stuartandnicola.com

The scammers are busy at the moment. After the crazy call from 365helpdesk.co.uk (now seems to be closed down) we've had calls from thesparksupport.com and now Comantra.

The calls are scams. They claim to be associated with Microsoft. In the case of Comantra they really do seem to be a genuine Gold partner, but based on their phone call I think our daughter who's four has a better understanding of how a computer works.

The calls are nothing if not entertaining.

After my previous experience of a call from someone claiming to be in London (but I suspect based in India) [see earlier post) it was Nicola's turn.

They called while I was out, but they left a number so I could call them back. So I did. Except this time I remembered to play dumb and try to find out where this was going.

I tried to get the webcam to record the conversation, but it messed up. It's a real shame because it was one of the most bizarre and surreal conversations I've ever had.

I recently had to reset our PC and decided to install Roxio Media Creator 2010 as I use Sonic for creating DVDs. I'm using Windows 64 bit and it is supposed to be compataible, but when I tried to launch many of the applications I got an error saying "The certificate file is missing or has been corrupted. Please reinstall it."

I am pretty sure someone tried to scam me by phone, so I thought I better alert you in case you get a call too.

I got a call out the blue from someone claiming to be doing "market research and awareness" about malicious programs and viruses. At first I said I wasn't interested as I was computer literate and I asked what they wanted to sell me, and how they got my name.

I tried to log on to Vista this evening and got this message for no obvious reason. Nikki's profile was fine, it was just mine that was broken.

I followed the fix suggested in a post at technologyquestions.com that involved a fairly simple registry fix to re-instate my profile that for some reason had been turned in to a back-up.

I installed the new iTunes 9 update tonight, and started getting an error every time iTunes then started. The error was in a window titled QuickTime Handler Window, and the error said that the application could not start because "d3dx9_36.dll was not found".

The error seems to be that a component of DirectX is not present, or up to date, and the fix is to download and reinstall the DirectX components. There's a walkthrough on about.com that explains what to do.

I discovered that the reliability index on our laptop hadn't been updating since July, and I couldn't get the index to start updating again. After some trial and error I discovered that the main system event log had also stopped updating and was telling me that the log was corrupted. When I cleared the main event log the performance index started updating again too. I've described more details about the problem, and the solution, below.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I noticed recently that I was getting lots of errors when I opened Outlook, and it kept reporting that there were errors in my data file and that it had to be checked.

I did some investigation and found that when I closed Outlook the Outlook process in task manager continued to run. If I then shutdown the PC, and rebooted later, Outlook warned me that the data file wasn't closed properly.

I did some research and it seemed to suggest that a faulty Outlook add-in might be the issue, so I tried disabling various ones but with no improvement.

Our new PC had (and still has!) Vista on it, and the newest Office with the weird ribbon system. At work we both use Office 2003, so we were keeping our old XP machine just to run the older office. But that machine is really playing up and is incredibly slow, plus it takes up a lot of space.