FAQ - Support
How do I capture a screen to illustrate a problem?
How can I tell what version is current?
My computer is acting screwy. How do I find out what is wrong?
I have been getting weird problems and disk error messages. How do I check them?
Motive Power runs, but the performance has slowed to a crawl. What should I check?
How do I capture a screen to illustrate a problem?
In Windows XP: Press Alt+PrtScrn to get the active window or PrtScrn to get the whole screen. Next start up Windows Paint, then pick edit and then paste. You should see the screen you captured in Paint. Save the file.
In Windows Vista or Windows 7 or Windows 8: Use the snip tool to outline the Motive Power screen area, and then save the file.
If needed, attach the file you just saved to e-mail that you send to support@motivepower.biz
How can I tell what version is current?
Click on Versions at the Motive Power web site to find out what version is currently shipping. Each time you start Motive Power it shows you the version number on the sign-in screen. You can also see the version on the Settings | This User screen. It is your responsibility to keep current by downloading the current update, if any, from the Web site.
My computer is acting screwy. How do I find out what is wrong?
One of the real advances of later versions of Windows is the ability to find out what is wrong with your computer. It is important to follow this procedure right after you have a problem. Look at the system clock in the lower right to get the time of the problem. You will be looking for error messages that occurred at this precise time. Error messages come in three levels: Information, Warning, and Error. We only care about Warnings and Errors.
Here is how it works:
Microsoft has made the later operating systems "fail soft". This means that things fail but the machine keeps running if possible. That is why you need to look in event viewer to find errors that occurred but did not cause total machine failure.
I have been getting weird problems and disk error messages. How do I check them?
You need to run a disk scan on your computer. You should run this some time when you don't need the computer. Depending on the speed of the machine and the size of the disk drive, this make take several hours if you pick the thorough option.
Here is how you run a disk scan on Windows XP, Vista, or 7:
The standard scan will take a few minutes and the full scan may take a few hours.
Motive Power runs, but the performance has slowed to a crawl. What should I check?
Your networking configuration has been altered. First check to be sure that your computers are all in the same workgroup. At a command prompt type Ipconfig to see the IP address of each machine. In most small networks the first three groups of the IP address should be the same on all machines. If you can't find any problems your DHCP provider may not be working properly. To test this assign static IP addresses to all your computers. If some of your computers will still be using dynamic IP addresses you have to set your router to set a range for dynamic addresses, leaving the rest for static addresses. You can find out more from Windows Help and support. Here is a link to an article on how to set up static addresses for Windows 7; here is a link for Windows XP.