The Tech Help Thread

I have yet to use their full service myself, but <a class="postlink" href="http://www.hidemyass.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">www.hidemyass.com</a> is 2/3 of your budget.

 

http://email.about.com/od/outlookaddons/tp/most_popular_outlook_add_ons.htm

Never used any myself, I always just created rules to sort emails based on sender/subject on the exchange server. Where I to use one, I think it would be Bells and Whistles. In any case, they do have a free trial so you can find out if you like it or not: http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook-bells.html

I can say this though: I used to be in a position where I got 300+ emails a day and had to respond to most of them. If you watch your inbox constantly, it will take up a great deal of time. Initially, I didn't manage my time well with email. I got to the point where would spend the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes of my day to email and additionally about 5-10 minutes every hour. More often than not, that was enough time to deal with the volume of email that I received.

This list has some other suggestions as well: http://www.sozofirm.com/email-efficiency-tips/

 

Anyone have any insight on an inexpensive and reliable UPS? The most recent power failure finally pushed me over the edge into wanting a way to save my work when the worst happens.

 

APC units are what we use here at my office, and what we recommend to clients. How much equipment are you planning on plugging into the UPS? You want to make sure that the load that you're going to put on it does not exceed the capacity of the UPS, and you will also want to factor in runtime.

APC has a UPS selector/calculator that you can use to determine what suits you best.

If you have further questions, feel free to PM or ask here.

 

My brother let me have his Samsung 7.7 Tablet. I've heard that you can DL DVD's onto this thing. Google search shows a lot of links where you have to buy something. Is that the only way? Going on a trip next week and it'd be nice to load a few movies on it for the plane ride.


Also, I'm all sorts of jordan_paul dumb when it comes to techie stuff so the more dumbed down, the better.

Thanks

 

Yesterday my Internet connection worked fine. I took a nap in the evening, woke up, noted no issues. About twenty minutes later, I was invited by a Steam buddy to play L4D, five minutes in I lose server connection which I never reestablish. Over the next 30 minutes, more and more websites begin to time out. I reboot, still same issue, though some websites that had previously timed out connect, while others still don't. My connection to Teamspeak was still perfectly stable most of the night, as was my ability to connect to Steam.

Over the next 4 hours, I swapped over to OpenDNS in my router settings (which didn't do fuck-all in my ipconfig readout despite rebooting router afterwards as well as flushing my browser cookies/cache and computer DNS cache), changed my IP and subnet mask range, rebooted my router countless times, and generally cursed the world. I ended up rolling back all changes I made because none worked. Throughout the night, I could sometimes google search something instantly and then time out on every attempt to link to a search result, so it wasn't a static issue.

I finally decided to download Avast to check for viruses. Manage to eventually get to the CNET dl page, click "Download Now", router hijacks my browser and tells me I'm showing excessive sessions. The third time, I tell it to shut the fuck up (literally) and stop bugging me. Download completes, avast fails to launch installer first two times. After installing, avast has 0 behavior, file, etc issues noted. A full drive scan shows absolutely nothing. Having Windows do it's network diagnostic came up with, at various points, DSN issue, contact network provider to setup service, and finally an offer to reset the LAN adapter, which did work...for about two minutes.


I'm on now, obviously, and having no issues other than being a wee bit slow, but I really do NOT want to spend 2 hours dealing with AT&Ts tech support (nice people, but they have a detailed script they do not deviate from and it doubles the time it should take to get anything worked out). Repeated googling turns up cases which either vary from mine or suggest a DNS error. I'm at a loss. Something similar has happened twice before, and was fixed by a technician coming out and replacing or jiggling the line in at my complex's connection box, but in those cases, once my connection went down, my router's DSL and internet lights went red (this time they didn't except when I was rebooting the router) and the connection stayed down until they came out.

Any ideas or suggestions are much appreciated, even if it's simply "the issue is X, they have to send a technician" so I understand what the hell was (is?) going on.

 

Hey guys, so I moved into a house with a buddy of mine right before Christmas. I've been having an issue where the internet will disconnect itself randomly all day. I'm currently using a router (provided by Direct TV), which I have an Ethernet cord plugged into, which goes into my Xbox. My computer is on the same wireless network, not hardwired, but has the same issue.

On the computer, if I click to disconnect Wifi, and then reconnect, it works fine (until it disconnects itself again).

Sorry if this is vague, I'm not the most tech savvy individual.

Thanks.

 

Has anyone cut their landline in lieu of Google Voice and/or Ooma? We're currently getting fucked by Time Warner since my wife calls home to Germany frequently. We have the international calling plan, but that alone is $20/month, plus the digital home phone service which is required.

I'm interested to see how much the initial investment is, along with how much it costs per month overall, compared to a normal landline with international service.

Thanks.

 

I'm looking for a new router and need some recommendations. I need something that will allow me pretty much full control over who uses what and when and how much, either right out of the box or by installing some new firmware. This old linksys garbage that I'm using does nothing, I can tell it to only accept one MAC address and yet it'll still allow multiple devices to use the network, and throttling does exactly nothing.

I've heard good things about tomato, but it seems only a few routers can use it and they're pretty old, so I'm not sure if that's the best route. DD-WRT seems like what I'm going to end up with, so any good recs for a decently priced, decently good router that won't make my head explode when I try to make it do things?

 

Yea go with the Linksys E-series, i have an E4200 and no complaints.

 

Cool, I'll take a look around here and see what people have in stock, ordering online might take too long. Did you have to flash DD-WRT or was it included on them?

 

Buffalo sells DD-WRT preloaded, or at least did: http://www.buffalo-technology.com/en/dd-wrt.html

 

I am also going to post this in the Cell phone thread, but i have an SII LTE and this morning it just keeps resting, i go to put my password in, the main screen pops up, then it resets, and keeps vibrating for a while, turns on again. And sits there still i try and get back into the phone again.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Is anyone any good at solving regular expressions? I need to figure out how to work one for the problem "All account numbers begin with a letter, then a period, then a number, then a period, then 4 numbers then a period then 3 numbers. The example they provided was X.1.1234.123"

Based on a couple websites I browsed it seems like this would do it but I'm getting an error in FTK.

/^[a-z]\.([0-9])\.({4}[0-9])\.({3}[ 0-9])$/

 

Code:

^[a-zA-Z]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]{4}\.[0-9]{3}$

 

I have recently acquired a Google Nexus 10 tablet. I think I need a bluetooth keyboard for it, anyone have any recommendations or experiences?