Using Open Office has saved our company thousands in licensing fee’s. Everyone in our organization uses it and we have yet to run into a compatibility issue when sending files to our clients. Sometimes we’ve found that the spell check doesn’t install properly initially and it is necessary to manually set it up. You’ll need to install the dictionaries and ensure spell check is enabled.

Here’s what we did to get it going. Note: You will need to be connected to the Internet so the dictionaries can download.

1. Go to File -> Wizards -> Select your language -> Click the “Start dicOOo” button.
2. Now follow the prompts until it asks you to restart Open Office
3. Once restarted go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings
4. Under Writing Aids verify/modify the settings and click OK.
5. Under Languages verify/modify the settings and click ok.

You should be good to go. I had to modify mine in one more spot because my Locale is different (long story).

1. Under Format -> Character -> Font the “Language” setting should match what you set in your Language Settings -> Languages

Now any new document you start will have spell check enabled.

We referenced this forum post, spell checker in openoffice.org, to get us started on the right path.

Download a copy and give it a try! OpenOffice.org

Hope this helps!

We recently ran into this issue at a new customers location. On our initial site discovery we changed the administrator password on the windows server. Standard procedure when changing IT companies. Later that day the client discovered that the scan to network share function was broken on their Konica Minolta Bizhub 350.

Well we assumed that it had to be because we changed the password. No problem right? Right, if your a printer tech for an office equipment firm. Well we went out there and logged into the administrator management to find the account settings and change the password. It wasn’t there so we called the firm that installed the copier and they told us where to find the scanner settings after explaining the problem. No problem, we found the scanner settings and no where is there any user account settings for the scanner. Remember this was a scanner problem.

We then second guessed our original theory and went to the windows server for answers. The first place we looked was the security tab in the event viewer. That is where windows logs successful/unsuccessful connections. No unsuccessful connections logged by the copier. It appeared as if the copier wasn’t even hitting the server. So we started at the physical layer and worked our way up.

The copier was definitely on the network and able to communicate. Users were printing to it as we worked. We could ping the server, the server could ping the copier. By IP and by name. Not a DNS problem either. We could print to the copier from the server. They definitely saw and could communicate with each other so back to the control panel on the copier. Nothing in any settings that could remotely relate to the scanner or network was helpful. All settings verified and checked out. The scan share was accessible by everyone so we made our second phone call to the copier tech.

He had me go under jobs and list them which showed a TX error. ED09C7. He looked up the error code and it was a user authentication error. So our original theory was correct. Changing the admin password broke the scanning. Ok, great now where do you find the user account settings? Why in User Settings of course NOT the administrator management. Ok, makes sense. The full path to find the user name and password is as follows.

User Setting -> FAX -> OneTouch -> -> Destination -> user password.

Well of course! Go to the FAX settings for a SCANNER issue. Wow! I believe I may never have found it without the call to the tech or some googling. FAX…… The copier was set to use SMB to talk to the server so of course a user name and password had to be used to authenticate on the server. The question then arises why was the failed authentication not recorded in event viewer?

We updated the password and bingo it worked. We hope this saves you a little time in fixing this error.

Yesterday we talked about cleaning out your temporary Internet files. Today we’ll look at preventing unnecessary programs from loading at start up. These programs load into memory and can cause your computer to be slow and sluggish.

99% of these programs do NOT need to load on boot. Adobe updater does not need to load. Quicktime does not need to load. All those Dell support programs, yeah, definitely don’t need to load. All these programs that load on boot can be launched by you when you need them. It’s not necessary for the program to be always ready and taking up valuable resources. Disabling these programs from loading at start up will enable your computer to boot faster and run more efficiently.

Using MSCONFIG in Windows XP.

1.Go to Start -> Run
2.Type msconfig and click OK or hit enter. This fires up the Microsoft System Configuration Utility
3.Click on the Startup tab.
4.You now have a list of all the programs loading on startup.
5.Disable all programs you recognize as not needed. They are just wasting memory.

If you are in doubt if a program is necessary then leave it. Only disable those you recognize and don’t need to be loaded and running at all times. Do a Google search for any programs in question. The leaner you get your startup the more resources you’ll free up to use.

Cleaning up your startup will significantly increase the performance of your PC. Throw in another 1GB or2GB of RAM and it’ll feel like a new PC again.

Something else to look at when trying to speed up your computer is defragmenting your hard drive. Over time your hard disk gets fragmented causing it to work harder and inefficiently. Your hard drive has an arm that moves over the disk reading the data. When your hard disk is fragmented that means the files are not in one contiguous are. That one document you saved could have parts in 14 locations on your hard drive. You can see how that could cause performance issues.

We recommend JKDefrag. It’s much more efficient and quicker than the built in Windows defragmenter. It’s also free! Install and run JkDefrag once or twice a month and your hard drive will thank you with a performance boost.

Do you find yourself frustrated rather than enjoying your computer time? Does opening Word, your digital camera software or your favorite application take forever? We hear that a lot.

There are a lot of factors that can cause a PC to perform sluggishly. More often than not it’s due to an infection of some sort. A virus, malware, spyware, etc… is eating resources causing the PC to seem slow for no reason. There are things other than viruses that can cause sluggishness.

Have you cleaned your temporary internet files lately? 80% of you are going to answer no! Temporary Internet Files are copies of the web pages, images, etc… you’ve browsed too. So every time you get online, a copy of the sites you visit is saved to your hard drive. Those files build up over time and bog down your system.

If you use Internet Explorer:

1. At the top of the browser click “tools”
2. click Internet Options
3. In the middle of that first tab(General) click “Delete Files”
4. Check the “Delete all offline content” checkbox
5. Click ok and wait. It may take a bit if you’ve never done this.

The next thing to look at is how many programs are installed and what truly is needed. Over time you download this, install that, and before you know it your overloaded. In particular older computers purchased via various online PC providers, cough Dell cough, come pre-installed with unnecessary software. If you also purchased it with the default base memory configuration then it’s probably not enough for todays software.

So now your lacking in RAM(memory) AND you still have that expired 30 day trial of Norton installed. You’ve upgraded MS Office from 2000 to 2007 and at boot up your computer is using 487MB of the 512MB’s of RAM installed. Yes, your computer should be slow.

512MB of RAM is barely enough to run Windows XP. So what do you do now?? Uninstall those unnecessary applications!

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs
2. Select any program you don’t use and get rid of it, like that 30 trial of Mavis Beacon or Norton Anti-Virus.
*If you are unsure then DON’T uninstall. Please ask someone you trust to be knowledgeable enough to know.
3. Uninstall any game or software you haven’t touched in forever. Sure you may want it someday but realistically will you ever use it?

Doing this and cleaning out your temp directories is a good start to speeding up and maintaining your PC. We’ll discuss how to prevent applications from loading into memory at start up and consuming resources in a future post.

Another board that works reasonably well for Ubuntu Hardy is the Asus M3n78 Pro. This board costs quite a bit more money, but it is a full ATX sized motherboard instead of the Micro ATX boards I discussed in a couple of previous posts. Some of the more notable features of this board are the four Memory slots, 3 PCI Slots, 2 PCIe 1x slots, a 16x slot and an integrated Gigabit NIC. This would not be a bad board for a MythTV backend server that you wanted to stick a bunch of disks and recording devices in. In fact, this is the exact board that I rebuilt my home server onto. Everything worked out of the box with this board except for the video which required that I install a newer video driver. The server now runs headless anyway now though.

-Kirt

For the guys that have been building systems with the Asus M2N68-VM, you will notice that inventory has been drying up. Even newegg.com does not have them sale anymore. One possible replacement for a low end workstation is the Asus M2N68-AM SE2. It has a similar, but scaled back feature set. They drop HDMI connector, drop from two to one PCI slot, drop the gigabit nic to a 100 Mbit nic and also drop down to two SATA ports from four. The video is a similar 7000 series chip that is compatible out of the box and it does have the same Nvidia nForce 630 Southbridge that just works with Ubuntu Hardy, 8.04. This is the Linux version that we prefer to roll for our Spokane based customers that need computers that just work for their standard web applications and word processing chores. This is another one of those board where everything just works out of the box.

-Kirt

Here’s an interesting one we came across yesterday. When the client(s) printed to the HP 6110 it printed the page as a mirror image. The printer was attached to a XP Pro machine on the network. Yes, the mirror image check box was NOT checked in the properties. It took awhile on the first workstation to figure out but here’s what we did to solve the problem.

Delete the printer on the workstation the printer is attached to and search the registry for 6100. In our case there was two separate keys for the hp6110 we had to delete.  Make sure the key is specific to the HP printer. Now reboot the workstation. Once it has rebooted, you can then re-install the printer.

You are not done yet because that did not fix the issue on the network workstations. We had to repeat the same process on each network workstation. Delete the printer, scour the registry, reboot, and re-install. Why did it start doing that? We don’t know. Something corrupted the driver apparently. Why HP doesn’t remove the registry entries either is unfathomable. In our case we had to remove the entries to get the mirror image printing to stop. Deleting the printer and re-installing did not work for us.

Hope this helps you out.

Interlink Advantage Network Services

In writing a technical summary of a customers network in Open Office 2.4 it became necessary to add a page between two existing pages. The document was already nine pages long and I needed to add a page between page three and four. Unlike some others in the office I am NOT a word processing power user and therefore had to Google to find the answer.

Click in the top of the page you want to be below the new page.

hit <ctrl><enter>

You now have a new page. It was that simple to add a new page in Open Office 2.4. No need to enter a manual page break or import into draw. <ctrl><enter> is all you need to add a new page.

By the way did you know Open Office is free? as in beer? YES! There’s no need to spend the $300 for the other office program. Open Office will handle Word and Excel files no problem. Did you know you can edit and create .doc and .xls files in Open Office? Open Office has come a long ways the last couple years and really you could run your office with Open Office and save the money on the purchase and yearly license for every workstation in your office.

If your using MS Office I challenge you to give Open Office a try. You’ll find that Open Office will handle your day to day office documentation without the need to pay thousands in licensing fee’s. If nothing else it’s a sound business decision that free’s up monetary resources for business growth.

We installed a remote backup server running Debian Linux in a client’s home. The backup server is also a firewall to protect the home’s Personal Computers. The home network also had a Twonky MediaServer to manage the components of a home theater.

Due to the way the home is wired (and other reasons) the Denon receiver sits outside the firewall in a DMZ behind the internet modem on a separate LAN. This caused the Twonky MediaServer to not be able to connect to the Denon receiver without opening some ports on the firewall. We typically run a closed outbound policy and open ports as needed.

We spent some time trying to research what ports the Denon was using. Unfortunately documentation was lacking so we had to resort to the old fashioned method. Here was the steps we took and the results.

The DMZ network where the Denon resides is on the 192.168.0.0/24 network.

First step was to port scan the network with nmap to find any responding IP’s. The Denon as you can see was kind enough to identify itself.

firewall:/$ nmap -sP 192.168.0.0/24
Results:
Host 192.168.0.102 appears to be up.
MAC Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (Denon)

We found the Denon so let’s see what ports are open.

firewall:/$ nmap 192.168.0.102
Starting Nmap ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2009-01-19 16:19 PST
Interesting ports on 192.168.0.102:
Not shown: 1673 closed ports

PORT     STATE SERVICE
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
443/tcp  open  https
5000/tcp open  UPnP
5001/tcp open  commplex-link
6666/tcp open  irc-serv
8080/tcp open  http-proxy
MAC Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (Denon)

Ahh, looks like UPnP, so open it up and test connectivity.

firewall:/# telnet 192.168.0.102 5000
Trying 192.168.0.102…
Connected to 192.168.0.102.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
HDMODE ANALOG

We had a machine come in recently that had a virus.  One of the files we deleted was in the Documents And Settings\<user>\Local Settings\temp\ dir called mousehook.dll. We’ve seen this file associated with Trojan.Dropper/Multi-CN.Process. We used KillBox to delete on reboot. Well upon reboot we logged in, the wallpaper flashed briefly and instantly logged back out to the log in screen. Hmmm…. same story in safe mode. Long story short here’s the fix to the log in and log out immediately problem that worked for us.

1. Boot into your XP cd

2. Select “R” to enter Recovery Console

3. cd to c:\windows\system32

4. Look for userinit.exe

5. If it’s there type the folowing: copy userinit.exe wsaupdater.exe

6. If not type the following: copy dllcache\userinit.exe .

7. Reboot

In our case c:\system32\userinit.exe was gone. In googling the issue we found reference to removing Search Assistant causing this problem. If you did step 5 and NOT 6 then you’ll need to do the following.

8. in Start -> Run type regedit and then hit enter

9. Now find the Userinit key in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

10. change the entry: C:\WINDOWS\System32\wsaupdater.exe to read C:\WINDOWS\System32\userinit.exe

11. Reboot

In our case the virus removed the userinit.exe file. Your mileage may vary. The standard disclaimer applies when editing the registry. Always back it up before making any modifications.

**UPDATE 04/03/2009**

We had a laptop come in and userinit.exe was NOT in the dllcache directory. In that case you’ll need to do the following while in the recovery console.

1. change your directory to the CDROM/DVDROM drive.

2. cd i386

3. expand userinit.ex_ c:\windows\system32

After entering the expand command you should see the text “1 file(s) copied”.

Restart your computer and you should be able to log on.

**Update 5/12/2009**

We had a XP Home system come in that immediately rebooted at the Windows splash screen while starting up before it gave us a login prompt. We went into the recovery console and started by doing a check disk.

C:> chkdsk c: /r

We exited and it rebooted to the login prompt. Obviously not the same issue as above but we wanted to throw that out there since it was a simple fix.