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16/01/11
Beware fake service calls.
We've had
two separate recent instances of our customers
receiving calls from someone claiming they are
being called in response to reported errors
regarding system
problems with their computers. Fortunately
in both cases, our customers were suspicious
enough to decline and call us straight away!
In one of the cases the caller asked to remotely
access the customers computer so he could check
the system out. Now had this gone ahead, who
knows what personal information he could have
stolen while he was in there, or even he could have placed some code
in the system to allow him to access at a later
date without the customer knowing anything about
it!
From a quick bit of research, these sort of
calls can seem legitimate and very plausible to
the average computer user, but you need to be
very aware that if you do send Microsoft error
reports, Microsoft do not make these type of
calls, and if you receive such they are blatant
scams.
If you have any concerns that your computer
system is not at it's best, or it just needs a
spring clean, please give us
a call on 01279 724192
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12/06/10
Quite a few cases
of noisy computers recently, mainly
desktop/towers but also some notebooks.
The customer refers to "loud whooshing
noise"!
I thought it odd but when I investigated, what
they meant was the CPU cooling fan was starting up
and running loudly on boot up, but instead of
quietening down, it just keeps running loudly
and "whooshing for ages". The culprit is plain and
ordinary "dust"!
The fan draws air through the fins of a heat
sink to cool the processor but over time with
dust, carpet fibres and pet hair, this can lead
to the heat sink becoming clogged and the fan
having to work mighty hard to get an air flow to
cool things down.
DON'T USE A VACUUM CLEANER TO CLEAN
THIS PLEASE!
There's bound to be static electricity built up on the plastic
crevice tool of your vacuum when in use and if you touch the
motherboard or other components with it you will risk
permanent damage to your computer!
Best get yourself a tin of compressed air or
air-duster as it's called, disconnect the
computer and take it outside the house, take the
side off and carefully use the air-duster to
blast the crud out.
Read the instructions on the tin please, as
these air-dusters can be potentially a hazard in
themselves.
If you'd rather not tackle this, please give us
a call and we'll carry out this and a bit of
spring cleaning of your system whilst we're with
you...give us a call on 01279 724192
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25/01/09
We've had a few
calls this last week regarding printers that
won't print although these were working OK the
day before. In all cases it's been "a
printer queue problem" where
an earlier print job has failed for some reason
(a paper jam is the most frequent occurrence)
and the customer requests another print which
then stacks up behind the earlier failed print.
If you do keep clicking "print" without clearing
the queue, well, all you end up with is a very
very long list of print items and no prints!
What you need to do is either double-click the
printer icon in the task bar (bottom right) or
go to printers in control panel and double click
the relevant printer icon, to open the printer
queue. Click to highlight the last entry
and then click "delete". Repeat the
process "UP" the list each item in turn.
This should then get you to the initial entry
that is "stuck". Click to highlight and
click delete. After a short while this
should clear and your printer will print yet
again!
If you have this occur on your pc, please try
the above, but in some cases it may need the
print spooler to be restarted, so if you'd like
our assistance or further advice in sorting this out for
you,
please give us a call on
01279 724192
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18/01/09
With XBox360, Wii
and similar gaming consoles being connectable
with wireless/WiFi we do get asked to hook these
up in to customers home networks. This is
straight forward for customers providing you can
follow the auto setup provided, but doing it
manually can be testing. However this item
is not about connectivity as such but rather can
you actually "play
a XBox game on XBox360?"
The answer is yes and no unfortunately.
Microsoft have a list of compatible games which
is still being added to
click here but if it's on the list, you will
still need however a hard disk drive (HDD)
accessory on your Xbox 360 console to obtain
Original Xbox
game support. There are three
ways to obtain updates for your Xbox 360
console:
So if you'd like
our assistance or advice in sorting this out for
you,
please give us a call on
01279 724192
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11/01/09
Here we are in
the New Year, and yet more mystery...we've had
three separate calls in the last week for
assistance on the very same subject. "My
screen has rotated
and how do I get it back
again?"
Now I've seen this before and the fix is pretty
simple for most machines, but why three
occurrences of it in one single week? What
is even stranger is that all the PC's concerned
are Toshiba laptops!
Now I put this down to coincidence to be honest,
but hey it is odd I'm sure you'll agree.
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Up
will rotate your screen up
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Down
will rotate your screen down
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Right
will rotate your
screen right
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Left
will rotate your screen left
If you have this occur on your pc, please try
the above, but note some pc's with certain video
cards, and I'm advised some HP laptops in the TX
series won't recognised these keyboard
shortcuts. So if
you'd like our assistance in sorting this out
for you, please give us a call
on 01279 724192
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