joddle

Having had my trusty little surface RT for a few years now for use when travelling I was horrified yesterday when the Google Search app stopped working properly. Every time I do a search it pauses then comes up with a message saying "Unable to connect to the internet". However everything else is connecting fine. If I use the google from IE it works fine. I have rebooted, reinstalled the app but it makes no difference. After years of working well why should this now suddenly stop? Any help on this appreciated

That's what I was hoping but they can't even access the site - let alone log in. It seems very odd because only 3 people have had this problems but all reported the same error message. They also get it on all their devices and although they can get to other websites they can't get to ours! The other hundreds of our member have no such problems!

Small update - one of those affected now finds he can access the site again but has no idea why or what has changed but another is still having the same issue On searching the web we found that sometimes Enhanced Protection Morse can reveal the error but when I put one of my machines into this mode I could still access the site so nothing gained there. Still searching for a reason - so again appealing for any guidance!!!

I belong to a society which has a professionally hosted website which can be accessed by members to get newsletters and other information. Recently we did a circular to our members and they needed to look at the website to get some things but for a few of them they could not connect to the site and all had the same message "Error 404 Vhost unknown". In all cases they can go to other websites without any issues. Most other people had no issues at all. So far: We have contacted the hosting company and so far they can see no reason for this We contacted the affected people to see if there was anything common about their systems but not apparent commonality We asked them to access our site via a provided link, via google and from typing URLs into their browsers but they always get the same error message So far we have learned little 1) the error occurs for any device for any particular person - i.e. they get the error if they use a pc, an I-pad, a mobile etc 2) the issue may not happen at one location (eg from home) but for the same person at another location the error occurs 3) the people use a variety of ISPs including Sky, BT. It's all starting to be a bit of a mystery but one which we could do without - any ideas please!!!!!

Sounds good and thanks - here in Spain they don't have ring mains so hoping that is not an issue anyway - I am sure it won't work if you have two separate phases but if you are on the same phase throughout the building I would have thought it should be OK. I cant imagine that the speed wont be good enough as at the moment with our wi fi repeaters we can still just about get a signal although the speed is very slow so hoping the powerline system will be some improvement on that..

Many thanks - I have now located a source of suitable parts and ordered one - although getting a new mouse would have been almost the same price!!!

I raised part of this in an earlier post but now really need to move forward so having thought about the advice given earlier and having had several attempts at getting a usable wi fi system around my house using wireless repeaters, I have finally come to the conclusion that maybe the best way to achieve my needs is by using a homeplug/powerline system to satisfy the needs of our family of 5 who all have devices connecting to the internet.. The main problem is that I live in a rambling old house with very thick walls and wi fi seemingly cannot penetrate to any useful extent. In addition I now have a boy at uni who needs a good connection for his studies but his room is about as far away from the router as can be imagined and thus he has great difficulty in getting any sort of connection, never mind a speedy or reliable one. Running cables around the house is not an option. So my thoughts are this - use a homeplug/powerline system in the following format with three main devices. 1 - office with main router and four connected PCs - use input homeplug with two connectors so I can still connect all the PCs by using second Ethernet connection 2 - Lounge - one wi fi plug using the Ethernet output for the tv (so the family can use Netflix) and the wifi so they can use their phones etc.in that part of the house 3 - Boys study - a second wi fi plug so he can connect his laptop but still use his phone from there but would give also give some wi fi to the other upstairs bedrooms. Hoping this is a sensible proposal - and if so now comes the second set of questions - Can I mix different makes of homeplug and can different speeds be mixed? I am thinking of a system based around the 500mb-p-s plugs but could I add a cheaper plug if needed in another room for say a guest laptop or if my daughter want to use one of the PCs in another room where the wifi does not reach very well. I have been looking at the TP link systems but also the Dlink ones but other on the market seem to do some of what I want as well - hence the questions of mix and match! Any advice on this much appreciated.

Somehow I have mislaid the little USB dongle for my logitec mouse which is only a few months old. Is it possible to get spares from anywhere?

Thanks - I don't want it - it doesn't work properly so its going.

Having just updated my old laptop from XP to W7 I am having an issue with updates. It simply refuses to do anything. On clicking on look for updates the progress bar reports "checking for updates" but hours later nothing has happened. It also always reports "never" for most recent check and for updates installed. What is going on and how do I fix it? The install is registered and the licence key verified. What am I doing wrong?

Having bit the bullet and bought a new HP laptop to replace my aged Dell Latitude, I am having just one little niggle - the HP support assistant. It always shows the exclamation mark and even if I then go into it and read the messages then delete them it still brings the same things back again so I cant get rid of the little yellow triangle. It has two sections one for the PC and one for the printer but it always its says there is one update for the PC but when I open the tab is says there are no updates!!! For the printer it constantly shows 2 messages which I read then delete but then they simply reappear again. Agggggg.. How do I cure this???

It seems there is a simple way to do a fast setup of older PCs when you cant find W7 drivers. First install W7. Then download (but do not run) all the XP drivers and store them in a folder. Then using Device Manager select the thing that needs a driver (ie those with yellow exclamation mark )and on the properties update the new driver by pointing at the folder with the XP drivers. This seems to work for almost everything - I have now managed to updated a Dell 400 and Acer Travelmate 2700 to W7 (all quite old XP machines) and all the drivers installed fine and both PCs running smoothly. , Hope this is of use to others struggling with failed installs with incompatibility messages when they try and install older drivers using their build in "setup" functions.

Aha - realised how to do it - all working perfectly now - thanks Ken

Thanks - but how do I install it - I still cant see the wi fi card in the system device manager

How can I find out which wifi card I have?. All my old dell d400n latitudes were fine and the cards recognised by w7.

Having decided my old Acer Travelmate 2700 was starting to run a bit slow I decided to install W7. The install went well and for the most part runs fine. I have a Ethernet a decent screen and sound but the one thing I cannot get working is the wifi. I can't even see the wifi card in the system so have no idea what to try. The wifi ran fine under XP but the Acer website does not offer any W7 drivers. So how can I find a driver for my wifi again? I tried installing the XP driver but it wont install saying the system is not compatible - _I even tried in XP compatibility mode but it came to the same thing. Any ideas please?

Thanks - that's pretty neat . At least it works!

On the whole I love w10 and edge BUT one thing driving me crazy is that when using Edge and I get a url or a telephone number I cannot simply copy and paste them - they always open an app or link. How do I disable those so I can simply copy a telephone number and past it into a document or something. I am not so worries abut URLs as they can be quite useful but the phone numbers are a real nuisance. there must e a simple switch somewhere to turn these facilities on or off - but where?

Thanks for you reply - I am no expert on batch files - or at least pretty rusty and although I know robocopy may help I cant be bothered to learn a new set of instructions when in theory the ones I am using should work fine.. In fact they do when the same code writes to a HDD! - its only when it writes to the flash drive that the issues happen - I am suspecting its something to do with the attributes but can't see why some files are affected and some not - most of them are dated before 2013 so should not be getting copied at all! There has to be an explanation but for now it eludes me. PS the pause is only there so the screen does not go off before I have seen that the programme has worked through - the lines I supplied are only the offending ones from a large batch file with many more xcopy statements (all which work fine!) and some even are clones of the lines I illustrated but going to an hdd!

My wife runs a small language school and we have 6 networked PCs for the students Each day I run a series of batch files to create backups of files etc - and for the most part they all work fine. However, one of the backup areas is on a USB flash drive connected to my router and this makes available a few things on the network for anyone no matter which computer is switched on or being used at the time. It also saves my hard disks from having to run all the time just to make these files available. The batch file code to do this part of the backup is very simple and designed to only copy new or any updated files - nothing else should be copied xcopy "C:\backup\english" "\\DSL-N55U-0014\english" /s /d /y pause The problem is that each time I run it, the files in just a -couple of the many sub folders insist on copying again every time despite none of the files having been updated. This does not happen when I am copying the same folders to other HDDs. I have tried adding the /a switch but it still happens - obviously there is something causing this but what? - any help appreciated. In reality its not much of an issue as the files copy pretty fast - but why? - non of the many hundreds of others don't!

Having now realised I have two slightly differing extenders, I have now sort of sorted out a system which works. I have used one extender, an older model, to do a wireless G extension and the other, a late model to do the wireless N - so far it seems to work OK except the range is still pretty limited. We live an old and rambling property with very think solid walls. Our telephone line and main office area where we have the router (which has three short antennae) and four Ethernet connected pcs is towards the front of the building but the lounge and areas where the kids use their laptops and tablets is on the back. The signal therefore has to pass through two walls or find away around them. The actual distance from the router to the extender is about 10-12 metres. The distance then from the extender to where the laptops and tablets are used is about 7 metres but again there is a wall in the way albeit with a large window in it. So my question is, without moving the router or the extender, is there any way of improving the signal between the router and the extender as we seem to lose quite a lot of the signal in that first hop? Someone mentioned using a booster aerial but I know nothing of those - but it made me wonder if it is possible to use short extension leads to the aerials to position them in a better position and if so can anyone recommend alternative antennae and leads?

In order to get better wi fi in my rambling house I bought anew router an Asus DS N55u which is dual band and offers other things over myaged (over 10 years old) Linksys. At first everything seemed fine - the network range is aboutthe same but in our house the advantage of wireless N was obvious with muchhigher speeds than we have ever had before. A few of our devices are also ableto take advantage of the dual band so that is a plus too. However, due to the layout of our house there are some darkspots where the wi-fi does not reach and so we have always had an extender topush the signal into those areas. The extender is a Netgear WNR200orptv2 . Inthe past we have always had reasonable speed from the extender and as it issupposed to be Wireless N capable, had expected to have a faster speed whenconnected to the new router. I factory reset the extender then installed it onto our newnetwork and all seemed well – and confirmed we had chosen the correct settingsfor a wireless N system – BUT when I started to use the extended network the speedhad been drastically reduced to in fact more like a slow dial up speed. I triedreinstalling a few times but always the same result. As I have another spare extender I connected that up but not with wireless N and its performing just like it did before at a reasonable speed - but not nearly as fast as the wireless N network! Has anyone any suggestions as to what is going on here? – or doI need to buy another extender? I see Asus make one for dual band so would thatwork any better?

Many thanks - I have actually done just that and is says "DDR2 PC2-6400 CL=6 Unbuffered NON-ECC DDR2-800 1.8V" Which part of that tells me its for Intel or AMD? However if I search for that on Ebay I get all sorts of things - some saying not suitable for PCs and some only for AMD! Confusing eh!

I have been looking to upgrade one of my older PCs running 64bit W10 (Dell 755) and add memory. Currently it has 4MB of DDR2 PC2-5300 but can take 8gb of PC2 6400 so I was hoping to buy 4 sticks of 2gb ram then use the old ram to populate some other Dell 755s which I also have and which have less than 4gb each and are running 32 bit W10.. When looking on Ebay and other such sites I see that there are loads of adds for PC2 ram but some state "for AMD processors only" - but the numbers of the memory seem to be the same as those being advertised for Dell Intel based Pcs the same as mine! ie DDR2 PC2-6400 (and sometimes with DDR2 PC2-6400u) SO - my question is; how can you tell if memory is going to be suitable for an intel pc if there is no other indication of that in the advert? Or is there something simple I am missing here?

A relative has asked me to upgrade her aging laptop (Acer Travelmate 5720) because she is getting messages about Vista not being supported soon. I have said I would upgrade to W7 in order then to qualify for a later W10 free upgrade - as I already have a couple of spare W7pro licences and both 32 and 64 bit install disks She does not have anything important on the laptop as her files have been backed up to another HDD. So my question is which way to do the upgrade. a) let the system upgrade b) to a clean install To my mind once she has W7 installed, the reserved reinstall partition that came with the machine will be simply unused and so that space will all be wasted - so perhaps best to reformat the HDD and do clean re-install. What do others think? Then there is the issue 32 or 64 bit - the pc has 1 GB installed and a max memory capability of 8GB ram (DDR2-667/PC2-5300) which is cheap enough to buy and the spec seems to suggest it is 64 bit capable. Again any thoughts?