It is extremely ironic that in the midst of a political hysteria over "securing our borders" it turns out that United States intelligence "demanded" that Telstra provide them access to private data of Australian citizens. 

http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/security-it/telstra-storing-data-on-behalf-of-us-government-20130712-hv0w4.html

Was the Australian public informed? Will those that betrayed the right to privacy of Australian citizens be brought to account? 
Of course not. 


I think, at the very least, Telstra share holders need to be informed whether they are contributing to the violation of Australian citizen's privacy. 

Cypherpunks unite. 

The IT industry is evolving with the rapid changes in technology these days. With this evolution come transformations to careers in IT. IT professionals need to move with these changes or they will fall behind.

Let’s have a look at some key roles for IT professionals in the future.

1: IT Consultants

Aside from large corporations that can afford to have IT professionals on staff, most businesses will outsource IT work to external consultants. These companies will thus get IT services on an as needed basis. This helps cut down costs as the company only has to pay IT staff when they need them. Companies can thus afford to pay for experts who they could not afford to be on a regular payroll. The company still received 24/7 support from their IT consultants.

2. Project Managers

In the future, a large number of permanent IT staff will work in the role of project manager. . These individuals spread out throughout different departments and provide guidance on projects. Their main role is to work as business advisers to help managers make the right technological decisions. Part of their job will be to keep on the lookout for new technologies that can help the business. These people also act as a liaison between the company, technology suppliers and external IT consultants.

3. IT Developers

The largest number of IT professionals will be employed as software developers.  . Although IT support used to focus on deploying and maintaining hardware and software, the future of IT is in web-based applications that that are largely user-friendly and maintained by the client. The role of the IT professional is thus largely moving away from computer repairs and deployment to the creation of web-based applications and utilities. More and more companies are demanding the services of largely web-based application development. 

We assumed that a job to add two Apple Macs to an existing PC network would be easy. It turns out we were wrong. This turned out to be one of our most challenging computer jobs to date. To save others experiencing the same pain I thought I would share some of our experiences. 

I will start with some background. Prior to adding the Macs we had a stable network of three PCs. We had set these machines up over two years ago. Since setup the network had never had any significant issues. A good router was installed and the server computer was properly specced for the task. The PCs were running Windows 7 and the Mac’s were running Max OSX 10.6.8 Lion. 

The addition of the Macs to the network did have any immediately noticeable effect on the PCs. However when the Macs attempted to use to the PCs file sharing we could see file access was slow, and rewrite operations often failed. After about two days the client showed us a message stating: 
“There was an error connecting to the server "Server". Check the server name or IP address, and then try again. If you are unable to resolve the problem contact your system administrator”.

We immediately ruled out the possibility of infrastructure problems because Internet remained up during all of these problems. Further the Internet proved to be fast. On investigating we saw that the drive had been formatted to NTFS despite the fact that we request it to be formatted in FAT. We backed up the clients data and then reformatted the drive. This fixed problem of intermittent read write errors but introduced a new set of problems.

The Macs would regularly get bumped off the PCs, and when viewing files they would often show for a second, then disappear, and then reappear almost two minutes later. To cap it all off the problems were intermittent. At this point we decided to further investigate the server.  An inspection of the event viewer revealed a “The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.” Error 2017”.

Fortunately we found Alan LaMielle’s fix. This pointed us to the fact that SMB problems were regular and caused by a restriction Microsoft placed in Windows  7 to encourage people to buy a server operating system. Two registry changes recommended by Alan and we thought we had the problem fixed.

First, set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache to ‘1’.

Second, set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size to ’3′.

Unfortunately the network was really slow and the intermittent disconnections persisted.  We returned to looking at the Macs.  Research revealed they we needed to adjust the network configuration of the Macs. We typed into terminal

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

This is supposed to change the way the packets are sent around the network. There are four settings (from http://www.small-tree.com/kb_results.asp?id=1):

delayed_ack=0 responds after every packet (OFF)
delayed_ack=1 always employs delayed ack, 6 packets can get 1 ack
delayed_ack=2 immediate ack after 2nd packet, 2 packets per ack  (Compatibility Mode)
delayed_ack=3 should auto detect when to employ delayed ack, 4 packets per ack.  (DEFAULT)

We executed this command and restarted the Macs. The connection sped up but the unreliability remained. Further research advised that we should enable Internet Connection Sharing. We did this and there was no change at all. Further researches recommended disabling IPv6. This improved the stability of the connection but the network connections still dropped every three days. When they dropped out the only solution was to restart the server.

We decided to reinvestigate the server. Further research revealed we needed to disable SMB2 in the server. To do this we changed the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\SMB2\ was set to a dword value of 00000000.

Network performance was still considered slow but the network was now reliable. To speed up the network we have now configured the server service on the Windows 7 server to restart at the start of every day. Not an optimum solution but it works well. We notice that approximately every 24 hours there is an error 2019 recorded in the event viewer. This error is caused by a memory leak. I am not sure why all these changes would cause a memory leak but it all seems to be working well now so we are leaving what works alone. When the system has proved to be completely stable I will probably take Robert Pearman's advice and use Polmon to see what is causing the memory leak.

Sometimes computer repairs are only solved by a mixture of persistence and pragmatism as was the case in this example. 

Today we are going to be talking about data recovery and hardrive repair. First, lets go through some techniques for data recovery from a non-damaged drive. The quickest technique for data recovery from a non-damaged drive is to clone your old disk to your new disk. This will often be done is you are upgrading the size of your hard drive. For example, if you are moving up from a 320GB Hard Disk Drive to a 1TB Hard Disk Drive you can clone your old drive to your new drive and still have approx 680GB space left over. 

To clone a drive you use special cloning software (that we have hehe) to clone your drive. You set your old drive as the source and the new drive as the destination. Assuming neither of your hard drives are damaged, your clone will most likely be successful. 

If you have a damaged hard drive there are a few techniques that are used to get get your data back. First, we can attempt a clone from the damaged drive. Even though you might not be able to access your files in your operating system (such as Windows) often drives with minor damage can still be clones and your files will be accessible on your new drive. If the clone fails, you should try cloning with numerous cloning programs to see if one does the trick. If no cloning program is working it is time to use a pre-installation environment to try a manual drag and drop copy from your damaged drive to the new drive. Often the problem with your old drive will be contained to a small number of directories, allowing for most of your data to be recovered. Sometimes, however, all directories will be corrupted or the hard disk will not be readable even in a pre-installation environment. 

IF this is the case, you require physical hard drive repair. This is a highly expensive procedure that requires specialist equipment and generally costs thousands of dollars. There is no guarantee that you will get your files back in this case and we do not recommend this for home users. 

Moral of the story is remember to back up your important files. Nerd out!!!!!!!!!!

Perhaps you have heard from your computer repair technician that the internet is running out of addresses. What does this mean for you here in Sydney? Well, what is happening is that there are a limited number (4.29 billion) of possible IPv4 addresses that can be allocated to networks residing on the internet. IP addresses work in the internet the same way your postal address works for your house. The IP address of your computer is how other computers on the internet locate it and send their data to. A new protocol IPv6 has been developed that allows for many more addresses. 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in fact. IPv6 will also simply the process of address assignment and includes additional network features.

IPv4 is short for Internet Protocol version 4. When you connect a computer to the internet it is assigned a unique IP address. Because there are a limited number of IP addresses, Network Address Translation (NAT) allows a distinction between a private IP address and a public IP address. All your computers on your network are identified by the same public IP address. NAT, which is built into your router, then directs the packet it has received to the appropriate computer on the network.

As there are so many IPv6 addresses available, this eliminates the need for a private vs public IP distinction. IPv6 performs the same function that ipv4 does. However, IPv6 uses a 128 bit address, while IPv4 uses 32 bit addressing system. An IPv6 address is so large in decimal or binary that it is displayed in hexadecimal notation.IPv4 and IPv6 run as parallel networks. Special gateways and protocols are needed for the two technologies to communicate to each other.

The next section probably won’t mean much to you unless you have some networking experience.IPv6 creates addresses that are equivalent to IPv4 address types and other types of addresses that are unique to IPv6. A node can possess multiple IPv6 addresses, each of which has its own unique function. The IPv6 address space allows for multiple levels of subnets and address allocation between the Internet and individual subnets within LANs and local intranets. The increased address space available lets us to allocate not

one but several unique IPv6 addresses to a network entity, with each address being used for

a different purpose.

The IPv6 128-bit address is separated at 16-bit boundaries, and each 16-bit section is converted

to a 4-digit hexadecimal number.

Global unicast IPv6 addresses are the IPv6 equivalent to IPv4 public unicast addresses. To demonstrate

IPv6 address syntax, lets look at the following IPv6 global unicast address:

24f1:0035:0000:0000:03ad:003f:af37:8d62

IPv6 addresses can be simplified by removing the leading zeros within each 16-bit

block. However, each block must have at least a single digit so you will always have at least a 0 in each block. .

The address representation now becomes:

24fa:35:0:0:3ad:3f:af37:8d62

 

Luckily for us, the transistion to IPv6 is going well and modern routers and operating sytems etc. all support IPv6. These technologies also make use of special translation software to enable communication between IPv4 and IPv6. So in answer to how IPv6 affects computer repair in Sydney. Not much at all. 

 Nerd out. 

A stitch in time saves nine. In the past we have talked about how to keep your computer running fast and keep your harddrive clean. Today we are going to talk about how to keep your computer physically clean. Like with many of our previous posts this will save you future computer repair work so try to keep on top of it. We will talk about how to keep your external and internal computer clean. 

Computer Screens

Computer screens will get dirty over time from a build of general dirt in the air. Also, every time you sneeze, take care not to aim at your screen. Computer screens also show up fingerprints as well so take care not to put your fingers on the screen. Whether you have an old-school CRT or an LCD screen the way to clean it is the same. You want to wipe the screen with a soft cloth. If you need to, dampen the cloth slightly but not too much. Make sure no excess liquid leaks down the screen as this can damage its functioning if it leaks into electronics. Electronics + water = computer repair here we come. 

Why is my computer running slow? Do you know why? This is a question that gets asked very frequently. There could be a lot of reasons.

1.       It could be that you have a lot of stuff that in not just installed but running at the same time. If you have dozens of programs running this will slow down your computer. So the first step is to make sure you don’t have too many programs running at once. On Windows 7 computers press Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open Task Manager. Look at the Applications tab and close down any Applications you are not using.

2.       There can be numerous background processes that you are not using, or do not need, that can be slowing down your computer. open Task Manager and look at the processes tab. A bit of operating system knowledge and critical thinking will let you know what processes are safe to end. A general rule of thumb is do not stop processes that are labelled as a Windows process as these are crucial to the functioning on the operating system.

3.       Turn off unwanted services and startup items in MSConfig. Search for “msconfig” in your start bar search and press Enter. You might find services you don’t need are running in the background. A useful tip is to look for services from companies that you don’t want running. For example, you might not want some services from your computer manufacturer that you don’t need. In MSConfig you can also see which programs automatically star tup when your computer boots into windows. Generally you will want as few start up programs as possible to increase the Windows load speed.

4.       You can use programs such as CCleaner to clean up your computer. CCleaner combines numerous Windows functions and a few more of its own to give your computer a good clean.

5.       Upgrade your computer with new hardware and software. If you are running a 10 year old PC, it might be time to upgrade.

6.       Format the hard drive. Formatting gets rid of all your data so make sure you have backed up any files you need to a hard-disk or a network backup. If you haven’t formatted in a few years, it’s probably time.  

With the advent of wireless networking and cloud computing more people are using computers in makeshift environments at home and at work. Many of these adhoc workstations have not given much thought to the way frequent use of the computer can impact our body. Given the amount of time people are spending in front of computers it is important to consider are you using your computer in a healthy way. In this article we try to help you think about how to carry out your daily tasks without doing unnecessary damage to your body. 

Note: we are not doctors and our advice is general so please check with a registered doctor before following any of this advice. 

Many different parts of the body are affected by our use of the computer. Some of the parts of body affected include our:

- Eyes and the computer monitor / screen we use and the lighting choices we make.

- Ears and amount of noise our computer generates or general background noise.

- Hands and wrists which can easily become strained due to poor choice of computer, keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, and laptop touch pad.

- Back and shoulders due to the computer screen (monitor) or computer desk being at the wrong height.

In order to ensure that we keep our bodies in optimal condition when using a PC I suggest the following 5 rules.

1. The 90/90 rule: Position your hands, waist and feet at a 90 degree angle to the computer.

2. Keep the different parts of your body relaxed. If you find any muscles tensing then try and stretch the muscle and then return to your computer.

3. Make sure that no part of your body is dangling in the air. This will cause excess strain. Ensure you have something to rest your feet, wrists and elbows on.

4. Make certain that your computer screen (monitor) is at eye level so that you do not strain your eyes or neck.

5. Take short breaks frequently. Get up and stretch your body. Let your eyes focus off in the distance. Walk around and keep the blood circulating to the body.

Through these simple tips not only will you look after your body but you will also ensure that you feel most comfortable. Being more comfortable means that you will be more focussed and less likely to become distracted by other things. These tips apply for both home and work computing. 

This article was written by Newtons Nerds laptop and computer repairs Sydney. We are computer consultants for home and business computer users. If you have any healthy computer tips we missed please let us know in the comments below.

Here at Newton's Nerds we are specialists in laptop screen repairs and replacements. Often problems with laptop screens can be repaired. For example, the connection from the screen to the motherboard can become disconnected resulting in a signal loss to the screen. However, if there is physical damage to a screen it will need to be replaced. The procedure itself is quite straightforward if you possess the magic touch.

Here are the tools needed for this job.

1.       We will need a Philips head screwdriver to unscrew the screen from its casing and to access the motherboard.

2.       A flathead screwdriver to disconnect the plastic clips of the screen bezel

3.       Some containers for the screws!

4.       A replacement screen. A quick search on the internet will reveal the model of screen that your laptop has. Simply source the new screen from a local computer parts provider.

First, we must release the old screen from its plastic casing. We must disconnect the bezel surrounding the screen by sliding a flathead screwdriver between the bezel and the case proper along the top of the screen casing. The bezel is the (usually) black plastic that surrounds your screen and keeps it secured to the case proper. The bezel should unclip with a decent, but not excessive, amount of force to pry it apart from the case proper. It may feel like you are breaking something but the bezel should clip right back on when you need it. Once the bezel is off, we must unscrew the screen from the casing thus letting it hang loose.

Next, we must disconnect the old screen from the motherboard.  On most Windows based laptops such as HP laptops, Toshiba laptops, Acer laptops, Asus laptops, Dell laptops, Samsung laptops, Compaq laptops, Lenovo laptops, the screen connects to the motherboard beneath the keyboard, so the keyboard will need to be removed. To do this, pry up the keyboard bezel (the black plastic thingo) that surrounds your keyboard with a flathead screwdriver. Unscrew the keyboard from the motherboard and in most models a wire that connects the screen to the motherboard will be visible. Pull out this connection from the motherboard and your old screen will be free.

 On Macbooks, the screen connects to the motherboard on the underside of the computer so the back panel will need to be removed. This is done by removing all the screws on the back to release the back panel. After removing the back panel, search for where the wire leaving the screen connects to the motherboard and release it.

 After the screen has been detached from the motherboard and unscrewed from its casing, the old screen will be lifted out and a new replacement will be put in its place. It is important that the exact same model screen is put in to match the specifications of the laptop design. The screen will then be attached to the motherboard. Next, we screw in the new screen to the casing and reattach the screen bezel. Make sure not to drop the screen as they are delicate beasts!

Now it’s time to test the new screen! Power on your laptop and your new screen should be working. If it isn’t working, check your connection to the motherboard and check the computer is still powering on and you haven’t inadvertently disconnected something you shouldn’t on the motherboard.

At Newton's Nerds Sydney, we specialise in laptop screen repairs and replacements. We have been working with laptop screens for over ten years and we guarantee you will be satisfied with our laptop screen repair services.

Computers have a variety of problems. These five simple steps will deal with the majority of computer problems that one faces on a day to day basis. We have included them to help you avoid unnecessary costs in getting one of our Nerds or Geeks out to help you with your computer. If your not located in Sydney then you would not be getting us out but you should still find this useful.
 
1. Ensure that the computer is getting power and is correctly plugged in. A loose cord may mean that the device will not receive the correct current and as a result malfunction or just not work at all.

2. Check that all devices that are attached to your computer are correctly plugged into your computer. Often a keyboard will mean that the system does not start up and if the screen is not connected then nothing will be displayed.

3. Make sure that any external storage is disconnected from the computer.

4. Check for any error messages that may be showing up on the screen. Often the screen will have an error message and tell you what is wrong with your computer.

5. Switch off the computer. Disconnect the power from the computer. Then reconnect the power and switch the computer back on.

You will be amazed how many unnecessary computer repair services can be averted simply by using our five item self help computer repair check list.