Font substituted for missing font November 10, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Psychic Troubleshooting, Windows , Comments
Fonts are not always free. People make a living out of font design. My first encounter was when I designed and implemented a series of barcode reader installations for a customer. The configuration guide I wrote required the barcode font (3of9 I think).
Which we had to buy.
I was reminded of this when our support team reported the following problem.
Multiple users report a
“FooBar font missing, default font substituted”
error.
Indeed it is missing, the FooBar font is not part of Adobe Illustrator, and that’s what the error message is trying to tell you, if you read it.
They see but they don’t understand … October 28, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Psychic Troubleshooting, Windows , Comments
A service call came though, with an end-user rant,
Obviously you’re changed something with your latest software update. I can’t use Office Live even though I have Internet Explorer 6.
Our on-site support passed it along with “What gives, doesn’t work with Firefox either.”
Now I have better things to do than intentionally break things. And in this case, the customer and the on-site support team, see, but don’t understand. The error message reads in part … on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 …
That’s right, the customer was using Windows 2000.
My reply to our support staff, “Read the error message.”
The solution for the customer? We have Citrix servers which run Windows Server 2003, which is a supported platform.
The colors I see on my screen are not the same as what prints out! August 18, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Printing, Psychic Troubleshooting , Comments
So you have a nice new shiny printer which can use CMYK color processing. CMYK is also known as four color processing.
And you wonder why:
The colors I see on my screen are not the same as what prints out.
Here are four reasons why:
- You’re using an application which only supports RGB colors (typical application: Microsoft Word/Publisher/Excel/Visio).
Your printer needs to convert the colors from RGB to CMYK. This color conversion is not always accurate. - How your computer display (CRT/LCD) is setup.
Ever wondered why your display screen manufacturer shipped color card(s) with your monitor? Color print matching is a reason. - Your using a PCL print driver, and not the Postscript driver.
Postscript printer drivers are more accurate at page/color rendering.
PCL is faster, and not so good at page/color rendering. - Paper being used
Photographic-type paper behaves differently (better) to normal paper.
Solutions:
- Use RGB if your printer driver supports it.
- Match application colour types to output color process type (CMYK to CMYK, RGB to RGB)
- Calibrate your computer display to the correct colors.
- Use a Postscript driver if you have it.
- Use RGB. Seriously. Use this color option if your printer supports it (almost most do).
- Get a printing consultant in.
If you need to do this you’re likely to be a graphic designer, and know all about things like four color processing & PANTONE colors.
Reference(s)
Digital Expert - Color Space Fundamentals
Dry Creek Photo - Monitor Calibration and Profiling
The Case Of The First Problem April 12, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Printing, Psychic Troubleshooting, Stories , Comments… or the customer’s Postscript printer prints gibberish.
By now, you would think, that all printers would ship with Postscript as standard. After all, Postscript has been out in the market since 1985.
So I was surprised when I received my first support call in my new job, “Postscript printer prints gibberish”.
After some psychic debugging, the answer was clear.
“Your printer does not have Postscript installed!”
The why? It’s an optional extra for this particular printer model. In the end, we told the customer to buy the Postscript option if they wanted it.
We also know there are known unknowns - Network troubleshooting February 14, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Networking, Psychic Troubleshooting, Quotations , CommentsSuch as WAN link utilisation.
Users were complaining that network performance was slow across the 80M WAN link. How did they know? Citrix users mostly …
So I ask our telecommunications provider, “is our link congested?”
‘No, 60% utilisation. Here’s a graph of the network performance:”
Can you see what’s wrong? Well there’s a couple of things, it’s a sample image for example. But if you knew we were running Netware 3 & 4, you’d expect to see IPX/SPX traffic. Which were the protocol layers our users were mostly using.
“Where is it?”, I ask.
‘Oh, we don’t measure IPX/SPX traffic, it’s only IP.’
My estimate, based on running a network sniffer, was that IPX/SPX was using 30% of the WAN link.
My recommendations were:
- remove IPX/SPX
(difficult, talking Netware 3 & 4 here) - upgrading the WAN link.
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” - Donald Rumsfeld
Hitting the Panic Button September 22, 2006
Posted by Dale in : Gadgets, Humour, Last Job, Psychic Troubleshooting, WinXP , Comments
“Bong! Bong! Bong!” goes Windows Messenger.
“Ring! Ring! Ring!” goes the phone.
Yes, my boss has hit the PANIC BUTTON.
Seems we have a customer having some Windows XP SP1 network problems.
Why did I catch the call? Well I’m problem-solving guru. Not that I actually work with day to day desktop problems anymore., but I’m good never-the-less
Now diagnosing the cause of the problem is like that Japanese play Rashômon, every one has a different opinion of the cause.
And it’s about as much fun as herding cats.
The actual cause of the network problem:
- we replaced a faulty server with a brand new shiny one.
- we upgraded the software to Windows 2003 R2
- the customer is still running Windows XP SP1, even though it’s out of support in less than a month.
My solution? Upgrade desktops to XP SP2, or throw a shed load of patches onto the current XP SP1 installation.
My boss might be getting an actual PANIC button for Christmas.
Windows 95 - We still have customers running it. July 10, 2006
Posted by Dale in : Last Job, Psychic Troubleshooting, Stories, Win9x , Comments
A Windows 95 bootscreen. (A Windows 95B boot screen to be precise.)
Now I rarely get to touch customer PCs these days, as I’m not in an “”operational”" support area.
But we still have tight arses customers who still run Windows 95, so I get a support question from one of our people (who should know better).
Queue theme music: Entrance of the Gladiators. <- click for the music. “The PC is stopping with an error when the logon script runs”, from our customer support engineer, Fred Nuckle. Time to diagnose problem: 1 hour.
Cause:
- F. Nuckle was mapping a network drive (let’s say U:).
- Running U:\foolish.exe,
- and while foolish.exe was executing, unmapping the network drive.
- So foolish.exe was going “what da fruitcake??” and causing an error.