Unhappy eBayer

A while ago I had a Dell Inspiron 6000 at the office that went shot, either due to the motherboard or the video card. Sadly, this laptop was purchased at Sams Club, so there's no more warranty on it. So off to the eBay. I put a bid on a new motherboard (with integrated video card) to try to knock out the problem. The ad I was looking at specifically said that the DC jack had been replaced with a new one. Good. Yeah. Thanks for nothing, Jack!

As you can see, not only was the DC jack not replaced...but it was completely mangled! I thought about just buying a new DC jack and replacing it myself (I've done it once before without any issue), but the seller, laptopaid offered to have me RMA it. So I sucked it up and paid the money to have it shipped USPS to the address they specified.

Too bad I didn't pay the extra few cents to have delivery confirmation. Apparently they've never received the defective system board. It's hard for me to accuse them of anything, since I didn't have tracking or delivery confirmation, so this isn't an acusatory post. But I'm most unhappy that my item was apparently lost in priority mail...

My screw-up aside, there is still the fact that they completely mis-advertised this motherboard. It would be one thing if they said it was sold as-is, but they advertised that it was tested and had the jack replaced, neither of which had been the case. So laptopaid is not without blame here.

Laptopaid, I'm taking your business card you sent with the motherboard and I'm tearing it up.

Ubuntu vs Virus

I had a user buzz me on the phone the other day complaining about a webpage that popped up saying she was infected with stuff. Fortunately, this user knows to call me when something like this happens (see, employee training does help). So I got on my Ubuntu laptop and took a look at the page, the Kentucky Institute of Medicine.

The page dumped me to a page that said my Ubuntu computer was infected. Because I knew that there wouldn't be any problem, I went through the presented dialog boxes, attempting to cancel the installation. Ultimately, the virus still tried to install anyway. Below are screenshots of what happened. Note that each time I hit cancel in the dialog boxes (click on the pictures to enlarge them):


The redirected website, acting as though it's scanning my Ubuntu laptop.



Oops, looks like I wasn't running an anti-virus on my Ubuntu computer...and got infected with Windows spyware programs??



My PC is soiled? Maybe I need to get some diapers...



"Destructive and damaging software founded." Oh noes! Hit the X! The X!!!




Oh look...it tries to install it anyway. Note that the filename makes it appear to look like AVG.

Just goes to show you can't trust anything you see on the internet, especially if it tells you your computer is infected. Or just use Linux/Ubuntu.

By the way, the Kentucky Institute Of Medicine is a perfectly legitimate website. It seems that their DNS servers got poisoned and would redirect to the virus-installing website. For a long time, the website continued to redirect and, as of this writing, it now has an "under construction" placeholder. So even legitimate websites can possibly get you infected, if you don't know what to look for. Just never trust websites. Always be suspicious.

And use Linux/Ubuntu. :P

Computer Needs Smoking Cessation

This is what happens when your computer lives in a house with smokers (and this is pretty mild compared to some I've seen):


To add insult to injury, this is one of those Dell Dimension 4700 with the CPU fan installed backwards.

McAfee's a Pack Rat

Working for a health department, we don't always have the latest and greatest technology. Oftentimes we have computers that have been working here longer than our staff. We still employ a handful of Compaq Deskpros running Win2K with 256MB of RAM and 10GB hard drives. As long as you don't do anything else with them besides your job, they're fine.

So I get a call from one of the poor staff that got assigned one of these Deskpros and she was telling me that our home health software wouldn't let her on. I ran back there and looked at the error message.
Oh, okay, that's all?

Seriously, that error message makes no sense. But the very fact that I took a screenshot of it led me to discover what caused it - no hard drive space.

Yeah, the hard drives are only 10GB, so that's no surprise. I go in to the user profiles and start deleting a few 100MB here and there...but it still isn't taking a dent out of the fact that the whole hard drive is stuffed. So I run some Sequoia View to see what's killing the hard drive.


What the...that huge yellow box is...McAfee?

I head over to the folder containing all that crap and check.


Yep, old McAfee DAT files are taking up nearly 4GB of the 10GB hard drive. A quick delete of this folder and everything is back to normal. Guess this is what happens when you use a computer with McAfee for 10 years without wiping it. I don't know it's normal for McAfee to hoard all it's old DAT files, but that seems like bad design to me.

Bad Electrical Practice

I'll be the first to admit that our office building is a dump. Not necessarily because of the equipment and the people in it, but the actual structure of the building. We purchased the building from a local electric company when they built they're new office.

So you'd think that everything would be electrically sound.

This building has been plagued by piss-poor electrical wiring for years. Several undocumented reports of exposed wiring up in the ceiling and burnt up fuse boxes (yes, we still have a fuse box in one part of the building).

Adding to the mess, the electric company still rents one small closet from us, so they can continue to operate a large microwave antenna. I've never felt very happy about this arrangement. The antenna techs can access the closet at any time. This same closet houses our network and phone equipment, and more than once I've had to fuss at their techs that were "just looking for an outside line," which was causing our internet and phones to shut off.

But recently, they've been sending techs over regularly, installing more equipment. I'm not a radio or a microwave expert, but I like to glance over the new equipment that they bring in. The last time I checked, I found this:














What you are looking at is a bank of four lead-acid batteries connected in series to act as a battery back up in the event of power failure. This is a perfectly legitimate method for creating this kind of backup, but there are a couple of problems. First, notice the pile of black and blue terminal caps lying on the floor. If anything metallic managed to bridge a positive and negative terminal, with that power you'd have an instant arc welder. If anything human bridged those terminals, you might have a dead human.

My second complaint is the fact that those batteries are not in a battery box. Lead-acid batteries can be very dangerous, because they contain acid (go figure)! If something caused one or more of the batteries to rupture (over charging, faulty batteries, etc), that acid can cause all sorts of problems, like starting a fire, rupturing further batteries, death, etc. They make special enclosures for battery setups just like this. Those enclosures hold the batteries and are rated to contain any leak or rupture. Unfortunately, I don't see one of these enclosures in that picture.

If our office building burns down, this'll be what caused it. Meanwhile, we're all getting dosed with microwaves. Mmm...I smell something tasty...

Users are hard on tech...

...some more than others.

Anyone that's directly supported users with their computer issues knows what I mean. You have people that are so afraid to do anything on their computer because they fear they'll do something wrong or break it. Then...you've got the other end of the spectrum, where people completely abuse the living daylights out of their tech. It's those people that accidental damage protection warranties had in mind.

We used to have a user, who I'm just going to refer to as Miss R. She had to be out in the field often, doing health inspections, so she was given a small Fujitsu Lifebook and a portable Canon inkjet printer. During her employment, hers was the only laptop that needed to have the USB ports replaced (the side-effect of keeping your USB cables plugged in when jamming your notebook into it's zip case). Also, I got constant complaints about her inkjet printer.

The first problem was when she needed to change out the ink carts. Now this Canon printer can work in two modes: pure black and white, using just one Black cartridge, or color, using a small black cart and a small color cart. When you use the two cartridges, there is a little caddy that the cartridges go into before it gets inserted into the printer - if you use just the large black cartridge, you use a different caddy. Unfortunately, when Miss R decided to change out the color cartridge for the large black and white only cartridge, she literally shoved the black cartridge into the color caddy so hard that it destroyed the caddy. Fortunately, she didn't need to print color anyway.

Later, though, I would get constant calls about her printer halting during prints and various USB connection problems with it. It was during this time that we diagnosed her screwed up USB ports on her laptop and had them repaired. But the problems eventually continued again. So I had her send me her printer.

Among the damages done to her printer were damaged clips to hold the lid shut, the actual plastic shell of the printer coming apart, and a severely mangled USB port. Nothing a little hot glue and solder wouldn't fix. But still...it makes me cringe to think about how she treated it for it to end up in this sorry state. Needless to say, during the rest of her employement, we didn't give her any expensive tech equipment unless there was a full-coverage accidental damage protection warranty on it.

Keyboard Lubrication

About a year ago, I ordered 12 Lenovo T61 laptops for our managers. They've been wonderful machines, by the way. But I was struck with horror and confusion when I was helping one of our managers with his Outlook when I noticed one side of his keyboard was particularly shiny...and slimy. What...the...heck?

According to him, it was Vaseline. That's right. Have you ever heard of using Vaseline to lubricate a lightbulb socket, to make it easier to remove a burnt-out lightbulb? I hadn't, but supposedly this is what he did to a light socket above his desk. And supposedly a glob of heated Vaseline dripped and fell on to his keyboard.

I wonder what the Lenovo Accidental Damage Protection people will say when I ask to replace his keyboard...

4 year old vs Windows

You know, kids and computers can go well together...as long as it isn't on a mission-critical system, like one with all your business data, photos, and programs (especially if you don't keep full, complete backups). Today I got a call from a lady that works at my church - she had allowed her 4-year-old nephew to use her computer, apparently without supervision. I don't know how long it took him, but he had figured out how to change the lady's login name and password, effectively making her account inaccessible to anyone but the nephew. This kid has computer hacker written all over him. :)

Lots of things were fortunate about how all this turned out. For one, although the lady has her account password-protected (now password-protected by the nephew), the computer's built-in Administrator account was not password-protected, a possibility I had been counting on (lest I have to use the password reset utility). Over the phone, I had the lady reboot her computer into Safe Mode, which brings up the option to log in as the Administrator, which had no password. This allowed her to go to the Control Panel, then to the Users and Groups and change her account name and password back to what they should be. A quick reboot and not only could she log in, but all of her files were right where she'd left them.

Using a Windows XP system without a password on the Administrator account (or disabling the account altogether) is a potentially dangerous oversight, especially if you have nosy roommates, but this oversight can come in handy sometimes.