Well another new Firefox release and this one is supposed to be good. I have not done any beta testing with the new Firefox as it tends to be hard to regress to an older version so today I just installed the newly released Firefox 3.5.

I like the new Firefox so far except for one crappy niggly problem with any new release and that is that most of my Firefox extensions, also known as Firefox Add-ons are not working. There is a fix though and it is the same with the older versions as well.

To reset the compatibility for Firefox Extensions go to the address bar and type about:config and hit enter.

Now that you are in the configuration portion of Firefox just right click anywhere in the first comumn and select new–>Boolean

the boolean has to be called extensions.checkCompatibility and when you hit enter it will ask you if you want this to be set to True or False, choose False.

Now after a restart all of your extensions should work fine and be active.

Let me know what you are finding. Do you like the new Firefox 3.5?

Well I am slowly upgrading all of my sites to Wordpress 2.8 and damn it seems good. One big site that I have was having trouble though. I was getting 500 internal server error after doing an upgrade on a rather large blog and this is what I now do to troubleshoot all Wordpress errors.

1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to plugins2 this will disable all plugins since the system will not find them

2. If this works and my blog works (It was kinda better but still slow and partially broke) then you can copy that folder to a drive on your machine and then delete all the plugins in that plugins2 folder, delete all the plugins, rename the folder back to plugins, and then add one at a time and see if everything is good. This can help you troubleshoot a bad or memory intensive plugin.

3. Inm my case I found that the blog was still sluggish so I used that hack for getting PHP 5 to work on 1 and 1 internet. I added AddType x-mapp-php5 .php as a line in my .htaccess and this fixed the 500 internal server errors. Read the rest of this entry »

I was using a new plugin today with one of my Wordpress blogs and it seems I am running PHP4 and the plugin needed PHP5. What to do?

Well in looking at the help stuff for my web host 1 and 1 internet I found that I just needed to add a line to my .htaccess file for the blog.

I added the following line to the top of the .htaccess file nad everything worked perfectly:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

It seems that the default PHP version at 1and1  internet is version 4 but just by adding the above line the default for that folder/domain will then become PHP5

This tip requires a change to the Windows Registry. Please see the MSFN Guide “Backup Your Registry” if you are new to the Windows Registry.

Windows Media Player (WMP) is a built-in application that allows you to play multimedia files. Like many other applications, WMP remembers the most recently played files and displays them in the Recent File List under the File menu. This feature is useful if you regularly play certain files, but you may want to clear the list if you share the computer and a user account or create archives and CDs.

There are two ways you can clear the list:

I. The ClearMRU.exe Utility is available for free in the Windows Media Player Bonus Pack from Microsoft, but Microsoft does not support this tool.

II. You can also manually delete the list through the Windows Registry:

1. Start the Windows Registry Editor, regedit.exe, by typing regedit in the Windows Run Command Line.

2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftMediaPlayerPlayerRecentFileList.

3. Delete the RecentFileList subkey.

4. If you’ve also streamed content from the Internet, you can delete the RecentURLList subkey.

5. Exit the Registry Editor.

6. Restart the computer.

To keep certain files in the list, don’t delete the entire key. Deleting individual entries within the key will get rid of the files that you no longer want in the Recent File List.

I just caught onto a race that is really interesting. As you may know, or not, I am on Twitter and just love the interactivity that is possible in the whole medium of Microblogging.

A few months ago there was a story that Lance Armstrong may have 1 million Twitter followers by the beginning of the Tour de France and although that may in fact be possible it seems that there is a better race.

The race to a million followers is between CNN (with an account that CNN does not even own), Ashton Kutcher, and Britney Spears. You know full well that when you have to celebrities and a news network in a race for a million of anything that Microblogging, Twitter, and mobile tech have really hit the mainstream.

Ashton Kutcher is saying that if he hits a million Twitter followers first than he will donate 10,000 beds to help combat malaria in 3rd world countries and EA games say they will put the 1 millionth follower of Ashton Kutchers into a video game. The helping the world thing is a great reason to follow Ashton, as well as the fact that he tends to have interesting tweets (which should be the most importnt thing).

With only 1300+ followers I am very behind all three of them.

Over the years I have reinstalled Windows on many machines and when I have I have had trouble the most with drivers for two components more than any other, Video cards and sound cards.

If you have a chance to see the drivers on a Windows XP machine before you reload Windows it is always a good idea to make sure that you right click on the “My Computer” go to manage and to device manager and take a look and probably write down each of those components. This way if Windows can not find the component when you reload Windows at least you can go and try to find it yourself.

If you are stuck now though and have a computer with a build in Sound cards and you would like to try to find a sound card driver than you can do what I tried successfully tonight, download an AC97 sound card driver and try that. If you can find the driver than it is just a case of running the install or setup.exe file and then after you are done you can reboot the computer and you will hopefully have sound again.

If this does not work then one of the things that you can do is to do a Google search for the computer model that you have and add sound driver to the query or you can actually open up the case and see if there is any reference to the motherboards or, if you have a sound card that is plugged into a slot look for the type of card that it is.

Windows XP will pass another milestone on the road to retirement next week when Microsoft withdraws mainstream support for the operating system..

While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay for additional support.

Mainstream support for XP will end on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the operating system originally shipped.

However, the passing of the deadline will place Microsoft in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP accounts for about 63 per cent of all internet connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 per cent. Read the rest of this entry »

There is one constant with computers. They Crash. I support lots of computers and can tell you that one thing that is very very important is doing backups in one way or another for your computer and data. There are two kinds of software that you can look at for your backups. Software that will backup files and folders.  and software that will create a disk image of your computer.

Backing up files and folders
There are several pices of software that will backup the files on your computer. Windows has backup software and there are many others including the one that I use which is called Sync Back. The most important thing when using software like this is to know what you want to backup. Ususally what you want is your desktop and profile and your My Documents folder. If you have lots of digital pictues then you will want to make sure that the location that your pictures are in is definitly being backed up.

Imaging your computer
Imaging your computer is a process where you backup your computer completly to another hard drive or disk (usually a hard drive nowadays). The software that is used for this is either Ghost or Acronis True Image although I am sure there are many more. The best way to do a disk image is that after you clean out your recycle bin and clean out your temporary internet files is that you run the software. Both software will ask you what drives you want to backup and where you want the data, it is nice here to have a portable hard drive so that you can put the disk image on something that you can keep away from the computer in a safe place. After you have done the backup you can usually shoose individual files to restore or restore everthing and replace what is on your drive (especially good if your drive crashes). Read the rest of this entry »

I am always excited about a new release of Firefox. I love Firefox for the fast rendering of pages and especially for the extensions that I use Firefox for. Extensions or “Add-Ons” as the Firefox guys call them add a lot of power to the app and lets you get things done very quickly or give you info that would be cumbersome to get if you tried to look for it.

Download the Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 here to try it out.

The new version that is coming that this is a beta of has a new javascript rendering engine. If you are not aware of javascript it is one of the basics that makes web 2.0 fast and javascript is a set of instructions that runs on your computer. The new rendering engine is making Firefox twice as fast as far as I can tell in bringing me info from the web.

One of the problems with any beta of Firefox is that none or almost none of your existing extensions work after the upgrade. There is a fix for this. To get Firefox add ons to work just follow the next few steps.

1. Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
2. Right-click on the Firefox window. Select New > Boolean.
3. When asked to enter the preference name, type extensions.checkCompatibility and click OK.
4. Make sure false is selected/highlighted and click OK.

Now when you restart Firefox everything will be enabled but please remember that if the upgrade broke any of the extensions then they may not work. I have not run into this in the past but it does happen and you will need to wait for the writer of the extension to update it so that it will work again.

Investigators who track Internet crime say scam artists are taking full advantage of this economy, targeting both businesses and individuals more intensely than ever. If you think you’ve seen everything, guess again; there are some new ways these scammers are trying to rip you off. 

Usually we hear about an increase in scams after a tragedy like wildfires, earthquakes and floods. But this time the tragedy is our economy, and scammers are definitely trying to take advantage of you and everybody else.

The downturn in the economy is causing an upswing in scams.

The FBI recieves 22 thousand reports a month of computer scams.

In this recession, the FBI says the bad guys have graduated from e-mails to sending text messages via cell phones.

“You get a text message, they can have the same things that e-mails have on them,” said Pavelites. “They can have a virus on them, they can have malware on them that somehow get information off your cell phone on them, and some people can now use their cell phone to do banking.”

And these days, those most in need are the biggest target.

“We see mortgage fraud and debt elimination schemes, work at home schemes says the FBI.

So what can you do? Experts suggest you treat each e-mail, text message and phone call with caution. Call the bank or business yourself before giving out any personal info and use the number you have on file, not the number on Caller ID.

Only read text messages and e-mails you expect to receive, especially if there’s an attachment.

“In most places, you lock the door behind you when you come in,” said Pavelites. “Do the same with places on the Internet. Update your virus ware, spam filters; update your spyware. If in doubt, don’t click.”

Another scam deals with recurring charges on your bank account. The fraudsters, once they have access, may steal amounts you’re used to seeing withdrawn for annual fees, only they’ll withdraw the money more than once.