What’s Up?

So I couldn’t think of a really good title that describes the recent “technical” problems that have resulted in no new ProReviewer posts for the last couple of weeks

Soon after I finished the post on ClipGuru a couple of weeks ago, as I was about to start on the next post, in fact at just after 5pm Saturday 8th November, we had a local power cut. No idea what caused it but after a few seconds the switchgear somewhere on the main grid automatically tried to reconnect the power twice in succession. No big deal you think, happens 2 or 3 times a year.

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When the power was eventually restored a little later I found that my server PC wouldn’t start up, my Windows Home Server was dead and my main XP desktop, which I use for all my work and blogging, had some data corruption (or so I thought).

What Next?

Well I started off with the dead machines checking al the usual things like fuses on the mains and then working into opening up the machines and checking connections, boards and memory properly seated, etc. To cut a long story short over I pinned it down to the power supplies having failed by taking an old power supply from another machine and trying it on the dead ones. This all sounds fairly straight forward but lack of time and pressure of other things at home and work meant this took until the middle of the week to sort out.

In the mean time my main working desktop and started to behave ever more strangely. Crashing, freezing and the graphics display working intermittently. I thought it was the graphics card as I could connect remotely and al seemed to be working normally. A new graphics card and power supplies were ordered. However, the main desktop just got worse and worse. In the end I decided it could only be the motherboard.

What Now?

Well I sorted out the server PC and WHS machine power supplies and they are all working properly. I have a motherboard/processor/memory bundle coming tomorrow (the old mobo/cpu/memory were over 3 years old, therefore well out of date, so I decided to replace the lot).

I have used part of the available time to transfer data and install programs to my Vista machine, which I am using now to write this post. It also means I have been able to move the computers around in the study so it will now be possible to switch between my main desktop with XP and the Vista PC which should help with posts including more Vista programs.

So I hope to resume normal service over the next week to 10 days with 3 to 4 posts a week

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What Does That Mean?

In a nutshell clicking on an image in Pro Reviewer will now show a full sized picture overlaid on the current webpage. There are navigation and close buttons at the bottom of the image. This is all provided Javascript is enabled in your browser otherwise the picture/image will be shown as before – Try it on the image below.

Regular readers of the Pro Reviewer blog will be aware that the reviews like to "tell the story" as much as possible using screenshots of the software. This is because the screenshot will show quickly exactly what you will expect to get from the software and the text notes will tell you anything additional or about bugs. The old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words" definitely applies to the approach here!

The downside to this is clicking on a lot of images to enlarge them to see the detail which creates a new webpage or loads the image in the current page so you have to use the back button on your browser.

LaptopTips – Great Plugin – Even Better Support

Shutter Reloaded is a WordPress Plugin that provides this functionality from LaptopTips.

I installed the plugin on ProReviewer yesterday evening but it wasn’t working. I checked the webpage code and everything seemed to be there. Looking at the LaptopTips site I could see that it was probably a conflict with some other code but sorting that out was beyond the time I have available. So I left a comment asking for assistance:

This was late yesterday evening for me but 11am local time for LaptopTips

I received an answer 4 hours later but didn’t pick it up until this morning (my time).

Brilliant Service!!!

By the way I have displayed the question and answer as images just to use Shutter Reloaded

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