Computer Tips -Tech Info

It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a […]

It’s been a while since I’ve had an “on-topic” post here, but as you might imagine quite a bit has been going on. I had this peculiar problem reported to me in the last week about print spool issues with certain models of printers following the official windows update day.    Send article as PDF […]

I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the […]

Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP’s lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don’t think that has been done yet. From what I remember about lightscribe is that it would require that you buy specially made […]

I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for […]

I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had done a test page through the printers software at the end of the install process (Some sort […]

Well, for the second month in a row (I don’t recall one in March..) Microsoft has re-released a patch for Windows. This time it’s the Flash patch (which really falls under 3rd party software). They’ve re-worked the version detection of the update in an attempt to solve all the problems that people have run into […]

Last month, April, the Microsoft patch cycle had one problem patch that broke certain explorer extensions (most notable some HP software…) This time around it looks like the Flash patch that they distributed has given a few people fits. For starters, yes it’s odd for Microsoft to distribute a patch for a 3rd party product. […]

Oracle released 36 patches in mid-April as part of their quarterly patch cycle…. unfortunately, not all of the patches were released. Apparently they hadn’t finished testing and users were advised to look for the updates around the first of May. Well, guess what – they’re not out yet and the word is that they won’t […]

HP will be making their virus throttler software avialable for Linux. Their virus throttler software detects compromised machines on a network, mails the administrator and throttles network connections to the machine, attempting to minimize the impact of the viral outbreak. (It seems as though it would be especially useful against network worms.    Send article […]