On Monday I reconfigured one of these printers to connect directly to the office’s ethernet hub, so it could be accessed wirelessly by the business’ laptops rather than needing to connect directly with a USB cable.  HP offers various software installations, so on my own laptop I chose to install only the drivers.  The installation routine completed, asked me to reboot and told me that the printer was ready to use.

The only problem was that it didn’t appear in my list of Windows XP printers.  I didn’t think this was worth troubleshooting; my laptop has had all kinds of software loaded on it and has connected to several different client networks in its time.  I figured things would be fine on this client’s own laptop.  I installed the full software package onto his machine, but after two hours it was obvious the process had frozen.

Time was running out, neither the client nor I wanted to spend much more of my time on this issue and I needed to be making my way back to London.  I rebooted the machine and went for a basic driver-only installation on his machine.  The software discovered the printer on the network, completed successfully and promised printer availability after a reboot.  The problem was, once more Windows XP couldn’t see it.

I figured that I’d have to leave the machine configured to print via a USB cable as a temporary measure.  This went smoothly; Windows XP’s Plug & Play found the printer, set it up and within a couple of minutes I had temporarily printed a test page.  I was mystified, but began to wonder whether there was anything I could do to configure this Windows XP printer to print via the network rather than the attached USB cable.

A little poking around in the “Ports” tab of the printer’s properties revealed  that the HP software installation had created a port called “Officejet6300series” with a description of “HP Standard TCP/IP Port”.  I changed the existing printer’s port to this one, unplugged the USB cable and printed a test page straight away.  It’s very disappointing that I had to sort this out manually, but at least it can be made to work.

The Mac could see other networks in the area and readily connected to the ones that weren’t security-enabled.  Equally, laptops running both Windows XP and Windows Vista were happy to associate with this apparently evasive network and deal with its WPA security.  Even my Nokia N95 mobile phone knew it was there and would happily connect with it.

The OS X Console utility wasn’t much help: a series of messages from SystemUIServer advising that there was an error joining the network, with a cryptic “Connection failed (16 result unavailable)” description.  I did a few searches and came up with the rather worrying news that OS X Leopard is known to be rather flaky where wireless is concerned.

Nothing I read seemed to encapsulate my own problem.  Even iStumbler failed to reveal the presence of the router sitting a couple of metres away from the Mac.  Several local WLANs were broadcasting on channel 11, but I checked the router and it was using channel 13.  On a hunch, I changed it to channel 10.  Almost immediately, the Mac connected.

It turns out that in certain areas of the world, only the use of channels 1-11 is permitted.  Europe uses channels 1-13, so why I encountered this problem with a British MacBook is unclear.  Nevertheless, it’s a good example of a frequent situation in IT troubleshooting: sometimes a little bit of trial and error is the only way to really find out what’s going on.

Many British ADSL providers use this BT Wholesale service to connect their customers to their own network.  The exceptions are those who have taken advantage of the local loop unbundling (LLU) concept to place their own equipment in BT’s exchanges.

If your service is based on BT ADSL Max, you can check your connection speed by using BT’S SpeedTester service at www.speedtester.bt.com.  The tester will ask for the phone number on which your ADSL line is based and for your ADSL login name.

Numerous internet speed testing websites are available.  For services based on ADSL Max, the BT tester provides one crucial piece of information you won’t find anywhere else: your IP Profile.  This figure has a direct impact on your speed of access.

If you know how to login to your router, you might find – as I do, usually – that you have a downstream connection speed of about 5Mbps, in line with the “up to 8Mbps” guideline for this type of service.  However, sometimes the IP Profile is much lower.

The IP Profile is essentially the highest speed at which the BT network management systems will let you download data.  If you’ve been experiencing connection problems and have temporarily connected at a lower speed, your IP Profile drops accordingly.

However, when you manage to reconnect at a higher speed, the IP Profile does not automatically rise again.  It can sometimes take several days to regain a higher profile, during which time your apparently fast connection feels much slower.

Here’s an example of the test results for me at the moment, when everything has been running fine for a couple of weeks:

    Your DSL connection rate: 5728 kbps(DOWN-STREAM),  448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
    IP profile for your line is - 5000 kbps
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 3077 kbps

Compare that with the following results from a few weeks previously, when my connection speed was slightly lower, but my IP Profile had dropped considerably:

    Your DSL connection rate: 4544 kbps(DOWN-STREAM),  448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
    IP profile for your line is - 350 kbps
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 296 kbps

Demon indicated that certain information needs to be provided in order for a persuasive case to be made to BT to get a fault investigated, otherwise the fault report is liable to be rejected.  Specifically, evidence of instability and slow speed.

Instability means line drops and reconnects.  Your ISP can usually provide this information itself.  Slow speed means poor performance and three separate sets of BT SpeedTester results (spaced more than three hours apart) are the best evidence.

If you can also provide evidence of having used two completely different routers to reproduce the fault, this is useful.  Typically most people don’t have a spare router though, and with retail prices of around £50 this is fairly understandable.

• You’re sending a document to someone – or publishing it on your website – and you don’t want the reader to be able to edit it;
• You’re not sure whether your reader has the same software package or version as you;
• Your “document” is actually a composite of various files created in various different applications;
• Your document is graphic-heavy and the file size is rather large.

Creating a PDF file is often seen as a bit of a black art, but if you’re a Windows user it can actually be very simple.  PDFCreator is a freeware application that installs as a printer.  When you want to create a PDF document, you “print” it to the PDF printer, which then allows you to save and/or e-mail the results.

PDFCreator can also queue up multiple files and then combine them together as a single PDF file, which can be useful in many instances.  For example, my invoices are created in Microsoft Word, but some clients require a second page of detail held in Excel.  PDFCreator allows me to put both sets of information together as a single file.

I’ve recommended PDFCreator to a couple of my clients.  One of them jokes that it’s the best thing I’ve ever helped her with.  She has a point: it’s lightweight, handy and easy to use.  It’s become an essential tool for me and was one of the first things that I installed on my new PC a couple of months ago.

“Hi all, I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus!  This is the worst virus announced by CNN.  I checked Snopes (URL above), and  it is for real !! Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP.  PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!”

I usually receive one or two of these messages a month from friends and business contacts.  Either I’m being asked to check them out, or they’re just forwarding them in a well-meaning attempt to help me avoid some kind of disaster befalling my computer.

This kind of e-mail hoax has been running for almost as long as I’ve had e-mail; many of the messages have retained exactly the same phrasing over the years.  Here are some tell-tale signs by which you can recognise when a message is safe to ignore:

• Norton won’t be “gearing up” for it.  Viruses don’t tend to schedule themselves conveniently like this.  The moment anti-virus software providers are aware of a virus, they’ll dissect it and release an update for their package, which gets downloaded automatically in the background.  Chances are you’ll never even know.  (Check that your home PC’s anti-virus package is updating at least once a day.)
• The message recommends that you forward it to everyone you know.  This is pure chain letter psychology.  They’re trying to see how far they can get the message to spread.
• The message contains pseudo-technical gobbledegook: for example, a virus that “burns” your disk.  The only thing your computer can burn is CDs or DVDs and even that depends on it having a CD/DVD writer as opposed to a reader.
• It contains melodramatic and meaningless advice to shutdown your computer immediately.  What, and never turn it on again?  It’s true that in the case of some genuine viruses this can be absolutely the right thing to do, but it’s usually followed by a call to your IT support person.
• It includes further exhortations to send the message on to everyone, just in case you didn’t get the point.  In CAPITALS and in bold too.
• In case that doesn’t work, it brings in the big guns – Microsoft, CNN, and so on.  People tend to associate these large corporations with authority, so the writer of the hoax is trying to bring some spurious authority to their message.  That still doesn’t mean it’s true.
• Finally, it will often use the self-important phrase “the most destructive virus ever”.  Oooh, scary!  This fumblingly inadequate machismo masks the reality that, in fact, many viruses are a bit crap.  One or two high-profile instances have caused genuine havoc, but there are many that fell at the first hurdle.

I recommend that you adopt a default viewpoint of scepticism where these messages are concerned.  The best way to deal with them is generally to delete them.  If in doubt, paste a few key phrases from it into your favourite search engine  and see what turns up.

Many messages will tell you that their virus warning has been checked on Snopes (a useful resource to remember) or similar sites, but of course this is rubbish.  In general, Snopes and its peers will have identified the message as a hoax months previously.

However, I soon found that I was having problems sending e-mail via my phone. I checked and re-checked the settings, but couldn’t see anything wrong with them. They work on my laptop, I figured, so there’s no reason that they shouldn’t work on the phone too. However, when I discovered that the same settings also failed on the laptop when it was connected via the mobile phone – yet they worked fine via any number of random wi-fi hotspots – a re-think was required.

It turns out that Vodafone blocks outgoing SMTP connections via port 25 to any servers other than its own, probably as an anti-spam measure. I was trying to use the SMTP server that my domain provider makes available to customers who can’t rely on a particular ISP – ideal for the transient, changeable nature of wi-fi access – when instead I needed to configure my mail client’s outgoing SMTP server to be send.vodafone.net instead. After I changed it, my Outbox emptied.

However, that didn’t seem like the right solution. The next time I used the laptop via wi-fi, outgoing e-mail would fail again because I would no longer be connecting via Vodafone. Back to the drawing board. I did some digging around and discovered that my domain provider’s SMTP server can also be accessed via SSL on port 465. I tested it and was pleased when it worked. That’s a solution that will stand me in good stead regardless of the underlying internet connection.

The moral of this story is that outgoing SMTP server settings that work well in one environment aren’t necessarily appropriate in another. The average home desktop PC user who only ever connects via a single broadband provider will rarely have to think about this kind of thing. However, people who are beginning to take advantage of the increasing number of cheap mobile broadband services now available will need to ensure that their settings work in multiple environments.