It never ceases to amaze me how often people automatically contact their IT department or technical support when problems occur on their computer. Typical issues are programs freezing, not seeing a folder on a network, or e-mail not sending. While some of these may be due to hardware failures, most often they are very simple to fix.

So, here is my list of things to do (not in any particular order):

1. Reboot the Computer

Software isn’t perfect. There are many components in an application which interact with each other and the operating system and things can go bad and crash. Or the application may just stop working correctly. Closing the program and running it again may be enough to fix this, but if the problem is with .NET, Java, or a memory leak, rebooting would be the best solution.

2. Press the F5 Key

An error can occur when trying to view a web site, or you can’t find a file that a coworker just placed in one of your folders. Pressing the F5 key will refresh a web browser or file browser and you’ll get an updated view of it. Most applications have options to refresh content and have a context menu (right click in a blank area) that will give you the option to refresh.

3. Wait a Little While

If your e-mail isn’t sending, the problem may be with your internet provider. They may be down or doing maintenance. Instead of phoning them (after being on hold for 10 minutes) and complaining, give them some time to fix the problem. Phoning them won’t fix the problem faster. You can be assured that they are doing the best they can to get back online because they want your continued business.

4. Learn More

This isn’t really a quick fix, but learning how to use your computer and software can really go a long way in being productive and working well. I find that most people know just how to push buttons but don’t really understand what’s going on. So when any problem occurs, they don’t try to think about how to fix it and call someone more technical for assistance.

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To find out which version of PowerShell is installed in your computer, you need to do more than just run it. When you start the command line interface, your lead to believe that version 1.0 is installed from the directory location displayed in the dialog box.

The text in the dialog box shows C:\WINDOWS\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe, which would make it seem like you were running version 1.0. The best way to determine which version is installed is to run the PowerShell command line interface and execute the following command:

    $Host.Version

This will give you the major and minor versions, along with the build and revision.

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The SendMail function for PowerShell will send an e-mail through an SMTP server. I’m currently using it for backing up a web server to a virtual machine and sending a confirmation by e-mail on the status of the backup.

Usage is very simple:

          SendMail Host From To Subject Message UserName Password

The Host is the mail server address, i.e. smtp.mail.com. The From and To are the sender and receiver of the e-mail. The Subject and Message are the title and contents of the e-mail. If authentication is required, then enter values for the UserName and Password, otherwise make them blank using single quotes, i.e. ‘’.

The function will return a boolean value: true if the mail was sent successfully, false if it couldn’t be sent. See example in this post.

SendMail Code

The following is the code for the SendMail function which can be pasted in your PowerShell application.

[== Code ==============================================]

function SendMail ([string] $sHost, [string] $sFrom, [string] $sTo, [string] $sSubject, [string] $sMessage, [string] $sUserName, [string] $sPassword)

####################################################################################################
# PURPOSE:
#   Sends an e-mail to an SMTP server. It will also authenticate to the server if a user name and
#   password are sent to the function. If authentication is not used, leave $sUserName and $sPassowrd
#   blank, i.e. ”.
#
# PARAMETERS:
#   $sHost (in) – host name of mail server
#   $sFrom (in) – e-mail address of mail sender
#   $sTo (in) – e-mail address of mail recipient
#   $sSubject (in) – subject title of message
#   $sMessage (in) – message sent to recipient
#   $sUserName (in) – user name for authentication
#   $sPassword (in) – password for authentication
#
# RETURN:
#   True – mail was sent succesfully
#   False – mail was not sent
####################################################################################################

{
  [bool] $bSuccess = 1                 # was mail sent without problems?

  $SmtpClient = new-object system.net.mail.smtpClient 
  $smtpclient.Host = $sHost

  # Authenticate only if a user name and password are set.
  if (($sUsername -ne ”) -band ($sPassword -ne ”))
  {
    $Credentials = new-object System.Net.networkCredential

    $Credentials.domain = ""
    $Credentials.UserName = $sUserName
    $Credentials.Password = $sPassword
    $SMTPClient.Credentials = $Credentials
  } # if (($sUsername -ne ”) -band ($sPassword -ne ”))

  # Send the mail.
  try
  {
    $smtpclient.Send($sFrom, $sTo, $sSubject, $sMessage)
  }
  catch
  {
    $bSuccess = 0
  }
  $bSuccess
} # SendMail

[== Code ==============================================]

Example of the SendMail Function

This is an example of how the SendMail function should be used.

[== Code ==============================================]

$bSent = SendMail ‘smtp.mail.com’ ‘sender@website.com’ ‘recipient@website.com’ ‘Test’ ‘This is a test.’ ‘sender@website.com’ ‘abc123′

if ($bSent)
{
  "Mail sent successfully."
}

else
{
  "Mail not sent."
}

[== Code ==============================================]

You can download the SendMail code and example here.

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Redirecting web pages becomes necessary when a web site is updated and old pages are replaced with new ones. This is very common when a site is upgraded to a CMS which typically displays pages as folders (i.e. www.website.com/about) as opposed to www.website.com/about.htm.

Its important to redirect old pages to new ones because if the old page is bookmarked in a web browser, it will lead to a 404 error page and the user will probably not try to manually change the URL to go to the home page. Also, its better for SEO to have a consistent page structure in your site.

Redirection in IIS

The easiest way to redirect web pages is through the Management Console in IIS in Windows. Find the page you want to redirect, right click on it, and select Properties. This will give you the following dialog box.

Select the A redirection to a URL radio button and enter the URL of the new page in the Redirect to textbox. Press the OK button to save the settings. When the page is viewed in a web browser, it will automatically redirect the browser to http://www.website.com/about.

Redirecting Using HTML

You can also give instructions to redirect in a web page. The page that needs to be directed will contain the code below. The meta tag should be enough to do the redirect, but on some web servers it may not work. The JavaScript below will redirect only if JavaScript is enabled on the user’s web browser. The meta redirect is done on the server side and doesn’t require any settings on the user’s part.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; http://www.website.com/about”>
</head>

<body>
<script language=”javascript”>
window.location = “http://www.website.com/about”;
</script>
</body>
</html>

In Part 2, I’ll show you how to redirect web pages in Apache using .htaccess.

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I somehow got background images enabled on my Windows XP desktop. There is no obvious solution to fixing this problem. It took some time experimenting and researching, but I finally found how to fix it.

Icons with a background image look like this:

They should look like this:

While I found several solutions to fix this, only one of them worked for me. To remove the background image, right click in an empty area on the desktop. A menu will open. Move the mouse over Arrange Icons By and you’ll open the next menu. You will see Lock Web Items on Desktop checked. If you click on this menu item, it will uncheck the option and remove the background images on the icons.

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