Draytek Vigor 2860 slow loading of websites (hardware acceleration) over VDSL

A few months back I installed a Vigor 2860 at a client who took out a BT Infinity package. Although the connection was a lot quicker than before, websites were still loading quite slowly and often wouldnt "fully" load.

This was evidenced by the site appearing, but web-browsers still processing the site rather than it every completing.

At another site who had a 2860 (but in this case it was being used for ADSL), I decided to update the firmware. Reading through the firmware patch notes, I saw an interesting thing which said:

On VDSL, if experiencing delays in web browsing then disable H/W Acceleration via [Hardware Acceleration] > [Setup]. This will not impact the throughput performance. 

Whats this I thought?

I turned it off immediately on my other site with the 2860 - and things started working perfectly.

So there we have it, ensure Hardware Acceleration is OFF

I have since noticed that 2860s shipping with an up to date firmware have this turned off as standard, but if you have an older unit it would be worth checking

Apple iPhone 5c not downloading email, apps closing and crashing

I recently had a client whose iPhone 5c was not downloading mail from their corporate account. It would sometimes get it, but then randomly stop for no reason.

Along with this, certain apps (especially maps) would close seemingly without reason. Other apps would crash and the whole phone was generally unresponsive.

The reason?

The system had no space free on the storage - 0 bytes available.

Some apps were removed and the problems instantly went away. The phone hadn't informed the user that it was full, therefore they just though it was messing them around

Vipre Business Console not downloading updates - stuck on "work in progress" in the console

Just a quick one - it looks like there's been a bad update sent out recently by Vipre as nearly all of my business consoles have been stuck with the "work in progress" message when trying to download updates.

Clients are reporting that they are up to date, but the definitions are around a week old at this point.

To clear your bad updates out, do the following:

1: Stop the "Vipre Business Site Service"
2: Go to program data/vipre business/
3: Rename (or delete) the threatdb and threatdbfull folders (i put a .old at the end of them)
4: Restart the "Vipre Business Site Service"
5: Re-open the console

You should find the updates are again showing "work in progress" but this time.. work really IS in progress

Spotify Error 4 (No Internet Connection) and iCloud wheel spinning on Windows

The PC in question is on a domain and was using re-directed folders.

I recently had a client who was unable to use the Spotify desktop client on their PC - when they tried to connect they received "Error 4 No Internet Connection". After pulling my hair out and finding nothing wrong with the system at all I decided that the OS must have some underlying issue that I just wasn't able to see and so go the user to use the web-based version of Spotify instead.

This worked fine and they were happy to work like this.

Fast forward 2 weeks later and the user installs iCloud - which will not login correctly. The wheel constantly spins and refuses to connect.

I followed every support article going, installed every update/service pack/hotfix. Updated network card drivers, disabled firewalls and AV software.

You name it and I did it

Eventually, I managed to work out that the issue was realted to roaming profiles - inparticular to having the appdata\roamning folder located on UNC. I moved the contents of the folder back to a local drive and changed the location - gave the system a reboot and everything started working as it should.

I really hope this helps someone (+1 me!) as this wasted a lot of time for me

Android Pay NFC - Please present one card only - Samsung Galaxy S5 with wireless charging

I recently got Android Pay for on my S5 Galaxy and have had a lot of problems trying to make payments with it.

It had only just rolled out int he UK, and I thought that the problem was that it was just to new however after a while I decided that something more must be going on as the payments kept failing witht he same rror:

"Please present one card only"

After thinking it over, I realised that I had custom fitted a wireless charger to the inside of my S5 and decided to remove it and try again.

And that fixed it - the wireless charging unit in the phone must have been interfering with the NFC chip and making the terminal unable to read it

I hope it helps someone :)

Wordpress All Import (WP All Import) WooCommerce - 403 Forbidden when importing

Continuing my Wordpress work, I needed to import a large amount of data into a Woo Commerce based store so decided to use WP All Import with the Woo Commerce add on to do this.

However, when I tried to import from my first CSV I kept getting a 403 Forbidden error. Naturally, I assumed that i'd done something wrong with the .htaccess access file but all seemed OK.

I decided to check the settings, and made a minor change of no consequence but when I tried to save it I again received the 403 Forbidden error.

Now realizing that it wasn't something to do with the import itself, but rather the plugin I turned to the support forums and setup guides for help - but nothing seemed to mention this.

Looking around the settings page, I this time noticed a box  called "Add port to URL" which allows you to change port that your webserver uses. I do all of my development work on a server running Apache on port 8080 and suddenly my problem was clear - the plugin wasn't capable of changing ports, it had to be informed of the port the web-server was using.

After enter 8080 in the box and saving the settings (which actually saved this time!) everything started to work as expected.

WordPress, Contact Form 7 and recpatcha causing "failed to send your message" when submitting forms

I've recently started using the recaptcha plugin for contact form 7 in my WordPress sites. When I made a recent site live, none of the forms were sending.

Upon investigation, the issue was related to having the recaptcha present on the form as if I removed it they would send straight away.

When I originally added it I remember setting up the API key and yet it still wasn't working. On closer examination, the secret key was wrong and resetting the API keys solved the issue.

The reason the key was wrong is because when you highlight the secret key on Googles API page and copy and paste it, it doesn't just select the key - it takes the text description of it too! So you end up pasting the key with extra text at the end which I never noticed when originally adding it.

Bottom line - if the form won't submit and you've got recaptcha running I would double check your API keys as you may have made the same mistake as me :)

One more thing to remember (although not directly related to the above) is that the codes for the contact form objects, such as  [your-name] are case sensitive! So [your-name] is not the same as [Your-Name]