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buzzyI got to help someone with their printer and computer. The printer was first, since that's what I originally came over to repair. The printer is an HP Photosmart D110 (CN731A) that's a week out of warranty, though it has been giving strange problems for a few months now. When the printer was turned on, it would say that paper needed to be loaded even when paper was already loaded. When you'd hit the OK button on the printer, it would say it wanted to run the cartridge alignment page. It gave no choice in the matter, so when you hit the OK button to run it, the printer would get stuck and wouldn't do anything. At first, I thought there was a problem with the sensor that checks whether there is paper in the printer. The solution (or so I've read) to that problem is to carefully feed a paper part of the way through the printer while it's off, then turn it on and let it spit the paper out. When that didn't work, I tried various things, such as checking the rollers, removing the duplexer (there isn't one, so it's just a curved piece of plastic with some little wheels on it), cycling the power, and performing hard resets. I found that when it was connected to the computer via USB, I could coax it into running the paper path cleaning by not hitting the OK when the printer told me to load paper. (I did make sure there was no paper in the printer when running the paper path cleaning, as directed.) After that, I loaded the paper and told it to run the cartridge alignment from the computer, instead of from the printer. The printer ran an alignment page, though it couldn't read the page since the black and color ink was gone. I loaded new black ink (all they had), and it was able to read the alignment page this time even though it was apparent that only the magenta color remained. I ran a test page and the printer was working normally. After all the hard resets, I had to redo the wireless setup. The printer printed normally wirelessly, so I considered it to be a success.
The problem with the computer was that the message "console.log: mikenote.prod" would appear randomly while the user checked her webmail on Road Runner using Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. (The user was not willing to switch to another browser. She does have Chrome, which is used for only one site that requires it; no messages appear on Chrome.) Looking for information on that error gave me a lot of people saying to disable add-ons and reset the Internet Explorer settings, neither of which worked. I eventually tracked the problem down to the JavaScript that runs the advertising. I added *.adsonar.com and *.doubleclick.net to the restricted sites zone (see this page on Microsoft's website if you don't know how to add sites to a security zone), and the messages stopped appearing. On Internet Explorer 9, you can use tracking protection lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy and you shouldn't have to worry about manually adding sites to your restricted sites zone.
