Spring cleaning

It’s spring in Australia and it was time for me to clean the insides of my computer. Back in January, I’d promised myself that I’d do it every 3 months or so. Well, it was 9 months before I got around to it (slap self upside the head!). It’s only a small job, but for some reason I kept putting it off.

Even after 9 months the fans were pretty dusty. I also found a fan I’d never seen before lurking under a board –it was CHOKED with dust as I suspect it’s never been cleaned in the 3+ years I’ve had the machine. So out came the damp cloth, the tatty old artist’s paintbrush, a can of compressed air and a screwdriver to remove the case. 30 minutes later and it was done.

The main fan (with fins) that needed cleaning; there was also a small fan hiding beneath the red board

Even after only 9 months, that fan had plenty of dust

Clumps of dust I removed from that fan alone

All nice and clean now!

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Internet connection issues?

In a previous post I talked about using commands like ping and tracert to test your internet connection and its speed.

Here are some more things you can use — SpeedTest and DownForJustMe.

SpeedTest

SpeedTest (http://www.speedtest.net/)  lets you test your connection speed and shows you the results compared to your ISP’s average and compared to other places in your state, country and the world.

Snapshot of my results

Australia compared to other countries

You can also view and download a CSV file of your results over time if you need to ‘prove’ that your connection is doing strange things (the screen shot below shows my results over a few hours — the red box is the slowest speed and the green box the fastest).

Results over time

Down for everyone or just me?

Another tool for checking a slow or non-responsive connection to a website is the Down For Everyone or Just Me? website (http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/).

You enter the URL you’re having trouble with, then press Enter or click the link.

Enter the URL in the box

After a very short time (less than one second?), you’ll get your answer:

Looks like there's nothing wrong -- it must be at my end

If there is something wrong, they’ll tell you that too. You don’t get a lot of information, but you get enough to ‘prove’ that it’s not something at your end. (In the example below I entered a fake URL just to see what the response would be.)

And if it's not working, you get this

[Links last checked August 2009]

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“What’s that there?” Computer hardware chart

If you’ve ever looked inside or at the back of a computer and were baffled, then be baffled no more! You can download a chart showing all the bits and pieces that make up a computer — with their names — from http://sonic840.deviantart.com/art/Computer-hardware-poster-1-7-111402099. Or you can buy a very large print of it.

Here’s just a small image of the chart — to see it full size, go to the website and click the same image there.

Computer hardware chart

[Links last checked July 2009; thanks to @CharJTF for alerting me to this chart]

Bypassing the server to get to the internet

Recently, my server went into meltdown (the hard drive fan failed causing the hard drives to overheat and shut down without warning). I had to send it to my PC Guru guys to diagnose and fix (new fan, one new hard drive — the other was OK). But I still needed to work, which meant I still needed internet access.

Here’s what I had to do to get internet access on all my computers without using the DHCP settings on the now-out-of-action server:

1. On each computer, open Network Connections (Start > Control Panel > Network Connections).
2. Right-click on Local Area Connection then select Properties.
3. On the General tab, scroll down to Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) (TCP/IP v4 on Vista) and click on it.
4. Click Properties to open the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) dialog box. My settings were all set to obtain an IP address and DNS server address automatically — these are what I had to change.
   

   Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) dialog box

5. Select the Use the following IP address option.
6. In the IP address field, enter an unused IP address for this computer (for example, I used 192.168.0.250 for one machine, 192.168.0.249 for another, 192.168.0.248 for yet another etc.).
7. The Subnet mask field should populate automatically with 255.255.255.0 after you finish entering the IP address. Leave these settings as they are.
8. In the Default gateway field, enter the IP address allocated to your modem/router — e.g. 192.168.0.1 (Note: your modem/router IP address will probably be different to this).
9. Select the Use the following DNS server addresses option.
10. In the Preferred DNS server field, enter the IP address allocated to your modem/router — e.g. 192.168.0.1 (Note: your modem/router IP address will probably be different to this).
11. Click OK.
12. Click Close to close the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) dialog box.

You should now be able to connect to the internet directly.

When I got my server back and all connected and powered up, I just had to set these settings on each computer back to Obtain an IP address automatically and Obtain DNS server address automatically and that was it — I was back connected to the internet and to the files on my server.

Thanks to the PC Guru guys for walking me through what to do.

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PC Guru guys save the day — again

After some ongoing issues with network connectivity, I lost all connection to the server on Thursday evening and we lost internet connection as well. I called the PC Guru emergency line late in the evening and one of their terrific techie Gurus helped me check various things before determining that the network card had likely failed, and then helping us access the internet via some set IP/DNS addresses. It was a long night…

On Friday we were going to a nearby town anyway, so I took the server and the new network card PC Guru had purchased for me a while back to a computer shop in the other town for them to install and configure with the help the PC Guru guys. I also purchased an extra card from the computer shop and had them install it too — just in case! And they identified a fan in the server that had failed so that got replaced as well.

I picked up the server next morning and drove back home where I put everything back together. Mostly it worked, but some things still had to be configured (as I expected and as the computer shop and the PC Guru had indicated would be the case). I called PC Guru out of hours again, and got the same Guru. He spent more time configuring my server, the new network card, the router, and the two PCs, then testing to make sure everything worked fine, which it is now. And he found some conflicting DNS (?) settings on the new router, so thinks he may have fixed the intermittently slow speeds we’ve been getting by resolving that conflict.

There is NO WAY I could have done this without PC Guru. Yes, I know that my Guru was ‘just doing his job’, and yes, I know that after hours calls are charged at a higher rate. But the security in knowing that someone is at the end of the phone when disaster strikes (i.e. something that prevents me from earning an income) is reassuring and helps me sleep at night ;-)

Over the entire time, my Guru was the consummate professional. Calm, methodical, logical, testing one thing at a time without adding extra options into the mix, and explaining all the while.

Again, PC Guru has come through for me!

Awesome.

Check the speed of your connection

I’ve been having intermittent speed issues with my 8Mbps ADSL Broadband connection, so I contacted my ISP. We checked lots of things, but one thing that has helped in ascertaining the actual speed I’m getting at any time is a little command line utility called tracert (for ‘trace route’).

1. Go to the command prompt (Start > Run, then enter cmd).
2. Type tracert [url], where [url] is the URL you want to check your connection speed to. For example, my ISP is iinet so to check my speed to their servers, I enter tracert www.iinet.net.au
3. The connection speed for each of the hops taken to reach the destination is reported back on screen.

According to the iinet Support people, this is a more reliable speed check than using ping [url], another command line utility.

For me, anything under 20 ms (milliseconds) is excellent! You can see from the images below that I’ve had much worse than that… And no, we still don’t know the reason (maybe we do now!), but at least I have a way of checking the speed at any time. I’ve blurred details such as server names and IP addresses.

A good speed!

Not so good...

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Noisy computer

I noticed that my computer’s Intel Desktop Utilities software was showing “Processor Zone Temperature exceeded its recommended maximum temperature” messages more regularly on boot up. Even though it’s summer here, the mornings have been pretty cool so I figured the cause of the overheating was everything the computer was trying to do on boot up. I’d had these messages before, and when the PC Guru guys put in a new power supply, the messages went away. So I figured the power supply was the issue…

However, on really hot days — even with the air conditioner on — my computer was also making a LOT of noise, and I was getting the occasional message about overheating during the day. The whine would start mid-late afternoon and continue on into the evening. It got to the point that I was powering off my computer every night, just to shut the noise off!

I figured the noise was caused by a fan, so I rang my PC Guru guys to confirm, and to find out if there was anything I could do to stop the noise. Aaron suggested it was excessive dust on the fins of the fan and asked me to open the box and look. I regularly vacuum the inlet/outlet holes on the case, so had assumed that the dust was kept at a minimum.

How wrong I was! When I opened the case, the fins behind the fan were coasted in thick but very fine dust. Now, this is a PC that was cleaned professionally by the PC Guru guys less than 9 months ago. We don’t live in a dusty area, so this is just dust from a normal 2-person household with no kids and no pets… and no smokers.

Aaron suggested I use a combination of these tools to clean the dust off — small artists’ paintbrush, Dustbuster vacuum cleaner, canned compressed air, slightly damp soft non-fibrous cloth (I used a Chux). I first tackled the obvious stuff with the Dustbuster, then the soft cloth. But the only thing that could access the fins behind the fan was the small paintbrush. Wiping the brush each time on the slightly damp cloth was a good move too, as the very slight dampness transferred to the brush allowing it to pick up the dust instead of moving it somewhere else.

It was amazing how much dust was on these fins! Any loose dust that wafted down on to the boards I blew off with the compressed air. A final vacuum and wipe down and it was all done.

Verdict: It’s very hot the day I’m writing this, and it’s now well after 5:00 PM and you wouldn’t even know my computer was on. It’s that quiet!

So I guess I’ll be scheduling some time every few months to take the cases off and remove the dust from ALL our computers.

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Connection issues sorted – I hope!

The Gurus at PC Guru have been a godsend – again! I’ve written about them before, but yesterday they finally got something sorted out that’s been an issue for over a month and that my ISP’s technical support said was a faulty router/modem or perhaps a dicky phone line, amongst other things.

For the past month or so I’ve had intermittent connection problems – some websites (like Google!) wouldn’t connect; I was getting “Access is Denied” messages when I tried to FTP changed web pages to a client’s website and my own; some of my RSS feeds weren’t coming through; and most recently, Microsoft Live Messenger wouldn’t connect. All through this other services worked fine – Skype, email, most websites, VPN, etc.

I had spent hours on the phone with iinet’s tech support and some time with the guys at PC Guru – mostly bouncing off them the random ideas that the various iinet people came up with. After many days, being shunted from one support person to the next (and having to explain the issues EVERY TIME [don't these people use a tracking system????] ) and doing pings and trace routes and all manner of things, someone finally suggested that the modem (I have a router) was faulty and that they’d send me a test modem. Another week went by. Then a phone call to say that it’d be another week…

Just over a week ago I got the test modem. And guess what? The problems were the same whether I was using theirs or mine! I did about 3-4 hours of isolation testing and various configurations of phone line, filters, modems, routers, phone cables, servers, PCs, laptops, etc. Frustrating! I was just glad that I’d worked in tech support myself for some years and realised why I had to do all these tests, as well as having enough knowledge to be able to do all this stuff. My husband or my Mum would’ve been way out of their depth, and my Dad would’ve thrown everything in the bin and given up on the internet and computer forever!

Anyhow, after reporting the results of the isolation tests to yet another tech support person at iinet, this one suggested that maybe it was a patchy phone line and that he’d lodge a fault with Telstra. Next day I get an SMS saying they’re closing the call! No fair – it’s not fixed!!! So I call them back and ask them not to close the call. This new person asks about the problem… so again I go through the whole raft of issues. To say I’m heartily sick of telling this story by now would be an understatement. But this time the person I’m speaking to offers up something new – she suggested that Bundle 1 of the issues was different from Bundle 2! Bundle 1 seemed to be fine now, and she said that the Bundle 2 problems appeared to be somewhere between my system and iinet.

So back to the PC guru guys with this latest ‘idea’… (they must’ve been getting sick of hearing me too!). Aaron agreed and said he suspected that something had got screwed in my ISA Server’s firewall settings (no, I don’t know what an ISA Server is either, or how the settings got screwed – perhaps one of those insidious Microsoft Auto Updates??), and that I really didn’t need ISA Server for such a small network and how about we uninstall it? Well, I still had a week’s work to do, so we arranged for him to call me yesterday morning.

Long story short… after 3.5 hours on the phone with Aaron with him doing some stuff remotely on my Server and me doing stuff while the connection was reset, and fiddling with the proxy settings, everything is now working 100%!!!! Yay! This has been a long and arduous journey – I just hope it lasts.

Lessons learned from this:

• If your support desk has a call logging system, USE IT. Document the issue in detail so the customer doesn’t have to repeat the issue time and again. That gets old real quick and doesn’t give customers much confidence in your tech support. It’s called “customer service” people – and that’s NOT an oxymoron, though there are days when I think it is.
• Listen to your customers and don’t assume they are dumb.
• If there are multiple possible reasons why the symptoms are occurring, don’t just insist that only one thing is responsible unless you know for certain that that’s the case. If I’d believed everything the various iinet people told me, I’d have paid out for a new router that I didn’t need, and incurred a Telstra call out fee for a fault that didn’t exist. And I would’ve still had the problem.
• If you have good people to help you out or bounce ideas off, use them – and recommend them to others. They are worth every cent you pay them. (Thanks PC Guru!!)
• Thank those who helped you and let them now how things are going a few days later. And also let those who worked on the problem at various stages know how it was resolved – hopefully they’ll add this to your customer notes and to their own knowledge base so they can learn from it as well. (Yes, I’m about to send those emails…)

Oh, and read Pamela Slims’ excellent post on “Your company brand is only as strong as your technical support“. The title says it all really.

More accolades for the gurus at PC Guru

One of the critical things for me in this lifestyle shift ‘down south’ was the ability to continue working for my clients, albeit remotely. Computers and broadband access are an essential for me – and both MUST be working. Which is why I paid for a Guru from PC Guru to bring down the computers and install my network and get everything working.

And they did – with a minimum of fuss, and with almost no issues found after the guru had left. The couple of minor issues that I did encounter got resolved on Sunday (yes, they work on Sundays to fix customer problems!! in fact, they advertise 24/7 support).

I’ve given PC Guru a good write-up before – and I can only reiterate what I’ve already said about their professionalism, knowledge – and service! So, if you’re in Perth or Western Australia – hell, they do much of their support remotely, so it probably doesn’t matter where you are! – and you have PC support issues and aren’t a big enough business to have an IT person on staff, give PC Guru a try.

(No, this is not a paid advertisement – I’m just a very happy customer!)

Hard drive crash

I’ve been getting daily emails about the state of my server ever since it was installed a couple of years ago. But about 3 or 4 weeks ago, I started noticing some unexplained errors, such as backups not being done, then a bad sector on the hard drive etc. I’ve been trying to contact the guy who put it together and who manages it remotely, but he seems to have dropped off the planet.

So after speaking to the sys admin guy at one of my workplaces, I bit the bullet and scheduled a time for a local company who deals in Microsoft Small Business Server and focuses on home and small business computer systems to come in and take a look at a few issues. Neil from PC Guru (http://www.pcguru.com.au) arrived right on time at 5:00pm on Tuesday afternoon (that’s always a big plus in my book!). He took a look at the logs and said what I was dreading – that he wouldn’t look at the other issues until he got the bad sector thing sorted… and he suspected a dying hard drive.

He discovered that the mirrored array wasn’t mirroring at all – and hadn’t been for some time. Then he tried to backup the data on to my desktop (which has plenty of space). But the backup script was one of the errors. So he tried a soft reboot, but then it went into Checkdisk mode (which he was trying to avoid until he got the data off), reporting a number of bad sectors. On boot up, there was a Registry Hive error (a nasty!!!). So Neil said that he’d take the server with him as he didn’t want to risk it and they would attempt to clone off the data in the office on Wednesday, but meantime replacement hard drives were required. It was now 6:30pm.

On Wednesday morning Neil called me with hard drive prices, and told me that he’d started the clone last night. Later that day I was called and told the cloning was still happening and that the ETA for my server was Thursday. And today I got told that were able to get the data off successfully – yay! The bad news was that the mirrored drive was totally dead, and the main drive was in a death roll (my words, not theirs). So two replacement 320GB hard drives later, and Aaron arrived this afternoon (on time!) to fit it all back together.

Unlike previous occasions when the server’s been down for whatever reason, this was absolutely painless. Everything just worked! The internet connected, the printer worked, network connections re-established by themselves, Exchange Server went and collected the email from the ISP as it should, and so on.

I’ve been very impressed with them to date, so much so that I have taken up one of their pre-paid plans. The things that have impressed me most have been:

• Good customer experience from the very first phone call
• They turned up on time
• They knew their stuff, but they didn’t baffle me with techno mumbo-jumbo – it was at the level I required and understood (which is probably more than many, but they figured that straight up)
• They dealt with me in a professional way at every step
• They contacted me about what was happening – I didn’t have to call them to find out
• They gave me a fair deal on the price of the new hard drives – and the hard drives were either already in stock or they had a supplier they got them from first thing Wednesday morning
• They had no problem working out of normal business hours, and offer a 24/7 service
• They are local! In fact they’re about 5 minutes drive away from us in South Perth!
• They set up another appointment with me to deal with all the other small issues that have been annoying me for some time – and again, had no problem with the time being at the end of the working day

I haven’t had such good customer experience from a company for a long time – I hope that they continue to maintain it as they grow.

And if you’re in Perth, I wholeheartedly recommend them just based on this brief experience so far. Details: http://www.pcguru.com.au; 1300 724 878