Using Open Office has saved our company thousands in licensing fees. Everyone in our organization uses it and we have yet to run into a compatibility issue when sending files to our clients. Sometimes we’ve found that the spell check doesn’t install properly initially and it is necessary to manually set it up. You’ll need to install the dictionaries and ensure spell check is enabled.

Here’s what we did to get it going. Note: You will need to be connected to the Internet so the dictionaries can download.

1. Go to File -> Wizards -> Select your language -> Click the “Start dicOOo” button.
2. Now follow the prompts until it asks you to restart Open Office
3. Once restarted go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings
4. Under Writing Aids verify/modify the settings and click OK.
5. Under Languages verify/modify the settings and click ok.

You should be good to go. I had to modify mine in one more spot because my Locale is different (long story).

1. Under Format -> Character -> Font the “Language” setting should match what you set in your Language Settings -> Languages

Now any new document you start will have spell check enabled.

We referenced this forum post, spell checker in openoffice.org, to get us started on the right path.

Download a copy and give it a try! OpenOffice.org

Hope this helps!

Do you find yourself frustrated rather than enjoying your computer time? Does opening Word, your digital camera software or your favorite application take forever? We hear that a lot.

There are a lot of factors that can cause a PC to perform sluggishly. More often than not it’s due to an infection of some sort. A virus, malware, spyware, etc… is eating resources causing the PC to seem slow for no reason. There are things other than viruses that can cause sluggishness.

Have you cleaned your temporary internet files lately? 80% of you are going to answer no! Temporary Internet Files are copies of the web pages, images, etc… you’ve browsed too. So every time you get online, a copy of the sites you visit is saved to your hard drive. Those files build up over time and bog down your system.

If you use Internet Explorer:

1. At the top of the browser click “tools”
2. click Internet Options
3. In the middle of that first tab(General) click “Delete Files”
4. Check the “Delete all offline content” checkbox
5. Click ok and wait. It may take a bit if you’ve never done this.

The next thing to look at is how many programs are installed and what truly is needed. Over time you download this, install that, and before you know it your overloaded. In particular older computers purchased via various online PC providers, cough Dell cough, come pre-installed with unnecessary software. If you also purchased it with the default base memory configuration then it’s probably not enough for todays software.

So now your lacking in RAM(memory) AND you still have that expired 30 day trial of Norton installed. You’ve upgraded MS Office from 2000 to 2007 and at boot up your computer is using 487MB of the 512MB’s of RAM installed. Yes, your computer should be slow.

512MB of RAM is barely enough to run Windows XP. So what do you do now?? Uninstall those unnecessary applications!

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs
2. Select any program you don’t use and get rid of it, like that 30 trial of Mavis Beacon or Norton Anti-Virus.
*If you are unsure then DON’T uninstall. Please ask someone you trust to be knowledgeable enough to know.
3. Uninstall any game or software you haven’t touched in forever. Sure you may want it someday but realistically will you ever use it?

Doing this and cleaning out your temp directories is a good start to speeding up and maintaining your PC. We’ll discuss how to prevent applications from loading into memory at start up and consuming resources in a future post.

Here’s an interesting one we came across yesterday. When the client(s) printed to the HP 6110 it printed the page as a mirror image. The printer was attached to a XP Pro machine on the network. Yes, the mirror image check box was NOT checked in the properties. It took awhile on the first workstation to figure out but here’s what we did to solve the problem.

Delete the printer on the workstation the printer is attached to and search the registry for 6100. In our case there was two separate keys for the hp6110 we had to delete.  Make sure the key is specific to the HP printer. Now reboot the workstation. Once it has rebooted, you can then re-install the printer.

You are not done yet because that did not fix the issue on the network workstations. We had to repeat the same process on each network workstation. Delete the printer, scour the registry, reboot, and re-install. Why did it start doing that? We don’t know. Something corrupted the driver apparently. Why HP doesn’t remove the registry entries either is unfathomable. In our case we had to remove the entries to get the mirror image printing to stop. Deleting the printer and re-installing did not work for us.

Hope this helps you out.

Interlink Advantage Network Services

We had a machine come in recently that had a virus.  One of the files we deleted was in the Documents And Settings\<user>\Local Settings\temp\ dir called mousehook.dll. We’ve seen this file associated with Trojan.Dropper/Multi-CN.Process. We used KillBox to delete on reboot. Well upon reboot we logged in, the wallpaper flashed briefly and instantly logged back out to the log in screen. Hmmm…. same story in safe mode. Long story short here’s the fix to the log in and log out immediately problem that worked for us.

1. Boot into your XP cd

2. Select “R” to enter Recovery Console

3. cd to c:\windows\system32

4. Look for userinit.exe

5. If it’s there type the folowing: copy userinit.exe wsaupdater.exe

6. If not type the following: copy dllcache\userinit.exe .

7. Reboot

In our case c:\system32\userinit.exe was gone. In googling the issue we found reference to removing Search Assistant causing this problem. If you did step 5 and NOT 6 then you’ll need to do the following.

8. in Start -> Run type regedit and then hit enter

9. Now find the Userinit key in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

10. change the entry: C:\WINDOWS\System32\wsaupdater.exe to read C:\WINDOWS\System32\userinit.exe

11. Reboot

In our case the virus removed the userinit.exe file. Your mileage may vary. The standard disclaimer applies when editing the registry. Always back it up before making any modifications.

**UPDATE 04/03/2009**

We had a laptop come in and userinit.exe was NOT in the dllcache directory. In that case you’ll need to do the following while in the recovery console.

1. change your directory to the CDROM/DVDROM drive.

2. cd i386

3. expand userinit.ex_ c:\windows\system32

After entering the expand command you should see the text “1 file(s) copied”.

Restart your computer and you should be able to log on.

**Update 5/12/2009**

We had a XP Home system come in that immediately rebooted at the Windows splash screen while starting up before it gave us a login prompt. We went into the recovery console and started by doing a check disk.

C:> chkdsk c: /r

We exited and it rebooted to the login prompt. Obviously not the same issue as above but we wanted to throw that out there since it was a simple fix.