move and delete files from the CD-RW disk as well.
I use Incd and I had a strange problem, I kept losing it. I would install the program - no problem, everything would be working perfectly until the first time I had to restart my computer for whatever reason.
The first thing I noticed is that the Incd icon is gone from the Notification area (down by the clock where it is supposed to be)
At first, usually I can still use the CD-RW as usual but then eventually I have to restart the computer for whatever reason again and BOOM, its history. I know longer have the capibility to use CD-RW. My computer treats it like its a read-only disk. I can read whats on it but I can't write to the CD or change any of its contents.
The recommended solution(s):
So far, So good.
Everybody likes to customize their windows by setting up wallpapers(backgrounds), screen savers, etc.
One of the biggest problems is the burden it places on our systems.
I recently downloaded a text file with the following instructions for doing it a different way that is supposed to be a lesser burden on your systems resources. There was no indication of authur, probably just public domain information, like most if not all Info on my site. You can find the same information that I discussed on this site on many other web pages all over the internet.
After the instructions I added a screen shot of my desktop.
Use active desktop to save memory used by wallpapers
When you choose a wallpaper using the standard method (selecting a background on the desktop tab, in the properties window),
Windows converts this image to a huge .bmp file (even if you selected a .jpg).
Then instead of having a nice 220K wallpaper, you get a 3,15MB wallpaper. To get rid of this,
try using active desktop's web capabilities, like this:
With this you can make interesting things, like using various small wallpapers, or even animated ones!! (you can select an animated .gif too!!). Simply select various images, and when you click OK, drag all them to its right location, and lock the content again.
PS: If you want to check the huge wallpaper windows makes, select a wallpaper the standard way, then browse to C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft" (where USER PROFILE, is the profile you're using, i.e. Administrator). There should be a file called Wallpaper.bmp, open it and you'll see your cureent wallpaper.
The following is a screenshot of my desktop. The snow globe is blinking like on the animated gif underneath it.
This is the actual animated gif.
Do you remember those cartoon flip books where you had a little book with a cartoon drawn on each page and each one was drawn slightly different so if you flipped through the pages it looked like the images were moving like a cartoon animation.
ANIMATED GIFS work on the same principle. Each gif on my page has 3 frames each or 3 pages. The frames are displayed one frame after another in a continuos loop giving the impression of movement or animation.
Use your imagination! Be creative! if you don't have the resources to create your own, just do a search on the internet for Animated Gifs.
The first one above I made myself. The second one, the globe alone, I downloaded of the internet.
One final note. You may ask in my screenshot why I didn't use a similar green background colour to blend in with the animation and the simple answer is the green background looked black on my monitor. That is why I chose a all black background.