TSW and the dongle needs food

Eastern Car Care in East Los Angeles had a problem:  Their gas station management software just stopped opening.  Mysteriously they received a message that a file named NmMulti.inf was missing the same day.  It didnt take long to figure out that their parallel port was to blame and sure enough the dreaded (sometimes) yellow exclamation point showed up under device manager.  After searching and downloading the correct drivers (three attempts later), the parallel port was working but the TSW program still would not open.  It was then that I realized that the parallel port had a dongle hooked up to it that was preventing the program from opening.  Luckily a simple reboot after installing the new parellel port drives did the trick and PC Fixer managed to be a hero in the Los Angeles Computer Repair business once again.

Many software manufacturers use these dongles to prevent software piracy and TSW did just that.  The program was very old and the gas station owner told me that they had gone out of business.

My next appointment brough me to a high-end accountant and talent agent who was about to embark on a 2 week vacation.  He needed to set up synchronization system for himself and his assistant so PC Fixer set him up with a simple briefcase system.  For some reason the briefcase had a problem with dragging over a folder of QuickBooks files.  No matter what we tried it simply would not add the entire folder to the briefcase.  The problem was never resolved but a workaround was implemented and all was well.  One little snag was Adobe Reader 9.  After we installed it on a Dell Vostro 1500 running Windows XP the computer would not work properly.  It was partially frozen and very slow.  Uninstalling Adobe Reader 9 solved the problem.  We also set him up with a new WiFi Guardian which is a secure tunnel for people using hotspots.  We will see how he likes it.

The next stop was at a Law Office on a boat in Marina Del Rey.  I love working there.  New computer setup went very well although the primary attorney was dissapointed that Earthlink could not get the DSL setup to his boat in time.

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