Matt Silverman

Purchased my AT&T Wireless 3G card about 2 months ago. Has worked flawlessly since then, up until today. Out of no where, when trying to connect with a full 3G signal available, an error message stating Error 668 caused the connection to terminate. I tried the usual problem solving of removing the aircard and reinserting it, restarting the ATT connection manager, and restarting my laptop. Nothing worked, and it continued to produce the Error 668 message.

As I would rather squeeze turnip juice than call AT&T Wireless for any technical support issues, I tried A few Google searches which netted some promising results. While I am not sure exactly what fixed my problem, it is now working again without any hardware replacement. Feel free to try the methods below.

Reinstall the Firmware

• If you have a different model or Mac OS, you can start at the Sierra Support website
• Otherwise, visit the 881 AirCard Support Downloads page for Windows
• Download and run the firmware application, while keeping your aircard plugged into the PCMCIA slot.
• Some people mentioned that installing the Connection watcher utility from the support downloads page may also help with this issue, but I did not need to use it.

After reinstalling the firmware, I attempted to connect again but still received the same error 668 code. I then moved to this next little workaround.

Install New ATT Connection Profile Using wap.cingular

This is what I think finally fixed my problem, but it did not work without first reinstalling the firmware.

1. Edit connection profiles in ATT Wireless Connection Utility

2. Click the “Add” button on the profile manager window, then select “AT&T” and hit next.
3. Change isp.cingular to wap.cingular, and leave all the other input boxes as is. My result looked like this:

4. Hit next, make sure both radio buttons are select to “Obtain IP Address Automatically” and hit next again.
5. Give your new profile a name, I used AT&T (2). I changed the connection options window to “Automatic” from the default manual, and that seemed to work for me.

6. Hit Finish, close out of the profile manager, select the connections drop down window in the AT&T connection utility, and then select the new AT&T (2) connection profile that we just created.

Hope this was some help to you. Please post in the comments if this did or did not work for you.

One of the biggest headaches with printers, especially USB printers, is getting a print job to stop once it has already started. Sometimes you can click cancel on the print job, but other times the job will go until completion. Even turning off the printer does not always solve the problem. I finally came across a solution that fixes all printing problems for me.

Step 1. If you need to immediately stop the printer from wasting paper/ink, turn off your printer. This may involve unplugging the power cord from the surge protector if the regular power buttons fail.

Step 2. Go to Start button > Run > net stop spooler

Step 3. Click OK

Step 4. Start > Run > C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers


Step 5. Hit OK, and delete all files within the “Printers” folder you just opened. This will delete any print jobs you had remaining.

Step 6. Start > Run > net start spooler


Step 7. Hit OK, and turn your printer back on.

All of your printing problems should now be solved. Please post comments if this did or did not work for you.

I recently realized that Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Premiere CS3 were updating themselves without permission to do so. I looked for an option within each respective application to disallow automatic updates, but could not find one. After doing some searching, I found this workaround.

To disable automatic updates in Adobe CS3 for Windows Vista (Should work for Windows XP too):

1. Start > Run > C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Updater5\AdobeUpdater.exe (if this does not work, navigate to to the common files folder and follow the same directory structure to get to AdobeUpdater.exe.
2. Adobe Updater will open, and select continue as it searches for updates.
3. On the screen where you tell it to download the updates, it will have a preferences link. Click the preferences link.
4. Un-check the box that says “Automatically check for updates.” and hit okay, then close out of the updater.
5. Enjoy.

Jimmy Kimmel has finally responded to Sarah Silverman’s “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” video, with his own amazing piece, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck.” He went above and beyond, and deserves recognition for this one.

I recently came across a video file that was .MKV, and had to do some sleuthing to figure out how to watch it. The best solution I came up with was downloading and installing the codec pack from cccp-project.net. Select all of the default options as you go through the installer. After installing on Windows Vista 32-bit I received an odd “String Error” message, but the install worked fine.

To play my file, I still had to use Windows’ “Choose a program to view this file” and it selected “media player classic,” which is included in the CCCP Project installer. After all was said and done, the movie files were playing correctly in the newly installed Media Player classic.