Waited about 10-15 seconds then pushed the power button again. The power light came on and the sound of agonized bearings in rotating machinery roared out from under the desk. It increased in intensity for a few seconds, wavered, and then slowed and stopped entirely. A two line text message appeared at the top of an otherwise black screen:

CPU Fan Failed. Press F2 to continue to boot. Otherwise, the system will power down in five seconds. Have system serviced immediately.

Pressed F2 and the now ominously quiet computer booted up normally. Since it was late on a Saturday night, I decided to just shut it down and deal with it the next day.

The next day it started up just fine again. I found a page on HP’s support site that explained what to do about that particular message. I followed instructions up to step 9. There is no Hardware Monitor in the Advanced menu, or anywhere else for that matter, in the BIOS on this computer!

I spent the next hour and a half in a chat session with an HP tech named “Michelle” and was eventually informed that the only way to get the fan replaced was to send the entire computer to HP for repair. They will not just send a replacement fan. I very reluctantly agreed.

I went back to my computer (the problem was with Pat’s, not mine) and tried to get reconnected over the network to her external hard drive. I was informed that the network name could not be found. I went back to Pat’s computer and looked for that drive and sure enough, it was not listed! This whole adventure was due to the failure of the old 160 GB Western Digital My Book drive, not the CPU fan at all!

The computer is going back any way. I want to be sure the fan does not fail in the few months it is still under warranty.

The plug-in adds another collapsible bar to the bottom of WordPress Post editor. It is very easy to use, allowing you select photos from your computer to upload en-masse. The only drawback I noticed is that if the photos have not been resized, they do take longer to load. And so far I have not succeeded in getting the pictures to display on a separate page. [Update: Version 2.0.1, installed on 2/14/2009 does work as advertised.]

Oh yeah, we have noticed that when the heater and fan are on, there is no more whistling at the air vents. It used to wake us up when it came on in the morning. Now it’s barely audible.

When I checked my site this morning, I was shocked to see one of those ugly search pages that my web host uses for 403 Forbidden warning pages. I was really sweating until I figured out that I had set the permissions incorrectly when I fixed the modified .htaccess files. Whew!

Let me set the background. There are three computers running on my home network, two less-than- one-year-old HPs running Vista Home Premium and one eight year old Dell with XP. When I got my HP, I was able to transfer most of my programs and settings from the old Dell using Windows Easy Transfer, including the accounts, though those required new passwords. I’ve forgotten some of the details, but there was a problem transferring the accounts used by the rest of the family. The only one I still needed was for my most excellent spouse, Patricia, so I just created a new one for her. Then I set up shared directories on the two HP computers so we can access all of our digital pictures.

That works pretty well except that connecting to the shared drives requires a password for the account on the remote computer. We leave the computers on all the time so logins are infrequent, usually only necessary after one or the other has been restarted. Since it is so infrequent, those passwords are easy to forget. I assumed that was the case when Pat complained that she always had trouble getting connected again.

Until today. She asked for help installing updates that had accumulated on her computer and after getting it done and restarting, I tried to make the shared folder connections for her. The login failed, saying that the password had expired! I thought, “Oh, I need to change that setting on my computer.” On Windows XP, the password policies can be set using the Local Security Policy snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console. I did not know that that little item does not ship with Windows Vista Home Editions.

After poking around on a few forums, I found that the password policies can still be set from the command line with “net accounts”, but only when run as Administrator. To do that, navigate through the Start Menu to a Command Prompt shortcut, then right-click it and choose “Run as administrator”. You will know that you got it right when “Administrator: Command Prompt” is shown on the window’s title bar. To see the relevant command line options for the “net accounts” command, type “net help accounts”.

Patty and I had been tripped up because her new account on my computer was subject to the default password age policy: 42 days. Now I know how to fix it, and hopefully you won’t have to poke around to find the answer when you need it.

Since you are only experiencing this problem when using Internet
Explorer, there is a setting in in menu option Tools-Internet
Settings-Advance called “do not save encrypted pages to disk”, please
make sure this option is off. If it was on, please turn it off and
restart Internet Explorer.

My guess is their implementation requires the pdf file download to disk before rendering. With that setting unchecked it shows the bill perfectly. Thank you to the Cox Online Customer Care Team

A week or so later, I mentioned this sordid little affair to my friend Terry. “Oh you know, I read something about that. What you have to do is unplug the computer from the back, then when you start it up, it finds them again.” “Yeah, right!” I thought to myself. Besides, it is a pain to actually have to shut down (as opposed to just restarting) and why would it make any difference? I hate to even restart. I have been running SETI for years and Climateprediction since I got this new computer, which actually has enough speed and power to work through those huge models in weeks instead of the better part of a year like my old system. It never used to be a problem to restart SETI. It just picked up within a few minutes of where it was interrupted and continued working. But I learned the hard way that under the latest version of BOINC, both programs get clobbered, hosing all the work units currently in queue if you do not explicitly exit before restarting. So I did nothing about the card readers.

Then a few days ago I got an email from my bank that I had received an ebill from Cox Communications. They have been my ISP (high speed Internet over cable) almost as long as they have offered that service, back when it was Cox@Home. Several years ago they began participating in my bank’s ebill service. I tried it then for one month and went back to paper billing when I found that it was not possible see the bill online. Last summer I signed up again because they now provide the bill in pdf format, accessible from the bank’s website. But this time when I tried to view the bill from the bank, there was a message that due to changes in federal regulations, Cox could no longer grant access from the bank site. Instead it was necessary to sign up for a new account with Cox and sign in. That required about a minute and I had access to a page with a drop-down list where you can select one of the last three months bills for viewing. Great! Except all that appeared was a new, blank browser window.

So began the remedial measures routine. Some of the following steps are followed by exiting and restarting Internet Explorer 7 as well.

1. Add the site to the Trusted Sites list.

Cox.com already was, but the billing page comes from a different domain. Same result.


2. Add the site to the list of sites from which cookies are always accepted.

No help.


3. Turn off Protected mode

No difference whatsoever.


4. Restart the computer.

I really try to avoid this, but sometimes it works wonders. Not one of those times.


5. Make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Reader.

It came installed on the new computer in October: version 8.1.0.137 and there had been no problems with viewing my other ebills. The latest currently available is 8.1.1. So I dutifully downloaded and installed it. Now I got a message box. There was a problem with Acrobat Reader. Please try again. Five tries, same result.


6. Send an email to Cox Tech Support.

I had run out of ideas for quick fixes. Cox promises responses in 24 hours in most cases and that was preferable to working through a voicemail system and then waiting on hold.

When 48 hours had passed with nothing but the automated acknowledgement I decided to call anyway. Getting through the voicemail was actually not too bad. The end was a surprise: a female voice announced “All of our agents are assisting other customers. Rather than wait on hold enter your phone number followed by the pound sign and we will call you back within three minutes.” It was only about 30 seconds before the phone rang! Caller ID reported the name as “CCC – VIRTUAL H”. I usually let the answering machine take calls with names I don’t recognize but figured it would be extraordinarily coincidental for it to be that annoying carpet cleaning message at this point. The technician listened to my problem explanation and then said “I had someone else call with this exact problem. You need to talk to Billing and set up an account to get access.” “I haven’t spoken withing Billing but I was able to setup an account and password. I can see that page, but when I select a particular month from the drop-down list I just get an empty window or an error message.” “OK I have two suggestions.” Actually I don’t remember now what the the first one was, but it was one of the things I had already tried. “OK then, try removing and reinstalling Adobe Reader.” “I’ve done that too.” Not quite true, I had not removed it before reinstalling. After several more minutes of conversation I was transferred to Billing where I got to explain the whole thing again. It turns out that the only thing they could help with was access, which I already had. “If it’s just not coming up, you need the Internet tech support.” “He sent me to you! How about you and he have a conversation and figure this out.”

Transfer back to the Internet tech, actually a different person than the first. “How long has it been since you cleared the browser cache and cookies?” “About a week.” Another lie. I never do that because then it is necessary to sign in again everywhere! “OK, go ahead and do that.” Guess what? Same problem. “Well I don’t know what else to do.” “Can I just get a copy of the bill?” “I’ll transfer you back.” After some 20 seconds of silence the tech comes back on the line, “I’m sorry, my system is not transferring. Please call right back to billing.” Aargh! I reluctanctly agreed. Now guess what! The line is busy – three tries in a row! And they wonder why I won’t buy there digital telephone service!

So I sent another email via their website. (No response to either one so far.) Thinking back on the 25 minute conversation, I decided it might be worth a try to remove and reinstall Adobe Reader. Much to my surprise, the Add/Remove Programs control panel showed two instances of Adobe Reader. Removed one without incident, but the next one refused since it was the same version as the one already removed. Exited and restarted the control panel and then removed the other instance successfully. Downloaded and reinstalled it again. When it said it needed a restart to complete, it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to try Terry’s suggestion concerning the missing card readers. I used the Device Manager to remove the Unknown Device driver. I also remembered to exit BOINC and shut the whole thing down, I believe for the first time since it came home from Costco, disconnected the power cord from the back, and waited about 15 seconds.

I would have bet money that there would be no effect, but when I started Windows Explorer and looked for the drives under Computer – there they were again – all four card readers. And the SD card slot works! As for the other problem, there was just one instance of Adobe Reader now, but it worked, or rather failed, exactly as when this adventure began.

Feeling quite frustrated by now, I think there has to be way find out where things are going south. There are no relevant messages that I can see in any of the Windows Event Logs. Maybe there is something, an add-on, in the FireFox browser that can point me in the right direction. I start up FireFox. It has a newer version ready to install. Do it later. Navigate to the bank, go the ebill page, lookup the Cox bill, logon there, select the December 2007 bill and –

So there you have it. It has been a few hours short of a week since I got the ebill notice. I have finally found a way to see my bill online, but still have no idea why it doesn’t work in IE7. As I feared, I have had to sign in again on a bunch of websites. Fortunately I do have a list of all my accounts and passwords. And now I have spent the better part of two days writing about it and you have also devoted a chunk of time reading about it. Like I said: computers are such time wasters!

If those faces are unfamiliar to you, this typical home computer of the time ought to produce a chuckle.