Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Troubleshooting

Symptoms

While downloading music from Itunes, the computer crashed and there would be a blue screen. After restarting the computer and running the downloads again the same thing happened. But if I did anything else besides run the downloads, my computer didn't crash; only when the music downloaded.

Hypothesis

  • I need to run system restore to a point from yesterday to undo changes made by downloading Adobe reader today.
  • The internet connection is slow right now and I will have to wait until tomorrow when it is refreshed.

Results

  • After running system restore, system restore did not complete because of an unknown error. The same result happened after running system restore on many different restore points of different times. Supposing that the problem was from downloading a new version of Adobe Reader, I unistalled Adobe reader and restarted. That did not fix the problem.
  • While running the music downloads again, Itunes ran slowly enough that the connection timed out. Then if I tried it again the computer would crash. So I turned off my computer and waited till the next day when the internet was faster and by then the downloads finished without crashing the computer.

Solution

Either my computer was on too long and needed to be turned off so it could rest, or the internet connection was inconsistent that day for the music, so I had to wait another day.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Spyware Stop

I bought this software about a year ago. I would use it about every day. After every scan, it was usually the same cookies and not spyware very often. The problem with it is that the files that returned after the scan were unfamiliar names. Some of them, I could tell what website they were from, and some of them I couldn't tell. It was free for the first week or month as a trial version and then I purchased it. Then later I realized that Windows Vista already has spyware software in Windows Defender. Every time I ran Windows Defender, It said that it didn't find malicious software. I'm not sure which software is more reliable. www.SpywareStop.com

Friday, October 3, 2008

John Smith error messages

I knew how to do some things. The first error message I got was that the password, P0ssw9rd01 was incorrect when I tried to login as John Smith. I logged in as administrator and changed the password so I was able to login as John Smith. I ran the first script in my account and the second one in John Smith's. I got an error message while trying to edit the biography file that said "cannot create the M:\jsmith.txt." I realize that part of the problem was that I needed to be logged in as an administrator and running commands as an administrator. I had another error message saying, "only an administrator may copy to the C: drive" and that I had to have permission. I thought that moving the file to another folder or drive would make a difference, but I saw that it didn't.