Computer Help

How To Fix Common Printer Errors

DEI — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:24:35 +0000

Printer errors occur usually due to a number of reasons. Here, we shall discuss some of these common errors, as well as the troubleshooting you can do to fix them.

Error: ”Windows cannot initialize the device driver for this hardware. (Code 37)

This would either mean your printer is not connected to the computer or you may have a faulty device driver software that prevented your printer to “communicate to your computer. In these cases, we first make sure that the printer cable is connected properly both to the printer and the PC and that the printer is powered on. If everything is fine and the error is still there, you may have to do an update or uninstall reinstall the existing driver to fix it.

To do this, at Start > Run, type sysdm.cpl and press Enter. The System Properties dialog box opens so we go to the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. In the Device Manager window, locate your printer, and double-click on it. Go to the Driver tab, select the Update Driver button to install the updated driver files or select the Uninstall button to remove the current driver.

Error: ˜Spoolsv.exe – Application Error. The instruction at “0×77fcc2c0″ referenced memory at “0×00000000. The memory could not be written.’

This happens when a large number of .SHD and .SPD printer spooler files accumulate in the printer’s spool folder. You can resolve this by cleaning up the spooler folder with the steps below:

At Start > Run, type Services.msc and press Enter.
Right-click on the Print Spooler services in the Services management console window, and select the Stop command.
Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers printer spool folder.
Select all files contained in this folder and delete them.
Go to the temp folder and delete all unnecessary files from it.
Open the Services management console window again and restart the Print Spooler service.

Error: ”Could Not Find the File Hpzr3207.dll on the HP CD”.

This occurs when you try to install the Hpzr3207.dll (an HP printer driver) on your computer. Conflicts between the language of the driver you are installing and the regional settings of your computer is behind this error. So you would need to ensure that the language of the driver and your regional settings match by doing one of the two methods below.

On the first method, We go to Start, then Control Panel and select the Regional and Language Options option to change the regional and language settings of your computer to match the language of the printer driver. After doing so, you must reinstall the driver. If that does not work, you can do the second method by opening the HP Website of your region or country and download the driver in your computer’s language to resolve the error.

Registry problems and malware infections may also cause printer errors. Therefore, it is a good idea to run a registry scan using a registry cleaner tool to detect and repair registry errors and to perform a full system scan using an updated antivirus and antispyware tool to ensure that your system is free of all malware information.

viewsonic va2013wm cannot display native resolution

Computer Help — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:21:12 +0000

I’m a big fan of Viewsonic monitors.

But all monitor manufacturers manage to produce the occasional faulty unit.

In this case, I got a brand new VA2013wm, but once connected to a PC, the display seemed blurrier than usual.

I look at the windows display properties, and I see its set to 1440 X 800.

Hey, it should be simple to fix.

I move the slider to the right, and I can choose from 1600 X 800 or 1600 X 900

Since the highest resolution is the monitors native resolution, it will result in the clearest display…

But when I select it, the desktop shows 2 horizontal black bars (top and bottom, about 2 cm high), and the left and right edges of the desktop are “off the edge” of the monitor (ie I cannot see them). With this amount of distortion, the desktop & screen fonts are almost unreadable.

I play with the monitors “auto adjust”, and the manual adjust settings, but with no improvement.

OK, I’ll try it on 2 other PCs, with different video cards… but the results are no better.

So I take it back to the supplier.

They test it out, and it mis-behaves for them as well (sign of relief).

They then try another new VA2013wm, and it also fails to work properly… hmmm, this is looking like either a faulty batch of monitors, or, possibly even a faulty design!

So what did I do?

I spent a bit of extra money and got a 22″ Viewsonic (which worked perfectly)

HP FW660AA monitor won’t resume from standby

Computer Help — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:32:28 +0000

Customer buys a new computer, but continues using the old monitor (a HP FW660AA).

Since the new PC has a DVI plug, I decide to connect the monitor using DVI (previously it was using the analog VGA cable).

Everything works well for about a day, and then I’m told the monitor say “going to sleep” and then goes blank. No matter what buttons are pressed, it just goes blank.

I ask the customer to use the VGA cord, and everything is OK, but I’m soon told that the display is “wavy”.

I go out thinking its probably something strange with the standby settings, or maybe the BIOS needs updating.

I get there, and I find restarting the PC fixes the problem, but I can force the problem to occur by setting the XP power properties to “system standby” in 1 minute, and then waiting 1 minute.

Sure enough, after 1 minute, the system goes to standby, and the system seems to be “off”. I move the mouse, and the system resumes, the HDD light flickers, but the monitor remains dark.

Oddly, this is not a problem while using the VGA cable.

OK, I download and install the latest intel motherboard BIOS, but that doesn’t help.

Since the customer has a spare Dell S2009Wb monitor, I plug it in, and I find it works perfectly using the DVI cable/plugs… and more importantly, it resumes from standby correctly.

So the HP monitor had a very specific fault: Only while using DVI, if the DVI signal indicated “go to standby” the monitor would shut down, and then be unable to detect when the DVI signal was available again…. weird.

Vista cannot see network shares

Computer Help — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:20:44 +0000

After a few problems getting vista to see shared network drives on some network attached devices (and sometime on XP shared drives as well), I finally found the solution:

Start -> secpol.msc (in the Search field).

In the left pane: Local Policies -> Security Options. In the right pane: double click on: “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level”.

Local Security Setting tab -> “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” option. -> OK.

Seems like microsoft have used Vista to cut ties with the past (insecure) versions of network share authentication. Of course they failed to realise that network attached drives cannot be easily updated.

Firefox: a (not so) quick evaluation

Computer Help — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:23:12 +0000

This is another of my browser quick evaluations.

This time, I’m evaluating Firefox, to see if its a suitable candidate in my quest to replace Maxthon as my default browser.

I’ve been using Firefox while working with Entrecard blogs, so I know it lacks multi-threaded tabs… its annoying, but not a huge problem.

The border width is the standard windows width… good.

Now for customisability:

At first, there doesn’t seem to be the ability to create your own toolbar, but I eventually find it: view -> toolbars -> customise -> add new toolbar.

OK, I’ll start by installing a pagerank add-on… I install SearchStatus, and it can be placed on any toolbar/menu bar available to firefox… its an excellent addon.

Now onto advert blocking: I installed adblock plus, and flashblock, and using the standard settings, I hardly saw and adverts and all flash content was blocked until I pressed the “play” button. This is the best ad blocking I’ve seen so far, with hardly any training required from the start, and a simple ABP “button” to switch ads on and off.

RSS feeds worked, but the built-in feed reader (looks like an extension to bookmarks) doesn’t allow you to “mark bookmarks as read”… so I can’t be sure what I’ve already seen and what I haven’t. Looks like I’ll need to use an “external” feed reader (I’d rather use the reader built in to the browser).

Unfortunately, typing a URL into the address bar, and pressing enter caused the website to be loaded into the current tab… Alt Enter will open it in a new tab, but will activate the new tab… I tried the tabnavigator addon, but it didn’t do anything that I wanted. Next, I tried the “tab kit” addon. It worked, and it has some nice features (tabs on multiple lines, typing a URL in the address bar opens it in a new tab, grouping tabs, etc)

I wanted to switch between tabs by using ctrl-right arrow & ctrl left arrow. I tried tabnavigator, tab kit, and keyconfig (to remap the keys), but none worked. Its disappointing, but not a major problem

I wanted to close tabs by double-clicking on the tabs, and found a plugin to do just that (close tab by double click).

I also added an “undo closed tabs button” … nice.

drag and drop urls from a web page only works if you drag the url all the way to the address bar… I’d like to just drag it slightly, and it looked like it couldn’t be done, until I accidentally found what I was after (QuickDrag).

spellcheck: like opera, FF will check spelling in input boxes… but it only started working once I installed a dictionary (Australian).

I also installed the SearchStatus add-on… it displays pagerank (plus a few other ranking figures) on the toolbar… great for SEO work.

I installed firebug (web developer tools)… its nice, but I’ve found that Operas “developer tools” (dragonfly) is just so smooth and seamless. Dragonfly is so good, that I’ll happily switch browsers every time I need to do some website development/alterations.

Other add-ons I added are: “Menu Editor”.. when right-clicking on a link, I have now moved the option to “open link in a new tab” to be the first option in the context menu…. Remove New Tab Button” removes the unneeded “+” button at the end of the bar of tabs.

Exporting favourites from Maxthon & importing them (into Opera & Firefox) is a simple process.

So far, the biggest advantage of Firefox, has been the wide range of plugins… but that’s also its biggest problem, as its difficult to know what FF can do unless you’ve heard about a feature before.

Finding the quickdrag add-on is a good example of this… I knew what I wanted, but it took a day of idle searching before I found what I wanted.

I’ve heard that Firefox still has problems with memory leaks and memory bloat, but I didn’t really look carefully enough to make a conclusion.

But I can say that Firefox 3.5.3 has crashed, locked up, frozen, or just simply disappeared (gone from task manager as well) more times than all the other tested browsers, combined.

So, the final verdict: (Many people will say “I told you so”) I’ll be switching to Firefox as my main browser(with Opera as a website development aid). Its not perfect, but its my best option.

Unusual internet dropouts

Computer Help — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:17:55 +0000

I recently visited an “Outside School Hours Care” centre (ie a centre that looks after school kids, outside school hours… usually before school, or after school… it helps parents handle unusual work hours).

They have 2 networked computers, which were behaving strangely… after a few questions, I got some unusual answers:

sometimes PC1 would be unable to get to the internet.
sometimes PC2 would be unable to get to the internet.
sometimes both PCs wouldn’t get to the internet.
and other times, their admin software (while reading data from the other PC over the network), would give network errors.
The schools (unfriendly) IT tech, said the ethernet port had failed, and installed a PCI ethernet card to get them going.

At first I though it might be a virus infection… but then I noticed they had a wireless modem router… When I ask about it, I’m told it was installed a few months ago (the previous modem had broken down)… but they didn’t know if the WiFi was active (they had no WiFi devices).

I’m then told their internet usage had skyrocketed over the last two months… and they have a caravan park next door… could that be the problem?

I think so.

The wireless was unsecured, so it wouldn’t have taken long for the word to spread amongst the caravan park…

I also mention that with the kind of file sharing they are using, they could find deleted files, corruption, etc.

It turns out they have had some unusual “missing documents” from the computers.

So I quickly enable WPA security, and do a spyware/virus scan.

The scan finds no infections. At least thats a relief.

With no more electronic “intruders” to worry about, everything seems to work smoothly. I even have some spare time to do some quick tuning and a defrag of the computers (with a big improvement in speed).