Glynneath PC Surgery has famous clients

We had a busy PC Surgery in Glynneath once more last Friday. Two of the clients were well known to Glynneath: Max Boyce and Hugh Lewis (AKA Sean Connery lookalike).


It was very interesting to listen to them both talk about playing golf with famous people and travelling the world. We managed to fix Hugh's computer, but ran out of time to fix Max's PC, it needs a reinstall.

USB Annoyances

One of the biggest problems that we have seen occurring in the past couple of weeks (apart from missing elves) has been a possible infection of USB Flash drives by rather nasty worms. These can infect host computers, and cause the infection to spread - rather reminiscent of the early days when viruses were spread by floppy disks. I'm sure we will be looking at this problem again and again.

A possible example of this infection was a

 laptop that we had in. According to the

 client,  PC World Tech Guys wanted to bin it (and probably sell the them a new computer), but Colin had other ideas. This is an ongoing problem, and at present important information has been saved from the hard disk by using Dai's wonder HDD connector prior to the reinstalling of Windows. 

Busy - it must have been a record!

What a busy Friday it was, with 9 computers to sort out or to give advice, ranging from a laptop with water spilled on the keyboard (insurance job) to one with a blown power supply and outdated anti virus protection (AVG 7.5 which is no longer supported with updates). The client had to dash down to Maplin to buy a new power unit which was then fitted, and further work could be done. While all this was going on there was frantic activity in the centre preparing for the Christmas Craft Fayre on Saturday, with everyone really looking forward to the appearance of the most important person there, together with his little helpers (Colin and Steve were unfortunately not available) 

The Joe Calzaghe PC Surgery

Welcome to the Joe Calzaghe PC Surgery. We all know of Joe's success, and this seems to be rubbing off on us all in the PC surgery. We must keep this merry banter going(although it can be dangerous at times)!! Our first client had a query about Sign Language - obviously another of Joe's strengths.

After that it became very quiet apart from a continuous exchange of ideas(!).

We then took the opportunity to become acquained with some of the new parts of Vista, and some useful toolls from the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows which we had updated last week

Christmas Fayre Time!

Morning started as usual with an Internet problem. A Belkin modem had been reset, and was not allowing a wireless connection. Although we could not access the computer involved because the lack of a password, it was possible to log into the wireless modem to reset the WEP encryptation, and consequently allow wireless access. The client was then spplied with the new WEP key and instructions how to log in. At 12.00, the Christmas Fayre opened (yes, November 20th - well over a month to go!!!), and we had a stall to try to involve more people in the community and persuade anyone with computer problems to use our services. Here we are at the fayre!

cd/dvd problems code error 39

the problem was that the cd drive was not showing. tried running disks but no joy. changed the cable and put a new cd rom in ,but same problem with code error 39.Run a google search and came up with this.run regedit from start,HKEY-LOCAL-MACHINE,SYSTEM/CURRENTCONTROLLER,CONTROL/CLASS/(4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318.

this folder is the dvd/cd-rom rive class description in the registry. look for any of the following names in the right hand column.UPPER FILTERS,LOWER FILTERS, UPPER FILTERS.BAK,LOWER FILTERS.BAK

if any are listed right click and delete them. reboot computer and you will have cd/dvd drives back.

Busy at the Dove

Michael hit the track running today as he had already advised two clients by telephone before we had actually started.

When we arrived nicely wet, we had a client with two computers, a Dell desktop which was displaying the Blue screen of Death, and a laptop which needed some files recovered.


The Dell was sorted out(ish) by

1. Running the PC Check disk, which did not find any problems, then



2. Using the CHKDSK/r function from UBCD4Win which seemed to be working well before I accidentally removedthe plug without noticing.

An old copy of McAfee was also removed, leaving the PC apparently working well but with warnings.