What's in a browser?

We as a household (as most people) switched to Google Chrome as web browser of choice a long time ago and in general it has worked like a charm (agreed they track every single click). It has worked even on websites where Internet Explorer and Firefox failed. 

Doing work from home and having daughter's school also virtual brings its own set of issues and concerns for ex: the other day Google Fiber went down for the whole day. For me I could always go to office (that's what I did) but for Avni it was not the best day :). A week later the portal through which she logs into for her school work went down. AISD did acknowledge that the portal was down but the classes run on ZOOM meetings (independent of AISD portal) and the teachers were starting those as usual.  

Between the 3 of us we have enough varieties of OS's (Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and IOS) and we went through testing the portal access with all the machines serially only to find the portal was not accessible. Barring the old iPad on all other devices we were accessing through Google Chrome. Thanks to Sandhya, we managed to get ZOOM meeting links for the classes and I went to the office room to start my work. 

For reasons I can't remember I have not installed Chrome on office machines and use Microsoft Edge and Bing. Out of curiosity I tried to log into the portal on my office laptop and voila it worked. Going back to other windows PC, the portal worked on Internet Explorer and same with Safari on Mac OS. At that point the access was denied on Chrome. 

Moral of the story, keep backup browsers and try with them if one browser gives access denied :).  

ps: I can almost hear someone screaming, why don't you have Linux  

Kids and hi-tech gadgets

We usually let our daughter play around with some of the hi-tech gadgets at home (TV, computer, Iphone, Ipod and so on) but do it under fairly close supervision. The reason is 2 fold, on 1 hand if she can break the system then it is not worth to be around her and on the other if at all there are a few things she manages to change and make it unusable there is always Dr. Google to help us bring things back to shape.

Surprisingly, there is a 3rd reason too. Thanks to her and her out of the box thinking, I have learnt a new thing or 2. For ex: I was not aware that my Samsung TV had something called “Store Demo” mode which can be turned on by clicking a few buttons in the front of the TV. In this mode the TV over rides any display settings you have and shows pictures in high brightness with 100% contrast, of course can’t watch for too long in that mode and since I am not that as savvy with the buttons as her I had to use the graphical UI to debug the problem. On the other occasion after she had played around with my computer keyboard, all it was doing was to print special characters and upper case letters only, this time around the fix was to ask Dr. Google and solution was to hold both “shift” keys simultaneously for a few seconds. My favorite is when she showed us that Windows 7 allows for screen to be oriented in 4 different ways (landscape, portrait, straight and reverse) and that the DELL laptops have a keyboard shortcut to achieve the same (CTRL+ALT+ Arrow key). 

The one equipment/gadget I am scared to let her play around is the IPhone, for its easy to use interface is so easy that she has accidentally deleted couple of pics and videos recorded on the phone. Of course that hasn’t stopped me from letting her play with it, I am more careful with her around. There is another side effect of letting her play with the Iphone, she thinks any screen of that size (like the camera) is touch sensitive and she can can go to the next pic or video by just moving her fingers across the screen.

I don’t know how long we can let her play for she is getting bigger and stronger and now getting in the mode of learning to throw things.    

Another PC problem/solution

When we moved to a new apartment the physical location of the router and desktop at home essentially prevented any form of wired communication between them. So, I went and bought a Linksys PCI wireless adapter and plugged it to the desktop. At that time I had a Linksys router and both the adapter and the router played well with each other.

Eventually the Linksys router went kaput and I replaced it with a Trendnet router (for it was the cheaper option). The PC had some trouble adjusting to the different router but the problem was not too too bad. Over time the problem became bad and sometimes so bad that it was a chance if the net was working more than an hour without dropping the connection. I tried all the tricks in the book, like using Windows zero configuration instead of Linksys network manager, adjusting the antenna, dropping the wireless mode to b/g instead of b/g/n and so on, but all yielded limited results.

After struggling with the problem for a while and searching between forums I found the solution. The trend net router allows multiple (11 to be precise) channels to communicate and default setting was to use ‘Auto Channel” select, the solution was to pick channel 1 or 11 and I went with 1. For the last 3 to 4 days I haven’t had a dropped connection and all is finally back to well. But since I have restricted to 1 channel for transmitting from the router I can see my signal strength varying over time (instead of 5 bars, I now get 4 or 3 bars some times). The variation hasn’t caused any disruption to my experience of surfing the net.

The theory behind is that the dropping of the connection is happening due to interference from neighboring routers and solutions were to reduce the frequency of transmission (which is apparently possible with other routers) or use the channel that gives maximum isolation (1 or 6 or 11 in Trendnet). Come to think of it, the problem became worse when my neighbors changed and couple of Indian techies moved next door.

Of course the router has its own problem, once every 3 weeks or once a month I need to disable and enable wireless mode. I don’t know why that is the case but the problem is livable and  I haven’t tried debugging.    

It’s not always Microsoft’s fault

Just when I thought that my ordeal of dealing with HD videos is over, I came across the crashing of software problem when working with larger video files (~800MB). I noticed that working with HD videos, both the cores of my system gets pegged to 100% and running at this rate for a few minutes either crashed my system completely or killed the software running. The typical Microsoft response was to check the last installed driver and blah and blah all led to dead ends with no solution in sight.

Out of curiosity. I ran a CPU stress test and started monitoring the temperature of the cores. Sure enough with both cores running at 100%, the core temperatures rose up to 93C and couple of minutes running at that temperature the stress test started giving errors. I used the compressed air cleaner and that cleaned out some of the dust but the temperature did not come down much (came down to 87C). Running at reduced temperature got me a couple of minutes with the videos but not enough to complete the job in hand.

As a last resort, I opened the system up and used an air blower (electric, not the manual one) to blow air over the CPU heat sink and fan. Sure enough a ton of dust came up and longer I blew air more dust came out. After a few minutes of this process and when I was convinced that I have cleaned up as much as I can, I plugged the system back in ran the same stress tests and monitor the temperature. The max temperature had come down to 60C with both cores pegged at 100% for more than 30minutes and I could edit and work the large video files without any problems.

At the beginning of the July 4th weekend I was convinced that the system I have is not good enough to work with HD videos and by the end of the weekend, thanks to my air blower, I am fairly happy with my system. I could have taken my system to one of those places to do a power cleaning but I think the electric air blower is a much cheaper and better option.

It’s not always Microsoft’s fault, some times it is the dust. Although I hold them responsible for not providing better debug tools with their OS.

In this process I found out couple of new things. Since the Klite codecs had been uninstalled, PICASA3 can play AVHCD videos and it can export videos to .wmv files (played by windows media player) without any loss in quality of the video.     

The day Chrome froze

For the last few months I have migrated over to Google Chrome to be my default web browser. It was all working fine till one day last week, chrome refused to load any website. As a typical user of Windows system, I uninstalled chrome and reinstalled the same, sadly that step did not help (of course I repeated this step multiple times hoping it will work at some point). Around the same time I noticed that the other browsers like Firefox and IE had started to work with diminished capacity. When I say diminished capacity I mean, I do a google search and click on the results I would be redirected to a malware website and pop ups come up every now and then.  

It didn't take a genius to figure out that the system has been infected by a malware or some such virus. So, I un-installed the AVG free antivirus (which I had been hoping will save me money) and installed the Norton Internet Security 2010. After doing a complete system scan with Norton I was surprised to see that  no virus was found. Next step I ran the Malwarebytes to detect any malware infections, still no luck. One good thing that came out of installing Norton was that the other browsers started to work better (read less redirection to malware and less popup) but Chrome still did not budge. 

After doing some Google search I found that the registry settings may have been modified by a virus or a malware and websites suggested registry fix options and alternate browsers. I tried a couple of free registry fix softwares and that didn't fix the problem either. 


As a last resort I booted the system with windows installer CD and asked it to repair the system. It took a whole hour and a few reboots and a ton of Microsoft updates later chrome started to work fine and firefox was back up too but another problem showed up and IE refused to load. 

Last step was to make IE work and for this I had to uninstall the previous installations of IE using the alternative steps described and then download and do a fresh installation of IE8. After all this IE started to work but with disclaimer "IE is running with add-ons disabled". Again after consulting    Dr. Google, I had to install and un-install Google toolbar and again re-install the same to get rid of  the disclaimer.    

The post looks like an ad for Norton or scare people away from windows towards Mac or Linux but that is not my intent. My intent is to say that registry fix softwares alone might not fix all the problems. There probably was an easy way like system restore to an earlier date but I was concerned that the restore may screw up my installations of Norton and other softwares.