Someone Tried to Rip Me Off!

I produce a DJ program called Sound Sequencer. I have not done much work on it for a few years and would like to get back into it sometime, but frankly in these times you have to stick with stuff that makes you a living, and thats the computer support work. The program is still a good program and still out there in use and is for sale via my website, however I received an e-mail from a colleage informing me that my program amungst others that were being offered at a lower price on a website called tangoradio.co.uk

I looked at this website and indeed they were selling my program. I tried the phone number on the website but it was disconnected and had no reply to an e-mail I sent. The cheeky thing was that they had my demo to download so someone could have tried the demo, liked it and bought it from these people, then they would have come to me for support. The other scenerio I thought of was that they had cracked the registration code algorithm, which frankly isnt rocket science but deters most hackers.

I checked the site every day since but now its gone so at least someone was able to talk to the owners and get them to see the error of their ways.

The Wonders of Fibre Broadband

I have a customer who was on ADSL but needed faster upload speeds due to their need to support some services directly on the web. Currently with Eclipse but I investigated fibre optic broadband providers in the area but the best deal was with Eclipse and it gave them the least amount of hassel or so I thought. Virgin was a contender but curiously enough BT said it was not available in their area.

I was curious about how this fibre broadband was going to work so I contacted Eclipse and they assured me that it a simple procedure. Apparently its done by BT and yet they could not offer this service in that area? The engineer would just need to change the face plate on the phone line and install a modem and away we go. I suspected that the fibre optic cable was not actually in their street but wanted to know how much copper wire there was between us and the fibre connection. There is a big green telephone mini exchange by the side of the road at the end of the street but no sign that it has recently been modified with extra stuff or that the road has been dug up to lay a cable. If the fibre connection was coming from the main exchange then that would be a mile of copper at least. This is supposed to be a fibre to cabinet (FTTC) connection.

The day of installation came. The engineer was supposed to arrive between 8am and 5pm but we saw no sign of him. Ringing up about it we were told the installation had been defered due to "customer request". What a load of crap. I know someone was there early, no later than 8.07 so unless the guy turned up at 8am exactly I dont see how we could have missed him. Could not get another date until 10 days later! and this is how they treat their business customers.

Next installation date came and an engineer arrived at 11 am. He installed the face plate and showed me the uplink and downlink speeds on his test equipment. He then installed the vdsl modem. We could have had a router from Eclipse but my customer has a Draytek Vigor 2820 which is a great bit of kit allowing ADSL or ethernet connection. You would think that BT would instruct its engineers on how their equipment works as he did not know how the modem would connect to our network. I was assuming the modem was a bit like the cable modems you get with Virgin and it was just a case of plugging in the ethernet cable a bit of DHCP and away you go. No manual with the modem so instead I spoke to BT technical support and realised it was PPPoE so once I had set up the router with the same Eclipse settings as we had for ADSL we had broadband. The BT engineer was nice enough to try to help and his remit was just to show that the connection was working but he kept going on about his responsiblity being only up to the end point and I felt that he just wanted to get out of there so I said that I would deal with it and ring techincal support if I needed help.

Now for the speed test. We were supposed to get 40mbit download and 10mbit upload but a simple test in the afternoon gave a speed on 17mbit download and 6.7 mbit upload. They say they guarentee a 12bit download speed throughout the day and I still need to do some tests to get a sense of what speeds they can expect. There are usage limits but these are quite generous at 200GB per month and its unlimited 11pm to 9am.

The customer really needed to upload speed as opposed to download. The previous ADSL cost £30 per month with a 20GB download limit, 8mbit download (6mbit at most really) and 0.5mbit upload. The new fibre costs £50 per month with a 200GB download limit, 40mbit download (17mbit best sofar) and 10mbit upload (6.7 sofar), so in all I would say that this is a good cost top benefit improvement.

I can see where fibre broadband is the next step to improve speeds by doing the FTTC stuff. You get fibre optic as close as you can to your home without it coming right up to your door, but even if it arrives in my area I still have 2 miles of copper cable to get to my house from the cabinet. At least my customer was only 50m away, and of course if everyone uses it, will we see the same old problem of contension ratios slowing everyone down again?

HP DV6000 Blank screen

Just had a HP DV6000 laptop in which the customer reported to me as having a problem with the screen. It had been restarting itself or the screen freezing in use but now it would not even start up.

It did not take me long to research this problem. I found many references and alot of youtube videos on the subject. The problem is a basic design flaw. You have heat from the processor going directly over the graphics processor chip, so you have your GPU running hotter than your processor and if it gets too hot, the solder holding the chip melts and the chip becomes unseated. The processor and GPU are upside down on the motherboard so effectively the GPU is dropping out of the board.

The fix is simply dismantling the laptop, and carefully, reheat the GPU so the solder makes contact with the motherboard again. I used the blowtorch attachment for my butane powered soldering iron to limit the area to be heated. Once cooled down replaced the paste on the processor and GPU cleaned out the fan and put it all back together. Key Presto it worked.

I use a program called speedfan to monitor the temperatures and another called hot cpu tester to get the temperature up and all was good.

Iam a bit concerned about my HP DV9500 as this has always been very hot but then I like to run it at maximum power!

What is a book?

Iam always getting stuff through the door or on the phone trying to sell me advertising for the business. Little do they know that I come from a publishing background and do have some understanding of advertising.

An interesting twist has come my way which I feel the need to comment on. Small Print Publishing Ltd sent me some blurb enticing me to advertise in a book called "Start your own business". The book is bone-fide and published yearly even with an ISBN number but as long as I bought advertising space I could become a "Recommended Supplier". I understand magazine advertising and in such cases its always a playoff between editorial content and advertising: the more editorial content, the higher cover price, so a book generally does not contain advertising and has a high cover price. Free newspapers and magazines are at the other end of the scale with mostly advertising and very little content. This has always made me wonder about computer magazines because most cost £5 or more yet are stuffed full of adverts and those so called free software disks often contain paid for software advertising and free utilities you can download for free yourself from the internet.

I digress, so my question is how successful is this book. In newspapers and magazines you can give circulation figures, which by law you can not lie about; exaggerate a bit, say you print 5000 copies but you can say you have a 15,000 readership as up to three people may read that paper / magazine. You dont have to prove your readership and who is to say that your copies get distributed, just as long as that number of copies gets printed. With a book I have yet to see anyone who comes clean about how many they sell, they just use marketing blurb such as best-selling.

I went to the website www.smallprintpublishing.com and was disappointed as all it has was "website coming soon" but a nice piece of flash describing what they did and indeed they do small print runs of books. I have written software manuals for products and its so much easier to publish yourself, though most software manuals can be downloaded along with the programs these days.

I still come back to the advertising though. I know you get revised editions of books but have never seen one revised due to advertising. Just what is the content to advertising ratio? Does the book size depend on how much advertising they get? I was thinking about e-mailing them but wasnt that bothered. What I did find interesting was that I had received a direct mail marketing letter. If they had sent me a copy of the book I might have thought more about their offer. Oh there is also a print deadline at the end of the month just to get you to feel you will be misiing out on something - no surpise there.

Suspicious Phone Call

I had an interesting phone call the other day. A man with an indian accent, clearly from a call centre, phoned me to say there was something wrong with my computer. He said he was from Microsoft and through his help I could check the problem on my computer. Since when does Microsoft call its customers? I thought, so I was immediately suspicious, however I thought I would play along. He got me to start up the event viewer and look for warnings and errors. No matter how good your computer behaves there will always be warnings and errors in the log but usually they are not serious. He asked me how may errors I had and I lied saying there were two warnings and three errors. He kept asking me to read the errors out and look for more errors and frankly I got bored and put the phone down.

I thought no more of it until a few days later when one of my customers phoned me and was concerned about a similar phone call she had had, but it had gone further with her and they had actually remotely connected to her machine. First they got her to go to ammyy.com which provides a free program for remote desktop work, similar to teamviewer where your computer creates a client code that you give to someoneelse who then becomes and operator and takes over your desktop. A great little program but you sure as hell dont know who is connecting to your machine. Next they got her to go to a website aka-cdn-ns.adtech.de. My customer was a bit vague here but I think they might have got her to install some software, so my first thought was spyware/keylogger. She had not used her banking, social network or ebay so I was confident that her data was going to be safe but I got her to immediately check for spyware and viruses. She was only suspicious after continually asking if the person phoning her was trying to sell her something and them just fobbing her off.

If you get a similar call just put the phone down.

Customer satisfaction

I always put the customer first. My aim is always to leave to customer happy with the work I have done for them, so compare and constrast two customers I had the other week.

Customer 1: He had a problem with wireless networking. The signal from the router varied between rooms which was probably due to the thickness of the walls and all that metal in the kitchen. He needed to move his office from inside the house to an outside building so I advised him to relocate the router to the living room and use powerline ethernet for a guarenteed connection. I had the equipment with me and was able to get a good connection through that method. I charged my normal call out fee (£45) and £40 for the equipment, but the gentleman gave me another £15 because he said it was worth it for what I had done. Good result.

Customer 2: She phoned and from what she said I deduced that her screen had failed. She wanted me to make sure but even a reduced call out fee at £30 would have been a bit much considering I was sure it was just a failed screen so I asked her to drop off the screen and I would check if for free. A few days later she phoned again, saying she could not disconnect the screen. I was going shopping the next day, so I said I would drop in and check the screen for free. When I got there, it was as I suspected, a failed screen. I did not have one she could have so I directed her to a local shop which would have a suitable replacement but she had borrowed a screen and would I install it. I did install it but the power and video cable from the old screen were not suitable so I supplied those items. I decided that I had done some work so I ought to charge and decided to charge the original £30 call out and include the cables in the price. After I left there was a problem with google chrome but I was able to resolve that over the phone. I then get a call later that day saying she was not happy with me charging £30 as the cables were less that ten pounds new. I explained that I had done some work and that I was including the cables in the work. She said she would not need those cables when she got a new screen as it would come with cables, but she clearing she needed cables now to work with the borrowed screen. I dont like unhappy customers so I thought about this and rang her back saying I would be ripping up her cheque and could she just return the cables when she got a new screen. She is probably still unhappy and I wont get the cables back but frankly some people will never be happy even with my above and beyond service.

Exhibitors Directory Scam

It really ticks me off to get yet another letter from Expo Guide. Basically they say they are an exhibitors directory and that you can have a free listing in their guide, but in the small print you are actually signing up to a 3 year contract costing some 1181 Euros (£1000) a year.

I can not believe they are still going. They give you a reply envelope which goes to France, but the actual company appears to be based in Mexico. From what I have read on various websites, they threaten legal proceeding (debt collectors) and basically try to frighten you into paying up.

What I want to know is: what the hell is our government and the EU doing about these blant scammers? I have been getting these letters for years and alway rip them up. They are posted in the UK and the Royal Mail should refuse to deliver them.

Nasty Rootkit Virus

I had a computer in with a very nasty rootkit virus recently. Identified by avg as trojan win32/zbot g and vbs generic, I tried my usual solution which involved using ComboFix, and that did not fix it. I found the program in the startup of the registry. Typically they tack themselves on after userint is called (which is where you log onto windows) so its always there, even in safe mode. Removed that entry, restarted and it came back. Found where the program was and tried to look at the folder in program files and windows said it was empty but I could still not remove the folder.

Drastic action required here so I took the drive out of the pc and piggy backed it onto another system. A full virus scan found some 6000 infected files. This was due to just about every dll and html file being infected, but the virus scan did not find the one I knew has there. Only by changing the owner and access rights to that folder could I find the file called yeclwdy.exe. Removed it and the folder, restarted and blow me down it came back! Took it out again, but this time cleaing out the folder and denying all access to it, restarted but that dis not fix it, it just created another in program files\common files. Eventually was able to find the same program in users startup menu which was why it always came back but again this was invisible to the system even with hidden and system files turned on. It must have a hook into explorer to hide itself from normal view.

Now happy that it had gone, I looked for other files like that yeclwdy.exe and found a load *mgr.exe e.g iexploremgr.exe, so I removed those aswell. I was able to reinstall those programs affected by dll infection and give it a clean bill of health.

How did the machine become infected you say? Well normally the infections come from the internet but this came on a memory stick. I put an old memory stick on the infected system and was later able to deduce that it created an autorun of itself on a memory stick (hidden of course), so my advise is to make sure autorun is turned off for external drives.

Server in the twilight zone

One of my customers has a HP Proliant ML150 G3 server running SBS 2003. I upgraded the memory and disk space in July in preparation for an upgrade to their main software application which required a bit more oomph. After the upgrade and sorting out a few little problems all was well. Come December the server would trip out in the night. Nothing in the system logs, it just reset itself, which indicated a hardware problem. The normal rule is: if something changes thats most likely causing the problem, so I checked the new hard drives which were on a RAID 1 (mirrored) and the volumes were not degraded. I swapped the memory back to the old memory and still the problem persisted, infact it was getting worse because it would trip out more and was liable to lockup during the day.

Winter was getting worse and the server room was getting really cold. No heating and there is an extractor fan to the outside which lets the cold in. The server has an operation temp range of 10 to 35 degrees centegrade. We had problems in the Summer and it tripped out due to overheating so now my thoughts were towards it being too cold. I used a program called Speedfan to monitor temperatures and certainly one of the processor cores was registering 7 degrees. Suspecting the cold or a faulty sensor I kept the server room warm and disabled thermal monitoring in the BIOS. This seemed to have an effect but did not cure it.

Now it gets really weird. Many years ago I created a simple backup protocol based on external disk drives connect by USB. I sucessfully used a program called Mirrorfolder to create a realtime backup to these external drives, such that at the end of the day a drive can be disconected, taken outside the building and they can have an absolute safe copy of the work for that day. The problem now was that the server would / would not recognise and attached drive. A restart would get it back. Next the keyboard would stop working: not on USB but the old small 6 pin DIN. I suspected the backup drive so copied data to and from it and it consistantly failed.

A solution was now at hand. Disconnect the backup and the server would not trip out or lockup. The problem here was that the customer would no longer have a backup which was not acceptable. A temporary solution is to have the backup on at night and take it off during the day. I have remote access and have to deal with the overnight restarts every morning to make sure they have a working system for the day. The proper solution is to get a new server, and that is being instigated.

So what has been going wrong? I have had machines with USB problems before. Usually a device is not recognised and I usually suspect power issues. The PSU cannot supply a stable current to the device. Replace the PSU or motherboard. With a server that can get expensive and their server was over three years old so its time for a new server.

Not busy, then busy

November was a bit quiet so I had nothing to talk about, yet December was very busy and I had no time to talk about anything but I am back now.