Posted on 18/12/11, filed under Engineer Diary | No Comments
You may not know it but in the modern Internet Explorer browsers (version 7,8) you can search the internet directly from a search box built into the browser and in I.E. version 9 you can search directly from the address line itself. Go on, have a try. You don’t need to go to www.google.com to actually search…
However, when you get a new PC, Internet explorer is pre-configured to use Bing (the Microsoft search engine) and it looks like Microsoft are trying their best to block users from changing their default search provider to something more useful like Google for example. When you go to tools-> manage add-ons in Internet Explorer 9 in the UK and try to add a new search provider you are taken to a non-working page and so you are stuck with Bing.
The solution: go to http://www.google.com/homepage/search where you can add Google with minimum fuss as your search provider.
We’d love to hear from you if that help to fix your computer problem
Posted on 16/12/11, filed under Engineer Diary | No Comments
Today I’ve been asked by a customer to help them with a problem. They are a busy law firm which works with many emails and documents which they need to refer to regularly.
Some of the users there have newer PCs with Windows 7 and take full advanatge of the feature in Windows Explorer that enables them to preview files such as word documents, PDFs and even saved email messages without needing to open them. That saves them a tons of time as it takes a lot less time to preview a file compared to openning it in Word, Acrobat or Outlook.
However, the problem was that the XP users didn’t have that feature and started to feel a bit jealous… 
the solution: I’ve installed a free XP preview pane software which solved the problem. You can download it as well (if you’re still on XP) from: http://www.4shared.com/file/58042204/7195bc4a/Vista__Explorer_Preview_Pane_for_Xp.html
Let me know how you got on
Posted on 23/06/10, filed under Engineer Diary | No Comments
Just been to see a client this week that had a problem with his USB stick. It worked fine on his other computers but when he tried plugging it in to his home PC he would get an error pop up saying that one of the devices has malfunctioned and it would appear as unknown device in device manager.
I have tried several solutions including uninstalling all the USB devices in device manager and even reinstalling Windows to no avail.
It turned out in the end that the PC will not boot if a mass storage usb device is plugged into it so I realised that the problem wasn’t with Windows. I have tried resetting the Bios to defaults, that didn’t work either. In the end, I took the Bios battery out of the mother board, let it stand for a few minutes and voila! it all started working again.
Good luck if it happens to you…
