Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Update on New Virus

Looks like the virus is the W32.Mydoom.AX@mm (Symantec's name) and protection for it is supposedly in the 17 Feb 2005 dat for Symantec, but it still made it through Postini's antivirus system and our Symantec AV systems.

Very annoying.

Here's the Symantec info page for the virus:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected]

New Virus Floating Around

Be careful out there. There's a new virus floating around that both McAfee and Symantec can't yet find in the native payload form yet.

Symantec doesn't find the payload until after it's been activated. Nasty stuff.

The payload is sent via email as a compressed zip file. The file has a .com or .htm extension (the two samples of it that I've seen so far) and once activated starts to propogate itself out on the net using SMTP.

Hopefully, Symantec and McAfee will put out new Dat files for this virus soon.

Word Printing Behavior

Some days I wish that Microsoft would purchase WordPerfect from Corel and incorporate a lot of the structural features of it into Word.

In Word 2003, if you print to a printer other than the default printer, the next time you go to print a document, Word defaults to the same printer instead of the default. This behavior is different from WordPerfect and from Word 97, I do believe.

If anyone knows how I can change this so that Word only uses the non-default printer for the specific job required, I'd appreciate it a lot.

Dell M5200N Printer Issue

Was getting an error generated by setpagedevice PS command when sending print jobs from Word or WordPerfect. User was trying to print an Avery label 2164 to a specific Dell M5200N workgroup laser printer outside her office, but the job wasn't going through.

I kept playing around with the printer and desktop, making sure that everything was as it should be and couldn't get it to work. Called Dell tech support and got no help there. The best the support person could do was recommend a system refresh...for an issue that was happening from multiple systems and multiple apps to the same printer for the same label size.

So I went back and tested printing to a different printer and it was working fine. Then went over the settings of the two printers with a fine tooth comb. Saw that paper size for Tray 1 on the offending device was set to Universal and Letter on the working printer. This paper size is set by the paper size set on the tray itself. Looked at the tray and sure enough the little plastic tab that determines paper size was off by one click.

Fixed the paper size tab and voila the problem went away.

Lesson to be learned from this? If a support tech doesn't give you a valid answer, have them transfer you up the chain or call another tech. Chances are if you are a decent IT person calling a level 1 tech at a company like Dell or HP and they tell you something that sounds bogus...it is.

Basically Dell's support is falling into the same mode as other large companies. Too many customers and not enough good techs, so you get shuffled to the level 1 call center people first who don't know much and are running off a general script.

In this business, so often it's not what you know or even your techniques that make you better, it's in getting the answers you need from others. Shows how dealing with people is so important for this business and it's certainly a skillset that I'm constantly working on.