Difference between revisions of "Ejbdesk1-maintenance-log"

From Ed's Mediawiki
(Laser Printer Replacement)
(Memory upgrade)
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==Memory upgrade==
 
==Memory upgrade==
 
2/19/2013 I got a Best Buy gift card for my birthday and it hung from a tack for a month waiting for me to need something there.  I checked out prices and decided to double the memory on this machine by buying a pair of 4 GB memory cards.  The machine now has two 2 GB and two 4 GB cards for a total of 12 GB.
 
2/19/2013 I got a Best Buy gift card for my birthday and it hung from a tack for a month waiting for me to need something there.  I checked out prices and decided to double the memory on this machine by buying a pair of 4 GB memory cards.  The machine now has two 2 GB and two 4 GB cards for a total of 12 GB.
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==Firefox video issues (html5)==
 +
Stacey started a channel on youtube with an introductory video that was in mp4 format.  My laptop would play it, but my desktop would not.  No google searches yielded a solution, but one hinted that firefox html5 support is not yet complete, and in fact html5 isn't really there yet.  Poking around in the source of the error page made it clear that the video was coming in through html5.  By clicking on the error message from youtube, I found a link at the bottom that offered to remove me from the "html5" trial.  I vaguely remember joining this effort over a year ago when I was playing with html5 on my own web site.  Clicking on this solved the problem.  The reason I did not have the problem on the laptop is because I was not logged in, so youtube did not pick up the html5 trial flag.

Revision as of 21:40, 3 March 2013


This page links to a record of stuff I have done to maintain ejbdesk1, my core i5-based windows 7 machine

Software added and removed

This is a record of programs added or removed over time. I am adding this after having done a lot without recording it, so it will be a little patchy until I catch up.

For some programs, removal is not straightforward, so they have their own topics. See below for information on these.

Thunderbird Issues

Great tool, but sometimes it loses its way.

Email Accounts

Setting up my email servers right.

Added Backup Drive

MOZY Issues

Note: I no longer use MOZY.

MOZY online backup works great, but issues come up sometimes.

The latest issue is that they blew out their prices for large backups to the point that it is not cost effective for me to use them anymore. Now I use Crashplan (details below).

Crashplan notes

I do backups pretty much continuously both to a local drive and to the cloud. The service I use for both of these is CrashPlan. For $120 a year, I back up three computers with unlimited storage. I currently have about 1,100 gigabytes backed up, most of this being my photo collection and family video clips.

Switch User Shortcut

Adding a button to go directly to switch user

Print shares for MAC OS X

Using LPD to serve my WIN7 printer shares.

Failed V drive

A poster child for having a backup strategy!

Deleting Too Long Folder and its Containing Tree

Removing Print Drivers

Things were getting messy, and I needed to re-do print drivers from scratch. Surprisingly hard to remove multiple drivers for the same hardware.

Context Menus and File Associations

Replacing V drive

V drive showing SMART errors. No real failure, but SMART errors indicate failure soon, and are enough to justify warranty replacement.

System Rebuild - Lost MBR on C drive

C: drive seems to have failed, and the untested drive image I had created did not succeed in a bootable replacement. The saga of the re-build.

Random Blue Screen Crashes

I have not seen these, but I keep finding that the machine has rebooted.

Uninstalling KB971033

Microsoft added this update to help fight pirated versions of Windows, but it is very annoying. Since I have a legal license that this update was questioning, and it required action on my part, I removed it.

SMART warning on C drive

Windows update failing

Making a system image

I have done this twice before, but did not write about it.

Jalbum Topics

I use Jalbum for my photo and video web pages. Very good tool. Misc topics covered here, including some technical stuff I have learned along the way. jAlbum uses plugins called skins to make nicer pages. I mostly use a skin called "matrix," which has its own complexities. Some of these are covered here.

Removing Kodak Easyshare

When I was looking for ways to easily share photos at full resolution, I downloaded and installed Kodak EasyShare. I ended up deciding not to use it, but the uninstall did not work. Later, Kodak got out of the business, and later still, I decided to clean this up. Some web research led me to this Kodak software: Clear Utility for KODAK EASYSHARE. I downloaded and ran it, and it seemed to be working, but stopped for multiple hours at some point. I killed the process and started it again, and that seemed to work. The web site says that this removes "leftover" files after an uninstall, but that seems to include the program itself if it has not been uninstalled successfully.

Norton Internet Security System Tray problem

With an upgrade to a new version of NIS, the tray icon kept going away shortly after closing the application interface.

Backup Disk Upgrade

The external drive I was using for local backups was getting full. How I moved my Crashplan backups to a bigger drive.

Restoring Ultra VNC

Norton Internet Security stopped working

System Disk Failure

Laser Printer Replacement

Our trusty old LaserJet 2200 finally wore out.

Memory upgrade

2/19/2013 I got a Best Buy gift card for my birthday and it hung from a tack for a month waiting for me to need something there. I checked out prices and decided to double the memory on this machine by buying a pair of 4 GB memory cards. The machine now has two 2 GB and two 4 GB cards for a total of 12 GB.

Firefox video issues (html5)

Stacey started a channel on youtube with an introductory video that was in mp4 format. My laptop would play it, but my desktop would not. No google searches yielded a solution, but one hinted that firefox html5 support is not yet complete, and in fact html5 isn't really there yet. Poking around in the source of the error page made it clear that the video was coming in through html5. By clicking on the error message from youtube, I found a link at the bottom that offered to remove me from the "html5" trial. I vaguely remember joining this effort over a year ago when I was playing with html5 on my own web site. Clicking on this solved the problem. The reason I did not have the problem on the laptop is because I was not logged in, so youtube did not pick up the html5 trial flag.