C.J. Software & Consulting, LLC

I ran into a strange problem with a client and their HP OfficeJet. The last line of the page was cut in half. It didn’t matter where that last line was, it would only print the top half of the line, with the letters cut in half. It turns out many other people have this problem when printing form Microsoft Word 2007. There doesn’t seem to be one specific setting that helps to resolve the issue. Different people changed different settings to find the right work around, but what worked for one didn’t work for the next.

The strangest part of it is that if I change the text color from solid black to another color, the last line printed fine. Even if I changed the color to a very dark grey…almost black…then it would print.

Recently, I’ve had some XP machines lose the user selection screen where someone can click on their name and icon to log in. Instead, their login was replaced with the standard Windows XP login dialog asking for a username and password.

I found an easy fix on this site. Just download and run it, and the user selection login screen is back!

This site has a ton of other useful fixed and utilities.

I’ve used a lot of different utilities to scan and remove malware, spyware, and adware.

The best one I’ve seen so far was MalwareBytes. They have a free version that does an excellent job detecting and removing these nasty pieces of software.

Today I had to replace a hard drive with bad sectors. Normally, I would backup the data on the original drive, reinstall the OS on the new drive, and restore the data from the backup. The greatest benefit to this is that my client gets a clean install, because only the software they need is reinstalled.

Since the computer I was replacing the drive on was very clean to start with, I decided to download the Acronis True Image WD Edition Software from Western Digital’s site (the new drive was a 500GB WD Caviar Blue).

I installed the new drive as a slave (via the Cable Select jumper option), installed Acronis True Image, rebooted, and ran Acronis. It detected a new clean drive, and asked me if I wanted to run a wizard to copy the image from the old drive to the new drive. After the wizard was complete, the computer rebooted, copied the old drive data to the new drive, then instructed me to press a key to shut down, then make the new drive the primary, which was just taking out the old drive and plugging in the new drive to the right connector on the cable going to the motherboard.

The computer booted up from the new drive, and everything from the old drive was on the new drive. You couldn’t even tell it was a new drive, other than the increase in speed and size!!!