troubleshooting

I once worked with a woman whose office looked like a hoarder's attic. Apart from very narrow passageways, every inch of space was piled ceiling-high with paper of every sort. The desktop of her Windows PC was similarly strewn with more icons than would fit on a single screen.

She claimed to be able to find exactly what she was looking for with little hunting, both in her office and on her desktop. The woman obviously had found a system that worked for her. If you find yourself struggling to manage the shortcuts and other items on your desktop, … Read more

For several months, the Vista PC in my home office refused to upgrade Firefox. The first few times this happened, I uninstalled the old version of Firefox and reinstalled the new version. (Instructions for installing Firefox are provided on the Firefox support site.)

Though this allowed me to upgrade the browser, the uninstall/reinstall process took far too long. The Firefox error message instructed me to "make sure there are no other copies of Firefox running on your computer, and then restart Firefox to try again." I closed Firefox, opened the Windows Task Manager Processes list (press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, choose Start Task Manager, and click the Processes tab).

Sure enough, there was an entry for "firefox.exe *32," even though there were no Firefox windows open on the system. I selected the rogue entry and chose End Process to close it. With the phantom process gone, Firefox updated without a hitch.

Here are solutions to four other common Firefox glitches.

… Read more

A year ago, I wrote about the free Startup Delayer from R2 Studios that lets you adjust how Windows loads your start-up programs. Two useful free tools for trimming your PC's roster of start-up apps are Pirisoft's CCleaner and Microsoft's (formerly SysInternals') AutoRuns. The problem is, you can do massive damage with such registry-editing programs--to the point of making your machine unbootable.… Read more

We published a report last week about the release of Apple's new MobileMe Gallery app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now shortly after that, Apple has released a series of knowledge base articles that you might have missed. We'll go over those here and discuss some other problems users have encountered with the app.

Removing the Gallery app from your iPhone/iPod Touch

Apple advises that removal of the Gallery app from your mobile device will only remove the app, its cache of files, and its settings. Data in your MobileMe Gallery, located at http://gallery.me.… Read more

Unless you're brand new-to using computers, the recent news that an Internet Explorer hole was exploited in China-based attacks against Google Gmail users and dozens of high-tech companies was no surprise.

Lately, malicious software has increasingly targeted holes in media players such as Adobe's Flash Player and Reader PDF software, so the Chinese attack on IE is in some ways a throwback. Many tech pundits have responded by recommending against using Internet Explorer at all. The free and easy availability of alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google's own Chrome would appear to … Read more

Like many people who work for a company that's located hundreds of miles from their home, I rely on remote-access programs, specifically the Remote Desktop Connection utility built into Windows. I recently encountered a relatively common bug in the program: in the midst of a remote session, I lost the ability to copy and paste.

Closing and restarting the remote connection fixed the problem temporarily. A more permanent solution is described by Pinal Dave on the SQL Authority blog. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and click Start Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab, select rdpclip.exe, click End Process, and close Task … Read more

If you ever need to troubleshoot a MobileMe sync problem, you'll need to access your MobileMe sync logs. While Mac OS X actively logs MobileMe sync data, Windows does not. Either way, this guide arms you with some good information to help troubleshoot MobileMe syncing problems on both platforms.

Mac OS X 10.6

You can find the MobileMe sync log file mobilemesync.log in the following location: ~/Library/Logs/Sync ("~" represents your Home folder).

You can always view a log file by using the Console application, like so:

A colleague contacted me the other day with an odd problem: Microsoft Word 2003's default paper size was stuck on A4. Every time he changed the paper-size default back to Letter, it reverted to A4 with the next print job.

My first thought was that his printer driver needed an update. But driver updates often spell trouble, so I recommended that he look for the fix first in Word itself, then check Windows' print settings, and install a new printer driver only after the first two options come up empty.

Try a new normal.dot template One potential cure-all … Read more