April 11, 2008 Archives

Today, I have been mostly troubleshooting PCs.

First off this morning my sister phoned me with some problems so I ended up talking her through installation and running of some Anti-Spyware software. Dad's PC had a similar issue just after lunch and I spent a good hour or so sorting that too.

Scoot phoned mid-afternoon to say he was having problems with his PC. The screen resolution had downgraded to 800x600 and anytime he tried to change it back to 1024x768 it came up with an error. Ended up popping down and finally decided that a reinstall of Windows was in order. He's been running Win98 and had only done 1 reinstall in the last 10 years. Anyway, I had a spare copy of XP which I gave him and installed that for him. Installed a few other bits and pieces and set the hard drives off defragging to help out as much as possible. Couldn't do any software updates for him since he isn't connected to the net.

I got home and my sister asked me to help her out on The Spiderwick Chronicles. I spent a good hour or so trying to help her out and ended up giving up.

I came back upstairs, plugged the laptop's lead in and got a nice white flash from the extension. Quickly unplugged and took the lead downstairs to change fuses. The fuse that I took out happened to still be fine and powered up a CD player. I put a new fuse in anyway and took the lead back upstairs. Moved a couple of plugs about and everything, including the extension that had flashed and my laptop, is still fine.