Archive for the ‘support’ Category

Change a Dialup Connection to 10 digit dialing. Hi Saskatchewan!

Monday, May 13th, 2013

My out of the blue problem today was resolving a dialup issue for a store in Saskatoon. Yes – we do support a few people using old fashioned analog modem connections.

Everything seemed normal, the phone cord connections, the modem was picking up the line, the ISP’s dialup number was answering if dialed on a cell phone, and it was entered correctly in the dialup settings… it was a puzzle. The on-screen error in Windows was a fairly generic 676.

Until the local contact mentioned that Saskatchewan just added a second area codes. The original area code 306 and the new 639. This has required mandatory 10 digit dialing – 10 digit dialing was optional for a year, but as of May 11, it’s mandatory.

The easy way to dial 10 digits in Windows XP is to shim the area code into the phone number box where there used to be just the 7 digits.

The “proper” way to make this change is to go to the dialup connection properties. Select “Use Dialing Rules”. Open the “Dialing Rules” window. Edit your location. Under “Area Code Rules”, add a new rule for area code 306 (for Saskatchewan) and set a new rule for all prefixes to “Include the area code”. Save everything and try it.

Remotely Enable Remote Desktop in Windows 7 Professional

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

I recently needed to login to a computer on a LAN that did not have Remote Desktop enabled. Here are the high-level steps that I took.

If you search online, you will typically find references to a registry setting to enable RDP.

Specifically:

HKLM Hive  -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Terminal Server > fDenyTSConnections  should be changed to zero.

See: http://pctech.blog.ca/2012/04/07/enable-remote-desktop-connection-in-windows-7-using-regedit-remotely-13444092/

That’s not sufficient in most cases.

You also typically need to allow Remote Desktop through the firewall. I did this using Sysinternals psexec tool to get a command prompt to the remote machine.

i.e. psexec \\remote-computer cmd.exe

Then running a netsh rule to enable RDP:
i.e. netsh firewall set service type = remotedesktop mode = enable

 

Also, I needed to add the user to the local computer’s Remote Access user’s group (not the exact name).

A reboot was required.

See:

netsh firewall rule:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736451(v=ws.10).aspx

psexec: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

Canada.com Email is Shutting Down… it’s a good time to move to a vanity domain.

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

I was mildly surprised when a relative mentioned to me that her free Canada.com email address was being shut down.  She’s had that email address for years – though, I know she hasn’t been using it for day-to-day email for most of that time.

For those individuals who are actively using their Canada.com email addresses still, here are a few suggestions from us at Perceptus:

  • Do NOT move to the email provided by your internet service provider.  Choose one of the major webmail providers such as Hotmail.com, Gmail.com or Yahoo.com – these services are all well run, and more importantly, they will probably be around for a long, long time.  Of these three, I recommend Google’s Gmail.com service.  I’ve written about this in a previous post: Picking an Email Address – Don’t use a Free Account from your ISP.
  • This is a great excuse to move to a vanity domain.  It’s cheap.  You can buy the rights to a .com domain for <$10 per year and have Google host the email for you.  If you have a few family members or friends, you can share a domain.  We use Google’s Apps for Domains  for all email to perceptus.ca – it’s excellent.
  • You do not have to lose your saved Canada.com email.  Read their own migration instructions here.  You can move your email to Google’s Gmail service easily.  These instructions can be adapted for all other major web email providers, and also, to download your email using POP3 to your own computer to software like Outlook or Thunderbird.
  • Remember to update all of your 3rd party logins.  eBay, PayPal.com, Amazon, everything.  You will not have an easy time getting access to your accounts once canada.com webmail goes offline.
  • Do this ASAP.  Canada.com really did a disservice to their users by providing such a small amount of notice.

I wonder if the email being shut down is related to the recent change in ownership of the site’s publisher, Postmedia Network Inc.  Seriously, couldn’t they find a way to make a buck on this by partnering with a 3rd party webmail provider and sharing ad revenue, rather than shutting it down?

Comments are encouraged.

Whoops. The Perceptus Forums needed some fixing.

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Whoops. The login pages to the Perceptus Forums, has been broken, probably for a while – it’s a quiet forum, it was easy to miss.

Anyway, it has been fixed. It’s too bad we don’t get frequent posts, or else we would have noticed earlier.

Free Computer Burn-In Software

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

I thought that free burn-in software would be easier to find.

Every now and then I cobble a computer together from parts, or I have to diagnose a PC that is crashing from time to time.  Unfortunately, even though a PC can boot, it doesn’t mean that it’s stable and ready to go. The tool for this job is burn-in software.

I used to use the free-as-in-beer version of SiSoft Sandra, but over the years it has gotten rather bloated.  Anyway, SiSoft Sandra is more geared towards benchmarking a computer rather than stress testing.

Today, I found a great little tool that seems to do a good-enough job of testing the CPU and RAM – it also puts a modest amount of load on the hard drive.

The free tool that I am currently recommending: CPU Stability Test by Jouni Vuorio. It seems to run fine in all current versions of Microsoft Windows.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,7146-order,1/reviews.html

It’s a bit old, circa 2000, and I can’t find a current website for it… but it works.  There are several “high-quality”, i.e. non-spammy, websites that host CPU Stability Test. Just Google for it if the link above goes stale.

There is still room to find a better free utility, but for now I’m satisfied.  But, if you have other suggestions for free burn-in testing software, please leave a comment!

Update: A free utility for testing memory (i.e. looking for bad memory sticks) that runs inside Windows – http://hcidesign.com/memtest/. If you’ve got the ability to reboot the machine, then use Memtest86.