Computer Support
The fastest disaster recovery ever
Are you ready for a disaster? What happens if your server room is flooded or the whole building goes on fire. A good offsite backup can mean your company not crashing just because your server did. TekBusters have good offsite backups and now we have a great one.
We can offer a backup to suit your needs, from simple set it and forget it that backup a few important files regularly to ones that run nightly, weekly or twice a day to store your files in a secure offsite location.
A great backup though? We can now offer the best of both worlds, onsite and offsite backup. We place a backup server on your site that we back up everything to and it in turn backs it up to a secure offsite location. Deleted a large file by accident, it’s on your local backup server, no need to wait. Lost the office? Everything is in storage offsite and can be restored quickly.
What makes this one stand out it the image based backup. With images of your important servers, if they crash we can spin up an image in a virtual machine within minutes. Your whole server just exploded after some one spilled gasoline in it? We just spin up an image and you are back working in minutes like nothing ever happened. Except for that smell of burnt server of course.
If the whole office disappears then we can spin these virtual servers up online and you can work from the cloud. So you keep working while we get new hardware and get your server restored.
It’s not just recovering from disaster, it’s keeping working through it all with full access to your data. That’s the difference between a good backup and a great backup.
Posted in Computer News, Computer Support | 
Tags: backups, bare metal recovery, image backups, virtual server | 
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Google Calendar Sync Error 2147312566
Google calendar is very useful to sync your calendar from Outlook to the web to yout mobile device etc. The problem though it that sometimes it doesn’t work. Often you will see an error along the lines of
could not connect to microsoft outlook error -2147312566 (or error -2147319779 or error -214695355).
First check that you are using a supported operating system and version of Outlook and if so try this fix.
1. Close Outlook and exit Calendar Sync.
2. Click on Start – Run and type in regedit and hit enter.
3. Find the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and look for entries 9.3 or 9.4.
If either of these are there rename these keys to OLD-9.3 or OLD-9.4.
4. Restart Outlook and Calendar Sync and try again.
In once case I had to delete all keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
WARNING : Be careful editing the registry. If you make a mistake you may end up crashing your system and it may not boot. If in doubt please call TekBusters for computer support.
Getting found on Google
Now that you have a website, are people using it? SEO (Search Engine Optimizaton) is the process of making your website not only human friendly but search engine friendly. This is making sure that when a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, Bin, AltaVista) check your site and index it they know what it is. The next step is getting to the top of the results page.
So if you are a plumber in Surrey you have to ask yourself, does Google know this? Suppose you are the best realtor in White Rock, does Bing know. SEO is the process of making sure they do so that everyone else does.
A simple test, suppose John, newly arrived from Manitoba to Surrey buys a house and one of his pipes start leaking. He needs a plumber fast, so he types’ plumber in Surrey’ into Google. Who do you think he will call? Some one in the first page. Research tells us that most likely he will call one of the first three results. If you’re a plumber and your website comes up on page 17, your website is no good for you. Sorry, no one will call.
More and more people search on the internet for goods and services and if your business is not being found then customers are going elsewhere. If you think your website could work harder for you (or you have no website and would like a hardworking one to start with), give TekBusters a call and we can help
Posted in Computer News, Computer Support, SEO | Tags: Search Engine Optimizion, SEM, SEO | No Comments »
Updating to AVG 2011
The latest AVG is out now and if you’ve been using this anti virus software we do recommend you upgrade it to the newest version. As always it is very important to have the latest anti virus installed and to make sure that it has all it’s updates. New viruses appear daily and a good anti virus is very important.
If you’re not using AVG you can check it out with a free version for home users at http://free.avg.com
If you are using AVG already here’s a quick guide to the update (this is for the free version)
First open AVG and click on the Get it now button on the ad at the bottom of the screen. If you are using the free version, click on the get Update Free Protection. Download and run the update. Again you will need to choose to use the Free Version.
Accept the next two screens with license number and for Quick Install. This will run for a few minutes or more as it downloads updates and installs.
Next it will ask you if you want to install the AVG security toolbar and set Yahoo as your home page. At the moment we recommend unticking both of these boxes. You should keep your homepage at whatever you like (and we do hope it’s the TekBusters website) and the AVG security toolbar has had some issues with browsers slowing down the computer.
Then let is continue to install, accepting all the defaults. If you do get an error, just restart your computer and try again and it will work.
Just for geeks – JBOSS error
For the geeks out there playing with JBOSS application server. If you come across this error “The JBossAll Service on Local Computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they have no work to do, for example, the performance Logs and Alerts service.” then one thing to check is your Java (there are lots of other causes but this one is another to try).
What we had was JBOSS installed by a script and the JAVA_HOME environment variable pointed to Java 6u20. Since we had update 21 installed on this server then JBOSS would not start. So check not only that your environment variables (and PATH) are set, but that they point to a real directory.
Error syncing Google Calendar with Outlook
If you want to use Google Calendar sync with Outlook on Windows 7 (64 bit) you can get the error “Could not connect to Microsoft Outlook : error -2146959355″.
There are a few steps to fix this.
1. Repair Outlook. Click on Start, Run and type in appwiz.cpl and hit enter. In here find your Outlook (or Office) and up the top click change. In the install window that appears choose repair.
2. Repair your PST. To do this use Scanpst.exe that is installed with Outlook. With Outlook 2007 this is in Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office 12\.
3. Change a registry setting. Click on Start, Run and type regedit and hit enter. Find HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and rename the key 9.3 to 9.3.do.not.use. Close regeidt and try again.
WARNING : Do not edit anything else in the registry, changing the wrong thing can stop your computer running completly, so be careful.
After all these steps your Outlook calendar should now sync with your Google calendar.
Posted in Computer Support | Tags: 64 bit, Could not connect to Microsoft Outlook, error -2146959355, Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, sync, Windows 7 | No Comments »
Reducing TCO
Thanks to all those at Lou’s networking breakfast for listening this morning.
TCO is Total Cost of Ownership and includes the cost of buying a computer and software and also maintaining it. Getting TekBusters out to fix it, and loss of productivity while it’s down all adds up and this is what TCO is. So here are some things to do to minimise TCO.
1. Get a business PC. There is a difference between business and home PCs. Business PCs are better designed and better up to the job of being used 40 hours a week. Also they have less ‘extras’ installed to slow down your PC and cause problems. It does cost more initially but in the end will cause you less trouble and reduce TCO. Usually a business PC will come with a business operating system installed, so Windows 7 Pro or XP Pro, not Home.
2. Pick your software. When you buy a PC you can get with it OEM software. This is a special licence only available with a new PC and usually about half the price of a regular license. The drawback is if you replace your PC you cannot transfer the software. If though you expect your PC to last 3 years then you can move to the newer version of the software anyway.
Also there is a lot of free software out there, I’ve listed some of them in this blog, click here to see.
3. Keep away viruses. You have to have anti virus. There is no way around it and no excuse since there are so many freely available (check the free software link above) and now Microsoft have released on called Microsoft Security Essentials as well. It’s not a bad idea to occasionally do an extra scan for malware and we recommend Malware Bytes for this.
4. Maintenance. Once every 1 – 2 months you should defragment your hard drive. Again I’ve posted about this before, so click here to see how. Also cleaning off the vents on your computer when they get dusty is necessary. Cans of compressed air are available at most electronics stores.
5. Remember to backup. I’ve discussed this here.
6. Picking the right printer can be important if you print a lot. Laser can save you a lot of money. Click here for more information.
Windows 7 compability mode
One of the nice features of Windows 7 is that it allows us to install in compability mode. While we wait for all the manufacutrers to update their software and drivers to work with Windows 7 we can still install the older drivers once we tell Windows what version the software is. I recently was installing a HP 2025x printer but when I ran the CD I got some strange error messages. “This program cannot be run using the Run As command”. I had to log in as administrator to run this. Which would be fine but I was logged in as administrator. It turns out the software does not have a Windows 7 64 bit version available. So I checked HPs website for the latest software (always try to get the correct version) and since there was none I installed it by telling my computer this was a Vista install. Just right click on your install file and choose Properties. Then in 
the Compability tab choose the version you need. In this case I used Visat Service Pack 2 and it installed (and works) just fine.
Cleaning your computer
At TekBusters we clean a lot of computers. Ones that started off nice and shiny and fast and are now going slower and slower. As well as removing malware and blowing out the case we also delete old files and run a disk defragment (see here for how to defragment a hard drive).
Sometimes though even after we delete temporary files the disk defragment wont run as there is not enough free disk space, well it will run but miss a lot of files. Disk defragmenter needs at least 15% free space to run properly. To free up space on XP you might consider disabling System Restore.
System Restore remembers changes you made to your computer so you can restore it to an earlier known good point. This is useful if you install some software that crashes your system. You can then restore your computer to how it was before you installed the dodgy software.
So is this safe? Yes, if your PC is running well. Once you have your updates installed and cleaned out temporary files, ran virus scans etc then reboot. Make sure your PC is running well. Now you can disable System Restore and run defragment. After the defragment you can enable system restore again (though you could use the option to use less space). Since you have checked that your PC is good up to this point, now when you restore it will go back to how it is now.
To access System Restore in XP click on Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> System Restore
Posted in Computer Support | Tags: defragment, not enough space to run a defrag, system restore | No Comments »
Malwarebytes will not update
- Open your internet settings (in IE this is under Tools – Options, or use Control Panel – Internet Options).
- Under the Connections tab, click on LAN Settings.
- Untick the Proxy Server boxes and click on OK.