ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: I enjoy your newspaper computer Geek section–very helpful.  Question:  What could have happened regarding my ability to ‘post’ a comment to an online newspaper story?  I must have changed a setting in Windows because, the comment block is no longer showing at the end of each story to write a comment using Facebook. It was here yesterday but gone today.

– Diane P.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: I’m unaware of anything you can change on your computer that would stop just that particular plug-in from working without shutting off a bunch of other stuff too.  Here are a few things to think about.  Is it just one article where it’s not appearing, or is it on all of them?  If it’s only on one, the odds are that there was a minor glitch in posting the story to the website, and that feature was accidentally left off.   If it’s not appearing on any of them, see if you can hit the Facebook website itself.  If you can’t, then you’ll need to determine why.  Possible reasons are an error in your DNS server that is failing to translate the Facebook.com URL into an IP address, (which is a problem to bring up with your Internet provider) or you may be accessing the site via an Internet connection on which access to Facebook is restricted (such as a connection at work via a corporate LAN). If none of this helps, you might try contacting the person at the paper who manages their web content. Look for a “Contact Us” link on the bottom of your newspaper’s website.

Q: We have Vista, Home Edition and Incredimail. For the last month the majority of all mail has been coming thru in multiple copies (from 2-12) .  Please advise how to prevent.

– Frank M.
Shalimar, Florida

A: When a problem suddenly starts like this the problem must be that something has changed on your system.  Software doesn’t suddenly start acting different without a reason.  Being able to narrow down exactly what changed is what separates computer users from the Geeks.  Did you recently update your IncrediMail?  Have you made any configuration changes?  Have you added or deleted any e-mail accounts?  Many people set up multiple e-mail accounts, and then have one master account that aggregates all the others.  I could see a problem like this happening if you have set up e-mail forwarding from one account to another and created a recursion of some sort.  I could also see a problem if IncrediMail is set up to leave e-mail messages on the server when it picks them up.  This is not supposed to result in duplicates, but anything is possible.

Of course, not everything that changes is under your control.  It’s possible that the problem is on the server side, or that a glitch on your computer corrupted one or more of IncrediMail’s data files.  That problem can be solved by deleting the files and letting IncrediMail re-create them.  I would recommend this only as a last resort, because it is a rather destructive fix, and I can’t guarantee that you won’t lose old e-mails doing this.  To proceed, perform the following steps:

1. Make sure Incredimail is completely shut down, including the icon in the System Notification Area.
2. Browse to the following file location: C:\Documents and Settings\Your Profile (Login Name)\Application Data\IM\Identities\{A Long Number}\Message Store.
3. Delete all files in this folder that have the extension of .bak or .msg, then re-load IncrediMail.

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Bonus Web-only Content:

In my answer to Diane P. in today’s column, I mentioned that one possible reason for the failure she was experiencing was an error in her DNS server.  For those of you not in the know, a DNS is a Domain Name Server.  The function of a DNS is to translate a meaningful web address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that a person can use, into a numeric Internet address (IP address) that a computer can use.  It’s far easier for people to remember names such as Google.com, Microsoft.com, and ItsGeekToMe.co than it would be to remember and type in the IP addresses of the computers that host these sites.  That doesn’t even take into account that the IP addresses can change at almost any time as a site is moved from one physical server to another.

A news story this week told of a computer crime ring that had been broken up by the FBI months ago, leaving behind a problem that has the potential to affect your Internet connection in July.  It seems that this gang of cyber-criminals was running an online advertising scam that infected the computers of the hundreds of thousands of people around the world.  Part of this infection caused the DNS used by these computers to route through the scammer’s server, essentially allowing the scammers to re-direct Internet traffic to any site they desired.  Rather than simply shut the scam down, the FBI was nice enough to put legitimate servers in place, at a cost of $87,000 for about 8 months of operation.  The problem is, the FBI is planning to shut down these servers on July 9th.  When they do, anyone’s computer that is still infected will effectively lose their DNS, and will basically be unable to connect to any websites.

The FBI’s security partner has set up a website where people can go and check to see if they are infected, and if so, learn how to fix the problem.  In this Geek’s opinion, it’s worth making a quick visit to gain the peace of mind.  You can get your system checked out by visiting http://www.dcwg.org.

Until next week – good luck and happy computing!

– Geek