Archive for January, 2010

Healing more Blackberry headaches

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Hello once again, and hope you’ve had a productive week.

At ARC IT Solutions we’ve been very busy, working on a site survey for a client who is expanding and moving to new premises, creating a spec for an Aussie company which needs a new website, and building a new PC for another client who needs Windows 7 to function properly with their bespoke software packages.

We’ve also launched a new website – www.blackberrystuff.co.uk – for a client, selling all kinds of Blackberry phones and accessories.

But enough about us, you’re here because you’re having headaches with your Blackberry – ones we didn’t cover with our first entry last week. Hopefully we can help you out with them this time.

So having dealt with what to do when your Blackberry screen freezes, or when you can’t send or receive emails, it’s time to cover two more ‘popular’ problems.

A lot of people have been calling us lately because they can’t connect their Blackberry to an existing Enterprise Server account.

All you have to do is go through the following steps and your problem should disappear.

  • Firstly, go into Options, then Advanced Options, and then Enterprise Activation.
  • Type in the user’s email address, and then the activation password provided.
  • Once you’ve done this the Blackberry will activate, although it may take a few minutes.

This is all assuming you have set up the user on the Enterprise Server, so check that first before going through the three steps.

Secondly, Blackberry memory leaks are also proving to be an issue. The device begins to ‘eat’ call logs and messages, making them mysteriously disappear. Your handset is doing this because it is running out of memory, and is trying to free up some space.

If you’re having this problem, you need to check the File Free info on your device. You can do this in one of two ways, either by going into Options, followed by Status; or by holding ALT, SHIFT and H all at the same time.

That will take you to a help screen, which tells you all kinds of techie stuff like your signal strength, your battery level, and loads of other things you couldn’t possibly be interested in. However it does also tell you how much room you have in your memory.

Ideally, you should have between 12 and 14mb of space, and this is expressed as the full number – i.e. 12000000 bytes, not 12mb. If you have less space than that, it’s time to delete some files and/or applications.

It’s probably best to go for applications first, as they take up most room. To do this, you need to go to Options, then Advanced Options, and Applications.

Then you’ll need to highlight the application you want to get rid of, select menu, and then delete.

You’ll need to reboot as well to finish everything off.

That’s it for now. We’ll be back with more suggestions on freeing up memory next week.

Have a good one!

Winning your Blackberry battles

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Hello and welcome to our new blog, where we will keep you posted on developments at ARC IT Solutions and also try and solve some of your computer-related headaches.

We are specialists at dealing with Blackberry problems – particularly anything to do with Blackberry Enterprise Server – and as such we handle lots of enquiries which are connected to installation and configuration.

Many of them are fairly straight-forward if you’ve been dealing with Blackberries for as long as we have (over six years now!), and we will aim to sort out as many as we can through this blog. That way you don’t have to make that support call and build a massive phone bill!

Of course we are still here to help if your issue is more advanced than the ones we cover here. Please feel free to give us a call on 0844 7452 123, or visit our website.

1. One of the most common problems we hear about is the Blackberry screen is frozen. So what do you do if your handset freezes and you can’t scroll up or down, or click on anything?

Well, you have two options.

Firstly, you could try a ’soft reset’. This is available on any handset, except the Pearl 81xx series. Hit your device’s ALT, right shift/CAP, and DEL keys simultaneously.

Your display will go black, and your LED indicator will turn red for a few seconds. Don’t be alarmed, this doesn’t mean impending doom! Your handset is just going through the reboot process, which can take a few minutes.

If that doesn’t work, try a ‘hard reset’.

This is merely removing your battery without first turning the unit off.

2. Another popular enquiry is connected to email – namely your Blackberry isn’t sending or receiving email messages. This can obviously be a big inconvenience, especially for business users.

The first thing to do is to look in the top left of your display. Can you see ‘GPRS’ in capital letters?

GPRS stands for General Packet Radio Service and is available on most second and third generation phones. It provides the user with ‘always-on’ internet access.

If that’s missing, it could be because you are not receiving a GPRS signal, and that’s probably what’s causing the issue. Try moving outside, or around the building, until the letters return to your display. It really can be that simple.

If you can see ‘GPRS’ on your display, but it’s in small letters rather than CAPS, you have no Blackberry data package and that means it’s time to call your airtime provider.

If neither of those work, you could also try a ‘hard reset’ which we described earlier.

Ok so that’s two of the biggest Blackberry battles fought and won. We’ll be back next week with more info on how to heal your Blackberry headaches.

ARC iT Solutions

Friday, January 15th, 2010