Persnickety Problem
I think, at long last, I have found the solution to a very persnickety and persistent problem that has been inflicting one of my users for well over the last year or so. The poor lady has a Mac Mini, but due to her familiarity we set it up so that she only uses Windows XP, but wait that’s not the bad part. Ever since she got her new computer she has from time-to-time received garbage characters on her screen. The timing was completely random, it could go for months and not do it, but it was always the same characters, typically a +E? combination with some variations including a dash or the percent symbol, maybe a comma too. I had tried many things, including replacing her keyboard twice, the mouse once, updating the Boot Camp drivers and I was on the verge of reinstalling Windows, until today.
She called me directly, which I usually hate (our users are supposed to call a central help line), but when she said that it was doing it again I ran up there to check it out. And indeed, every few seconds to a couple of minutes the characters would appear on the screen. Very weird. So her boss wonders by, he knows about this problem and suggests that maybe it’s the mouse. Huh, couldn’t hurt, I certainly don’t have any other ideas, and let me ask you if you’ve ever Googled “Mac Mini +E?”? Not very effective, and that’s usually my saving grace, have problem, never heard of it? Google! So in the course of getting a new mouse from the office I come back to find out that the characters appeared again, with her hold mouse disconnected. That’s probably not it then. I plug the new mouse in, just for S&G, then start to wonder if it could be one of her other USB devices. She has a card reader or USB printer that, just maybe, is sending crazy, sporadic signals to the computer.
This leads me to swap her USB devices around a bit and it just so happens that out of the corner of my eye I see the green light on the magnetic card reader go red for a split second, then go green. And guess what? The characters had appeared in her open Word document. Ah hah! I took a mental step back and took a good look at her arrangement, the Mac Mini has the AC adapters for the Mac and the monitor sitting on top of it, and the card reader is sitting on top of them. Magnetic card readers have magnetic card strip reading thingies in them. It all seems so obvious now, and after I waved the card reader over the AC adapters a few times I was able to reproduce the problem. So hopefully, now that the reader is on the other side of the monitor away from the AC adapters the problem won’t reoccur. I’m hesitant to get excited and write this one off, such is my luck, but I’m optimistic. Oh yes, optimistic.