It seems that more often than not, we encounter ourselves with internet connection problems, computers that can’t see each other on the local network and problems that appear suddenly after everything was working well.

There is an easy way to try something before checking something else or calling for help.

This is called Power Cycling and can help you with your internet connection, booting problems and local network issues. It consists of turning off/on your equipment exactly in order. Follow this steps to do a complete Power Cycle:

• Turn your computer(s) off. It is important to unplug the power cords. If you have a laptop, unplug it and remove the battery for a few seconds.
• Turn off your router(s) and/or internet modem. Unplug the power cords, it is important.
• After you have all your equipment turned off, wait from 30 to 60 seconds for any residual power to drain from your devices.
• Now you have to turn on, in order, all your devices. Turn the internet modem on and wait for all its status lights to show that a connection has been established successfully. Turn the router on and wait about 30 seconds for it to initialize properly. Then turn on your computer(s).

Now you should be able to connect to the internet or see other computers on the network. Do this everytime you experience slow speeds, intermittent signal on the wireless network and local network computers can’t see each other after they were fine.

If this does not solve your problem, you will have to contact tech support or call someone to help you out.

I wasn’t aware that Microsoft didn’t include the Telnet client by default on all Vista installations until i needed to test some things with my new router and the open source firmware i choose to install on it.

So, to enable the client you just need to follow this easy steps:

1. Go to Control Panel - Programs
2. Under Program and Features click Turn Windows features on or off
3. Thick the checkbox Telnet Client
4. Click OK and wait for the installation to finish

I was reading the other day a blog entry from the developer of Xplorer2 and i remebered that i suffered the same problem when i was traveling some time ago.

The problem is that some times, one can’t send email when outside the region of our own ISP. I don’t remember where i was but i could’t send any email. I returned home frustated after that and i forget the problem until recently when it happened to me again.

The solution is to change the port for the Outgoing email server. The default in all email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Eudora is 25. Chage it to port 587 and give it a try. I was able to send email this way without any problems using Outlook 2007.

Read the article here.

Yesterday i was trying to send a compressed file to a cousin via e-mail. He told that he never got anything on his mailbox. He was using Hotmail and i sent the file using my ISP’s account in Outlook 2007.

After several tries, nothing happened: I didn’t receive any errors on my side and he didn’t got the file.

I tried to re-send it but this time i add my GMail account to the recipients.

I got this error from GMail: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment so i knew GMail blocked the mail because of the attachment.

The problem is that i don’t know if my ISP or Hotmail were blocking the other tries.

I will try to contact my ISP to see if they are blocking because i didn’t receive any error from the mail server.

The compressed file i was trying to send contained a little .exe program along with other text files.

This a new way of blocking, so if you ever need to send an executable file using Gmail or other ISP’s, you will need to change the extension of the .exe files in order to bypass this, even if you compressed them.

Since I began using Wordpress in my site, I was very annoyed when using Code Tags formatting in my posts because sometimes I copy and paste text to the Wordpress visual editor and it always makes a mess with the formatting.

I had to write all the text I wanted to post instead of just pasting it. But now i found a great little program called Wordpress Code Marker-Upper in this site.

You just paste the code you want to post and it does the formatting and copies the code back to the clipboard. Now you can paste the code in Wordpress and it works great. What a time saver.

I hope Wordpress developers get this right in the next versions because it really is annoying.

As many of you know, the 2.0 and 3.0 versions are installed as OS components on Windows Vista and do not appear in the Programs and Features (formerly known as Add/Remove Programs) control panel.

If you run into problems using .NET Framework applications on Windows Vista, and you suspect that files or registry entries that are a part of the .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0 are corrupt, you can use the instructions listed below to attempt to repair them.

Repairing .NET Framework 2.0/3.0 files on Windows Vista

1. Click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Accessories, then right-click on the Command Prompt item and select Run as administrator
2. Click Continue to authorize opening a command prompt with administrative privileges
3. Run this command in the cmd prompt: sfc /scannow
4. The cmd prompt should list text stating “Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.”
5. Wait for the scan to complete (this can take several minutes so be patient)
6. When the scan completes, the SFC tool will indicate whether or not it found any integrity violations and offer you the chance to fix any that are found

Unfortunately, there is not an easy way of repairing the registry keys/values that are installed by Windows Vista like there is for files. If you want to try to repair the registry keys/values that are a part of the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0, you will need to run Windows Vista OS setup again and repair the OS.

Source: Aaron Stebner’s WebLog

Since the introduction of ICHR8 Intel made some core improvements to the new AHCI interface for SATA devices.

If you don’t know what AHCI is, it provides better power managements features, hot-plug functionality and other enhancements to SATA devides such as hard drives and optical drives. Even some sites claim that AHCI provides more performance over standard controllers.

Intel has more information about AHCI.

If your BIOS supports it, you can turn on AHCI mode, but if you are currently running windows you can get into trouble and your current installation won’t boot.

So, if you want to turn on AHCI mode, you first need to enable the AHCI driver in Windows Vista before changing it in the BIOS. Read how to enable it here.

Basically, you just need to change a registry key in order to avoid a BSOD with the message STOP 0×0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE when enabling AHCI.

I will enable it as soon as i get another HDD to use a RAID 0 for Vista.

If you use the Quick Launch bar for storing your most frequent programs, you can have large icons displayed instead of the smaller ones that it have by default.

To make it possible just follow this easy instructions:

• Unlock the taskbar by right-clicking on it and unchecking Lock the Taskbar.
• Go to an empty space in the taskbar and right-click on it to select View - Show Large Icons.
• Lock the taskbar by right-clicking on it and checking Lock the Taskbar.

Now it will show 32×32 pixels icons instead of the default size, which is 16×16.

This is an easy tip, but many people doesn’t know this already.