SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!
If you do not currently receive LSM you can easily do so totally free of charge by clicking the 'subscribe' button and entering your email details on the following page.
|
Welcome
Ed – Jonathan Burnside
This is volume 2 issue 7 of LSM arriving in your in-box slightly later than usual (sorry for the delay!). We hope to have plenty of articles as we head into the winter months to keep your mind off the poor weather, but if there is a particular issue you would like us to cover then please use the feedback form to let us know.
In this issue we have two articles that focus on pieces of hardware that we use everyday. The first examines the humble mouse and educates the reader on troubleshooting a mouse that appears to be doing crazy things on-screen. So if this happens to you, you’ll know exactly what to do.
Our second article looks at the terminology surrounding monitors. Many people will have heard some of the terms but not know what they mean. Once you have read this article you’ll feel enlightened and no doubt able to impress you colleagues.
|
Trouble-shooting mouse problems
Question : I have a problem with my mouse. This usually happens when I leave the PC idle for more than five minutes. The mouse goes berserk whenever I try clicking it. It would point to another icon and then run the related program. Although I press the "Escape" key, I still could not control it. I have to wait for about five minutes for it to settle down. The problem would recur whenever I leave it for a while.
Answer : Several things can cause this to happen. The most obvious possibility would be that the mouse is faulty. The first (and easiest) thing to try is to replace the mouse with a fairly simple one that's known to work on another PC. If that works, then it's a fair bet that the mouse (or the mouse driver) is faulty. Before the mouse is replaced, consider installing the latest version of the mouse's driver software (if one is needed or available). If that doesn't work either, then it's probably time to replace the mouse. But before that, remove the cable and look at it closely. If any pins are bent, straighten them very gently. A pair of "needle-nose" pliers are ideal for this job.
If it's a ball mouse (mechanical or opto-mechanical) try cleaning the mouse ball and the rollers. Mechanical and opto-mechanical mice tend to gather dust and dirt around the rollers and the ball after they've been used for a while - sometimes cleaning them will solve a lot of issues.
Most mechanical and opto-mechanical mice have an "access port" on the "bottom" where the ball protrudes. This "access port" is akin to a manhole cover with a hole in the middle to accommodate the mouse ball.
Most of the time, the mouse's cover can be removed by rotating it counter-clockwise (arrows showing the correct direction of rotation may be embossed onto the cover itself). Rotate the cover to remove it. Care should be taken at this stage because very often, the cover is the only thing supporting the ball -- removing the cover will cause the ball to drop out of the mouse. Because of this, it's best that the mouse be upside down when the cover is removed.
Once the ball is removed, two shafts will be visible. They're quite easy to spot because in an uncleaned mechanical mouse, they will have dirt wrapped around them. The best way we've found to remove dirt from a rolling shaft is to cut it lengthwise with a small spade-end screwdriver. After this, it can be picked up with a small pair of tweezers and lifted out.
Another reason is because the display driver is bugged. Most modern PCs have something called a "hard-ware cursor" in which the position and display of the cursor is actually controlled by the display card. This "hardware cursor" is used to accelerate cursor rendering and positioning. Because of this, a bug in the display driver can cause the cursor to appear to suddenly go haywire.
A bug in the display driver can lay dormant for a while, only to be triggered when something happens, for instance, if the display card is instructed to put the monitor on standby.
Updating the display driver might be able to solve this problem. Also, to avoid such problems from recurring, the power management options can be turned off. To do this, right-click on any empty area of the desktop, and select "properties" from the pop-up menu.
When the "display properties" window pops up, click on the "Screen Saver" tab, and then on the button that says "Power". This will open a windows titled "Display Properties". From here, click on the downward- pointing arrow just below "Power Schemes" and select "Home/Office Desk".
Next, under "settings for Home/Office Desk Power Scheme", click on the downward-pointing arrow to the right of "Turn off Monitor" and select "Never". Do the same for "Turn off Hard Disks" and "System Standby". After this, click on the button labelled "Save As". A window titled "Save Scheme" will pop up, with "Home/Office Desk" already filled in. All that needs to be done here is to click on the "OK" button. This will save the new scheme.
After the new scheme is saved, click on the "OK" buttons to close the "Power Options Properties" and "Display Properties" windows. This will effectively disable the "power saving" functions in Windows XP and might help solve any problems related to device drivers behaving strangely after the PC idles for a while.
The "power saving mode" can be turned off in the PC's basic input/output system (BIOS). This can usually be done by adjusting a setting in the PC's BIOS firmware. This setting is usually called "Power Management" or a similar term.
One other possibility is that the system's been infected with some sort of malware that makes the cursor go haywire. This can be cleaned up with a virus cleaner software. |
Monitor Glossary of Terms
by
Peterson Willson
CRT - Cathode Ray Tube, big glass bulb used in the large bulky monitors similar to TVs.
LCD - Liquid Crystal Display.
TFT - Thin Film Transistor, a type of LCD technology where every pixel is connected to a transistor.
Pixel - Abbreviation of picture element. They are individual dots (elements) which constitute the image created on the LCD monitor.
Viewable Area - The diagonal measurement of a CRT screen from where the glass becomes visible from behind the bezel.
Colours - How many colours the monitor can reproduce, which can be up to 16.7million. Some displays require dithering to display such an array of colours, and can normally reproduce 252,000 colours.
Dithering - Dithering is the attempt by a computer program to approximate a colour from a mixture of other colours when the required colour is not available. Dithering also occurs when a monitor attempts to display images specified with more colours than it is equipped to handle.
Response Time - How quick the monitor reacts to a keystroke or CD-ROM. Very pertinent for graphical use, such as game playing. The lower the time the better e.g. 20ms is better than 40ms. There is a rising (r) and falling (f) time, this gives the overall figure.
Footprint - used to describe the amount of space on a desktop a monitor covers.
Dot Pitch - A measurement of distance between the centres of two same colour phosphor dots on the screen. The closer the dots, the smaller the dot pitch, and the sharper the image. For example 0.264mm is better than 0.297mm.
Resolution - The size of the image displayed in number of dots (pixels) which makes up the width and the height of the image e.g. 1024 X 768.
Brightness/Luminance Cd/m2 - Cd is an abbreviation for candela. A candela is a unit of measurement of the intensity of light. An ordinary wax candle generates one candela.
NIT - Candelas per square metre can also be called NIT: The term for brightness / luminous (surface) intensity of a light source.
Contrast Ratio - The degree of difference between light and dark extremes of colour on the screen. Contrast is a method of measuring a dynamic range. The higher the contrast ratio, the more detailed the image will be. Blacks will be blacker, whites will be whiter, and particularly text on the image will be more vivid.
Aspect Ratio - The ratio of width to height. When an image is displayed on different screens, the aspect ratio must be kept the same to avoid "stretching" in either the vertical or horizontal direction. For most current monitors, this ratio is 4:3.
Colour Temperature - A measurement of the colour of white light, expressed in Kelvins. (The Kelvin scale is a measure of temperature, starting from absolute zero.) The colour temperature is the colour of light a perfect black-body radiator emits when heated to that temperature. Computer monitors typically have a colour temperature of 5000-9300 Kelvins: 5000 Kelvins is a yellowish-white, 9300 Kelvins is a blue white.
RGB - A colour model using red, green, and blue; the additive primary colours. RGB data is used by PCs to transfer images to connected displays, such as LCD monitors, via a VGA cable.
VGA - Video Graphics Array use RGB data to transfer data.
15 Pin D-Sub - This is the shape of connector which plugs into the VGA port on PCs.
MPRII - Rules created by SWEDAC (Swedish Board for Technical Accreditation) to reduce the emissions of a monitor while working. Together with the TCO rules, it belongs to the rules followed by the manufacturers to safeguard the health of PC users.
TCO - These are the initials, in Swedish, of the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees, which has set stringent standards for devices that emit radiation.
Willson Peterson is computer expert and network engineer. He is the author of "How to backup your computer data."
Click here ==> http://www.ebookarticle.com to visit his website.
|
