CCAR Help :: Technical Training and Support » Tips & Tidbits of the Week

Contact Manager Error Message?

Jared White — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:06:11 +0000

The contact manager error is common in browsers that have multiple pop-up blockers enabled. Google and Yahoo toolbars must be disabled before trying to fix the issue. See below:

Quick and Easy Steps:

1. First click the ‘View’ option at the top of the browser. view screenshot

2. Hover over ‘Toolbars’. view screenshot

3. Uncheck anything but ‘Standard Buttons’, ‘Address Bar’ and ‘Links’. view screenshot

4. Now click ‘Tools’ at the top of your browser. view screenshot

5. Select ‘Internet Options’. view screenshot

6. Go to the ‘Security’ Tab. view screenshot

7. Click once on ‘Trusted Sites’ so it’s highlighted. view screenshot

8. Click the ‘Sites’ button, below. view screenshot

9. In the trusted sites window uncheck ‘Require Server Verification’. view screenshot

10. Then add *.fnismls.com to the website box. view screenshot

11. Click ‘Add’, then ‘OK’ view screenshot

12. Click on ‘Custom Level’. view screenshot

13. Scroll down to the heading ‘Miscellaneous’. view screenshot

14. Above ‘Miscellaneuous’ set ‘Java Permissions’ to Low Safety. view screenshot

15. Change or keep all options above set to ‘Enable’. view screenshot

16. Press ‘OK’ out of security settings

17. Press ‘OK’ out of internet options

Finally, restart your computer. That should do it. If you still get the error then you might have more than one popup-blocker running. If that’s the case, give us a call at our Technical Support Center at 925-295-1270 and we can help you from there.

General Disclaimer

CCAR does not guarantee the reliability or quality of any of the products, links, software, or hardware of the vendors mentioned in CCAR Help Blog articles. Nor do we have a vested interest in any of those entities whatsoever. You hereby acknowledge that any reliance upon or use of any of the aforementioned shall be at your sole risk. CCAR reserves the right, in its sole discretion and without any obligation, to make improvements to, or correct any error or omissions in any portion of the information presented on this site.

Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 18

Jared White — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:27:48 +0000

• Go ahead, give it the boot!

o Boot options for repair (for users and Tech’s alike)

The following information could possibly help you avoid using the services of a Tech person in the event your computer does not start up properly.

I believe in arming the real estate agent with information that could perhaps save a great deal of time and money. I say this because if your computer does not come to a login screen or keeps restarting, you may be able to resolve the issue very quickly yourself and I will tell you how. Let’s say you turn on your computer and you get a blue screen with text and then it continually reboots. Or, when you boot your computer you notice that you never get to a login screen, or it sits there forever and never makes it to the desktop. What you want to do next falls into 3 choices below from the screenshot below that.

I usually resolve issues in the following order. How you get the boot options to come up is when you first turn on your computer, tap the F8 key once every second until you see the black boot screen in the screenshot below. Up/down arrows will allow you to highlight an option and then click the enter key:

1) Last known good configuration

o This is an easy choice. If there has been a change such as a driver or a program has been installed that is now causing your system to not boot up properly, you may be able to reverse the effects of the install by choosing this option.

2) Repair your computer

o Let’s say you tried the last known good configuration option and that has not worked for you. You can choose this option and what it attempts to do is replace or repair the startup files that may have been affected that are causing the boot issue.

3) Safe mode with networking

o There are times when even though you cannot get to a login screen or to your desktop through a normal boot, you may be able to reach your desktop by choosing this option. If you are able to get to your desktop with this option, then there is a good chance that an installed program is what is keeping you from getting to your desktop with a typical boot. Safe mode with networking temporarily stops drivers and processes from loading up which may be at fault. If you can get to your desktop with this option and you remember that just before your computer crashed that a program was installed, then you can uninstall the offending program from this option and reboot again and perhaps everything will return back to normal.

So as you can see, there are a number of potential quick fixes that can often result in returning your system back to a normal state in less time that it takes to call a Tech, let alone waiting for them to arrive to your location.

Incidentally, this is the last article of the Windows 7 series. We will rotate the articles in this series from time to time. I hope you have enjoyed and learned something from these articles. I wish you many happy years of use of your Windows 7 computer armed with the information in these articles.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 17

Jared White — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:58:39 +0000

I need my old file back, what do I do?

o Enter Shadow Copies

Here is something you may not know. There is a way to restore previous versions of files in Vista and Windows 7. Most systems right out of the box will have the settings for Shadow Copies turned on by default and this will allow you to restore an older version of a file.

To do this, locate the file or folder where you normally keep the file you are looking for the previous version of, right-click on the file or folder that appears to be from a date that was just prior to the point where something had gone wrong. Then select Restore Previous Versions to see what’s available (see below). From the Previous Versions dialog for a folder, you can open the folder and drag the file or files from inside the folder (or the folder itself) to anywhere you wish, such as the desktop. Once you have relocated your file or folder you can verify the version is the correct one you were looking for.

In the next article you will learn how to choose boot options when your computer is having issues.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 16

Jared White — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:22:25 +0000

Restoring hope

o Turning back the hands of time

So here’s the situation: Your computer was working fine recently but it seems that now your browser has been crashing or you can’t get on to Paragon, or you have been getting errors. What do you do? As Tech’s, we like to look at a number of possibilities but when adjustments made to correct the issue or issues do not result in success, a great tool is System Restore.

System Restore can turn back the hands of time to a date you know your system was working. It will not alter data files so there is no reason to worry. How you (or we) run this process is by going to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. It can take a few minutes to come up after you have clicked on the icon. You will have 2 options. Select the one that says “Choose a different restore point”. From there you pick a date that you are certain was before the point of failure.

You can also click the check box Show more restore points for more date ranges. It is better to go back a few days or even a week or more before the point you know your computer was working right, just to be on the safe side if you are unsure. After System Restore runs, your system will reboot. If this process still does improve the situation, you may have a virus or Malware or something else going on. Sometimes System Restore fails to roll back or if the System Restore succeeds, it may not fix the particular issue you are having. This is where you may need to seek out a Tech person or us at CCAR.

In the next article you will learn how to recover a file you had deleted or improperly changed and get back the old version.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 15

Jared White — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:09:00 +0000

Lettuce backup a bit

o Creating system repair discs, backing up your personal files

Let’s’ now look at backing up in two important phases.

1) Creating system repair discs

2) Backing up your personal files

First, when you create a set of system discs, you are backing up your entire hard drive including your operating system. You usually do this only once and at the point when you first buy your computer. With system repair discs, if your system crashes, this may end up becoming one of the possible options used for a Tech person to repair it. If you did not create the discs when you bought your computer, you can still create them at a latter point such as right now. Make sure you have 3 DVD’s on hand for this.

Go to Start, Control Panel then click on the Backup and Restore icon. Click on the Create a System recovery disc link in the left blue pane. (See screenshot below). From there you can create your system repair discs. Then store these in a place you remember where you can get to them easily if needed at some point.

This next part could be the most critical point of all my writings because this involves protecting you from what could be the severe consequence of data loss, data that may be unrecoverable if it is not replicated elsewhere. For you, the real estate agent, backing up your personal files regularly should be mandatory above all else.

The following is a simplified version of my article titled “The Greatest Backup on Earth” which is located on ccarhelp.com. I am going to provide a simple and effective solution that I use. I use a combination of a USB Flash drive and free software from allwaysync.com. The reason I use a flash drive is because wherever I go, it goes. If you have an external drive sitting at home, that is great if your computer crashes but NOT good if your computer and external hard drive are stolen or worse yet, your house burns down.

You can buy a USB Flash drive for around $25.00. Make sure you get one that is 8-16 gigabytes. The one I use is SanDisk Cruzer Micro because it has password protection and a nice large flashing light when it is running a backup. You can search for this model on the internet if you like. After you download Allwaysync, you will be able to choose the source and destination folders, the source being your documents folder on your computer and the destination being a folder on your USB Flash drive. Then once each week or so you just have to click on one button on the Allwaysync interface to synchronize changed files, added files, and deleted files. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at Tech Support.

In the next article you will learn how to turn back time on your computer to when it was working properly.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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iPad review part 2: The Basics

-2 — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:42:56 +0000

Now that we have unboxed and taken a first critical look at the ipad in our first post in this series, lets take a step back and cover the basics very briefly. If you are already familiar with the ipad, or even the itouch/iphone, you may want to skip this one.

The ipad is basically a big iphone. Guess what, sometimes bigger technology is better. After an intense decade of competition in the emerging smartphone space, where miniaturization was the rule of thumb, we are starting to see a push for ‘bigger.’ This is of course driven by the screen. The iphone screen is beautiful, but you can bet that virtually everyone who first turned on their iphone and started gesturing at the surface said to themselves, ‘wow, it would be great if this thing was 6 times the size!’

In reality, the original protoype that led to the iphone was in fact the surface tablet that eventually became the ipad, only well after the iphone enjoyed its amazing release.

The ipad is a surface computing device. That just means that it is a computer that employs a special graphical user interface, or GUI. That interface, for the ipad and other surface devices like it, is the screen itself. Since surface computing and the iphone both already exist, how can anyone call the ipad a revolutionary device?

Well, do you remember when the rubiks cube rolled out? Big deal, another multicolor plastic puzzle with moving pieces. Wrong… the cube just ‘got it right.’ A 2 year old could immediately pick it up and start working the cube. It was intuitive, but it also challenged you. It felt good, it looked good, and it swept the world. In the process, it absolutely changed the way that we looked at a few things.

Enter the ipad. Yes, just a slate tablet. Yes, just a surface device. Yes, just a reinvention of the pda. But oh my.

This is what Apple does so well. Take established concepts and technologies, and create the ‘perfect’ version of them.

So what do you get for your money?

Well the ipad comes in white or black, in 16, 32, and 64 gigabyte models. For reference, the 16 gb model could hold about 10-12 high full length movies like Avatar (no perceptible difference from the dvd), and still have room for lots of apps and a bit of user data (stored app sessions, pictures, etc). The 64 gb version can easily hold 45 such movies and still have a lot of space to grow.

Beyond that, there are now 3g variants of these models. That basically just means that you can now get the device with a cellular card installed, pretty much like the iphone. It is not meant to make calls (though i am sure there is an app for that), but rather for data access. Browsing on the go – access to mobile MLS, email, mapping, etc. As I noted in the first post, for many agents the data access on the fly is a must, but you may want to strongly consider a Verizon or Sprint mifi card for basically the same cost. This mobile hot spot will practically fit in your wallet, and offers as good or better data access, with more flexibility. Of course, if you leave it at home…

For many of us, the 3g option is not needed, as we are constantly in a wifi hotspot.

As discussed in the first review post, the box also comes with a power adapter and cable. Beyond that, you will almost certainly want a protective case, bag, or something to accessorize your ipad and protect it from damage (including a film overlay to protect the screen)

Beyond the hardware, you get an:

amazing listing presentation tool. The screen is just so pleasing to look at, the gesture based interface so appealing, that listing presentations, and listing review with buyers, are obvious ways to take advantage of the device. Whether you are reviewing a powerpoint type presentation, a series of images, or websites (or all of the above), the ipad is a great way to get your message across when sitting with a client.
a powerful mobile productivity tool. Example: with a $10 app or two you could rapidly create a visually stunning listing presentation on the fly at the home in question, not that you want to. The ability to be truly productive on the ipad, compared with sitting at a desktop pc with an suite of office software, etc. , will depend on the apps. As more and more apps are built and perfected for the ipad experience, things might get interesting.
a potent tool for bonding; bonding with clients, with family and with friends will be a natural result of using the device. Unlike a laptop, passing the pad back and forth between users is very comfortable. Tthe ipad has an xfactor that is also shared by the Nintendo wii systems here… Put a 73 year old technophobe across the ipad from a 3 year old child, and they will both have a phenomenal experience. It is the simplicity of the gestures and the intuitive interface that makes the tool appealing to just about anyone.
a sublime gaming platform for certain types of games

So while we have touched on it, we haven’t really focused yet on what makes the ipad, and its smaller cousins the ipod touch and iphone so ‘cool.’ In a nutshell, they are simple, but sophisticated. I am repeatedly amazed at how many intuitive functions there are.

For example, if you scribble something on your screen, but don’t like the results, just shake your device gently, and it will erase (a 4 year old actually showed this to me)… just like the etch-a-sketch many of us grew up with. Looking at a photo? Want to see the next one? Just swipe your finger. This is called ‘inertial scrolling’ and is a big part of what makes the devices so useful. When you take a phone call and hold the iphone to your ear, the screen automatically dims to conserve battery… pull it away from your ear a few inches to look at the screen, and it automatically lights the screen.

How is that possible? Well, the idevices are all leveraging accelerometer technology. That just means that the device can tell when you are tipping it, rotating it, and shaking it… and it can tell how fast.

Also, obviously, the devices are taking advantage of ‘multi-touch surface computing.’ That just means that you can touch the screen to do things, drag them, etc… but you can do so with multiple fingers. So if there is a bit of text that you want to grab, you can just ‘pinch’ the screen at both ends of the text blob, and it instantly highlights just that portion. This screen technology (which again Apple certainly did not invent, but definitely has ‘perfected’) is now sophisticated enough that well made apps are now using ‘wrist protection’ to ignore your wrist resting comfortably on the surface while giving ‘focus’ to your finger doing the drawing.

Finally, the speed of the system makes it ‘cool.’ Granted, this is a bit of a ploy. The idevices do not allow genuine multitasking. So, while I can watch a movie on our recent rebareastbay.com event on my laptop in one corner of my screen, have three or four browser windows open, and still be typing on this post all at once, I cannot do this on the ipad. The ipad runs one app at a time, and does so very effectively. The ploy is that it is not that hard to run one app at a time. But in practical use, the ability to be working in about 2 seconds after picking up the ipad, and the ability to switch between apps in that same 2 seconds and be working in the new app, make multitasking somewhat irrelevant. We all do too much multitasking these days anyways. I do not feel limited by the one app at a time approach, I feel like I focus more on what I am doing, and have a better experience over all as a result.

So enough about what it is and why it is cool. Lets take a first look at what you can do right out of the box with an ipad, and some of the tools that CCAR puts at your disposal for free!

Some immediate, practical examples.

The CCAR mobile portal

mobile MLS access
mobile HOT access
mobile ccar contacts
mobile find a realtor
mobile reverse MLS lookup (find a REALTOR® by their property, etc)
much more that we will demonstrate visually in the next post

CCAR HOT – HomesOpenToday.com – while you can access HOT through the mobile portal, since HOT is simply a website, you can also of course browse there from the built in browser.

CCAR Single property websites – CCAR creates a few different views of your listing as soon as the listing is entered into the MLS. These are essentially single property websites that you can frame onto your website, link to from any number of venues where you might want to share listing information, etc.

CCAR Cooliris galleries – CCAR also creates some flash driven ‘cooliris’ listing galleries – for your agent inventory, your office inventory, and for all upcoming open homes. But wait, you say. If these engaging galleries are flash driven, how can you take advantage of them on the ipad which does not support flash?

Well, there is of course an app for that! Cooliris recently put out an app that works well on both the iphone and the ipad. I suspect that the next revision will improve the quality of the images, which do seem more geared to the smaller screen of the iphone. We will demonstrate this app visually in our next post, as well as most of the tools we reference here, and beyond.

One of the really interesting and fun things you can do for free with the ipad is display its interface on your pc. So, for example, I can project an image on a screen from my laptop. We have all seen this a thousand times in presentations. Well, add one little step, which is a piece of free client software on my pc, and a corresponding app running on the ipad, and I am now able to be holding the tablet in my hand, driving that wonderful interface, and watching the results on my laptop screen (and/or a projector). See a printscreen below. Now that we have that bit of functionality, we will be recording some demonstrations for future reviews.

This concludes part 2 of our series of reviews on the ipad. We could go on and on describing uses for the ipad using CCAR and third party tools, but it will be much more effective to show you rather than tell you.
Now that the unboxing, and the basics are behind us, we can focus on advanced practical uses in future posts, including video demonstrations of the device in action.

Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 14

Jared White — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:38:42 +0000

Help, I’m under attack

o Malware prevention, removal, and peace of mind

I’ve also created a separate, more complete article on Malware and how to spot the symptoms and the removal process but this abbreviated version can still help you. The key points to remember are that if you find that your computer has a pop-up that indicates you have a bunch of virus’s and you sense that this may not be true, or your computer is running very slow, or if you type in a web page you are taken to another site than the one you were trying to get to – you may have Malware. There are a number of free programs that can be used to remove Malware.

Here are 2 programs I use to remove Malware. If you want more information on spotting and removing Malware see my article titled “Malware, Help I’m Under Attack! It is located on ccarhelp.com. That article includes much more detail and a couple more free programs you can use. If you select Malwarebytes from the link below, make sure you select Perform full scan as seen in the picture at the bottom. I have used this program with great success for quite some time. Remember, it will ask you to reboot after a scan. Make sure you do so.

In the next article you will learn how to make backup discs of your system and as an added bonus how to back up your data in a very simple way.

MalwareBytes: http://malwarebytes.org

SuperAntiSpyWare: http://superantispyware.com

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 13

Jared White — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:21:43 +0000

Update time!

o Update options and a better world

Updates are VERY important for both a stable system as well as to protect against attacks. There are several settings that you can set the updates as seen in the screenshot below. The choice that is highlighted is not one I recommend. The reason is, many times a user will be working on an important document or in the case of my wife, taking an online test and not notice the message in the corner indicating the system needs to reboot after downloading the updates (It asks if you want to postpone, but it can be hard to see with programs open) and then it forcibly shuts down the computer. This can happen if you leave the room for even 10 minutes.

To add insult to injury, if someone is working on an important document of urgent matter or taking a test and the reboot takes place, when this happens, it takes even more time than usual because it has to configure your updates – and at a time that is NOT at all convenient.

In my opinion, the best choice is “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them” (not the choice that is highlighted below).

In the next article you will learn how to remove Malware from your system to save time and money!

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 12

Jared White — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:40:09 +0000

Don’t put out the fire…….WALL!

o The Firewall, your coat of armor

This is more of a checklist than an article but a quite important one at that. The key to one critical area of security is to make your firewall is turned on, and the basic settings are at default. Go to Start, Control Panel, Windows Firewall and look for the screen similar to the one below.

As a note in some cases, a Tech person may have made changes to specifically allow certain applications to communicate past the firewall so all you want to do here is make sure the basic settings match the ones below in the picture. Other than that, for the real estate agent, there really is nothing else that needs to be configured unless you are running a unique program that requires what is called an acceptance rule which is handled by a Tech person when that is needed on those rare occasions.

Overall, there should be no need to make changes yourself beyond making sure the firewall is turned on as seen below.

In the next article you will learn about updates and the proper setting for receiving and installing updates.

Note: slowness can also be the result of Malware which we will cover in a separate article.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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Windows 7 for Real Estate Agents Edition 11

Jared White — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:51:32 +0000

• I need a tune-up and an aspirin by Richard Tausch

o Uninstalling Programs, Defragmenting, and msconfig (for Pro’s only)

So let´s say you´ve clicked on internet explorer or opened up program and things seem to be running very slow, or when you boot up, it takes a lot longer to get to the desktop than it used to. Well have no fear, there may be a few simple things you (or a Tech person) can do to speed things up a bit. I will cover this in 3 major areas in the following, the first two you may be able to do without a tech person.

• Uninstall Programs

The first order of business is to uninstall programs you know you don´t need. But you want to make absolutely sure you aren´t uninstalling critical applications, programs, etc. Always go with the obvious choices, those that you are sure of, or have a Tech person help you decide if you are not sure. To uninstall a program, go to Start, Control Panel, Programs and Features, and you will see a screen similar to the one below but with more programs. From here you can uninstall the ones you no longer need. Remember to ask for help from a Tech person if items in the list seem ambiguous to you.

• Defragment your hard drive

As mentioned in article #1 of this series, Windows 7 defragmenter uses less resource than its predecessor and allows you to continue working with less impact on performance while the defragmenter is running. To put it in simple terms, defragmenting simply organizes your files better on your hard drive by placing related files closer together so that the needle that reads the hard disc doesn´t have to run all over the disc(s) looking for files.
To defragment, go to Start, Control Panel, System and Security. Under the Administrative Tools Section, Click on Defragment your hard drive. You will see the screen below. You can continue working while your hard disc is defragmented.

• Msconfig

Okay, now for the final piece to all of this. The following process should only be followed by a Tech person; otherwise the outcome may lead to undesirable results. However, if you have completed the first two items above uninstalling programs and defragmenting your hard drive, having done so will save time, especially if you are paying a Tech by the hour for this next process. Your Tech will typically know how to perform the following using msconfig so I´ll say no more except to indicate that there are programs running in the background which can slow things down and these programs, rarely used, can be de-selected from starting up and that can make your system run faster. The screenshot below is an example of the type of programs that may be running in the background. If you are still having issues, you may be able to take two aspirin and call us in the morning.

Note: slowness can also be the result of Malware which we will cover in a separate article.

In the next article you will learn how to check your firewall settings to make sure they are properly set.

Here´s to happy computing!

Richard Tausch, MCSE, CCNA, CompTia Security +

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