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Computer Problems

Although the designers of computers and software strive to make them simple to use, there's a lot of complexity beneath the surface. So it's not very surprising when problems arise. This page gives describes some of the problems I've encountered, and the solutions.

In November 2002 DSL finally became available in our area. Along with the SBC DSL package came a collection of services from Yahoo. I got DSL for the speed, not for these custom features - but of course I checked them out anyway.

The DSL yahoo home page was pretty slick, but I quickly found that most of the links didn't work. I figured it was a problem with the internet service provider. I sent some feedback to them, but never got a reply. Since I didn't really care to use these services, I didn't spend to much effort on resolving the problem, but it was something I wanted to get to the bottom of.

Six months later I stumbled on the source of the problem. Belarc Advisor, a program I had installed long ago, was messing up the links by adding definitions to my c:\windows\hosts file. Somehow this program was "protecting" my computer. I uninstalled it, cleaned up what it had done to my hosts file, and all the yahoo links worked fine.

I've used AnalogX's simpleserver to run my web page for a long time. The program's great and simple to use, but the documentation is minimal. The free download site says it has features like server logging, so you can see who's visiting your web site; but nothing that tell's you how to activate those features! But I figured it out: Undocumented SimpleServer

I heard about BitTorrent in a San Jose Mercury News article. It's very useful - in a nutshell, when downloading a file, you're at your maximum dsl/cable modem speed almost all the time.
But after successfully downloading some DVD size files, I ran into a problem. At 91% download and over 4 GB, BitTorrent came up with an Errno 9 "Bad File Descriptor". I tried restarting the download again and again - always the same problem. I used search engines and found other references to this error, but no solution! I even tried deleting the file and doing the entire download again - failed in the same spot, many hours later. So I chalked it up to a bad file.

Tried to download another DVD size file - this one also failed with the same error, this one when 93% complete. Then it hit me - I was doing the download on a Windows 98 computer, all with FAT32 file systems that can't handle a single file over 4GB. Somehow the error message "Bad File Descriptor" didn't quite convey that this was the problem.

So I moved the folder and files over to an NTFS hard drive on my (networked) Windows XP computer, and tried the download again, still using the W98 machine. This time it came up with ErrNo 12.

Finally, I restarted the Bittorrent download from the XP machine and the file downloaded to the end! Problem solved.

This was a TV problem, but it could relate to computer displays so I'll include it here. We have a (December 1999) Daewoo television in our bedroom. It's worked great for years, and it has a wake up clock feature that's nice - but a few weeks ago the color started going weird at the edges, and progressed to the middle of the screen. It looked like it needed degaussing. Normally a TV or monitor does this automatically at power on - in fact, I remembered that when this TV came on it use to make quite a noise during the power on degauss cyle (kind of a thump and a decaying hum) that use to wake me up.

I realized it hadn't been making that sound lately. I took it apart, located the degaussing coil around the perimeter of the picture tube and found where it connected to the circuit board. When I looked at the solder side of the board in that area, I found a component wire (probably the thermistor that causes the decaying field) that was loose in it's hole and the area was slightly discolored as if had been a cold solder joint that then caused some arcing.

I resoldered the joint and reassembled the TV. The degaussing noise was back and the color was back to normal. Problem fixed.

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Al@Fennema.no-ip.com

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