Welcome to Part Two of this series.

In Part One we looked at the situation that I was facing, having moved to a dedicated server from a shared-platform server. Being a noob as far as Linux is concerned, I followed leads from other people who were more experienced in using Linux, (Although one of them did in fact confess that, although he used Linux more than anything else at work, his main area of proficiency was, in fact, Windows.) which ended in a dead end.

Not to be outdone I eventually discovered a blog post from February 2008 which appeared to contain part of an interesting line of php that turned out to be the answer to my problem.

In Part Two, which you’re reading now, we’re going to look at that line of php, as well as add it to our respective blogs to prevent unnecessary 404 errors.

First, though, from my experience, although somewhat limited, I suggest that only bloggers who are hosted on a dedicated server use this code: I don’t see why it would be necessary to run on a shared-platform server. If you are on a shared-platform; that is sharing a server at your hosting company’s depot with others unknown, then your web-host’s engineers will normally be tending to the server and keeping it problem-free. (Which, in my case, is why it costs more to host 4 individual websites on separate domains on shared-platform servers than it does to host those 4 domains on a  single dedicated server: Because the engineers will only fix hardware faults and occasionally give limited advice on dedicated servers.) If you get unexpected 404s on a shared-platform server, phone customer support and they’ll ask the engineers to put it right. – Only use this code if you have no other alternative.

Note 1: – Which brings me on to thinking: There must be some setting somewhere in the server which will prevent the 404 issue from occurring. The engineers can sort it on shared-platform servers; so why can’t I on a dedicated server?

The answer to that is; a) I’m a technician. – Engineers are much better trained and have a wealth of experience. b) I’m a trained electronics technician, rather than a trained computer technician. c) Er, read on: You’ll see that I have sorted it out; but not in the server settings (Linux) themselves; rather, on a third-party application, namely WordPress, that is on the server, using php.

OK; so first, as promised, I’ll reveal where I found this code and give credit: The site is called “The Moonlight Blog”.  I’ve linked the name to the relevant page.

As you’ll see, the writer gives this information: -

Note the php. When rebuilt by myself it looks like: -

<?php header("Status: 200 OK");
?>

Yes I did say a single line of php; well it sort of is; it just works if it’s typed like that; so that’s how I’m presenting it.

“That was the fruit of a week’s work?” you ask; bemused.

In itself that was the fruit of a few minutes work; it just took me a week to find it, as well as many other things besides.

Note 2: In Part One I stated that the author’s php notation was incomplete; that’s true and then again not true: You see if you’re working with php all the time you know what goes where, and you come to expect a pattern. – so much so in fact that you only need write the information that’s not obvious to the trained eye.

header(“Status: 200 OK”); is the bit that the developer needs. The developer knows that it’s php because the semi-colon shows that it’s the end of the statement. The machine won’t know that it’s php because the machine hasn’t been told that it’s php. The bit that I added tells the machine that it’s php; otherwise, to the experienced developer, it’s simply not required.

OK so we have our line of php code; written so that the machine can understand it.

Where do I put it?

Well; since it’s an instruction for the header of a page to return a html 200 code when executed; it appears logical to put it in the header.php file in the theme folder; located at ~\wp-content\themes\<name of your theme>\header.php. if you have more than one header folder; for example: page_header.php and post_header.php, put it in all of the header files.

Where exactly do I put it in the header.php file(s)?

Right at the very top; above all the other text. Why? Because it works.

How do I add it to my header.php file?

There are 2 ways to do this: The first is possibly the easiest, and is from inside the WordPress GUI itself: -

(This method will only add it to the currently active theme installed on your WordPress installation.)

Click on the arrow on the Appearance tab and click on Editor. On the page that follows, look on the right-hand-side of the screen and click on Header (header.php).

In the text editor in the centre of the screen, type or copy & paste the php from this article above all the other text. You might have to click at the start of the first line and press return to create a clear line at the very top before you insert it.

Below the text editor window you’ll see a blue button with white writing on it “Update File”. Click it and wait for the function to execute. – That’s it.

The other way of doing it is to open up your FTP client and navigate to the wp-content folder on your server. On an Ubuntu server the path could look something like

/home/default/yourdomain/user/htdocs/wp-content

(Various servers/hosting companies may vary.)

Inside that folder you’ll find a folder called “plugins”. Open that and you’ll see a folder with the name of your current theme. Open that folder and download the header.php file to your local computer.

Use a text editor program to open the file and insert the php from this article at the very top of all the other text. Close and save. Use your ftp client to overwrite the existing header.php file on your server with the edited file. Do the same with any other themes you may have loaded as you wish.

-It’s as easy as that: The word “easy” depending upon your previous experience.

Just to recap: We’ve added some additional php to our header.php file in our header.php file in our WordPress blog to instruct the page headers to return a html 200 – OK when executed. This should stop them returning a html 404- not found error. The server then has no choice but to execute the other php on the page in question  and serve the product of that execution to the requesting machine.

- And that’s about all there is to say. This php did the trick for me. Why not let me and all my readers know whether or not it did the trick for you too? Leave a comment. Leave a comment also if you have anything further to add. I’m not a php expert, whereas you might be though; so do feel free to add something.

That’s all.

- And now; some adverts: -

Please excuse the semi-cryptic title; but the whole issue was a rather large conundrum for me; so I do think it fitting:

I’ve just done a week of self-imposed intensive Linux study: Although it certainly and without doubt expanded my mind, it wasn’t actually necessary, as in “vital”: -

In this and the following article; I intend to relate how I surprised myself by solving what appeared to be a major problem on an Ubuntu dedicated server, by inserting just a single line of php into WordPress.

Here is the situation that I was faced with: -

I needed to move this blog onto a dedicated server, as it was hogging resources on the shared-platform server that it was currently on; and my hosting company have a policy of moving sites that did this onto a backroom scripting server that was virtually inaccessible to the net, as it was full of other sites that also hogged all the server’s resources, leaving none for the victim’s resource-hungry blog to use. They do this without warning ; and they tell you after they’ve done it.

Because the shared-platform server is shared between a number of websites belonging to any number of customers, there’s no way that I, as a user, could pre-empt this in advance. No server resource-indicator was available, and as I clearly stated; the hosts didn’t send an email saying “Your blog is using too many resources. Please see to it within 24 hours or we’ll stick it onto a backroom server…” – They just did it anyway, regardless, and any notification followed that.

The third time that this happened, a week before writing this blog post, I decided that I was going to rent a dedicated server: I had 8 active domains, 7 were hosted, and all on shared-platform servers. It was costing me a lot more to keep them each on a shared-platform server than it would do to put them all on single a dedicated server, and since only 3 of them were active, 2 noticeably so, it wouldn’t overload a single low-calibre server, at least for the time-being.

I asked to upgrade to a dedicated server, and one was set aside for me, and was online within 24 hours. Expecting things to be much the same on a dedicated server as on a shared-platform server, minus the resource issues, I moved this blog to the new dedicated server: I copied the database to the space I’d reserved for it on the new server using the mysqldump feature, following which I copied all the files from a backup of the shared-platform server and FTP’d them up to the new server in the domain-space that I’d pre-created for it.

Under normal circumstances that would have been that, and I’d have got straight up and running, and continued the blog from that point. What I didn’t notice straight away, until I had egg on my face because I’d just sent out a bulletin to my mailing list that the blog was back in full operation, was that every link on the welcome page resulted in a 404 when clicked. – Oh s—t!

What now? I phoned the web-hosting company: fasthosts.co.uk. The guy I spoke to told me that I’d forgotten to install a WordPress plugin, and suggested that I look in the WordPress plugin directory for it. I asked if he knew which one it was, or had a clue what it was called. He replied that WordPress was a third-party application that the support department don’t support, and therefore he was not allowed to tell me even if he knew.

Thanks for nothing. To cut a long story short I made so many calls to the support department over the last few days that I think I must have spoken to everyone who worked there at least once. I learned that there were 3 people there who were quite technically astute, and that 2 of them were very nice friendly types. The others were either distant and matter-of-fact, or as unhelpful as possible. All will remain nameless for the purposes of this article.

I developed a friendship of sorts with a couple of them, and we discussed the issue to some degree without breaking any company policies. One of them suggested that it could be that the database hadn’t connected with the files because I’d initially negligently forgotten to allocate the database to a particular domain when I created a reserved space for it in the system. After uploading all the files and the database again, this assumption proved to be incorrect.

Another one of them suggested that the reason why a lot of the “pretty” URLs that WP uses were resulting in a 404 was that the server’s mod_rewrite feature in Apache was switched off by default for security reasons. Once again it was against company policy to discuss this to any more helpful extent. On investigation I found that indeed mod_rewrite was off by default. I asked around as well as scanned Google and posted on this blog, asking for people to tell me ways to turn it on, and I used pretty much all of them, without result. (I notice that during my week of cyber-abstinence my viewers have mainly deserted this blog; but I suppose if there’s nothing much there to browse it might seem pointless trying to browse it.) I even ran a script to see the state of mod_rewrite; which told me it was now on, so seemingly my switch-on operations had worked.

I could have asked the host’s engineer to check it and do it himself if it wasn’t done properly; but at £60 + VAT per 1/2 hour, charged by the 1/2 hour, there was no way that I was going to be ripped off that way.

The result was…no change: I still got the 404s, even though I’d changed the URL structure to default in the permalinks section, which did give me less 404s to worry about it’s true. –Any 404s where there shouldn’t be 404s, nevertheless, is too many. – Worst of all the RSS feed still wasn’t working.

It appeared that the blog was dead. – I made a logical assumption that something somewhere had corrupted and that was that. It was at this point that I made another announcement that would leave me with major egg on my face: I announced to my mailing list and also to Facebook that the blog was dead, and that I’d get another newer domain set up in its place, and copy over as much content as I could get hold of that I felt was of any value.

I built shazzalive.com on the server; which immediately suffered from the same problem as that described above from the word go. Major problems!

I decided to see if there was a different solution to the problem available. Somehow I inadvertently stumbled across a blog article written in February 2008. (I’ll give credit + link & trackback in the follow-up article.) In it the blogger, who it seems knows php well, was saying that he’d had a similar problem, and that he’d used a line of php to solve the problems. Although English clearly wasn’t his first language; and his php notation was incomplete, it gave me ideas: This might be the solution that I was looking for.

First came the job of rebuilding the line so that it looked like actual php, as you’d expect to see it written in a WordPress php file: It did look like a piece of a php line (The structure of it indicated that.); but it seemed that it needed a beginning and an end. Since all I had to go on was what I saw, I enclosed it in the usual angled bracket used mathematically to mean “is less then”, followed by “?” and “php”, and ended it with “?” and the greater-than sign on the following line. It now looked like a proper php line.

The second task was to determine where in WordPress he’d put this line. He said that he’d put it in the “php application”, (Remember; English wasn’t his first language.) and further down he’d indicated that he’d placed it at the top. From the look of it, it just gave me the impression that it should go inside the header.php file; so that’s where I put it, at the very top.

‘Moment of truth: All the URLs appeared to be working as they should, even the “pretty” ones, and no 404 error from the server; but I was going to have to have better than that before I settled on it. – I went into permalinks and set the URL structure for the “prettiest” format I could: Date and time etc. – Now would I get results? YES! Everything worked; including the RSS feed! (I reset the URL format to the format that I’ve always used, in order that my URLs as listed and linked in search-engines synchronised, despite it not being the most SEO-friendly format.)

Target neutralised! (At last!)

So what was the line of code I used? Part 2 will reveal all; including a step-by-step guide to including the php in your own blog. Make sure you don’t miss Part Two; coming soon here on kkomp.com: – Taking you beyond the comfort zone.

…You see until very recently I’ve been running this blog on a shared-platform Red Hat Linux server which was maintained by the host’s engineers, and I had no such problems. Having been forced to switch to a dedicated server due to resource issues on the shared-platform server- Meaning that this blog was using over 50% of the RAM, and, at times, up to 50% of the CPU resources. – I am now told that it’s up to me solely to perform any software maintenance, and that if I need the assistance of the host’s (Fasthosts.co.uk) engineers, it’ll cost me £60.00 + VAT (Currently £ £69.00) per half-hour; chargeable by the half-hour.

Well I certainly am not paying that! £60 including VAT per hour is reasonable; but what they’re asking is extortionate: Basically they want £69 to spend 5 minutes or less editing a few lines of code. – And to my mind that’s a con: I’m not Microsoft or Sun Microsystems or something, and I can’t budget for that amount at this point in time.

The only answer , then, is to fix it myself. I have two tools to do this with currently: those being the host’s remote console; which breaks down in some way the middle of an operation every time, and I also have Putty. I want to also use phpMyAdmin; but, having spent several hours translating the setup instructions from the badly-written, poorly-spaced, badly punctuated semi-hieroglyphics of the Linux-ese dialect spoken by the writer, I’m stumped in a similar way on installing that too.

As a result of having mod_rewrite switched off I’ve had to change my URL structure to default. Now none of the existing search-engine listings can find any of my pages, + I’m not getting any brownie-points from them for decent easy-to-find URLs either.

I tried Pico for the very first time in Putty recently, in the hope that it would help me re-write the file at /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf , but all I got was a blank in the console, for whatever reason, rather than anything that I could edit.

So as I wrote before; I, as a total idiot when it comes to Linux, am seeking some advice in the form of a step-by-step idiot’s guide on every single thing that I need to do to accomplish this. The help of my readers would be greatly appreciated. I know I’m a noob, and whatever other Linux-ese insults the Linux-community wish to throw, so don’t bother: I’m just looking to get started using Linux properly: Isn’t using Linux what the Linux community want everyone to do; albeit in this case on a server?

Please leave your reply in the comments box below. Thank you.

When a tech says s/he’s coming right over, log out and go for coffee: It’s no problem for us to remember 2700 screen saver passwords.

When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, and trophies: We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

When tech support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at once: We’re probably just testing the email system.

When a tech is eating lunch at her/his desk, walk right in and explain your problem(s) and expect her/him to respond immediately: We don’t even like eating food and only exist to serve.

When a tech is at the coffee machine or outside having a smoke, ask her/him a computer question: The only reason why we drink coffee or smoke at all is to ferret out all those users who don’t have e-mail or a telephone line.

Send urgent e-mail ALL IN UPPERCASE. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

When you call a tech’s direct line, ignore the bilingual greeting that
says s/he’s out of town for a week, record your message, and wait exactly 24 hours before you send an e-mail straight to the director because no one ever returned your call. : You’re entitled to common courtesy.

When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support: There’s
electronics in it, right?

When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on a tech’s chair with no name, no phone number, and no description of the problem. We love a good mystery.

When you have a tech on the phone walking you through changing a
setting; read the paper. We don’t actually mean for you to DO anything, we just love to hear ourselves talk.

When we offer training on the upcoming software upgrade, don’t bother going: We’ll be there to hold your hand after it is done.

When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times: Print
jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all
68 printers in the office: One of them is bound to work.

Don’t use online help: Online help is for wimps.

If you’re taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go
around and update the network drivers for you and all your co-workers: We’re grateful for the overtime when we have to stay until 2:30am fixing them.

When you have a tech fixing your computer at a quarter past one, eat your lunch in their face: We function better when slightly dizzy.

Don’t ever thank us; We love this AND we get paid for it!

When a tech asks you whether you’ve installed any new software on this computer; lie: It’s nobody’s business what you’ve got on your computer.

If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it: Mouse cables were designed to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.

If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on us: Of
course keyboards work much better with half a pound of bread crumbs, crisps, and nail clippings under the keys.

When you get the message saying "Are you sure?" click "Yes":
If you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?

Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don’t know nufink about that
computer crap". – It never bothers us to hear our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

When you need to change the toner cartridge; call tech support: Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Fudge-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a Master’s degree in nuclear physics.

When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk: We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn’t know jack sh1t about the problem.

When you receive a 300-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a high-priority mail attachment: We’ve got plenty of disk space and processor capacity on the mail server.

Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks: God forbid somebody else might get a chance to squeeze into the print queue.

When you bump into a tech in the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question: We work 24 hours a day 7 days a week, even while at the grocery store on weekends.

If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on the weekends and do his projects on your office computer: We’ll be there for you when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access database flip out.

When you bring us your own no-brand home PC to repair for free at the office, tell us how urgently we need to fix it so your son can get back to playing Call of Duty 2: We’ll get right on it because we have so much free time at the office. Everybody knows all we do is surf the Internet all day anyway.

Don’t write anything down; ever: We can play back the error messages from our video recording.

When we do something as a favour in our own time at our own expense, feel free to criticise us.

That’s OK, we don’t expect you to lift anything or get under your desk. Manual labour was part of our IT degree.

When an IT person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue: We love a good argument.

When an IT person tells you that they’ll be there shortly, reply in
scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by
shortly?". That motivates us.

Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical: We know exactly what is meant by "my thingy blew up" and "I’ve got gobbledegook on my screen".

When you call someone in to fix a problem – don’t tell them about the
other 10 problems until they physically arrive: That’s OK – we can clear our schedule for the rest of the day.

When your application can’t do what you want, blame us: We write all the software that runs on your PC and can customise it on the fly. Steve Ballmer lets us do this.

Remember the IT person doesn’t need to think – they’ve seen every problem before.

When you find an IT person on the phone, sit uninvited on the corner of their desk and stare at them until they hang up.

When you think the network/e-mail/office application is going slow, call us: We have a button to press that makes it go back to its normal speed.

The instant you call us (on our mobile) we can see what’s happening on your screen and can solve it instantaneously.

Be aware that IT people don’t need to use the toilet, so you have a
right to be upset if we don’t answer the phone.

And finally, always remember…. we were sitting there waiting for your call… The whole day!!

Life is a bed of roses. – Watch out for the pricks!

Hello and welcome to another fortnightly Public Newsletter.

In this newsletter I’ll be going through the latest gen on the plans for the future of kkomp.com following the launch of shazzalive.com. You’ll notice that the intentions have changed since the last major announcement in July of this year.

Also I’ll be listing and writing a small piece on articles which have been posted since the last newsletters’ publication.

- So let’s get started by mentioning that; contrary to what was announced in July of this year, I won’t be abandoning this blog following the launch of shazzalive.com. The original intention was to concentrate my full efforts into shazzalive.com, (Or shazzalive.co.uk; whichever takes your fancy: They both go to the same place.) and to leave this blog static online as a reference library, without populating it with further content.

That’s not going to happen: This blog has taken a fair number of months to build up; through which I’ve learned some php, css, and enhanced my blog-editing skills somewhat. – It’s just too much of a sad thing to let it drift into obscurity.

The thing that worries me is how on earth I’ll manage two blogs at once: It’s time-consuming enough managing the one. Nevertheless other mere mortals have managed just that and more; so I’ll be up for the challenge. I do hope you’ll all visit shazzalive regularly, once it’s been launched.

The reason I was going to abandon this blog in the first place was because I had made cock-up after cock-up during my learning process with regard to php and css, and it appeared that I’d edited bits I shouldn’t have and left the blog a bit of a wreck. Having gone through everything with a fine-toothed comb, though, it appears that the problems were nowhere near as bad as I’d estimated, and in reality I was just panicking too much.

So this blog stays.

OK; now let’s have a quick resume’ on what’s been going on over the last two weeks here on kkomp.com: -

Death to Internet Explorer 6

This article tells of the reason why people should stop using Internet Explorer 6. Although it’s the default browser with Windows XP, there’s absolutely no excuse for not upgrading it and/or running another better browser along with it. It’s 8 years old at time of writing, and it certainly shows its age!

Microsoft Banned From Selling Word in the USA

Everyone’s out to get Microsoft recently, and the latest move is from a company that claims that Microsoft has infringed its patent on XML.

Ensure You Get Installation Media with Your New PC. Part 1

- Because if you don’t you’ll end up in a turmoil later. Soon Windows 7 will be shipping installed on new computers. In the rush, don’t forget to ensure that you have a copy of the operating system’s install media.

What Would You Readers Like to See on This Blog?

It can, at times, be harder to decide what to write about than actually writing it. In this article I make a call to readers for a little inspiration.

How to Install Windows 7

With Windows 7 due to  launch on October 22nd, there’s a good chance that you’ll be upgrading your operating system. This article is aimed particularly at people who are upgrading from XP to Windows 7.

Does a Computer Need Time to “Warm Up”?

Remember the old days when switching on the power was followed by a few minutes wait for the valves (vacuum tubes) to warm up? Thank the gods of technology for the transistor.

Useful WordPress Plugins

A few plugins that WordPress users might find useful.

Social-Networking Backup Services

How do you back up your Twitter account? Where do your Facebook comments and articles end up? The short answer is in file 13: Erased after time. (You didn’t honestly imagine that Twitter run petabytes of storage to archive every tweet ever made did you?) If you want to keep your Facebook offerings and/or your tweets then you’ll have to do that on your own computer. Here’s a couple of pieces of software that will assist you to retrieve your offerings.

How to Uninstall IE8 in XP 

People love Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8; so much so, in fact, that they can’t wait to get rid of it once it finds its way onto their computer. That’s not too hard to do in Vista. In XP it can throw up a number of issues: read this article to discover more. (Whatever you do, though; please please don’t go back to using IE6: Use IE7 and have Firefox. Opera, or Safari as your main browser.)

…And on that note there endeth this Public Newsletter. There’ll be another one published in a fortnight, all being well.

I’m just wondering which fort the fortnight is in? Is that a normal night, a night under siege, a night on the town even? – No not on the town; unless the town’s inside the fort…

If anyone has a clue where the term “fortnight”, as in “two weeks” came from, then please do leave a comment.

I’ll be reading up on some Linux material in order to write some kind an article on that subject, which I might even manage to present on this blog in the coming week.

Pax vobiscum.

Enjoy your weekend.

Blessed be.

Mainly in the last month or so there has been a growing movement of developers, webmasters, and blog owners, against the obsolete and outdated browser, Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer 6 is the default web-browser that shipped with Windows XP ever since 2001.

Less than a year after its release, Microsoft realised that IE6 wouldn’t make them enough money, so they stopped supporting it. The result of that left security problems and browser bugs that have never been properly fixed: all of which produce a nightmare scenario for developers who are attempting to make their developments cross-browser compliant.

The inherent problems include: –

• Anyone using transparency in .png images will lose out if the images are viewed using IE6.

• Several css issues which mean that IE6 processes css code incorrectly.

• Frequent crashes caused by the code that the browser is attempting to run.

Like all ancient and obsolete technologies, IE6 must become extinct. I urge everybody to help devoted developers to hasten that demise, and stop this retarded relic from holding up progress on the internet.

I positively encourage all readers to show their support for the "IE6 Must Die" movement by displaying the anti-IE6 twibbon on their Twitter avatar: -

 http://twibbon.com/join/IE6-Must-Die

There follows a download link to some code, which WordPress and other blog-masters can add to their blog, if they are happy doing so. This code will display a small line of text (Arial, font size 10) stating: -

"This blog does not support Internet Explorer 6 or earlier. If you are using IE6, please upgrade to a decent browser: – "

Immediately underneath this text will appear four tiny linked browser logos: FireFox, Opera, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari. The links allow the reader to download the latest version of any of those browsers.

You can see an example of this code in action in my header.

Download your code here. (.txt file.)

In conclusion, then, there are 2 things which I’m currently trying to get people to kill off through this blog: There’s 32-bit computing; which is not having a huge effect yet, but which comes with restrictions that stop users being able to use any more than 4GB RAM on their computer: Something which will prevent future development of large applications which require a huge amount of memory.

(You don’t think anyone will ever need more than 4GB RAM? : remember the 386-based computers of less than 20 years ago with 16MBs RAM? Try running Crysis on one. – You might get 1 frame per minute or, more likely, a BSOD. Bad example? OK. – Try running Google Earth on one of those then..!)

More importantly at time of writing, there’s also IE6.

Both must die: IE6 first, followed by 32-bit computing.

You can also help to kill off 32-bit computing by installing the 64-bit version of Windows 7 later this year; if your computer can cope with it.

Everyone is out to get Microsoft! Microsoft has become so rich that it seems that everybody sees it as a legal cash-cow that they can get a nice sum of money out of by suing. If it’s not the EU trying to milk money from Microsoft it’s someone else.

<< I chose this graphic because the situation as a whole is becoming farcical, to say the least.

– Having said that, though; Microsoft may have erred on the side of unethicality on numerous occasions in the past. – And now another of their previous misdemeanours has come back and bitten them in the ass:

Judge Leonard Davis in the US State of Texas has ruled that Microsoft must stop selling Microsoft Word in the US because of a patent infringement. Microsoft infringed US Patent # 5,787,449, filed on July 28th 1988 by i4i of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Microsoft have also been ordered to pay more than $290 million in damages to i4i. This has been increased from the previous $200 million order issued on 26 May "for its wilful infringement of the i4i patent".

The judge ordered a ban on "selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML." XML is an integral part of Microsoft Word which allows users to customise the format of their documents and makes them readable across multiple word-processing applications.

Microsoft spokesman, Kevin Kutz, said that Microsoft was disappointed and that it would appeal. "We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict,"

Microsoft has been ordered to comply with the ban within 60 days, but will it comply or simply ignore the ruling as it seeks to overturn it? I get the feeling that it’ll pursue the latter and simply ignore while it seeks to have the ruling overturned. What do you think?

- Maybe it’s a case of i4i and tooth 4 tooth?

Windows 7 is due to be released soon: On the 22nd October 2009 to be exact. On and after that date I foresee many people buying new pre-built computers with Windows 7 installed on them. Why do I pre-empt this happening? The reason is that many people didn’t rush out to buy Vista after it was released to manufacturing (RTM) simply because it sucked at first, and has taken almost until its successor is released to get working at least something like it should with the release of 2 Service Packs. – This means that a lot more people are still running XP rather than Vista. My blog’s visitor statistics bear this out, and they indicate that approximately four times more of my readers are still running XP compared to those running Vista. XP will run on pretty much any hardware available new or secondhand today. Vista, and more importantly Windows 7, will only run on hardware designed to run Vista and 7.

- This means that a large number of Windows users are probably still running old equipment, designed in the pre-Vista era.

<nag time> I know for a fact that some Windows users are still running equipment built in the Win 9x era, pre-XP, with the original copy of Win 9x operating system still in use too. – Well those people deserve everything they get: Their system will always be slow, but more importantly it will always be improperly patched against critical threats. As a result it will be infested with malware and taken over by criminals using botnets to run DDOS attacks, relay and generate spam, and relay illegal porn, among other things. If the legal authorities discover that they’re doing this and throw the book at them then I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for them. </nag time>

Those Windows users running fully-patched XP operating systems on old hardware are going to be needing new computers rather soon I would imagine, as their old hardware must be showing signs of age by now; and a new machine with Windows 7 preinstalled would be just the thing for them. – So as soon as 7 is released they’ll be in the stores buying brand new shiny computers.

I’m sure that many of those people will still run XP in addition to Windows 7, even on a new machine; whether it be in a VM environment inside windows 7 itself, or as a dual-boot on their new computers. – Good for them: I intend to do just that myself on the machine that I built for Windows 7 use, which currently is running the Win 7 64-bit Release Candidate, up until 2014 – when the XP Support Lifecycle ends and no further security patches are issued for XP. – I’ll then remove it from my machines totally: I don’t want to become an online security-risk to myself and others.

(I was rather chuffed the other day when the O.S. used up over 7 of the 8GB of RAM I’d fitted, while transferring over 30GB of files across my home network. – I knew that there was a point to installing all that memory somewhere. )

If you’re one of those people who are buying a new machine with Windows 7 pre-installed, then ensure that you get an accompanying Windows 7 installation DVD from the retailer; even if it costs extra, (Although it shouldn’t.) because you are definitely going to need it some day; and if you can’t get to it or an image of it, then you could find yourself screwed, big time. make sure that the copy of the pre-installed operating system has the same key-code as the preinstalled operating system: If it hasn’t then it’s not a proper copy.

Why am I writing about this in particular?

When XP was RTM’d, a lot of manufacturers took the shortcut of not including installation CD media with their computers sold with XP preinstalled, in order to save on costs. This was all very well; but it left many people in a strange predicament when their operating system or other software asked for the Windows installation CD and there wasn’t one. I myself bought a cheap computer with an Intel Celeron in the days before I built my own, and discovered that there was no Windows CD packaged with it when I got it home and had used it a while: Just a manufacturer’s CD with a ghost-copy of the drive as it was when it was sold to me.

How did I get round that?

The manufacturer and the retailer were no help whatsoever; yet I needed the CD as I needed to do a format and reinstall, as the operating system had become corrupt and crashed, and I had a buyer for the machine after putting it up for sale locally.

What did I do? I booted with a Linux distro and found the CD image on the hard-drive, copied it to CD, and reinstalled from that.

I looked for a folder containing 2 particular files; one of which was winnt.exe; the DOS setup file, and winnt32.exe; the protected mode setup file. – Both of which were needed to do the full reinstall after the reformat. It had some coded name rather than a name plainly stating that it was the CD image file. – In fact not even the manufacturer’s helpdesk nor the retailer knew that it was there on the disc! – How’s that for useless?!

This was an less usual case, however; in that I needed to do a full reinstall, and luckily the entire CD image had been copied to disk in this case. It isn’t always though. – So what do you do, having no XP CD, when Windows or another program asks for it?

You tell it to look in the largest of the directories called “i386”: When it asks you to insert your CD; just press the OK button. It’ll fail; but the next dialog should ask you to tell the computer the location of the installation CD. Instead of telling it the location of the CD, because there isn’t a location for the CD; (The CD doesn’t exist as far as you know.) you point it towards the largest i386 directory.

There’s a bonus: The bonus is that Windows remembers the location of the files. The next time a program wants to look at the installation media, Windows will look in i386 first. – Sweet!

A good idea is to copy your installation CD to your hard-drive. The first time that a program asks for the installation CD; just point it at the copied image: Point it to the i386 folder in the copied image if it wants to be pedantic. That way you’ll not have to worry about having your installation CD to hand again.

- That’s Windows XP: What do you do if the operating system in question is Windows 7?

Well; you’ll find out in part 2. – Coming soon.

(Yes; I will write it before 22nd October 2009.)

I write about a varied number of topics; mainly technical, electronics and computers: Hardware and software.

This blog has passed the 470-article mark already at time of writing.

In the past; particularly when this blog was new, a lot of my posts were to do with technology news, some with my personal slant on the issue. This didn’t really pull in the visitors; as you can get news anywhere for free. I noticed that the few computer help articles which I wrote in the early days were getting the most hits; vastly more than news items in some cases, so I continued on that line.

As you may know; I’m a qualified electronics technician with a technical mind, so therefore writing about computer and electronics-related issues is enjoyable for me. I don’t know everything about everything, obviously, and I sometimes do a lot of research before writing the content of some articles.

I generally tend to think of issues that I’ve had in the past with computers as subjects for my posts; in the hope that my having solved them, and telling you readers my solution will give valuable assistance in many cases. I also share a little of my knowledge of practical electronics in order that my readers can find out the basics on that level also.

I do a lot of guesswork, in that I guess what subjects my readers want to read about, then I write about them: Some prove very popular; such as a couple of the posts about BT Home Hub 2.0 that I wrote in 2008 for instance. Others flop and get as little as 1 reader a week from the word go, in rare cases.

- So I’m asking you to help me out a little here: I’m providing this blog as a service to you, my readers: I provide a lot of free content, as well as putting some tempting offers your way too, hoping that you’ll buy something and help me to keep this blog financed.

I’m not asking you to buy more or to click on more banner advertisments, although every little helps. What I am asking is for you to give me a few ideas as to what you’d like to see as regards content in the future on this blog. As long as it’s about technology; preferably about computers and/or electronics, I’ll be grateful for your input as regards some ideas to write about.

Next year, 2010, probably from January onwards, I’ll be running a second blog at shazzalive.com, which will include reviews of new technically-oriented products, interviews, special offers, etc. I did have it in mind, only a few days ago, to shift all activity to shazzalive and basically abandon this blog and leave it static as an online reference-library; but I’m having second thoughts about that: This blog is taking time to build up; but it would be a shame to just abandon it totally.

I’ll probably continue posting a few articles of the usual nature on it from January 2010 onwards; just not quite so many perhaps? Until then I’m intending to continue as I am doing – with, hopefully a little help from my readers: So if you have any notions of ideas for articles; I’ll be glad to hear about them, either in the comments section below, or on Facebook. – Which means that you’ll have to befriend me on Facebook, on which I appear as Sharron Field. Click the linked word “Facebook” above and it’ll take you straight to my Facebook profile. If you can’t be bothered with all that then just leave a comment below. I look forward to your suggestions.

In this article we’ll take a look at installing Windows 7: This article deals mainly with moving from XP straight to 7, bypassing Vista. Upgrading from Vista to 7 is quite a doddle in comparison.

With Microsoft’s proposed launch of Windows7 only a couple of months away at the time of writing; I thought it a good idea to write a piece on installing it; for those who’ve never done it yet. Microsoft have been fairly good this time round: They’ve asked their customers what they want included, they’ve given us a beta version to try, and also a Release Candidate following on from that, which sends telemetry back to Microsoft as you use it; therefore giving the makers the perfect statistics from millions of computers to tweak the release to near perfection prior to Release To Manufacturing (RTM).

How to install it depends on which operating system you were running prior to installing. I’m assuming you were running either Windows XP or Windows Vista. If you were running Windows 2000 then it’s time to change it fast: Its support lifecycle is ending. The same applies to Windows XP and Windows 2000 users – That being: No upgrade is available. – More on that later. If you were running Windows 9x then shame on you: Anything from Windows ME backwards is obsolete; meaning that Microsoft no longer issue patches for newly-discovered critical vulnerabilities that exist in the operating system, and your best bet is to reformat your hard-drive instantly, as your machine is probably crawling with malware and part of a botnet. – You’re also an unprotected propagation haven for it, you’re assisting in the spread of it, and the criminals who wrote and use it love you. – So much so that they’ll probably empty your bank account when it comes up on the massive list of accounts they’ve harvested from people like you who can’t be bothered to get a decent secure operating system, as they process that list. – I’d change your account password fast if I were you, but don’t use that old computer with Windows 9x on it to do so: For all you know someone could well have sneaked a keylogger onto it via a port opened by malware that got in through an unpatched vulnerability.

Back to the subject in hand: -

First; if your machine is capable of running a 64-bit operating system then I do suggest that you install Windows 7 64-bit. There is no reason, other than restriction by your machine, for you or anyone else to be running a 32-bit operating system with all its restrictions in this day and age. – None whatsoever. Let’s all work to kill off 32-bit computing once and for all. You can go from 32 to 64-bit straight off in a change of operating system without any problems; provided that your machine will run a 64-bit operating system. If your machine was built before 2005 then it might not be able to do so. If it was built after 2006 then it almost definitely can. (Although you might have to upgrade the processor on a few models – ?)

You might consider building or buying a whole new setup to run 7 on, as I did; leaving your old machine to run XP while your new box runs 7. There is a utility on the Windows 7 installation disc called The Migration Wizard (Windows Easy Transfer). This can extract your files and settings from your old machine and transfer them to your new machine, just like the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (FASTWiz; as I call it (Even though it was slow. – It’s faster in 7; though still a bit sluggish.).) did in XP: -

Navigate through the Windows 7 DVD to the \support\migwiz folder. Run the migsetup.exe program. The migsetup.exe program will scan your Windows XP installation drive for files and settings that can be migrated and show you a list of them. You can de-select and re-select items that you do or don’t want to migrate, and you can even add things from other drives. When you’re ready, the wizard compresses and stores all the items selected in a single file on a drive of your choice. (You should choose a drive other than the one to which you plan to install Windows 7 for this purpose.) You can even have migsetup.exe write to an external hard drive, flash drive, or writable DVD if you prefer.

If you’re installing Windows 7 having previously been running XP then you can’t do an in-place upgrade: You’ll have to either: -

• Back everything important; reformat, and install Windows 7.
• Dual-boot Windows 7 with XP.
• Upgrade XP to Vista, and then upgrade to 7.
• Install 7 on top of XP.

Back everything important; reformat, and install Windows 7. Remember to ensure that you have backed up everything important/irreplaceable if going the first route: This is in my mind the best route to take when upgrading from XP to 7.

If you own a "full" version of 7, then it’s safe to format the drive first before you attempt to install 7. If, on the other hand, you have an "upgrade" version of Windows 7, Windows XP must be running when Windows 7 is installed, otherwise the product activation will fail, unless you have the original Windows XP CD with you.

Insert your Windows 7 DVD and run Setup. When you’re asked if you want to format the target drive say "yes". The "Quick Format" option is faster than a full format, and it’ll do the trick. If you want to be pedantic then a full format will be fine too; if you have the time to spare. Setup will erase everything on that particular drive before it starts to install Windows 7. Now re-install all the things you saved with Migration Wizard if you wish to do so, or reinstall from your backup(s). – Target neutralised!

Dual-boot Windows 7 with XP. The dual-boot (Or triple-boot.) option is worth considering; particularly if you already run a dual-boot system; such as Windows XP and Linux. – Particularly if you want to keep your Linux installation; but triple-booting with Linux is beyond the scope of this article. I prefer to stick with Windows.

You may find that some Windows XP applications will not run under Windows 7. You can either do as this linked article suggests, and run XP inside a Virtual Machine inside 7, or you can partition your drive if you have lots of space, and install a separate OS per partition: – A “dual-boot setup”. – When you boot up you choose which OS to run. You’ll need to create a new partition on your hard drive, and probably  resize the existing partition also. Paragon Partition Manager and similar programs will do this for you, as will a number of free and demo-version disc-management programs, such as  Bootit NG from Terabyte Unlimited.

Once you’ve created your new partition, insert the Windows 7 DVD and run Setup and install to the new partition. When you restart your box after installing 7, you’ll have the option to start Windows XP or Windows 7. – ‘Good eh?

You might, alternatively, install a new, second, hard-drive and install Windows 7 on that after formatting it and getting it recognised by the operating system. This would be an alternative idea for a dual-boot setup if your existing disc is getting rather full and doesn’t have a lot of room on it to install 7.

Upgrade XP to Vista, and then upgrade to 7. The double-upgrade seems a crazy idea to me; and I can say with some near-certainty that something somewhere will go tits-up; even though you might not at first notice it. Myself I wouldn’t risk that. Do it if you must; but on your own head be it. I refuse to advise on this. – Sod that for a laugh!

Install 7 on top of XP. If you attempt to install 7 on top of XP the following will happen: Windows 7 installer will gather up all your XP operating-system files; including the My Documents folder, your profile folder, the lot, and stick them in a folder called “Windows.old” on your system drive. Windows 7 installer will then install Windows 7 in the space remaining. If your hard-drive is rather full prior to this I would suggest that you use the first method instead, or your new installation won’t have a lot of room to operate in. If you have more than 1 hard drive then Windows 7 installer will leave any secondary and subsequent drive untouched: It’s only interested in your system drive (C:, or whatever drive letter you choose to install to, only).

Although the Windows 7 installer will preserve most if not all of your files inside the XP installation intact inside Windows.old, there is no guarantee that it will preserve every file in a working condition, exactly as was before. You will not be able to run XP from inside of Windows.old either. The machine will boot into Windows 7 when started. Windows XP as an operating system is lost.

If you’re installing Windows 7 on a machine running Vista, then you can either use the first method, above, to do a clean reinstall, or simply upgrade your operating system with an in-place upgrade. I’m not sure why Microsoft have punished those people who didn’t upgrade to Vista in this way to be honest. – But they have, for whatever reason.

Have you installed Windows 7 yet? Do you have anything that you’d like to add to the above?

Although this is a bit of a strange subject; it is nevertheless something which I’ve been mulling over in my mind for a number of years.

When a computer is booted up after a significant period of time since it was last used; it and all of its parts are , at that infinitessimately  (Did I spell that right?) minute moment in time, operating at room temperature: -

So yes; in essence a computer does need to “warm up”: The result of electricity flowing through its parts, causing the millions of microscopic transistors to switch at incredibly high-frequencies is heat. – That heat has to go somewhere, and it does: It flows through the individual component’s casing and most of it is caught by any type of heatsink/cooler attached to the component and radiated into the air inside the case, to be extracted from said case by a case fan.

-The question is: How long does it take for a computer to warm up?

By asking that question, I am, in reality, asking “How long does it take for the active and inactive sub-components; by which I mean the individual transistors within an integrated circuit or “chip”, as well as the passive components such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors, to reach their optimal operating temperature? What I’m not asking is “How long does it take for the entire computer or the major components of a computer to get as hot as they normally do.”

You see; by the time everything is hot inside a computer, it means the heat from the operations of the individual transistors and the electricity passing through them has permeated the casing of the component of which they are a sub-component. For instance; in a situation where the upper surface of an in-use soldered-in component consisting of thousands of transistors in a package; such as the SATA controller chip, gets hot to the touch, the actual working components of that chip have become hot and reached their thermal maximum comparatively long before the heat permeated through the chip’s casing.

- So the working transistors become hot long before the heat is actually noticeable by the observer. What about the passive components? ‘Much the same: Although they don’t actually actively switch the electricity, they nevertheless do have electricity flowing into and/or through them; which produces heat.

While it is true that the cumulative heat from an individual component plus any effects from nearby components would cause the temperature of an individual component to rise slightly beyond the thermal effect caused by the operations within; the overall effect is a uniform distribution of heat due to the design of the motherboard, and thus we can basically discount this for the purposes of this article.

Why write this article?

When I was at college, my tutor was around retirement age, and although a fully-qualified and experienced electronics engineer, he grew up in the days of valves. (Vacuum-tubes.) He used to allow his computer to “warm up” before using it. He said that it takes a few minutes to reach its working temperature. I didn’t dispute this at the time; nevertheless I do now to some extent.

Valves are a totally different commodity to transistors; even though their operation is similar; at least to some degree: Whereas the flow of current between collector and emitter, or source and drain, in a transistor, is regulated by a voltage on the base or gate; the flow of current between anode and cathode in a valve is regulated by a grid, or series of grids. There ends the similarity.

Valves need to be hot, and for all their sub-components to reach a thermal equilibrium within their glass envelope before they can work optimally, partially due to their massive size in comparison with that of a transistor. (This is achieved by what is known as a heater: It’s a heating element powered by a separate, usually AC, voltage, which is wound inside the cathode at the centre of the valve itself, and it literally heats the cathode to a point where any surplus electrons applied to it fly off into the vacuum contained within the valve’s glass envelope, being regulated by the grid on the way, and hitting the anode. To achieve this effect the voltage potential between cathode and anode must be in the hundreds of volts.) Transistors, on the other hand, work straight away. Heat is not needed; but is nevertheless produced by their operation.

- So valves; especially in the case of audio valves, need to warm up before they reach their full potential. if you ever have listened to or you ever get the chance to listen to the sound output from a valve amplifier, you’ll notice that the fidelity of the sound changes with time: The more time goes by the less the change, as the valve(s) gets nearer maximum operating temperature and it/their electrical characteristics change as a result.

The same is true, to a very limited extent, with transistors; but it’s hardly noticeable as it happens so fast: Mainly within a fraction of a second, and tails off within the first couple of seconds. Why? Because a transistor is minute compared to a valve, and therefore it heats up and reaches maximum operating temperature much faster. Also it needs no assistance from a separate heater to begin working: It just works, and any change in its electrical characteristics  due to heat occurs almost instantaneously.

To summarise…

In answer to the original question, then, I would say that a computer does need to warm up; but only for a couple of seconds at most. By the time the BIOS has kicked in, all the active components (transistors and diodes mainly.) have reached their optimum thermal state. By the time the BIOS has finished its initial work, after switching on, and the operating system’s ready to start loading up, even the passive components (Resistors, capacitors, and inductors mainly.) have likewise reached their potential operating temperature.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Have you anything to add? Please do comment below. – I’m very much open to debate on this subject.

If you’re new to WordPress, here are a few plugins that you might find useful. If you see one you think you’d like to use you’ll have to Google for it as I didn’t have time to hyperlink them all.

There are a number of email backup apps out there at the moment; some online, some locally stored on your computer, and saving the backups to said computer, One thing you might not hear a lot about are backups for your online social-networking. In the face of that I thought I’d tell you about a couple of apps that will back up some of your social networking activities:

The first of these is a service called Backup My Tweets. It’s a social media backup service that works with Twitter, and it’s absolutely free.  As Twitter doesn’t store more than 3200 tweets at a time, it’s a good idea to use this service.  The backups via this service will allow you to save your social media files as an XML file, a JSON file, or an HTML file.

Another backup service for social media sites is called SocialSafe. SocialSafe backs up your Facebook account. It does cost, but only $2.99, including add-ons and updates. It runs in Adobe Air, which you’ll need to install on your machine before installing and running this app. Having done so, you can backup everything in your Facebook account; photos, photos you were tagged in, posts and profile information, the lot. SocialSafe is platform-independent; so it won’t matter whether you run Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Once you’ve backed up, you can access all the files from your local machine via a text editor (Notepad, Wordpad…), word processor, (Microsoft Word, Open Office…) and via photo-editing software if you so desire.

SocialSafe say that they intend to cover other social-networking services in addition to Facebook; and may indeed already do so by the time this article is published.

Many Internet Explorer users have upgraded to IE8, only to find that it just isn’t working for whatever reason

Uninstalling it can pose a few problems: -

Microsoft have written a knowledgebase article: How do I Uninstall or Remove Internet Explorer 8? The article speaks of a  utility that allegedly does the business. I suggest that you go there and give it a try first

If you don’t have any joy with that, then  look for Internet Explorer 8 in the Add/Remove programs section (or the Programs and Features section) of Control Panel. I’m assuming here that you installed XP Service Pack 3 before you installed IE8.  If you didn’t then we have another, larger problem: You can’t uninstall Internet Explorer 8 if it is set as not removable. This occurs if you install Internet Explorer 8 before you install Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP. If you did indeed do this then you won’t find an uninstall link in Control Panel; and… Are you ready for a lot of tedious work?.. You’ll have to uninstall SP3, uninstall IE8, reinstall SP3, then if you want to give it another try, re-install IE8 and/or install FireFox. – I did say it would be tedious, and indeed you have several hours’ work there; as well as a possibility of other things going tits-up too.

(In the Microsoft KB article How do I uninstall or remove Internet Explorer 8? There are methods outlined with which you can manually get to and run the uninstaller from a Command Prompt, should you need to do so.)

OK. – Assuming that you can indeed find an entry for IE8 in Control Panel: -

When you click Remove it should start the "Windows Internet Explorer 8 Removal Wizard":

- Which is where things start to go pear-shaped: -

You’ll most likely be warned that any number of pieces of software were installed since the upgrade to IE8. It’s possible that removing IE8 will break one or more of them. Marvellous!

If you’ve only recently upgraded then this list should be fairly short; however it does tend to potentially get long after only a short period of time. – Nevertheless, if you’re getting grief from IE8, then you have only two options; those being to take the risk and uninstall IE8, hoping that you won’t have to reinstall too many broken applications afterwards, or, and this is the option that I recommend, ignore IE8 (If you can.) and install a much better browser like FireFox and use that instead.

If you’re uninstalling IE8 your computer will ask you to reboot it afterwards. After rebooting you just start Internet Explorer and it should have reverted to IE7.

It’s all great fun isn’t it? – Never mind: Windows 7 will RTM soon, on 22nd October 2009, and it promises to be a lot more user-friendly than XP. – Hopefully. On that note I’ll just say 1 more thing before I end off: Please; for the sake of advancement, when you get your copy of Windows 7, install and run the 64-bit version if at all possible. – Let’s end 32-bit computing with all its limitations once and for all.

After much deliberation and decision-making in the last few days; my final plans for this blog have been somewhat set in stone, subject to minor alteration as and when necessary and dependant upon circumstances as time goes by:

The plan is to continue posting to this blog until January 2010. Some of those posts will be duplicated on shazzalive.com; with video if practical to do so. Furthermore, some of the posts that have proven to be popular and valuable that are already posted on this blog will be rewritten/edited and posted on shazzalive.com along with audio and/or video.

As already mentioned; most content will cease to be produced for this blog from January 2010., and I’ll be producing content for shazzalive.com only. – But that doesn’t mean all content will cease production for this blog. – For one thing there are my members-only newsletter subscribers who may well be in for a bonus if they remain subscribed. All existing members-only newsletter subscribers will have the email address that is on record put into the signup process for shazzalive.co.uk (Shazzalive.com simply redirects to shazzalive.co.uk. Shazzalive.com is easier to remember, easier to type, and is used as the URL generally.) as and when. Hopefully people will join the shazzalive mailing list also. If anyone on my list receives a confirmation email for shazzalive.co.uk but doesn’t want to join, then simply ignore that email. I do hope that everyone on my list will join up to the shazzalive mailing list, though, as there’ll be so much more on shazzalive.com: There’ll be videos, audio files, transcripts, probably reviews too. There will be some amazing offers, interviews, technical and business advice…

Of course, all this won’t suddenly appear on the new blog in January 2010 itself: It’s going to take time to build up contributors, readers, advertisers, writers… I don’t promise you the entire world instantly, as if I did I simply wouldn’t be able to deliver. What I am intending is to produce something bigger and better than kkomp.com; whist at the same time allowing kkomp.com to languish online as a reference library.

This week on kkomp.com has seen 3 new articles appear: -

Video

The first of these is simply called “Video”: Video is not something that I’m well practiced in, so I’m going to be creating a number of trial runs leading up to the opening of shazzalive.com. This was my first attempt. It could do with a few tweaks here and there; but it’s passable. The video advertises a product from David Risley; himself a well experienced video-jockey who produces some outstanding-quality videos; but not just videos: David has been blogging since before blogging was invented, and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge which has allowed him to build up and run an online-business generating a six-figure income, with which he supports a family and lives quite comfortably in his home in Tampa Bay, Florida.

Let David Risley teach you the basics of a six-figure problogger business in only 3 days. The course includes 14 videos, and has a 92 page transcript, checklist, and audio podcasts of all modules included. Download my FREE 5-page .pdf report on 3-Day Money

In 3-Day-Money, David shares his wealth of knowledge with you: From the fundamentals of starting up a blog, including choosing a decent market niche, right through to the techniques and marketing tactics he uses to continue to generate an income-stream and keep his entrepreneurship on the rails of success. 3-day-Money also acts as a great forerunner-course for David’s current project; Blog Masters Club, which will be opening its doors again in or around January 2010

How To Launch System Restore From a Command Prompt in Windows XP

- Tells you how to launch System Restore whilst in Windows XP’s Safe Mode.

List All Installed Drivers in Windows XP Professional is an article for those running Windows XP Professional that shows how to get XP Pro to list all installed drivers from the command-prompt.(This post is also duplicated on shazzalive.com.)

Keep watching this space for more articles that show you how to do more with your computer, give you practical advice on practical electronics, and add to your technical knowledge.

That’s all for this newsletter, Enjoy your weekend, whatever you’ve got planned.

In Windows XP Professional there is a tool called Driver Query. (This tool is not available in Windows XP Home.) This tool, when run, will provide you with a list of all local drivers. – You might even see some drivers that you didn’t even know existed.

To run Driver Query; open a command prompt window, (Start>Run and type “cmd”.) ad type “driverquery” on the command line at the command prompt.

Driver Query displays the results in a table in the command prompt window.

If you wish to save the results to a csv file so that you can open them in a spreadsheet, you can do so by typing the following on the command line. (Do not include the inverted commas themselves.): -

“Driverquery /v /fo csv > drivers.csv”

This will save the table in comma separated values to the file drivers.csv .

…And that’s the way it’s done. Please take note, once again, that this will only work in the Professional version of XP. – If you run Windows XP Home then I’m afraid it just won’t produce results.

System Restore was introduced by Microsoft particularly for the sort of instances where, if you load a corrupt or dodgy driver for instance, and something fails to work because of that driver’s installation, you can restore a significant number of settings in your operating system to an earlier point in time; provided that you have created a previous Restore Point, and your computer works properly again without your having to do much but wait for the process to complete.

There are times, though, when that new driver can prevent Windows XP from booting fully (Even in Safe Mode.) and cause it to go down with a BSOD during boot-up, ad-infinitum.

Although there are alternative methods for getting Windows XP to start up and ignore the newly-installed driver that is causing the problem; (Most if not all of them are mentioned in this blog in other articles.) you may wish that you could use System Restore to resolve the error. – Nevertheless it appears that you can’t; because XP won’t boot, and unless it does you can’t get to System Restore… Or so you thought up until now.

This is how to launch System Restore from a command-prompt: –

First shut down your computer and/or switch it off. – This will clear any residual crap from the RAM; just to be on the safe side of cautious. Also we need to get to the Windows Advanced Options Menu; so shutting down and switching off will help there too.

OK; everything’s off: Press your computer’s power button to switch it on, and as soon as you do that repeatedly press the F8 key. One of two things should happen after the initial BIOS screen appears, depending upon the motherboard you have fitted inside your box: – (If anyone tries this and gets something else happening then I’d ask you to comment below. Please give details of the motherboard you have fitted, as well as other system spec.s (Including age of system.), and as good a description as you can of what happens.)

Either it’ll open up a boot-menu screen, or it’ll bypass this step and go straight to the next step. If it does open a boot-menu screen, (Primary Hard drive, CD-ROM, Floppy, etc.) we don’t need that, so don’t change anything there, just hit the Esc key, and as soon as you press the Esc key, repeatedly hit F8 again.

The Windows Advanced Options Menu that I mentioned earlier should appear. This is white text on a dark-grey background. The options open to you are: –

Select the “Safe Mode With Command Prompt” option.

On the next screen you’ll see “Please select the operating system to start.”

If you’ve only installed a single installation of Windows XP then your choice will already be highlighted and you just press Enter¬ again. If your machine has on a dual-boot and/or you see more than a single operating system; use the up and down arrow keys to select the operating system that you were just trying to boot into, (Windows XP.) and then press Enter¬.

Log on to your computer using an administrator account or with an account that has administrator privileges.
At the command-prompt, type the following command, exactly as shown below: -

C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

When you see the System Restore window, the graphics may not look quite the same as you’re used to, but you can still follow the instructions on the screen and restore your computer to an earlier state’ provided that you have at least one previously-made restore-point.

- Target neutralised.

What if your computer refuses to boot into Safe Mode With Command Prompt? If it does then see this series of posts: “Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot”.

Today there’s not-a-lot of a particularly technical nature to post: Rather, having spent the weekend setting up and testing various lighting and sound set-ups in the small amount of office space that I have, (That wasn’t an easy mission I can assure you: Finding the best positions for, first of all me, then the lights, the teleprompter screen, and the microphone was one thing; actually creating the room to put them in position was another.) then doing several takes of a promotional video, before editing and producing a final cut; I didn’t get any posts written, edited, and scheduled to go out this week.

That’s not to say that there will be no posts this week: Indeed I intend to write some and post them as they are produced. – But; what with this setback as well as trying to get shazzalive.com running, I’ll probably only be producing around 3 posts  a week, including the Friday newsletter. – In fact I think that once a week is currently a bit too regular for the newsletter – So in future, after this week, I’m only going to be producing a newsletter on a scheduled basis once a fortnight; bi-weekly in other words. I’ll still endeavour to post something every Friday all the same.

OK then; so after my weekend as lighting technician, sound recorder, producer, presenter, production supervisor, video editor… and everything else associated with making a video; you’re probably itching to see the result. – Well it’s passable in my opinion, but it could do with a few tweaks; such as the camera being placed more in-front of the teleprompter screen, as well as another light placed just below bottom-right of the picture as you see it.

This is in fact only my second video that I’ve actually produced and displayed publicly on the internet; so I’m not exactly well-practiced at the art of video-production. Recently I’ve listened to an audio-only interview that Gideon Shalwick did with Maria Andros over the phone; America-Australia. – The long-distance line held out fairly well all through.. This got me thinking, and I realised that I wasn’t putting enough content out there and that I wasn’t claiming enough real-estate on the internet, and my visitor numbers and search-engine ratings were suffering as a result.

Now this step will eventually filter down to my blog; in that I’ll be including more self-made video-content on it eventually. Whilst I am fairly certain that many of you will like to have articles in audio/video format, I’m aware that some of you would prefer to read text-only. This blog’s been mainly text-only up until now, and has attracted many visitors – Therefore I’ll provide at least a basic transcript along with the video when I am able to do so.

On that note, all that remains for me to do is to show the video, along with a transcript underneath it: -

Transcript: -

“Hi, and welcome to this video. My name is Sharron Field, and I’m the owner and creator of kkomp.com. In this video I want to tell you about someone who has made it big in the field of internet marketing:-

This person started off blogging as a hobby, even before it was called “blogging”. He’s now one of the biggest internet marketing gurus online. His name is David Risley; and you may have heard of him yourself. Having himself made it, he wants to share his success with others. He has a number of major projects currently running; one of which is called 3-Day-Money.

3-Day-Money is an online business-training course. It’s called 3-Day-Money because it can be completed in 3 days; although you can take as long as you like to study it. 3-Day-Money goes through, in detail, all of the steps you’ll need in setting up your own successful internet business. 3-Day-Money discusses everything from setting up your own blog through to business-models and techniques that David himself uses to run a successful online business generating a six-figure income.

I’ve purchased the product myself, and since then I’ve had time to put it to the test: This product comes with my personal recommendation as a 3^rd party.

I’m not going to rabbit on any further about it in this video though: I’ll let David do all of that himself. If you go to my blog at http://kkomp.com and scroll down the Welcome page, you’ll see a banner ad for 3-Day-Money. Just click on that and you can watch free videos, made by the product’s creator himself, which explain the course much better than I ever could. There’s also a free 5-page pdf document that I wrote myself on 3-Day-money advertised right underneath the banner ad: You can take a look at that if you like too.

Thank you for watching this video. While you’re on my blog; why not take the opportunity to join my mailing list and get extra free stuff delivered to your inbox?

Here’s to your success. I’m Sharron Field; owner and creator of kkomp.com.”

Download my FREE 5-page .pdf report on 3-Day Money

“Wait a minute… Why does the video say that I have to go to the Welcome page and scroll down to find the banner when the banner’s here all along?”

Well spotted. Here’s the reason why: The video is on You Tube; there’s no article on You Tube; just video, therefore people can’t get to the banner just by scrolling down the page there.

OK so why, after 36 hours or so since you released the video and post, have you just added the banner to the post?

Again; well spotted: I wanted to do a limited experiment to see what percentage of viewers actually bothered to go from here to the Welcome page and scroll down. – While the results aren’t fully processed yet, it appears that the answer is less than 50%

“Hasn’t that impacted on your campaign’s initial success?”

Maybe, maybe not. We geeks are scientists too; and no research comes without a price.

Haven’t you clicked on the banner yet? – What are you waiting for?!