Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

So I installed the new Norton Internet Security and what’s it do?  Clutters my PC with another toolbar.  Ugh. I dislike toolbars.

There’s no help for removing the toolbar evident on Norton’s web site, so I initiate a chat and he wants to install software to run my system from his location. “No thanks. It’s a toolbar. Just tell me where you put the ‘how to remove toolbar’ info.”

While he’s searching for an answer, I found this buried in the help:

Hiding and showing the Norton toolbar

You can hide the Norton toolbar if you do not want to see the evaluation of every Web page that you visit. However, you will still be notified of suspicious and known fraudulent pages or if an error needs your attention.

To hide or show the Norton toolbar

At the top of your browser window, click View.

On the Toolbars submenu, do one of the following:

Uncheck Norton Toolbar to hide the toolbar.

Check Norton Toolbar to show the toolbar.

That was easy.

I know this doesn’t remove it, but it solved the problem from my perspective. Less clutter means happier browsing.

Why did he want to remotely access my PC to do that?

I just installed Ubuntu 8.04.2 on an ASUS K8U-X.  All went well — it even handled my SATA drive after some monkeying around.

However, the sound didn’t work.  My board has the M5455 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device.  I think it needs the ALI-1888 driver. I finally solved the problem with help from post #9 here. This part of the solution worked for me.

Edit the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file by commenting out this line:

#options snd-intel8x0m index=-2

And adding this line:

options snd-intel8x0 buggy_semaphore=1

Reboot. It works.

Well — it’s working so far. 🙂 ~Steve

I have a problem.

I have a DD-WRT router that’s served me for years — and continues to serve me well.  It connects to four PCs wirelessly and one or two wired.  All the computers that connect through this router can surf the web except the one in the secretary’s office.  Two weeks ago that computer suddenly could not surf the web or mail servers.

The secretary’s computer can connect to the router.  When you give it the router page, it can load the router setup page in firefox.  It can even connect to google if you tell it to go to google’s IP instead of google’s domain name.  But it cannot connect if you give it any domain name.  Obviously it’s not picking up the DNS info.

The Internet Protocol properties (TCP/IP) are set to obtain the IP address automatically.  I have changed them to a static IP with the gateway and DNS server set appropriately as follows:

IP set to 192.168.1.98
Subnet Mask set to 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway set to 192.168.2.1 (the router)
Preferred DNS set to 192.168.2.1

(I originally typed this wrong.)

I know the above setting is correct because my office PC has a static address and it works with that setting.

But the secretary’s computer consistently cannot pick up the DNS from the server.  All other computers on the network (wired or wireless, static IP or assigned) use the DNS without any problem.

I have tried turning off the firewall (Norton) and making sure Windows firewall is disabled.  It still didn’t work.

Someone told me to replace the card.  I pulled the wireless card out and used the network port on the motherboard.  Same result.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.