CRASH! – What To Do?
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I have a good friend who is quite adept at using her computer – In fact she’s quite a whizz when it comes to operating her machine, and does some fairly amazing feats with regard to online and local applications. A lot of people are good at operating their computer, my friend especially so; just as a lot of people are good at driving a car, for instance. – Using that example again though, how many car drivers are adept at maintaining their cars? Not a lot to be honest. Many rely solely upon the local garage to keep their vehicles running, and some might even tend to neglect the maintenance of their vehicle to some extent in order to save on costs. In the same way; how many computer operators are adept at maintaining their computers? Again not a lot. Many may rely upon a friend who’s clued up on computer tech to keep their computer running, some may pay a geek to do it. – And yes, there are some who neglect their computer’s maintenance in order to save on costs. – After all; a computer’s a machine, right? Plug in, switch on, and it works? It’s very rare that I have to have my washing machine serviced; so therefore my computing machine shouldn’t need much servicing either. ‘Not quite right actually, I’m sorry to say: A computer is a lot more complicated than a washing machine, and needs regular care and servicing. – There are many articles regarding caring for and servicing your computer on this blog, so do take a while to check some of them out. The other night my friend and I were chatting online, and her computer crashed a number of times. This is what happens in a lot of cases to a lot of people’s machines, particularly those running Windows (XP) – and it’s those users that I’m mainly targeting with this article: They just seem to crash suddenly, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, after having worked perfectly, maybe even for years. Why does this happen? To discover the problem so that we can fix it, we first have to use a process of logical deduction by trial and error:Let’s start by asking the question: “Why did my computer crash?” The immediate answer to that is that it could be due to one of two issues: A software error- the easiest and cheapest to fix, or a hardware error. The most likely of the two is a software error, so we’ll investigate that first: - The most logical software error to look for first is data corruption on the hard drive, and there’s an easy-ish way check for that and put it right at the same time: There’s a function built into all windows operating systems in use today called “chkdsk”, short for check disk. This function at times auto-activates on startup if the operating system detects disk corruption. However we can make it run anyway, without waiting until the operating system notices the problem: - Here’s what I advised my friend to do: - Start up your computer and boot into Windows. Don’t open any programs or use the internet yet. Click Start > Run, and type “cmd”. In the dos window (Black window with white text.) that appears, type “chkdsk /f” at the command-prompt (>) and press return. (Note the space between “chkdsk” and”/f”: It’s “chkdsk /f”, not “chkdsk/f”) The computer replies that it can’t do it right now and asks if you’d like to schedule the job for when the machine restarts. Type “y” at the prompt and press return. Reboot your computer and allow it to check your disk’s file system for errors when it starts up. (This could take a while.) When the disk check’s finished, Windows will momentarily report any errors it found and fixed and will then boot back into Windows. In a lot of cases the problem will be solved by this step alone. The problem was being caused by a corrupt file system on the disk, which was causing Windows to read the disk wrongly, causing data errors and a system crash as a result. This is probably the most common cause of a crash, particularly in Windows XP, but it’s not always the cause. – It’s possible that there could be many other things involved which are causing the issue. For further guidance, please read my free eBook "Some Things to Try if Windows XP Crashes During Boot", which will give you a lot more ideas on the matter. To get your free copy, just insert your email address into one of the appropriate forms on this page: You’ll see one at the top of the sidebar, and also one underneath this article. As you may notice, doing as above will also allow you to join the Kkomp.com – Beyond community, and get all the associated benefits of doing so. – It’s totally free of charge, and you’ll be notified of all new articles on this blog, as well as special offers, advanced notifications, and more. |
A Phone Running XP? – Yes – Really!
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I get the feeling that Microsoft might be forced to extend the service-lifetime of their Windows XP operating system beyond 2014 at this rate. Why? Because the latest generation of smartphones all come with an amazing array of applications, and this particular smartphone runs XP.
Since September 2009, Chinese company ITG have been working on a smartphone that would run Windows XP. This has now come to fruition, and the prototype is released. The unit’s specs are as follows: –
…And there’s even a video of it on You Tube. (…Complete with Linux zealots saying something similar to: - “The screen’s far too small; but if it had Linux on it then it would be perfect.”
- Yes I wonder about such people too; such as how they managed to survive into their early teens. Modern-day fuckwittery among a certain section of society appears to be unparalleled since records began. Click here and see the comments for yourself if you doubt me.)
Source: Techtree, tomshardware.com. This is going to throw up a number of problems if Microsoft get funny about it: Firstly; are the softies happy about this venture? Secondly; if MS do indeed end the Windows XP product lifecycle in 2014, as currently expected, then future buyers of this technology might feel somewhat short-changed. What do you think? Please leave a comment.
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A Bit More About 64-Bit
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- But first: - Unlike most, if not all, other bloggers, I didn’t send out emails to my list wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and clogging up the internet. This was because I was so badly affected by a very heavy flu-like cold, which I believe a large percentage of the UK have also contracted, that I just wasn’t up to doing any writing from Wednesday 23rd until now. Even now I have itchy sniffles, slightly aching muscles, and feel too hot and too cold in sequence, but I have to get this show back on the road. – I think I’m going to do my utmost to avoid colds as much as possible in future: The last one I had, earlier in 2009, knocked me out for a few days too; and I really don’t like feeling mentally-incapacitated due to a microscopic lifeform invading my body and breeding: In fact I felt so much like crap that at one point I had to check that I wasn’t evolving into Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo. I hope you all enjoyed your celebrations anyway; whether or not you’re on my list. If you’re not on my list then you’ve been missing out and will continue to miss out in 2010 unless you join ASAP: You’ll no doubt see that large blue form at the top of the sidebar which promises you a free report. – Well, all you need do is enter an email address at which you’d like to receive communications, and click the “Get it Free” button… And that’s it: I’ll handle all the rest – ‘no need for you to worry about a thing. – That includes your privacy: Read my Privacy Policy. 2010 just a few days away eh? Happy New Year to you all; just in case I get hit by some other disease before then. (X-fingers.) I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like only yesterday that I was down by the river with a friend watching the fireworks herald in the year 2000. In a way I wish it were 2000 now; as this blog, as it is now, would most likely have made me a tidy sum of money already; without really trying that hard. – But things have changed: No longer do a select few “cool” people have their own website. Now pretty much everyone and their dog has a website; and it’s no longer a case of sticking up a few banners and watching the cash roll in. Things have changed, and will no doubt continue to do so in the following decade. On that note I want to share something with you; yes it’s free – for now anyway, I’m not sure what this’ll be leading on to, but it’ll be good. [I think you may need to act fast if you want to get onto whatever’s happening; otherwise you might have to wait a while. I didn’t get a chance myself to find out exactly what’s going on.] Anyway, no charge; I think this may be useful to you if you have a blog or are thinking of blogging in the coming decade: Click here for more on that.
Now we’ve got that out of the way; I want to talk a bit more about 64-bit and memory: -
On a hardware level, different machines have different physical RAM capabilities. This is usually governed by the processor and/or chipset architecture’s capacity to address x number of memory-locations. Also, of course, the amount of RAM that can be used is governed by the number of RAM-slots, and the capabilities of the RAM-controllers. On a software level, theoretically, a 64-bit operating system is capable of addressing thousands of terabytes of memory; but in reality this could overcomplicate things and cause development costs to rise out of proportion: Therefore most 64-bit operating systems are only capable of addressing a few hundred gigabytes maximum. Going back to hardware; even this amount of memory would, at the time of writing, take up a lot of space on the motherboard. Generally most motherboards available today will be able to utilise anything between 8 and up to 32 GBs RAM as a maximum. So how much RAM do I need? How much should I have installed? That depends on a number of factors: Firstly; are you running a 32 or a 64-bit operating system? If you’re running a 32-bit operating system then you won’t need any more than 4 GBs, and the machine won’t see all of that either. – Having said that; the more the merrier. – Up to 4GBs with a 32-bit OS, that is, and as much as you like/can get with a 64-bit OS. I have a computer running 32-bit Windows XP Professional SP3 on an AMD Athlon 64×2 dual-core processor, with 2GBs RAM without any problem. I’ve even set the registry to commit all operations to RAM rather than the paging file, and it’s ‘happy as Larry. The most memory-intensive thing I do on it is search through thousands of large files, which sometimes takes it to the wire, but nonetheless, it’s working fine. I also have a computer running 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium on an AMD Phenom x3 triple-core processor. It has 8GBs RAM installed; although it rarely uses more than 5, no matter what I do on it. I don’t use many memory-hungry resource-hogging, graphics-intensive programs on it though. If I did I might use all 8MBs and need more. I know of someone who has fitted and used all 16MBs of memory on their Mac; so it varies from person to person. A 64-bit OS should run on tickover quite easily with only 2GBs RAM, and have some to spare. I recommend a minimum of 4MBs, personally though, for normal use, with a 64-bit OS. Can I have “too much RAM”? In short, in the case of a 64-bit OS; no: If you have more RAM installed than the computer can use at the time, it simply won’t use it until and if ever it needs it. Even in the case of a 32-bit OS, you can install 32 GBs if you like, as long as you don’t mind the fact that the operating system will never see more than 4 of those gigabytes. A 64-bit operating system will see it though; whether or not it has to use it: So install it, why not, if you can and if you can spare a few extra readies: At least you’ll know it’s there for if the machine ever needs it. Any questions? Anything to add? Come on, don’t be shy; there’s a comment box somewhere below, and it’s there to be used.
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Can I Install a 32-Bit Operating System on a 64-bit-Capable PC?
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Forgive me for an emotional outburst, but this one made me laugh and cry when I saw it in the search-stats. To tell the truth I am surprised that at this point in time people are still asking such questions as those below. – Nevertheless, the purpose of this blog is to educate and help people; which is what it’ll continue to do. The questions were actually worded similar to “Can I use Windows XP…” or “Can I use Windows 7… 32-bit on a 64-bit computer?”: – I’ve seen both versions. Windows XP is the only operating system that I recommend using the 32-bit version of by default. Why? - Because there were so few 64-bit drivers written and produced for XP that it really isn’t worth bothering with the 64-bit version of XP unless you happen to be a techno-masochist. XP is pretty much outdated anyway; I’m using the 32-bit version of XP I currently have installed on 1 of my 2 comps until the machine has a major hardware failure, or 2014: Whichever is sooner. If you’re dual-booting XP and Windows 7, or running XP in a virtual machine inside Windows 7, then I encourage you to run the 32-bit version of XP… Which will run perfectly well on a 64-bit-capable computer. As for Windows 7; why oh why would anyone want to run the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on a 64-bit-capable box? There is only one valid reason that I’ve heard so far; and that is that some of the internal hardware as well as a number of the external peripheral devices are so old that they won’t work in a 64-bit environment no matter what. ‘2 Important facts here: -
Resisting the impulsive urge to tell the person to stop being so mean and tight-fisted, and upgrade their old hardware and/or buy/build a new box; I see this as probably the only valid reason to install the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on an otherwise 64-bit-capable machine: i.e. One that has at least a 64-bit-capable motherboard and processor. The 64-bit version of Windows 7 is packed in the same presentation-case as the 32-bit version; so why oh why oh why would anyone want to install the 32-bit version on a machine that is 100% capable of running the 64-bit version? – But yet I know of at least one case where this has actually happened. It baffles me; honestly it completely does my head in. “A lot of the application software I use is only available in 32-bit.” and “A 64-bit operating system uses up more RAM”, whilst possibly true; just don’t cut it with me: – - So I reply to that with: Wait a while until the 64-bit versions of your software appear, use the 32-bit versions until then, and fit extra RAM if you have less than 4GBs installed. It’s not exactly going to cost you a fortune; and 32-bit software runs fine in a 64-bit Windows operating environment anyway. There is just one device that I’m having trouble with as far as Windows 7 64-bit is concerned; and that’s my Labtec webcam 6.0.1: I have XP 32-bit drivers for it on CD, which is fine for my XP system. When I try to install it on my Windows 7 64-bit box, though, the Vista 64-bit driver won’t install for some reason. Normally, in most cases, if no Windows 7-specific 64-bit driver is available, (At least, I can’t find one online.) then the Vista 64-bit driver is usually good enough. – Not in this case though: it just doesn’t want to know. – But it’s only a cheap webcam; it’s not anything massively expensive or irreplaceable. It cost me less than £7 around 2 years ago: It’s hardly the crown jewels! I’ll just buy a newer model with a Windows 7-specific driver. – ‘Simple as that. + One more thing I’d better make clear, as an addition to the above, since I notice that Google sends relevant traffic here, is that yes, you can run both a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version of the same OS on the same machine… BUT in order to do it legally you’ll need a separate licence for each version: One licence will not cover both 32 and 64-bit. + + If you’re intending to run both 32 and 64-bit operating systems then I suggest that you use a separate disk for each OS. You can partition a single disk if you must; but using separate disks will avoid complications cropping up over time; trust me on that. + (Added 28th December 2009.)
I realise that I’m being long-winded with regard to this Windows 7 64-bit fixation of mine; but it’s a wide topic that I’d like to ensure that I’ve covered all aspects of to a large extent, without completely flogging it to death so much that readers protest with their mouse and back-button. That’s all. |
How to View an Email’s Source Quickly in Windows
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Your friendly spammers Occasionally, you may get an email that appears to have been sent by someone you know, or someone who seems to know you rather well, judging from the familiarity of the way the person is coming across and their seeming friendliness. Unfortunately this is a tactic of malware distributors, who spoof a sender’s email address and send people an email as a spam that appears to come from someone close, or to be related to an important matter, in the hope that you’ll click the link provided and open the floodgates to any malware they’d like to infest your computer with.
Is that supposedly friendly email genuine, or a spoof? Other than intuition, there are a number of ways of finding out for sure: The most risky of which is to click the link in the email and download the “holiday video” or the “free idea”. – Of course that’s going to lead to you getting a box crawling with malware; so what’s the least risky way of finding out? That would be to check the message’s source. It looks something like the one below, and you can normally view it by jumping through a series of hoops, depending upon which email client you use. Trace the truth To trace the email’s source you read backwards from above the message’s content notation: – So in this case I start above where it says “This is a multi-part message in MIME format”. The first content you’ll see, reading upwards, is the destination address, which was my personal email, up through any number of stages where the message has been relayed via various servers, (In this case just the one.), and finally at the top, the sender’s information, name of their computer, etc. psiorac2x is the name of one of my machines, I use BT as an ISP, and the IP pool they’re using at that time is synonymous with the set of IP addresses they sometimes commonly use for dynamic IP assignment; so in this case I can see that I sent this email to myself on Tuesday 29th September 2009, using Microsoft Outlook Express. (You’ll note that it’s not always possible to trace the exact IP of the sender if their ISP is dynamically assigning the sender an IP address; but the ISP themselves will know exactly which IP address corresponded to which user at what time. – Therefore, unless the IP is spoofed, you should be able to complain to the sender’s ISP if need be.)
You scratch my back; I’ll claw repeatedly at yours. (No that wasn’t a sensual come-on line. Now I’m told that what I’m about to tell you isn’t documented anywhere; which, if true, makes it a rather valuable piece of information. At kkomp.com I like providing value to my readers; as it provides good content, and has the readers coming back for more. In this case, however, the information appears a little too good to give away for free, with nothing expected in return, so I’m going to do a deal with you. Thus deal is purely on trust, mind, and it’s not compulsory. – However I’d be more than appreciative if, in exchange for what I’m about to reveal to you, you’d do me the honour of joining my mailing list if you’re not already on it. Doing so will give you an added bonus, in fact; because not only will you have free notifications of every new post on this blog posted to the email address that you request to be used, but there are also other titbits of information and special offers that I send to my clientele: – From time to time I’m in a generous mood and I throw an eBook out to the mailing list, or another type of free download. I also tell he mailing-list people about any special offers before they’re offered on any of the pages of this blog. I also just communicate with my list at times to let them know what’s going on and reveal some insider information… - My question, then, is why are you missing out on all this? The answer is simple: The answer is because you haven’t joined my mailing list yet. I know that I currently do a Public Newsletter every fortnight on a Friday; but that particular newsletter is very general and makes up only a part of my communication with my readers: To get the full package; you’ll need to subscribe to the mailing list. It’s very easy to do: There’s a form at the top of the sidebar on the left of almost every page and post. Simply insert your chosen email address in there, click the button, and Feedblitz will send you an email asking for confirmation of your request. Click the confirmation link in that email, and you’ve joined the mailing list: What could be simpler? OK – Having got that covered, here is the information promised: – This trick may work also with other email clients, and/or using other operating systems; I’ll leave you to find that out. Please comment and let me know. Is that trick really totally undocumented? I’m sceptical; but once again please comment and let me know. Enjoy the coming week; and beware of “friendly” emails. |
AHCI – What is it and Can I Use it?
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AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. Advanced Host Controller Interface was designed purposefully with SATA hard-discs in mind: The Advanced Host Controller Interface standard allows SATA discs to fully utilise their advanced features; such as hot-swapping and native command queuing.
I have no information about this subject with regard to Linux operating systems, and the same goes for a Mac and OS X, so I’ll stick with Windows only for now. Perhaps a Linux guru and/or a Mac user in the know would comment and fill me in on the blanks I’ve just outlined? STOP PRESS: In fact, newer mainstream Linux kernels support AHCI natively… See here. Staying with Windows… AHCI can be activated in the BIOS screen of newer motherboards by changing the SATA ports’ mode from ATA to AHCI; but this action alone may well cause your Windows installation to produce a BSOD on boot. – Simply changing the mode in the BIOS with a Windows operating system already installed on the hard-drive is that the correct storage driver isn’t installed – therefore the existing ATA driver is looking for ATA and finds AHCI; can’t make any sense of it, and crashes Windows. The way to put this right is to set the BIOS for AHCI (Only if you’re using at least 1 relatively modern SATA drive, of course: The setting will have no effect on their PATA counterparts, as those use a totally separate controller.) and do a repair install, AKA maintenance reinstall, of Windows. This will cause Windows to set itself up again, this time with the correct drivers. You won’t be able to simply switch back from AHCI to ATA again without performing the repair installation again. This operation will work with Windows Vista, SP1, 2. It shouldn’t cause any problems in Windows 7 either. With Windows XP I’m not sure, as my sources of information on this subject appear to indicate that it will work in XP SP2 onwards, but possibly only with the inclusion of a vendor-specific driver. It’s probably best to leave the BIOS on a computer with an existing Windows XP installation set to ATA, unless you have a lot of time to experiment. It is possible that it’ll work in XP: Maybe; maybe not – ? Again I’d ask for expert comment on this. “Windows Vista natively supports both AHCI and NCQ. FreeBSD fully supports AHCI and NCQ since version 8.0.” – Wikipedia. |
Why Do Users Still Use IE6?
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Internet Explorer 6 Must Die
From time to time I like to blow off some steam from my semi-red(dish)-haired (Now grey but dyed.) head. This is one such occasion; and what better to take out my moanings of condemnation and displeasure on than my old friend Internet Explorer 6? As you may know; I’m totally against Microsoft’s old and dysfunctional browser, Internet Explorer 6. Two out of five of my visitors running Windows are using IE6; so if you’re viewing this blog in IE6 right now, your viewing experience is, to say the least, limited. I once pulled up this blog on an ancient computer in a hospital I visited in Bournemouth, UK, which was running IE6: It didn’t even look like a blog in all honesty, let alone my blog. – OK, it was during 2008, when this blog had a strange theme and hadn’t been otherwise enhanced much at all, but nevertheless it looked like the blog had been attacked with a sledgehammer, and then thrown back on the screen. Now this computer had probably never been updated since it arrived in the hospital: It had a sticker on it saying that it was built to run Windows 98, and was being used to run a prosthetic imaging program, slowly. – However it was internet connected; so while the consultant was out of the room I browsed with it while I waited. In my opinion, computers as old as this simply shouldn’t be running, and I’m extremely surprised that any still are. Nevertheless this is indeed the case. Some of the computers in used at college when I was studying electronics in 2005/6 were so old that the case had been modded to hold a network interface card so that they could connect to the internet! (Joke – But they were ancient; AGP slots, 16MB graphics, etc.) (Yes, I’m talking early Pentium 1 or older.) – Somehow they’d managed to get them to run XP. (Actually I once installed XP on a comp with a P1 processor, 256 MB PC133 RAM, and 16MB graphics: It did actually run, although slowly and badly. I ended up wiping the disc and putting it just outside my front door at night until somebody eventually stole it. (Good riddance.)) So there are old computers around; but that’s no excuse for running IE6. It’s getting near that point in the lunar phase where I am likely to get disgruntled easily; and so, bearing this in mind, let’s proceed: - Some users don’t even realise that they’re running IE6. I’m not being funny here; but a lot of non-computer-savvy users are running an “old faithful” machine that’s had XP installed on it forever. They don’t know about the essentiality of Microsoft updates, neither do they care, and have the updates turned off. Why? Well they somehow think that the more that they have on their hard-drive, the slower their machine will run. – Therefore they’ve uninstalled such “unnecessary” programs as anti-virus, firewall, etc, and are very prudent about keeping as little on their 4GB HDD as possible. – Yet still their machine is ten-times slower than it was when it was new. – Any ideas why? These people mentioned above are still, seemingly obviously, running IE6, just as it came with XP from the offing. It works, kind of, between crashes, so why fix it? They don’t know or care that it’s IE6 anyway. It works, even though they get voices and screens full of spammy adverts appearing unexpectedly all the time. - And it’s much the same scenario with most of those still running Windows 9x: Why pay for a new operating system when the existing one works fine anyway, when all the screens from the malware have been cancelled out that is. I still see it today: Yes, today I saw a user in China who visited this blog was using Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 4! Does the phrase “malware nursery” spring to anyone’s mind? We’re going off topic somewhat here: The thing is that IE6 is the default browser that ships with Windows XP. people who install XP generally don’t seem to worry so long as it works. Yes many XP users have already upgraded their browser, but many more haven’t bothered. I’ve used XP since 2002. When IE7 came out I upgraded, and again when IE8 RTM was out. After upgrading to IE7 I started using FireFox as my main browser. Many never even bothered whatsoever. I’ve also seen people running Server 2003 using IE6 too: Probably the same goes for them. Before we proceed further; let’s take a look at a few adverts: -
Corporate environments One of this biggest offenders for not updating computers are corporate environments: At college I commented that the IT department were useless as none of the computers had been updated since they had XP installed. I was told that the computers wouldn’t work properly on the college’s massive LAN if they were updated; which was a lie, as I’d updated mine a week ago, as well as installed a firewall with which I could block the tutor from spying on what I was doing on my computer. I was told that the college’s server had a software firewall installed, and that it acted as a hardware firewall, in addition to which they had a corporate contract with Sophos to update all their antivirus programs on each individual computer regularly. Whilst the latter was true, and also the former to some extent, it still didn’t make the network secure: All it would take is for a single piece of malware to get in and suddenly the entire network is a massive crapware – incubator and distribution – network. I think someone, whether purposefully or unknowingly, brought a nasty in on a USB stick once (Not me.) which was why the internet was unavailable for a week afterwards. Corporate environments tend to have IT departments who assume that they’re gods; despite the fact that most of them don’t have a clue; regardless of their training or qualifications. – Add to this the British worker’s attitude of “Do as little as possible for as much as possible”, and you’ll normally find that there’s glaring insecurities in most corporate networks. IE6 remains there as IE6 works and is inconvenient to upgrade on all machines; corporate licence or not; because the IT department want to charge a fortune for doing it, while Management want to cut costs. When Vista with IE7 came along; not many people upgraded, because Vista at the time was a heap of merde’. (In fact my blog’s statistics show that the three most popular browsers are, in this order, sadly: Internet Explorer 6, FireFox 3, Internet Explorer 7. IE8 is a little further down at No5.) – But here comes Windows 7: It’s good, it’s well-thought-out, it’s functional, and there’s nothing hidden about it this time. – So buy it. If your computer can’t run it then renew your computer. – And if you can; run the 64-bit version and help kill off RAM-restricted 32-bit computing along with IE6. Reasons to be cheerful. – Temporarily: - - But there is one legitimate reason in my mind for using IE6. – One only; and that’s only the case until October 22nd 2009: The user is using Windows 2000. Windows 2000 won’t run IE7 or 8, so there’s a slither of an excuse for using it until Windows 7 is officially launched. – After which people should take their old computers offline in my opinion, anything that won’t run Vista or 7 should be disconnected from the internet and used as a stand-alone machine. Cost is really no longer much of an obstacle. – Stop drinking, smoking, taking drugs, gambling, whatever, and buy a new computer. (A decent computer is a million times more important.) – I’ve already showed you recently, in the article entitled “Build a Decent Budget PC for £225GBP”, how you can build your own well-specced machine for a couple of nicker plus. “But I can’t…” Rubbish; “can’t” means “can’t be bothered to learn how”. Yes you can build it yourself: As a child; did you ever fit Lego bricks together? Then you can build a computer: It’s an adult version of Lego, with wires, data, and electricity added to make it a bit more difficult than a Lego set. To borrow a phrase from an online associate; if you run IE6 after October 2009, then you lose at life. – End of story. If you’re running it now then stop doing so and update your computer, or scrap it and buy/build another one + buy Windows 7 when it RTMs. If you don’t know whether you’re running it or not, then if you’re using XP, (Or Windows 9x – Which you shouldn’t be doing: You’re a security risk to yourself and all other internet users.) and haven’t updated your browser since installation, then you probably are. – Get it sorted. - And so the novel ends here: Pressure between my ears has equalised with the air-pressure inside this room, and I’m happy again. Please keep me a happy bunny by not using Internet Explorer 6. By not doing so you’ll have a better browsing experience, and I won’t get so frustrated at seeing so much IE6 usage either. My suggestion is, whatever version of Internet Explorer you’re using, if running Windows, whether or not you’re aware what version it is, simply install FireFox and use that instead for browsing. If you don’t like FireFox then use Opera or Safari. At the top of the page there are some browser logos, just under the words “This blog does not fully support Internet Explorer 6 or earlier. If you are using IE6, please download a decent browser. Click on a browser logo below: –“. If you hover over a logo it’ll identify itself to you. If you click it then you can download the respective browser and use it in place of IE6. I’ll be nice, charitable even: I’ll bring the logos down here so that you IE6 users can click on them and get a decent browser. – Aren’t I kind? : -
There you are: Now you can browse the net with a decent browser and enjoy your experience. – Also I don’t want to see you browse onto this site using IE6 again. In fact, if I can find a piece of fully-reliable IE6 php detection software that never gives a false-positive, then I’m thinking of banning IE6 from this blog altogether in 2010. – I don’t care: IE6 will die; even if it means that I have to to lose some traffic in order to help put it in the grave once and for all. That’s all. And now; another advert: -
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Death to Internet Explorer 6
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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: –
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. |
How to Install Windows 7
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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. 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?
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? |
How to Uninstall IE8 in XP
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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.
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Beyond: The Newsletter – 7th August 2009
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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: - 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
- Tells you how to launch System Restore whilst in Windows XP’s Safe Mode.
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. |
List All Installed Drivers in Windows XP Professional
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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.
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How To Launch System Restore From a Command Prompt in Windows XP
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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. 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.
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How to Install/Change a Hard-Drive
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There’s quite a lot of information below: Some of it might be applicable to you, some might not. I’ve tried to cover this matter as comprehensively as I can; but if you do run up against problems and obstacles that aren’t covered herein; there are many more similar resources online which may or may not deal with your particular issue(s). I’ve collected data on this subject from a number of leading online resources, as well as contributing to it myself from my own experience. I hope that this article has all the information that you’ll need contained within it. It was quite an effort to collate, write, adapt, and update all of the info from my sources, and I hope I’ve done the subject justice. The physical act of installation in itself is actually quite easy. It’s the preparation and getting the thing ready for use that may take a little longer; particularly if it’s an IDE (PATA) drive.
If you’re installing an IDE (PATA) hard drive then you’ll first need to set the jumpers on the drive so that it works correctly with your current hardware. IDE hard drives have settings for master, slave and cable select. This is because of the multi-drive-connected ribbon-cable used: The drive has to tell the controller on the other end of the cable how it’s been connected; otherwise confusion will reign. For Serial ATA drives (SATA), you don’t need to worry about jumpers as there aren’t any: SATA drives have a single cable running to a single corresponding port for each drive cable. See your motherboard’s manual if you’re using SATA for more details on how the drives should be connected and if there is a particular special sequence of connections pertaining to certain drives. – More on IDE drives and their jumpers and connections below. Next: - Before you do anything else, take a look at the inside of the computer’s case and work out where you want the drive be positioned. If you’re using an IDE hard drive, it would be best to connect the drive on a different IDE channel than your DVD/CD drives if at all possible. Some (older) motherboards have two IDE channel connectors, but most modern motherboards have only one. If you can do so, it’s a better idea to connect your disc drives to IDE2, and connect your hard drives to IDE1. SATA drives are totally different. Each SATA drive has it’s own channel. It’s usually fairly straightforward to work out the connections; but if in doubt check your motherboard’s manual. Now that SATA optical drives are fairly commonplace, you might not even require an IDE connector, even if your motherboard has one or maybe more: – Providing, of course, that it has SATA capability. If it doesn’t then it’s getting well past its prime anyway, to be perfectly frank, and you may consider changing it: This operation will probably entail, by necessity, also upgrading the RAM and processor too. – So if you do feel that you’d like to have a change of motherboard, then you might consider building or purchasing a new computer. If not; and you’re happy with your existing motherboard, then you’ll probably get anything between 5 minutes and 5 years of life from it yet. – Just don’t expect it to have the capabilities of more modern components. Back to the subject at hand; and let’s take a look at the materials required: –
Whichever drive you’re replacing, if you are indeed replacing a drive, make sure that you back up any data you want to save before you start, or you could well be sorry at a later time. If you don’t want to have to go through the laborious process of reinstalling Windows, you can clone the contents of your old hard drive to your new one using the setup utilities that hard drive manufacturers provide, or you can use any of the specific cloning programs available online. If you intend to reinstall Windows; make sure you have discs for Windows, all your drivers, and all your programs. This will prevent frustrations at a later point in time. (At least one leading online publication recommends using the “Ultimate Boot CD”in this process. I don’t personally recommend using this, as I’ve had some bad experience with it. (Neither am I going to link to it.) – However if you want to use it then go right ahead. – That’s your prerogative.) If you’re simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage then there’s no need to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you’re installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive. If your current hard drive is set as “Cable Select” (meaning it is the only drive on the channel), then you may need to change it to “Master” which will allow you to add the second hard drive as a slave (see below). Setting the Jumpers on IDE Drives (if using IDE)
IDE can accommodate two drives per channel. Some computers may have two channels available on the motherboard; but most modern boards will have only one. The primary drive on a single channel is called the Master, and the secondary one is called the Slave. If there are 2 IDE channels on your motherboard, then they’re labelled as Primary (or IDE1) and Secondary (or IDE2). The hard drive that the system boots from is usually the primary master. Generally, if you’re adding a second hard drive you’d set it up as the primary slave. (The secondary master and slave are usually used for optical drives, although they can accommodate hard drives if needed.) Most IDE drives arrive pre-set to be used as masters: If you want to use one as a slave, you’ll have to change the jumpers, which are located between the power connector and the IDE connector. Each manufacturer has different jumper settings, so you’ll either have to read the diagram on the top of the drive telling you how to set the jumpers, or the instructions in your hard drive’s manual – Which you can download from the manufacturer’s website if your hard drive didn’t come with one. If you have an 80-conductor ribbon cable, you can use Cable Select as a jumper-setting: With both drives set to Cable Select, the computer will recognize the drive hooked up to the black end connector as the master and the one hooked up to the middle gray connector as the slave. – Just be sure that the drives are connected to the right connectors if you use this setting.
…And now – having done all the preliminary checks and adjustments; let’s get into actually physically fitting the thing: Here we go: - Turn the computer off and switch off the power supply’s switch. You might not want to unplug it if you are using a 3-pin plug to plug it in to the AC household electrical supply: Why not? Because the case is earthed properly if you leave the 3-pin plug plugged in to the household supply power socket. – You might want to use the earthed case to discharge any static electricity in your body from time to time, and/or you might want to wear an antistatic wrist strap just to be on the safe side, (*Technician’s Tip: It’s always a good idea to wear an antistatic wrist strap whenever you do anything inside a computer. There are some companies that will sack people for failing to do so.) which you can connect to the computer’s earthed case or its chassis. Now remove the side-panel and any other panels that you wish to remove. (It might be an idea to take digital photographs of everything inside before you start; especially if you’re new to this. If anything goes wrong at any stage or you forget what goes where, you can refer to these photographs for guidance.)
If you’re replacing an old hard drive, unplug all the cables from the old drive. You will see either a ribbon cable and a small (white) Molex power plug, or a small data connector and a larger power connector in the case of a SATA drive Do not force their plugs out: The ribbon cable connector on an IDE drive is usually fairly easy to remove, as are all connectors on a SATA drive. Sometimes the Molex power connector on an IDE drive (Occasionally on a SATA drive.) can seem hard to budge. Just rock it back and forth (Lengthwise, along the narrow side of the drive), taking care not to rip the connector off the drive (Which can happen.). Once all the cables are disconnected, remove the mounting screws that hold the drive to the case frame. You might find that you need to tip the case or get into some strange positions to reach all the screws. You may find that the hard drive is mounted in a cage that you’ll be able to take out. Now remove the old drive from the case. If you’re replacing the old drive, slide the new drive in the slot from where the old one came out. If you’re adding a second drive then just pick an empty drive bay, but remember that hard-drives produce heat; so try not to mount them too close together with other drives if at all possible. If you’re installing an IDE drive than a slot a bit below the current drive might work best, because it will make it easier to route cables. If you’re installing a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay, you may need to add an adaptor or a mounting bracket to make it fit. Screw the drive into place, making sure the screws aren’t going in crooked and cross-threading as a result.
If you need a separate controller card, install it now into a spare motherboard PCI or PCIe slot. You probably won’t need to worry about this; It’s usually only necessary to add a controller card if you want to add more IDE or SATA drives than your computer’s motherboard will support with it’s existing ports. If you are using SATA, your motherboard will probably have enough SATA ports, unless you’re running some huge RAID configuration. If there aren’t enough ports available, however, you should fit a controller card. Attach the cable plugs to the hard drive, as well as to the motherboard and/or controller card if necessary. There are two cables: There’s the ribbon cable if the drive is IDE, or SATA data cable if the drive is SATA, and the power cable. The ribbon cable goes from the controller to the drive. Most cables are keyed to the connector so they only go in one way; if the cable isn’t going in, try flipping it over. The SATA data cable’s plug also only connects one way round, as does a SATA power plug and a Molex power plug. – Whether or not it appears to be going in – don’t force anything, or you’ll possibly end up in tears. If you’re adding a second IDE drive, simply choose an unused connector on the same ribbon cable. Most IDE ribbon cables come with three connectors: one on the end (usually black) and one mid-way (usually gray), then one further away on the other end which connects to the motherboard (usually blue, green, or red). In general, the master drive should use the black connector on the end and the slave should use the gray connector in the middle, but if each drive is set either as master or slave, the position is not as important. (With SATA you have only 1 choice: Plug a new cable into a socket on the SATA controller on the motherboard and plug the other end into the SATA data socket on the drive.)
Now check that everything is as it should be, switch the switch on the power supply at the back of the computer on, and power up. It’s best to leave the case cover off for now in case you need to fiddle with something or troubleshoot the installation. Your new drive may be instantly recognised by the system; but if not try the following: If you didn’t use a controller card, enter the BIOS (usually by pressing the F1, F2, F10, F12, or Delete key when you see the Power-On Self-Test or the manufacturer logo). Check the BIOS to make sure that the drives are all being recognized. If you installed a drive on an IDE connector that was not in use, you may have to set the corresponding drive to “Auto.” If your BIOS has an auto-detect feature, you can use that as well. If you did use a controller card, it will pop up a screen showing the name of the card and any drives it has detected. If the drives are not being recognized, check that both power and data cables are in tightly (including the motherboard end for the data cables), and that the jumpers are set correctly. Windows may be able to see the drive but may need some help to display it. A reboot may be needed after Windows finds and installs drivers, or if that doesn’t work a little software coaxing may help – But some of that’s beyond the scope of this article. If everything looks right and is working properly then proceed>.
Finally… Now that your new drive is installed you can add data to it. If you’re replacing your current drive and cloning it to your new drive, you’ll need to connect both drives. If you’re using IDE drives only, change any necessary jumpers (see above) so that both drives as well as a CD drive are recognized. At this stage it is not important to screw in your old drive; you can just rest it somewhere convenient, but it’s not advisable to leave it hanging in mid-air. Now clone your old drive to the new one and disconnect the old one, reset the jumpers as appropriate if you’re using IDE drives. If you’re replacing your current primary drive but you’ve no intention of cloning its contents to the new drive, put your operating system’s CD in the drive and boot from it. You’ll be prompted during the first part of setup to partition and format your drive. If you’re installing Windows XP,Vista, or 7; make sure to use the NTFS file system: it’ll make life so much easier for you as compared to FAT32.
If you’re installing a secondary drive for storage purposes, your operating system won’t see your new drive until you format it. To format the drive in Windows XP, right-click on My Computer and go to “Manage”. In the window that comes up, click Disk Management in the left pane. Once it loads, you should see an “Initialize Disk” wizard pop up. Partition and format the disk to your liking, but make sure not to convert it to a dynamic disk, as doing so will probably end in tears eventually. Other operating systems may vary, but I can’t cover every possible operating system in this article. That’s about it for this article: You now have a new working hard drive installed. Please see my other articles for more advice on what you can do next. You’ll find a chronological listing of articles on the page called “Blog Contents”, which you can access from the menu at the top of every page and post on this blog. In the same menu you’ll also find “Posts Listing: Computer Hardware” and “Posts Listing: Computer Software Help”; both of which could have an article or two listed on them with regards to what to do next, if you’re looking for ideas.
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How to Adjust the Size of Your Paging File in Windows XP
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A paging file in Windows is an area of the hard-disc that the Windows operating system reserves for operations that it would otherwise carry out using the system’s RAM. The actual amount of this area that Windows uses depends upon 2 major factors: How much of the processor’s capability you are currently using, combined with how many programs you have running, and how much RAM you have fitted to your computer’s motherboard. With a 32-bit operating system there’s probably always going to be at least a tiny part of the reserved space used, as the maximum amount of RAM that a 32-bit operating system can see at any given point is 4 gigabytes. In practice, owing to operating tolerances as well as taking into account various system hardware caches, the actual amount of RAM that a 32-bit operating system will recognise is around 3.5 gigabytes. – It’s a fair bit of RAM, and enough for most applications, but not many computers running a 32-bit operating system have more than around 2GB RAM. With a 64-bit operating system you can fit up to several exabytes of RAM, so therefore the more RAM you have fitted the less the paging file is used, to a certain extent anyway. Having said all that, though, I do know that people have turned off their paging file completely whilst running XP Pro 32-bit with a gigabyte of RAM, and as far as I am aware their computer ran something like normally. I don’t suggest you try it for yourself, though. So why would you want to adjust the size of your paging file? To be honest the only reason I can think of, other than trying your computer out to see if it runs without a paging file, or changing its size following installation of more RAM, (which isn’t compulsory.) is in a case where you’re running so low on disc space that Windows won’t work properly; and you need just that little bit extra before you can get the C: drive to a state in which you can fit a larger hard-drive and all that it entails without Windows going tits-up somewhere in the process. – Therefore you cut down the System Restore area and the paging file allocation on C: to make that bit of extra room, cross your fingers and everything else, pray if you’re religious, and begin. Without going too far off track; here’s how to get to the necessary adjustments that Microsoft have cleverly buried in XP: - Right-click on the “My Computer”icon and click “Properties”. In the Performance section at the top of the dialogue box, click Settings. Click the Advanced tab, and click the Change button in the Virtual memory section. …And you’ll see something very much like this: -
Normally, as you’ll note from the pic, I leave it to Windows to decide the size of it: Windows knows what it’s doing – more or less – and has a rough idea what size paging file it needs. My C: drive on this particular computer is about 79.5 GB in size, and is partitioned off from the rest of the drive. Windows uses a few MBs of that for the paging file and I don’t really worry about it that much if at all. I only have a paging file on C: drive. It’s set to “No paging file” for all the other drives; which means that it’s turned off on all other drives. You may want to set the size of your paging file however. Indeed it may already be set to some limit. If you get problems with paging file size then you might like to set it as I have done; then if Windows has issues with its current size it’ll pop up a notice on-screen telling you that it’s enlarging the paging file, and do so. To set your paging file within custom parameters; select “Custom size” by putting a . in the appropriate radio button, and typing in the size you want. There are all kinds of advisories that tell you what size you should set it to; some of which have conflicting advice. – Which is why I let the operating system handle it. If you select the drive letter by highlighting it, you can set a paging file size for most drives; other than removable drives for obvious reasons. I’ve tried putting the paging file on other drives than C:, on other drives as well as C:, even partitioning a separate drive specially for the paging file alone: In my experience nothing seems to be better than having it on C: drive only and letting Windows manage its size. Do you have different experiences? If so then please do comment. - Other than that; that just about rounds it off.
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Microsoft and the Massive 7 UK Con
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The internet is probably the most useful place any American can go to for a bargain. In the UK the situation’s slightly different: Yes; UK people can find things at a decent price on the net most of the time and/or cheaper than in most High Street shops; but the way the cookie crumbles favours Americans. I’m not sure whether this is why Americans use the internet a lot more than the British; or whether it’s a result of the British using the internet less, possibly due to the comparative lack of education and abundance of negativity in UK culture when compared with the American equivalent. – ‘Sorry Brits; but honestly we’re going to end up a nation of half-witted moronic thugs and delinquents unless something radical happens, and soon. I’m not going into politics right now: But perhaps I should; as the stuck-up self-interested privileged “elite” currently in UK politics who have allowed this situation to deteriorate over the last few generations seem to hardly be able to run a bath; let alone a country. The term “Americans” herein refers to those who are resident in the US and Canada. I found it rather, to all intents and purposes, racist, that an overwhelming number of sometimes crazy offers that appear on the internet are only available to US and Canadian residents. One such offer concerns Microsoft’s up and coming operating system; Windows 7: An article by Rich Menga on PCMech.com; which is run from Tampa, Florida, by David Risley and others, announces the headline: - “Windows 7 Home Premium Pre-Order, $49.99 Upgrade, $199.99 Full” Inside the article; Rich clearly states: - “Starting today, if you pre-order Windows 7 as an upgrade, the Home Premium Edition (which is what most people would go for) is just a tick under $50. See below.” Wow; that’s amazing! I can order my own copy at a massive discount! (The three images below are copied directly from Rich’s article on PC Mech.)
“The full versions start with Home Premium at $199.99. That’s still steep, but it is cheaper than Vista. See below.”
“What versions of Windows qualify you for the upgrade?"Windows Vista or Windows XP. Yes, XP qualifies be it Home or Pro Edition. Is says so right on the Office Depot sale page for this product. “
Brilliant! I run XP professional and Windows 7 RC. – I qualify! “A near-60% discount on the purchase of Home Premium means this is the cheapest Windows upgrade we’ve seen in a very long time. I use Windows 7 RC on a daily basis. It’s stable and solid. And now, thankfully, cheap (at least for the upgrade). This upgrade offer lasts from today, June 26 to July 11. Where to get it?The links go directly to the Windows 7 pre-order page for the respective vendor.” I attempted to order from Amazon.com: They are unable to ship this product to my address. I looked at Office Depot… Office What? ‘Never heard of them. – An exclusively American company.# I tried the Microsoft Store: The words “United States” were written in the banner at the top of the page. I was asked to sign in with my Windows Live ID: No problem yet; but it wouldn’t allow me to leave the ‘state’ field blank, neither would it allow me to enter a British postcode in the ‘Zip’ field – So I’m stuffed there too. I know; how about if I go back and select ‘United Kingdom’ from the drop-down list that appears when I click ‘United States’ in the banner bar?.. - NO! <stifled scream> :-
I don’t want Vista. I hate Vista; Vista sucks. I’m definitely not buying it just to get 7! Even if you charged me for 7 and gave me Vista free I’d send Vista back. Hang on a minute: How much?
Unless there’s been a massive devaluation of the UK pound against the US dollar that I missed, then I make that offer about 5 times the cost in the UK as it is in the USA! – + I’ll have a copy of Vista to use as a coaster on my coffee table. If you’re in the UK and are thinking of going for this offer; my advice is don’t. Microsoft are fully aware that a lot of British people don’t have the brains they were born with, and are too lazy to even browse the internet: That’s why they’re offering you the chance to increase their Vista sales figures, so that they can say “We did well with Vista in the UK; the figures prove it.” In the meantime you’re in reality paying probably full price for Windows 7 and also jointly all buying a backlog of unsold Vista DVDs at a knock-down price just to make some room in Microsoft’s warehouse while saving on their recycling bill. Yes it stinks: It’s a big con, and if you’ve already fallen for it then Microsoft saw you coming a while ago. Well Brits: Don’t all just sit there with your stiff upper lip, tutting and murmuring “Terrible!”: Get your arse in gear and complain; to the EU bureaucrats you’ve just elected, (– Let’s see how helpful the BNP can be, eh?) to Parliament, to the European Court of Human Rights, to Microsoft themselves even. You, me, and every Windows user in the UK who owns a computer and wants an operating system upgrade are being ripped off! Are you going to let them get away with it? What did you say? – “What’s it worth to me?” – About £120 odd; that’s how much you’re being ripped off for. Are you just going to take it lying down? – No don’t answer that.
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Something to Try if Windows XP Crashes During Boot – Part 13
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Is this an early Halloween / technical post?
Maybe? This is Part 13 of the series. It should be part 5; but for the negatively superstitious amongst us I’ve named it part 13. Why? Well I tried to start to go into the whys and wherefores of that; but I just ended up opening up the subjects of religion and superstition, which I don’t want to do right now. – So we’ll just say OK – Part 13 it is. In Part 1 we tried opening up the Windows Advanced Options pre-boot menu and selecting the option “Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)” In Part 2 we looked at removing a driver by booting into Safe Mode. In Part 3 we looked at how corruption could be the cause of the problem, and how to get rid of it using chkdsk and sfc. This can be taken further by using a program by GRC Corp called “SpinRite”: See this article for more information. In Part 4 we spoke about the awesome power of the Windows Recovery Console and how this might help as a last resort. - On very rare occasions, though, none of this is accessible: The computer’s BIOS screen appears at or just after power up; and then another black screen with white text appears saying that the CPU was not found, or the RAM isn’t present, or something similar. This has happened to me just the once with an AsRock K7—-VSTA board with DDR RAM which had an AMD Sempron 2.2GHz CPU running on it. Exactly what happened, why did it happen, and what can be done about it? Exactly what happened? : - The machine started to crash with a frequent BSOD, which seemed to be for random reasons. I did almost everything suggested in Parts 1 to 3 to try to solve the problem. I didn’t get as far as the Windows Recovery Console, as the machine crashed with another BSOD and refused to start. It started with the usual BIOS screen and then went straight on to a screen telling me that it couldn’t find a processor.. I tried restarting it several times by using the reset button, but the same happened each time. Why did it happen? : - When the BIOS starts up it instantly asks all of the fundamental components to declare themselves present and identify themselves. The BIOS knows what basic components should always be present in a computer in order for it to be able to operate; such as a processor, RAM, hard-drive, etc, and it makes request of those components to register their presence and then identify themselves by type and serial number. One of the first components, if not the first component, it looks for to be present is a processor. For some reason the BIOS asked for a processor to identify itself and no reply registered with it. This could be for a number of reasons: -
I checked the power plugs: They were all plugged in securely and tightly. I checked the PSU and it seemed OK. That was all I needed to know. A 32-bit single-cored Sempron CPU wasn’t worth replacing if it was dead, and if I was going to buy a new motherboard I’d have at least a dual-core Athlon 64 x 2 on it. I stripped out the motherboard, CPU, and RAM. (The DDR RAM still worked when I used it in an old PC.) The CPU I gave away marked as possibly faulty. The motherboard was binned and recycled. I bought a new Gigabyte socket AM2 motherboard with a new Athlon 64 x 2 2.2GHz CPU and 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM. The rebuilt computer is what I’m writing this post on. In short, then, Part 13 is the Death Card: It indicates death of old substandard parts; and replacement with new, more functional and better components, bringing rebirth to a computer. (I bet you never thought of the concept of cyber-reincarnation before!?) Part 13 is unlucky for some: Those who can’t or won’t learn how to rebuild or repair a computer. – But Part 13 is lucky for others – who end up with a similar or identical looking computer which has enhanced performance, having rebuilt it insdie using new companents. In conclusion, then; if Windows XP crashes during boot and the BIOS says that it can’t find… then basically your box is dead. – But it can be reborn if you’re prepared to spend time and money on it. Namaste’.
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1) The processor is fried: It’s dead and can’t respond.
1) Is obviously a hardware fault: The processor has died, and probably so has any number of other components.
Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot – Part 4
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I was going to end this series at Part 3; but having thought further about it, I feel that the Windows Recovery Console is worth a mention: - First; what exactly is the Windows Recovery Console? It’s a pre-boot repair tool that allows you to recover from and repair system issues that affect the machine’s ability to boot up. It’s very powerful and is certainly not to be sniffed at. I encourage users to only use the Recovery Console as a last resort: In fact in some cases a repair reinstallation may be just as, if not more, effective. It has diagnostic as well as repair uses though; so it might be a useful commodity at times. So how do I access the Windows Recovery Console? To access the Recovery Console you have to boot from the XP CD. Having done so you’ll eventually arrive at a screen that looks like this: -
Press “R”, as per the instruction on screen, and the Recovery Console starts. The Recovery Console will check for Windows installations, and list any that are on the hard-drive. Unless the computer has been set up to multi-boot, there will only be one.
Select the operating system you want to repair and press Enter. Windows will then ask you for the administrator password: -
Enter the administrator password, et voila; you’re into the Recovery Console.
It’s a glorified Windows Command Prompt which allows access to the root folder (%systemroot%) and the Windows folder + its respective tree. Once you’ve done the major repair you can boot into Windows, (Safe Mode or normally.) and continue any repair work needed.
Details of how to use fully, and also the commands available for use within the Recovery Console, are available within the following Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: – Article ID: 314058 – Last Review: September 22, 2008 – Revision: 5.2 Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console for advanced usersYou can access this article by clicking here. I think I’ve just about touched on everything in this and the other three articles. If your Windows XP installation ever screws up at boot in future; I hope that these articles will give you some ideas as to what to do and how to resolve the issue. If you’d like to comment then the comment forms are open for around six months from the date of writing. Enjoy XP; even of you’re soon moving on to Windows Seven. (You could actually run Windows XP inside a virtual environment within Windows Seven…That’s an idea for another article perhaps?) Warning: The Recovery Console is a powerful tool; and if used incorrectly can further screw up your installation just as much as it can repair it; so use it with extreme care.
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![clip_image002[8]](http://kkomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/clip-image0028.jpg "clip_image002[8]")
![clip_image002[10]](http://kkomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/clip-image00210.jpg "clip_image002[10]")
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Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot – Part 3
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This is Part Three of this series. In Part 1 we went to the Windows Advanced Options Menu…
… And we tried using the “Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)” option. This sometimes, (Usually in my experience.) does the trick, but not always. In Part 2 we looked at something else we could do if that doesn’t solve the issue: If it doesn’t solve the problem it usually means that one of the drivers is bad/corrupt/dodgy; so we looked at removing that driver by booting into Safe Mode. What we didn’t look at was what to do if your XP computer doesn’t crash, but rather just boots and goes tits up; to put not too fine a point on it. If you get a scrambled picture then ‘chances are that your graphics driver is playing up and needs removing and reinstalling, and/or your graphics card is either crap or has developed a fault. Some motherboards just don’t like some graphics cards: I have an Asus mobo that just hates a certain Asus nVidia graphics card. There’s nothing wrong with the graphics card; it works fine in other computers, but it just won’t work properly with this one board. OK so we’ve covered a lot so far in parts 1 & 2; but there may be a couple more things that’s preventing XP from starting: – These are operating system/data corruption and/or file system corruption. Operating system corruption can result from too much buggering about and trying to be clever; – The usual scenario in my case. – or from a phenomenon (specific to Windows – ?) known as “software rot”. For whatever reason, Windows moves things around, writes, copies, deletes, all in normal operation. Eventually it makes a tiny error; which can go unnoticed. – But when a number of tiny errors build up over months of operation, then a big error happens, and things start to go downhill from there: A cascade of errors causing errors, until eventually the system becomes inoperable. The above can take years and stay unnoticed until the machine simply stops working, or it can happen suddenly. File system corruption is much the same: The NTFS, or in some cases, the FAT32, file system, is the storage medium’s file storage structure on the disc. In short the computer stores tiny bits of data made up of a few bytes in many tiny storage areas on the disk. These are marked out before the data is added to the disk: It’s accomplished by process called “formatting”; which is the first thing that needs to be done if a new hard-drive is installed, or if the old one needs to be wiped. Also in the file system are indexes of these little areas of data; which can also be prone to error.
Since we’re on the subject of the file system; the way to correct a file system error is by using the chkdsk function built into Windows. In Windows XP this can be activated from the command prompt as well as the GUI. Open a command prompt (Start>Run and type “cmd”.) and type “chkdsk C: /f”. (Assuming that C: is the disc that you want to check for file system errors.) This instructs Windows to run chkdsk on drive C:, and the parameter f instructs the operating system to check specifically for file system errors and repair them. Similarly; chkdsk can also check the disc for file system and data errors, and repair them. To instruct Windows to do this, open a command prompt, (Start>Run and type “cmd”.) and type “chkdsk C: /r” (Assuming that C: is the disc that you want to check for errors.) Using the parameter r instructs the operating system to repair any errors it finds on the disc: These include file system errors, corrupt data, and bad sectors. As you may imagine; this can be a long process on some occasions. While chkdsk attends to disc errors, there is another process that checks further for data errors in the essential operating system files. This process is called the system file checker. To run it; first insert your (original) XP CD into the optical drive, then open a command prompt, (Start>Run and type “cmd”.) and type “sfc /scannow”. This instructs the operating system to run the system file checker, check the crucial system files that Windows needs in order to be able to operate, check their parity, and, if there are any errors; delete the file and replace it from the files on CD. – Short of performing a repair reinstallation, this is the best way to clear operating system corruption. So that’s covered pretty much everything. If you’ve done everything suggested and it still won’t boot, then you have a choice of a repair reinstall or a disk-format-and-reinstall. Before you do that, though, try pulling out all the USB plugs and other peripherals and seeing if the machine boots with no peripherals connected. If it does then you have a faulty peripheral device. Plug things back in one by one and boot after every device you plug in. When your computer fails to boot you’ll know that the last peripheral device you plugged in is faulty. “ – After I’ve spent hours doing all that, from Part 1, 2 and 3; and now you tell me it’s a faulty peripheral device!” - Don’t worry: You’ve just given your machine a full software service, and it’ll work a lot better as a result. |
Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot – Part 2
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This is part 2 of the series. I’m assuming you’ve already read Part 1. In Part 1 we brought up the Windows Advanced Options Menu:
We selected the option “Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)”, but that still hasn’t worked and your Windows XP computer still won’t boot: Either it’s crashing with a BSOD as it boots up, or it’s just not working at all well when it has apparently booted up fully. – The screen is scrambled, there are things missing, whatever. This time we’re going to try something else. Does your computer crash and restart or go to a BSOD? Does your computer automatically restart when it crashes? There’s nothing wrong about that in itself, but if it does so then you don’t get the chance to read the data presented on the BSOD. The first thing we need to do is to stop the computer from automatically restarting every time it crashes, in order that you can study the BSOD. If the computer doesn’t go to a BSOD or automatically restart, but just doesn’t work properly when it’s fully booted for whatever reason then see Part Three of this series. (Still to be written at time of writing: It won’t be long before it’s produced though.) Go to the Windows Advanced Options Menu and use the up and down arrow keys to select “Disable automatic restart on system failure”. Press Enter¬. Allow the computer to reboot and to crash again. You should now be able to study the blue screen. (BSOD)
On the blue screen you’ll see the reason why the computer crashed, some tips which might or might not help, and some “Technical Information”, aka gibberish. The gibberish is probably the most important part of it all. First, though, try following the stated tips to whatever extent possible. I suggest photographing the blue screen with a digital camera: You might need the information later on, and the screen might not be accessible at the time you need it. If that particular computer is the only one you have then you’ll need to use a neighbour’s computer, or an internet cafe’, public library computer, whatever, for the next bit: – Type the stop error code into Google. You’ll find the stop error code in “Technical Information” on the blue screen. In the example above the stop error code is the alphanumerical sequence 0×000000D1 : - *** STOP 0×000000D1 (0×000… Type that code into Google and it’ll return reams of information on the error; exactly what it is, what it might be, what causes it, what people think, … You might even find a solution there. If it’s a driver issue, however, you need to identify which driver it is that’s causing the BSOD to occur. When you’ve done that we need to remove that driver before we can restart the machine and boot into Windows proper. To do this we go into the Windows Advanced Options Menu, and use the up and down arrow keys to select “Safe Mode”. Press Enter¬. Safe Mode is a mode where Windows runs without loading all the drivers. Essentially it loads a minimal set of drivers that are essential for it to operate, and no more. On the basis of that, ‘chances are that the driver causing the BSOD won’t be loaded, and therefore Windows will boot into Safe Mode. Whilst in Safe Mode, having identified the driver that’s causing the issue; go into Device Manager and remove that driver. Having done so, restart the computer. Depending upon which driver it is; Windows will either reinstall one that works from the i386 folder on the hard drive and load it at boot, or it’ll start without it and let you know. If it starts without it then the piece of hardware that the driver pertained to will be severely limited in function if it works at all. It’ll be using any default driver that comes with the OS. You’ll need to manually reinstall a driver in this case – But I do suggest that you go to the device manufacturer’s website and download/install the latest driver for the device in question. If the driver was a specialised keyboard or mouse driver then you may have to do a repair reinstallation of Windows before you can load the new driver. A graphics card should still work in a very limited fashion using the default drivers that come with the OS. To get it working properly again you should install the latest driver from the manufacturer’s website.
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Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot – Part 1
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Windows XP can be a funny old sod at times:
Sometimes and for no apparent reason it’ll go wonky even while you boot it up; even if your last session appeared flawless. In a lot of cases this is because it failed to load a driver properly. The result can be a number of things: It could fail to boot with a BSOD during boot-up, it could give you a mal-formed or scrambled picture on the monitor due to having loaded the graphics driver incorrectly, it might boot but not work properly – sometimes followed by a BSOD, or numerous other things. If this happens then shut it down again in the normal manner, if you can, and try booting it up again. In numerous cases it’ll boot-up properly the next time, and everything will be fine. – But what if the same problem occurs again when you try to boot it again? Well, if it’s happened twice then the probability is that it’ll occur a third time; so it’s time to take action. This solution works sometimes; other times it doesn’t; but it’s the easiest solution of all, so it’s worth a try before you try anything else: - 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 should appear. This is white text on a dark-grey background. The options open to you are: -
In this case we want “Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)”, so use the down and up arrow keys to highlight this line. Press enter¬. Forget the other options for the time being. In this article we’ll deal with that one only. 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. It 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¬. Windows will start to boot; except this time it looks in the System Volume Information folders on your hard-drive for a setting it used before when that driver loaded correctly. If it finds it then it’ll load it into the boot sequence and proceed with boot. If it doesn’t and still encounters the problem then the crash that happened before will probably happen again. – But that’s another article’s reading from that point. **In light of the paragraph above I’m going to make this a series: This post being Part 1, Parts 2 onward to be written soon.** - This operation thus far may solve your problem, and then again it might not. If it does solve the problem then I suggest that you allow the computer to fully boot, and then restart it again, just so that the new settings that work are written to the registry before you do anything else. Coming up in Part 2: If that didn’t work then we’ll use the Windows Advanced Options Menu to do something else. – Coming soon.
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Preview Links With CoolPreviews ((FireFox & IE6) Add-on)(Free Software)
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CoolPreviews is an extremely useful add-on to the FireFox (& IE6) web-browser that allows you to preview a hyperlinked page’s content without actually clicking on the hyperlink. This can be particularly useful when browsing a site with many hyperlinks as it allows you to view hyperlinks without actually clicking on them and opening the page in FireFox. Firefox 2.0-3.5b4+ required. Having installed CoolPreviews, you’ll see a little blue magnifying-glass icon after a hyperlink when you mouse-over it. Clicking that icon will cause CoolPreviews to present its own sub-window within your FireFox or IE6 browser, in which a preview will be displayed. This preview can be locked so that it doesn’t vanish when you remove the mouse-pointer from the CoolPreviews window. I’ve tested this FireFoxadd-on in Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and also in Windows Seven RC (64-bit). It will also work in Windows Vista, Mac osX, and Linux. There is also a version for use with Internet Explorer 6: This version doesn’t work with IE 7 or IE 8; however I have noticed that the majority of my readers who use Internet Explorer as their preferred browser actually have IE 6 installed; therefore I thought this worth a mention. (Incidentally; also worth a mention is that IE6 is getting rather dated. Although it’s not as sucky as IE7 to my mind, it’s probably worth upgrading to IE8 if you want to stay with IE, unless you have a very old computer that’s short on resources. Also, once again unless you have a very old computer with depleted resources – Particularly with regard to RAM – it would be worth your while to install FireFox in addition to IE in my humble opinion, even if you continue to use IE as your default browser.) - And the best thing of all is, of course, that this add-on is absolutely free of charge. – So why not download it? If you don’t have FireFox and don’t use IE6 then why not download FireFox as well? (‘Awaiting brownie points from Mozilla.) Here are the links again: – |
How To Create An XP Service Pack 3 Disc
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If you’re like me (Computer builder.) and install XP a lot, then a useful thing to have in your arsenal is your own XP SP3 CD, to save you all that time downloading it from the internet. There is another option available, which is to slipstream SP3 with Windows XP SP2, but for the time being I’ll concentrate on making a separate disc. To make things easier, Microsoft have released an official Windows XP SP3 ISO image. << Click the linked text to download it. It’s a free download. – This can be written to a CD as you would with any ISO image. The entire file is 549MB in size; so it might take a while to download. The best no-brainer ISO burner software I’ve found is ImgBurn : It makes creating a CD from an ISO so easy it’s incredible. – So much so in fact that there’s no need to give any instructions other than those already given on the website. Do you install XP regularly; perhaps on computers that you build? Do you install SP3 too, or do you leave it for the customer to do? Are you going to start installing Windows Seven as soon as you can in preference to XP? Have you already started installing the Windows Seven RC build 7100 at the customer’s request? Do feel free to comment.
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It’s Time for The 64-Bit Revolution
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In 2003; AMD introduced the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer, the single-cored Athlon 64, onto the market. Six years later, and now virtually all processors produced at the present moment are 64-bit capable. Also most processors used these days have 2 or more cores, enabling approximately 1.7 times or more of the functionality of a single-cored CPU.
Meanwhile, leaving the minority operating systems, such as Linux, and Mac osX – which only runs well on an Apple computer anyway, aside; between 2001 and almost up to the present day the market leader of operating systems, namely Microsoft Windows, has in reality been fairly stagnant. Despite the release of Windows Vista in January 2007, which in many ways went down like a lead balloon from the offing, most people have been using Windows XP since 2001. (Myself included.(Well, since January 2002 to be exact. – I stayed with Windows 98SE until I managed to afford a new computer. – Things were a bit tighter then.) Back in the days when XP was launched, everyone was using a single-cored processor that was only 32-bit capable. In those days 250 megabytes of RAM was considered a vast amount, a 60GB hard-drive had a massive amount of space on it, the Intel Pentium 4 was the latest cutting-edge CPU, (The new machine I bought in 2002 had a first-generation P4 2.8GHz processor installed.) 32MB graphics were considered the norm, and 64MB were considered leading-edge… Nobody but the extreme-geeks wanted 64-bit operating systems; and therefore most of the XP CDs sold were 32-bit. 32-bit became the norm, became known. It was taught that computers went from 4-bits in the 1960s and 70s, (Commodore Pet) to 8-bits (16-colours!) in the 1980s, to 16-bits (DOS) and then to 32-bits (Windows 95 et al.) in the 1990s. – And from there a general feeling amongst the less-computer-literate that this was the ultimate destiny, that technology had no need to progress further than that. Windows 98SE became replaced by the excuse for an operating system known as Windows ME, and shortly afterwards by Windows 2000, which combined the advances made in ME with the lessons learned from ME: The limited and insecure FAT32 file-system which Microsoft had previously hailed as the way ahead, was falling out of favour, and customers had the choice now of using either FAT32 or the far superior NTFS disk-formats. Not far down the road came XP; which built on the lessons learned from 2000, and XP and 2000 were the in-thing. Many people stuck to using 98SE and ME, in addition to those using 2000 and XP. Support for 98SE and ME was eventually discontinued; but to this day some die-hards still use those operating systems, despite their now being a massive security-risk both in terms of the user and of the rest of the internet-community as a whole. XP became the principle operating system, even holding out extremely well against the newer Windows Vista, which flopped from launch. – This caused consternation among many of the Microsoft faithful; many of whom switched to Linux and Apple’s Mac in protest. Despite all this; the remaining Microsoft community – which only shrank in size by a few percent due to defectors to Linux and Mac – stayed in the 32-bit frame of mind. A few took up 64-bit computing with Vista after SP1. Even fewer took up 64-bit computing with XP after SP2 and 3. Meanwhile; Apples Mac community; its numbers swelled with Vista detractors, was already completely 64-bit. Linux distros appeared utilising the 64-bit potential of modern machines also. Microsoft people either didn’t appear to know or care about 64-bit computing: 32-bit computing appeared good enough so why change? There was and still remains a danger of getting stuck in a rut. What’s the big deal about 64-bit computing then? Why should I want to use a 64-bit operating system as opposed to a 32-bit operating system? Let me ask you this: (I know a question in answer to a question may be considered lame; but bear with me here.) Why would you want to use a 32-bit operating system as opposed to a 16-bit operating system? Because 32-bit has more capabilities, right? – Like 32 million colours as opposed to 256 colours… No I’m not saying that there’s several trillion colours in 64-bit…. Well there may in fact be so; but it’s a bit pointless to use that as a reason to upgrade, as the human eye only sees just over 24 million different colours. The main thing about 64-bit operating systems is that they enable your computer to work with more memory. (RAM) – Vastly more in fact: These days applications are demanding more and more RAM and other system resources to be in use on your computer in order to run them. – But there’s a limit to how much RAM you can use per system. If you’re running a 32-bit operating system you can use up to around 3.5 gigabytes of RAM. In 2001 that must have seemed like a colossal amount of memory. These days 2 gigabytes is standard. – On a computer with a 32-bit operating system that is. I’m typing this on a computer that I built in December 2008. This computer has 2 GB RAM, an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 dual-core 64-bit capable processor… Yet as with most such computers belonging to most people, it’s currently running a 32-bit XP Professional operating system. The computer next to it, which I built in April 2009, has 4GB RAM – and today I bought another 4 GB RAM which I intend to fit soon. It has an AMD Phenom triple-cored 64-bit-enabled processor and is currently running Windows 7 RC 64-bit. My point is that this year a new Windows operating system is going to be launched. – But this is no Vista: This one’s Windows 7. It works almost flawlessly and neither I nor several of my online acquaintances can find anything to complain about with regard to it. – And this is before it’s even been fully released! – OK ‘straight to the point: Which is that 32-bit is so 1990s and 2000s. Next year we’ll be entering the 2010s and, as usual, technology will be moving on at its standard fast-pace. Windows 7 will be available in both 32 and 64-bit versions. If you have a 64-bit capable computer and buy and/or load 32-bit Windows 7 you won’t be doing yourself any favours. When Windows 95 was released it was possible to run a 16-bit operating system on a 32-bit computer designed to run Windows 95. – Try running one of today’s apps in a 16-bit environment though. It wouldn’t run. Even if it did run; the machines that were around when 16-bit was the in-thing would hardly be capable of running a single app that’s used today. (I tried running XP Home on a computer powered by a Pentium 1 processor. (1996/7 IIRC.) It was 32-bit capable so it ran: Badly and tediously slowly. It took 1/2 hour to boot…) In a few years your 32-bit operating system won’t be capable of running the applications of the time properly and in multiples, because they’ll need more memory than is able to be utilised by a 32-bit operating system. Remember; a 32-bit operating system can only see about 3.5 gigabytes at one time. A 64-bit operating system can see and use over 16 million terabytes of RAM though. That should be all you need for a few years yet. Do yourself a favour: When you move up to Windows 7; get a 64-bit version of the operating system (Provided that your system is 64-bit capable.(Most systems built in the last 2 years are 64-bit capable. If unsure ask your retailer or an experienced geek.)) It’s time everyone snapped out of this 32-bit mentality; it’s so yesterday. – It’s like choosing to drive a Reliant Robin in favour of a Porsche.
Let’s all break the mould and go 64-bit. I intend to do so; and it’s in everyone’s best interests to do likewise. Do you agree? |
What Is pagefile.sys, And Can I Do Without It?
| - So what is pagefile.sys? I see it on my hard-drive, hidden away, taking up space, but is it really necessary?
In answer to that; pagefile.sys is the Windows Paging file. It’s a file that Windows uses as RAM when the installed RAM is all in use. If there’s not much space left in RAM then Windows may write some of the contents of the RAM to pagefile.sys so that it can fit further memory requests in. The drawback is that reading from pagefile.sys takes comparatively ages longer than reading from RAM. If Windows needs the data that it just wrote to pagefile.sys again it’ll dump some other data to pagefile.sys in order to make space in RAM, read the data it needs from pagefile.sys, and write it back to RAM for easy access: Hence the reason pagefile.sys also known as a “swap file”.
That’s all fine and dandy if you don’t have masses of RAM installed. If you have 4GB RAM installed with a 32-bit Windows operating system then it’s likely that Windows will have little need for the paging file and will use the 3.5GB of installed RAM that it can see for most everything to a large extent. Even the 2GB I have installed with my 32-bit Windows XP Pro operating system negates a lot of disk activity as Windows has less need for pagefile.sys. – But it still uses it because it’s there. The more RAM that’s fitted to the computer in question, the less pagefile.sys is used. Therefore that’s less usage of and strain on the hard-drive; meaning that the disk will last at least a little longer. How much longer? Somewhere between an indivisible fraction of a second and infinity. How long is a piece of string? So how do I stop Windows from using pagefile.sys altogether? If you have enough RAM fitted you can delete it; although I see no properly valid reason to do so. I personally still have a pagefile.sys on both of my machines, both of which have 2GB RAM installed, as I myself don’t see any point in deleting it. Others will disagree. *Remember that pagefile.sys is a hidden system file. In order to see it you’ll need to enable “Show hidden files” and disable “Hide protected operating system files” in Folder Options. As a system file you can’t simply delete it as you would for, say, a file that you yourself created but no longer wanted on your computer.* To do so what you have to do is to set your Virtual Memory to zero and restart your computer. Here’s how to do that i Windows XP Pro:-
Your computer is no longer using pagefile.sys, and you can now therefore delete it. If you re-enable Virtual Memory, pagefile.sys will return. What difference has that made to the operating system’s operation? The operating system is still running as it always was. The difference is that everything is running in RAM only; so the first thing you will notice is that you have less available RAM. I just switched off my paging file and XP Pro was using just over 1GB RAM on tickover, as opposed to the 600MB or so that it usually uses. I have many programs and peripherals running though: Your system may vary with regard to the amount. If you don’t have enough RAM installed you might run into problems; which is why I recommend not trying this unless you have a decent amount of RAM installed. On the positive side the system appears to run very slightly faster in some aspects. (I have switched the paging file back on though. I’d rather use it than not.) Are you currently running your system without a paging file? What performance benefits/deficits do you get from doing so? Please comment. |
Using Windows Automated System Recovery With No Floppy Drive: Is it Possible?
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Situation: You’re running Windows XP Professional on a computer without a floppy drive, and you want to use the Automated System Recovery tool to generate a system backup. Windows Automated System Recovery writes to a pair of drives: One of them is user-selectable and is where the system backup is stored. This can be another drive on the computer itself, (It is possible to actually write the backup to the same disk as the original files; but that’s almost totally pointless.) a drive on another computer, or a USB drive. The other one of them is Drive A: on the local computer; which is the floppy drive if you have one fitted. If you don’t then a problem arises as the ASR wizard asks to write to a floppy-disk in drive A: . The floppy lists the system files that are installed on the PC; and without it you can’t even begin a restore operation using ASR.
If you don’t have a floppy drive fitted to that particular computer then there are ways round the situation. None of the available methods are able to get away from having a floppy drive installed on a computer at some point. To save the reader time I’ll state here that there appears to be no way out of having to have a floppy drive installed somewhere, on the computer in question or on another computer. In short, if you’re using Windows XP and want to use ASR but don’t have and can’t get hold of a floppy-drive then in short you’re screwed. You can write the floppy that goes with your backup on the computer in question without having a floppy drive installed on that particular computer. However you will require a second networked computer with a floppy drive installed on it: - After running the ASR wizard without writing the floppy as per the machine’s instructions, navigate to C:\windows\repair\asr.sif and C:\windows\repair\asrpnp.sif . Copy these files across to a location on your networked computer that has a floppy drive installed, and then copy them from that location to a floppy disk. You now have a floppy to go with the backup, but if you want to reinstall the backup at any point you’ll need a floppy drive fitted to your original computer in order to be able to do so: In this case of reinstallation a networked computer with a floppy drive installed can’t help. – That means that, if you can’t get hold of a spare floppy drive, you’ll have to uninstall the floppy drive from your networked computer and at least plug it in to the original computer; both power lead and data cable. The last sentence of the paragraph directly above is in all honesty the only solid solution to the problem: Plug in or fully install an old floppy drive. If you don’t have any floppy disks and can’t get hold of any then there is a device available that adapts a floppy drive for a flash card, and I see no reason why it won’t work with ASR. At $25.00 USD you might think it to be a trifle too expensive to bother with. That’s about it then: If you don’t have a floppy drive anywhere then you won’t be able to use Windows ASR. – End of story. There are other backup solutions available though; some will cost you money, others are free. personally I recommend Acronis True Image and Paragon Drive Backup, in that order. Neither are free, but if you don’t want to pay then I suggest searching on Google for free backup programs. Do you know different? Do you have a better solution to the issue? If so then comment. Further Reading: See this article, and this article also. |
Service Your Software
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If you buy your computers pre-built with the operating system and other software pre-installed, you’ll notice that over time the unit’s operation becomes slower and slower. Eventually things might start to go wrong: Existing programs may crash unexpectedly, new programs that you install may not work properly and/or may affect other programs and/or the operating system itself. Even the operating system itself may seem to start behaving strangely. Why does this happen? In this article I’m going to be looking at the issues from the perspective of a Windows XP Professional user; such as myself. In a lot of cases the issues arise due to a lack of maintenance. Imagine if you bought a new car but never checked, maintained, or serviced it at all: Eventually it would start to go wrong and eventually break down. A computer is like a car in that it requires constant maintenance. Just like a car won’t work well or long if all you do is fill it up with petrol for a long time, ignoring maintenance; so a computer won’t work well or long if all you do is plug it in and use it for a long time, ignoring maintenance. In such cases the first thing people normally do is blame their hardware or somebody else. The somebody else is usually a tech; primarily the tech that built it. I once had someone insist that the reason why their machine wasn’t working very fast after they’d been downloading virus-laden files using p2p software and installing pirated software was because I hadn’t built it properly and that it was definitely a hardware fault. – This despite the fact that this person’s computer-literacy was virtually nil, and they had no idea of what went on inside their machine. Even if the user practices safe-computing to the letter; there’s still a need to maintain the software. If your anti-malware software requires manually updating then do it regularly and routinely; or upgrade the entire program to one that automatically updates. There are free anti-malware programs that update regularly from the internet and will cost you nothing, nada, zilch. The one I recommend is called Avast! . Even though your anti-malware program may regularly update itself from the web; there are still chances that a new virus might get in before the update occurs. There are also chances that a particular type of malware that’s got into your computer may not be recognised by the program. Always run a full virus-scan at least weekly; using both your installed software as well as an online virus scanner. There’s also the chance that data residing on your hard-drive, including your hard-drive’s file system itself, can become corrupted. (Especially with Windows.) The more time this is allowed to continue the worse it’ll get; until it eventually becomes noticeable and the user starts suspecting a hardware malfunction after a system crash or some other symptom. I suggest that every month you run the chkdsk program. Although this can be run from the graphical user interface inside Windows; it’s easier to run it from a command line in my opinion: - Click Start>Run and type chkdsk /r. This instructs the computer to run the chkdsk program which checks the hard-drive for errors. In this case, since you’ve used the /r parameter; it’ll check for any errors that it finds in the file-system and the data, and it’ll do it’s best to repair any errors that it finds. – It’s not infallible but it usually works. If you’re running chkdsk on your primary drive you’ll be asked to reboot so that chkdsk can work while the drive’s not in use.
If you have more than one hard-drive, or a partitioned hard-drive, you may find that you have to specify a drive letter in the command. For example: chkdsk E: /r This command instructs the computer to run the chkdsk program on drive E: and repair any errors that it finds. There’s also data fragmentation, which builds up over time. (This only happens with Windows and some Linux distros. It doesn’t happen on a Mac.) What’s going on here? When Windows writes to disk it writes to the next available space on the disk. If that space is less than the data that it needs to write then it moves on past the data already on the disk to the next available space, where it starts writing again. If it still hasn’t finished writing the file but runs out of space again, then it once again uses the next available space…and so on until the write is completed. As a consequence you end up with several fragments of the file strewn across the disk. Although the system knows where these fragments are, and that they’re bits of a single file; because the information that tells it so is stored in the registry, the read-heads of the hard-drive have to spend longer seeking out and reading all those fragments when Windows wants to access the file again at a later time. If that’s just the one file then it doesn’t make much difference to performance. If it’s lots of files that are fragmented then the hard-drive can take twice as long or more reading them all, and hence performance is slowed down significantly. If it’s a large lot of or all the files that are fragmented them the computer becomes disorientated, sees data errors where there are none due to slow read-times, and crashes. Also the amount of strain on the hard-disk’s mechanisms can vastly increase reading fragmented files; therefore the lifetime of the drive decreases with use. You can buy programs that automate the defragmentation process. I personally recommend Diskeeper for this purpose. Although it’s paid-software, you can currently use the software free for 30 days trial if you’d prefer to try it out first. If you’re not using automated defragmentation-software, however, you should manually defragment your hard-drive at least weekly. Failure to do so will result in impaired system performance and eventually a BSOD if you leave it long enough. Finally the obvious: If you run pirated software you’re breaking the law and are liable for prosecution if found out. Also pirated software might contain corrupted data and/or viruses/spyware/keyloggers. It might also use techniques to bypass the program’s anti-piracy measures that are detrimental to your computer hardware. If you insist on running pirated software than be prepared for anything to go wrong.
If you use p2p software; even if you don’t make illegal downloads, be very careful what you download: There are viruses out there that can get into your system and disable all of its protection; leaving it vulnerable to any and all kinds of attack. Your computer is a machine: Like any machine; including your body, if you don’t maintain it then it WILL fall into disrepair and eventually break down. Please comment. *I am not currently at time of writing affiliated to Avast! or Diskeeper: Therefore whether or not you use these products; I will not gain or lose anything.
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The First Bell Tolls for Windows XP
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On April 14th 2009 – Which incidentally is also one of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesdays”. – Windows XP leaves Microsoft’s mainstream support and enters extended support. At seven-years old; XP is already Microsoft’s most successful operating system, partly due to its enhanced longevity. Normally Microsoft keeps an operating system in mainstream support for 5 years after its release date, and then puts it into extended support for another 5, before retiring it completely. In the case of XP, however, Microsoft were forced to extend the support-lifetime a further 3 years due to the long delay between the releases of XP and Vista. In reality, then, XP has been already living on borrowed time for the last couple of years and a bit more. Mainstream support includes security and functionality bug-fixes – Also issuing service packs as an extra, which are a condensed form of a compilation of existing and new bug and security fixes encapsulated into a single package for ease of installation. Extended support, however, includes critical updates and security-related patches only. From April 14th onwards this is all that XP will have issued. Does that mean that people should stop using XP? Not at all. There is another 5 years of critical-security related support available for XP from April 2009. This means that XP will not become a security risk, like Win 9x and ME now are due to the unavailability of security fixes, until April 2014. My advice for the moment is if you’re comfortable using XP at present then carry on using it for now. What of its successors? Well in my opinion Vista was a flop, and at this point isn’t worth worrying about. – Although having said that there are a few people, one of whom is an online-friend of mine, who prefer Vista to anything else Microsoft have ever produced. Those people are nevertheless in the minority. Then there’s Windows 7: At time of writing, Windows 7 is available in beta form. (NOTICE: If people who intend to download the beta haven’t yet done so then I do suggest doing so ASAP as a matter of urgency. Microsoft are closing entries to the beta program in a few days time.) Windows 7 looks promising; but as I’ve stated in an earlier article, Microsoft have decided to issue 6 versions, allegedly in the hope of maximising their profits by doing so. As I said in a comment I made on PC Mech, if it was a choice between Home, pro, and Business versions; I’d go straight out and buy Pro as soon as it was released in RTM format. Now I’m going to wait to let those with the money who are brave enough to do so jump in where angels fear to tread and test the versions, before reporting what the customer will get with each version. Yes I’m hanging back until I know what I’m letting myself in for, and I advise my readers to do the same, unless they happen to be well-off financially and extremely geeky. For now I’m sticking to XP; and I may well run XP on one of my comps right up until 2014. I may even use it as a standalone system even after that, until the comp it’s installed on packs up beyond reasonable repair through old age. Are Microsoft going to do their best to kill off XP from April onward as rumour has it? I don’t think they need to in all honesty. I think Windows 7 will do that before long, although not totally. What’s your opinion? Please do comment. |
The End of XP? When?
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This year, Microsoft forced major retailers to stop supplying XP. In January 2009 even small system builders such as myself will be stopped from supplying XP. Will that be a death knell for XP?
Not immediately, no; but if the pre-beta code reports are anything to go by, then Windows Seven may well be the start of the end for this almost seven-year-old operating system. Some reports I’ve heard indicate that Microsoft will be launching Seven in October 2009. According to PCWorld.com: "The word on the blogosphere is that Windows 7 should be released to manufacturing in October 2009 with general availability by November". Microsoft haven’t yet released anything concrete yet as far as I know – Other than declaring that the new OS will be launched in the latter half of 2009, however some bloggers may be privy to insider information that I have not yet received.
Windows Vista; the disaster of an operating system in many ways, and the major trigger of the minor popularity-loss for the Softies, which did more good for its predecessor XP and the Apple Mac with its osX Unix operating system than anything else, has kept most of those users who continue to use Microsoft’s operating systems (Including myself.) with XP for the time being. In fact this blog’s visitor count indicates that almost 5 times more visitors use XP than use Vista, with a third as many people as those using Vista on a Mac using osX. Seven is coming; and in my opinion we’ll probably be seeing most of those who upgraded from XP to Vista upgrading to Seven in 2009; as well as probably at least two-thirds of the XP users. That will be probably just as much a death knell for Vista as it will be for XP, if not even more so. Seven will work on the same hardware as Vista; so there’s really no reason for Vista users not to upgrade. XP users boxes will be starting to clap out in a lot of cases, so those affected will no doubt upgrade equipment and operating system too. If you have a perfectly good computer that’s still running XP, and either you can’t afford to, don’t want to, or simply can’t move to Seven because of the hardware requirements, then don’t worry: Currently, as stated in the Microsoft XP Product Support Lifecycle page, partially shown above; they will continue mainstream support for XP until April 2009 – As they are currently doing that is – after which they’ll only be continuing support regarding security issues from that date until the currently scheduled day in April 2014 when XP becomes obsolete. Then XP will go the way of 9x and ME. By then, however, Seven’s successor will probably have been long released, Vista will have been condemned, and maybe even a successor to Seven’s successor will be in beta? One of my computers that I recently built from scrap components probably isn’t capable of running anything greater than Vista Home Basic. It has a 64-bit capable motherboard running a 32-bit AMD Sempron 1800MHz processor in a socket configuration that’s already almost obsolete; AMD socket 754. I don’t think they made any dual-core processors in that socket, and even if I could upgrade to a single-core Athlon 64 by buying second-hand, I wouldn’t bother upgrading to Vista. – So that’s one computer which’ll be running XP to 2014; if it lasts that long, that is.
Feel free to comment generally on anything you like in this article: There is a comment box below for that purpose. Have a good day/evening/night/morning, wherever you are on the planet. |
OneCare to be Discontinued
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In an unexpected turn of events, Microsoft have become rather chivalrous by aiming to provide a free tool, code-named "Morro," that will provide a basic anti-malware service; protecting against viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This will be offered at the same time, June 30th 2009, as they discontinue their Windows Live OneCare consumer security service. Morro will have a small footprint and use only a few system resources. The idea is that it will run on low-power PCs and low-bandwidth networks. As a stand-alone download it will support Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Existing OneCare customers will be directed toward using Morro instead when it becomes available. If you are currently and/or up to June 30th 2009 a OneCare user you will continue to be able to use the online backup feature as normal until that date; probably with the same charges attached. The Windows Live OneCare blog says that this is not due to a poor sales figure, but rather a tactic aimed at bringing protection to millions world-wide who have none. Personally I think it’s probably a bit of both – Oh please; Microsoft aren’t known generally for being that public-spirited, despite being nowhere near as tight and money-grabbing as Apple. I very much doubt that they’d drop a product line that was making them a fortune.
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Microsoft Still Need You to Send in Your Error Reports
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There are those in the geek community who say that Microsoft have seen every error report and there’s no point sending in error reports to them. As a consequence of this they switch error reporting off, advise others to do likewise, and no longer bother sending error reports to Microsoft. Admittedly I was starting to formulate the same opinion lately: Fairly recently I had a computer – a self-build – that had started repeatedly encountering stop errors. My primary hard-disk had recently died, which’ll teach me not to use second-hand disks in computers that I build for myself. (To save on costs I’d bought a batch of few second-hand disks off eBay which I thought I’d use for experimentation and in prototype-builds at the time. Most of them were still stuck in unused prototypes etc that were stored in the junk cupboard, but one of them was lying around spare when I built this computer, so I used it as a primary disk and used the larger disk that I’d bought new and intended for purpose as an additional disk.) This caused a spate of stop errors, ending in the computer’s refusal to boot at all. Having replaced the faulty disk and reinstalled everything I assumed that the system would operate as normal. I was surprised when, a week later, I encountered another stop error, followed by another the next day, and the next… Several days of fairly intensive tests showed that the component causing this problem was the floppy drive, which I replaced and the stop errors stopped. I had sent every error report to Microsoft, who each time informed me that the error was caused by a device or driver. Very helpful: I checked every driver and updated if possible. I checked every device thoroughly; ending with the floppy drive which was faulty. All those hours could have been saved if Microsoft had been more specific about which device or driver had caused the errors. I started to think that Microsoft were just deleting most/all error reports from Windows XP users: After all XP was now considered outdated by them, and it appeared that Microsoft were only interested in Vista. I didn’t switch error reporting off, neither did I get any more stop errors. – Until yesterday. This time M$ reported that the stop error had been caused by malware in the form of spooldr.sys. I ran all the checks Microsoft suggested, but found nothing, and no spooldr.sys either. I’d had an identical report when my disk was dying- surely the new disk wasn’t on its way out too? Today I encountered another unexpected stop error. The error report went off to M$, and I was expecting them to say either it was caused by a device or driver, or by spooldr.sys: The former telling me that they couldn’t be bothered to be specific, the latter telling me that they didn’t have a clue. I was extremely surprised to see the message that they returned on sending the error to them:-
"This problem is being researched" "Thank you for submitting a problem report to Microsoft. At this time we are researching the cause of this problem." So they are still interested in error reports regarding XP! "Please continue to submit all Windows problem reports. This will ensure that when a solution is available, you will receive updated information."
Either way round; to my mind it’s a Microsoft fault. The other computer that I built for myself shortly before this one is a totally different model. (One from my "Exel" line of "Kustomised" computers, and which runs like a dream with only a single hiccup so far after a year plus.) The one in question is from my "INXPense" line of "Kustomised" computers; of which I’ve built quite a few, and none of which have been plagued with any unexplained issues. The component models currently incorporated in this computer have all been previously used in other INXPense computers which have all been shipped to customers and which as far as I am aware are still working perfectly today. The only untested, "un-prototyped" shall we say, thing about this individual unique computer is the combination of components: The power supply and motherboard are standard and are used in all INXPense computers, as is the case and lower front panel, recessed and covered by a sliding flap. The IDE DVD-RW drive is of the type used in most INXPense computers. The graphics card ditto. The processor type as far as core and speed is concerned has been incorporated in one other INXPense computer. The identical Seagate SATA HDD has also been incorporated into one other INXPense computer, but as a secondary disk. Identical RAM with identical frequency of operation has been incorporated into a number of… All INXPense computers bar one are fitted with a floppy drive. At some point in the future I’m going to try installing a different HDD, processor, and probably almost every other component too, until and if I can discover what is causing this latest issue, if it has anything to do with the way the machine is constructed, unless Microsoft beat me to it. Yes, you’re right; I was going off topic somewhat. Microsoft have said in essence that they are interested in what went wrong, that they don’t know what went wrong, and that they want to try and work out the problem so that they can find a solution. They are interested in my error reports that I send in to them. Perhaps they have seen 99% of error reports before, and maybe they do know what your particular problem is, despite their reply only being sketchy in nature. I suggest, though, that despite this Microsoft’s customers don’t switch automatic error reporting off and that they do continue to send error reports to Microsoft for their analysis. – Even if they have seen most error reports 1000 times or more before, what happened very recently to me proves that they maybe haven’t seen every conceivable error report, that they don’t have a cause and/or solution for every error, and that they may still be totally clueless as to some, possibly extremely rare errors, that can occur with even "outdated" operating systems. Your thoughts? Please do comment.
Addendum: I eventually discovered that the fault was file-system corruption which was causing a mis-read of data and a subsequent BSOD, as well as an old outdated driver installed for the graphics card from an installation CD. It took a while to locate the f/s corruption, and the problem was initially pre-diagnosed by deduction. However the system works fine now. |
Official 2008 kkomp.com Usage Statistics
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November 1st is, surprisingly, the first day of the month (Not much gets past me!): Here are the percentages of users, out of a total numerous original visitors since July 2008, who are using a certain one of a number of various operating systems. (There is a reason why I’m presenting these figures, which will become evident further down.):- (The percentages are rounded off to the nearest full 0.1 percentage point above the actual decimalised percentage points less than 0.1; which is why the total percentage figure adds up to a fraction just under 100%.) 24838 of my (original) visitors were using Windows: That’s approximately 92.5%. 1124 of my (original) visitors were using a Mac: That’s approximately 4.1%. 764 of my (original) visitors were using Linux: That’s approximately 3.1% I want to deal with Windows specifically from this point. No favouritism intended; and well done to the Mac users – That’s a fairly good figure, which demonstrates that the Apple community is growing. Well done also to the Linux users: A figure of 3.1% shows that Linux usage is increasing – Great news for the open-source community. Windows users; all 92.5% of you: You’ve proved some things to my mind. I want to share them with you. I have touched on some of them before in previous statistical reports that I’ve presented:- I feel that 3 months of usage statistics in the latter-half of the year is an ample sample (Poetry!) to indicate a usage trend for the year as a whole; So I’m going to present and share with anyone reading, the Official 2008 kkomp.com Windows Usage Analysis. (Percentages are rounded off to the nearest 1/100th decimal point above.) Behold:- 75% of you Windows users are using Windows XP. 15% of you Windows users are using Windows Vista. 4.3% of you Windows users are using Windows 2K. 1.7% of you Windows users are using Windows Server 2008. *And the obsolete ones still in use:* 1.6% of you Windows users are using Windows 98 and 98SE 1.5% of you Windows users are using Windows NT4. 0.4% of you Windows users are using Windows ME. 0.4% of you Windows users are using Windows 95.
I’m going to class Windows NT4 as an obsolete operating system. I would rather say obsolescent; but for this analysis I’m classifying it as obsolete. I’m also stating as a fact that Windows 98 and 98SE, ME, and 95, are also obsolete operating systems. That’s 3.9% of you Windows users who are using an obsolete operating system, or 2.4% if you don’t count NT4 as obsolete. To those 3.9/2.4%: Did you know that, since your operating system is obsolete, it is a security risk? Microsoft have stopped patching it or issuing critical updates and bug fixes for it. That means that, since it became obsolete, it can harbour the newly-discovered security threats which can affect other Windows computers. It could be part of an advanced botnet already, and you have absolutely no way of knowing what criminal gang has your computer exploited to do their work. It could be being used as a spam server. It could be relaying illegal pornography. It could be standing by to participate in a DDOS attack on a mainstream server. It may be a virus storage facility if you don’t have antivirus or can’t be bothered to update your antivirus: True, the viruses may not be able to affect your computer itself; but you can bet your rear-end that they’re affecting others. Worst of all you could have the authorities calling and arresting you for criminal cyber activities that you knew absolutely nothing about: How does distributing child pornography sound? Participating in a directed DDOS attack designed to deprive a company of its right to a healthy internet connection, or designed to commit sabotage and theft of company classified secret information by electronic means? Assisting in the distribution of unsolicited illegal advertising? Assisting in the distribution of computer viruses likely to cause a nuisance and inconvenience to the general public on an international level as well as possibly causing millions in losses?
The lawsuits could be colossal and cost you millions and/or your freedom. – And all because you couldn’t be bothered to spend a few bucks/pounds, whatever, on a new operating system and/or a new computer. If you get nicked it’s your own fault; and ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the (British) law. (Probably most other countries’ legal systems also.) Is it really worth taking the risk? If you’re 100% sure you know what you’re doing, are an experienced and knowledgeable geek + internet security expert, and are running the OS as a bit of nostalgia, then good luck to you. Otherwise ditch the obsolete OS, sell the 486 or whatever old heap you’re running it on to a museum, buy new, and stay safe online. Don’t make yourself and others suffer as a result of your own lethargy. End of lecture. I know I’ve said similar before. This is repetition for emphasis. It is important. Please address the issue post-haste, for your own sake as much as that of others. To the other Windows users who aren’t using an obsolete OS: Keep it up. – That means keep your antivirus and antispyware updated at all times. Scan your computer regularly. Install all the updates and patches issued by Microsoft. – Why not go check Windows Update right now to see if there’s anything you missed? To change the subject; I am astonished that 5 times more people are still using Windows XP rather than Windows Vista. I read an article on PCMech.com by David Risley entitled "Is Windows Vista Really a Failure?". In answer to that question just look at the statistics. Go figure! I’m looking forward to Windows Seven: I think Microsoft have learned their lesson with Vista. (The first public beta comes out early next year BTW.). |
Turn Off LCD (Free Software)
This is where Turn Off LCD comes into its own. Developed by Taimur Asad, Turn Off LCD is a small-sized handy utility that doesn’t require installation and runs out-of-the-box. You’ will, however, need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed to run it. It allows you to instantly switch off your LCD display screen with a single click The software will run on both Windows Vista and Windows XP.
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Windows Can’t Detect My Antivirus Software
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If you’ve just installed new antivirus software, but Windows Security Center says you have no antivirus software installed, don’t be alarmed: It more than likely has installed properly and it probably is working. It’s probably that Windows Security Center can’t see it; that’s all. If Windows doesn’t detect it and/or the program doesn’t tell Windows that it’s installed then Windows thinks there’s no antivirus software installed and reports to you that there isn’t any installed; simple as that. Can you make Windows see it? Not really, no; but you can tell Windows that you do have antivirus software installed that it can’t see, and that you know it’s there and will keep a check on it so that Windows doesn’t have to.
Depending upon whether you’re running Vista or XP, there are different ways of doing this: If you’re running Vista go to Control Panel and click on Security Center. Click "Check settings" with regard to the "Malware protection" line.
This might not be exactly what your screen looks like; but in any event click the button marked "Turn on".
Once again this might not be exactly the same as the screen that you get. In any event click on "I have an antivirus program that I’ll monitor myself". Malware protection changes from red to yellow and the state changes to "Not Monitored". Now Windows Vista will stop nagging you. Ensure that you monitor your new antivirus program yourself. In Windows XP go to the Control Panel and click on Security Center. The process is similar but a lot less hassle: Click on "Virus protection" and click on "I have an antivirus program that I’ll monitor myself". Again Windows XP will stop nagging you; but you must ensure that you monitor the state of your new antivirus program yourself. |
“Computer Can’t See BT Home Hub” – Updated.
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Preamble Most routers connect to the internet on one side, and to the computer by means of the IEEE ethernet port via a cat 5 cable. The router may connect the same way to other devices also possibly; such as other computer(s) maybe, and/or a NAS server perhaps. This is known as a LAN (Local Area Network). To set up a network it’s not just a simple matter of connecting up and everything works hunky-dory though: The network settings have to be correct inside each device in order that it knows where everything else is. With Windows XP Microsoft have simplified this operation with the Network Setup Wizard, or "NetSetWiz" as I refer to it. Without going into all the complicated technical details, you run the NetSetWiz on all computers and other devices using Windows, after having correctly connected up your network, and it sets up each device to interact with the other devices running Windows. Even though the NetSetWiz didn’t appear until XP was released; it’ll work on pretty much any version of Windows in use today. Microsoft have done a fairly good job as regards this wizard with backwards compatibility. Inevitably, though, there are times when things break down, and it doesn’t seem to work quite as it should. Even when using just a single router with a single computer, which doesn’t usually require any assistance from the NetSetWiz, there can be communication problems occurring between router and computer. I’m writing this article mainly because I notice that I’m getting a larger than usual number of visitors who’ve been searching Google with a term similar to "BT Home Hub doesn’t connect with computer" or "Computer can’t see BT Home Hub". I have quite a few references to the BT Home Hub on this blog, which is why Google refers it to the visitors; but not a lot if anything as regards troubleshooting.
Guts So you’ve connected the BT Home Hub as BT suggest: Filter at or near the BT socket with telephone and computer connections running from it; the cable connected from the filter to your BT Home Hub. The power adapter plugged in to a live 13 Amp socket, and the low-voltage output lead connected to the power input of your Home Hub. (*Note: The recent BT Home Hubs; 2.0 and above, require a working voltage of 15 Volts. The older BT Home Hubs, before 2.0 require a working voltage of 9 Volts: Therefore if you’re replacing an old Home Hub with a new 2.0 or greater, you would probably have problems with it, if it works at all, if you don’t use the power adapter supplied with it and use the old one instead. (I don’t advise using the new adapter with an old Home Hub; although it may or may not work as a temporary measure. (Then again it might damage the old Home Hub due to over-voltage – I don’t know and I don’t intend to experiment in this area.))) You power everything up and – No internet connection. First check that the top three lights on the Hub are lit up and are blue. If not then refer to the documentation supplied with the Hub. If yes then check the cat 5 cable connection between the router and the computer. (Unless you’re using a wireless connection.) If there’s nothing wrong with that, check that your ethernet adapter is working properly and has a driver or the correct driver installed. You can do this in Device Manager. If a yellow mark with an ! is attached to your ethernet adapter’s icon in Device Manager, I suggest you right-click on the icon in question and remove the device from the list. Following that click "Actions" at the top of the Device Manager page and "Scan for hardware changes". The computer will see the device and add it back to the list, then it’ll look for and install the driver again. When it has done this the ! should vanish and the ethernet controller should work correctly. If not then you have a problem with the driver that you are using and need to get a new driver from the motherboard’s manufacturer or the manufacturer of your ethernet controller. If everything is OK so far but you still can’t connect to the internet then there may be a TCP/IP error in that your Home Hub has assigned your ethernet controller an invalid IP address. To solve this you can either reboot both the computer and the Home Hub, or to save rebooting the computer you could go to a command prompt and type in "ipconfig /flushDNS": (Note the space between ipconfig and /flushdns.) This will empty your DNS cache where the invalid IP address has been stored, and the Hub will hopefully assign a new, correct IP address when it reboots. There was a typo in the above paragraph previous to 27th November 2008, for which I apologise. Going this far should have sorted all but a tiny percentage of problems. if you’re still having problems I suggest that you refer to the documentation that was supplied with the Hume Hub, or phone BT themselves on 0800 800 150. Unfortunately their call-centre is in India, half of their representatives are totally computer-illiterate and are reading from a script, and a lot of them have such strong Indian accents that they’re rather hard to understand. Some of them also have no intelligence to speak of. If you are replacing an old BT Home Hub with a new model 2.0 or greater then it should be possible to plug it straight in to the existing connections as before, remembering to swap the old 9V power adapter for the new 15V power adapter. It is quite possible to run your BT Home Hub without using any of BT’s software. I suggest that you don’t install the Norton Security Suite provided with the Home Hub as this is bloatware. Use something else instead with equivalent function. See this article on an alternative antivirus/antispyware solution.
I also suggest that you might like to not install the BT Broadband Desktop help client unless you are computer-illiterate: The reason being is that some antispyware vendors consider the BT Broadband Desktop Help client as spyware/malware, and the Home Hub will work perfectly well without it being installed. If you don’t know much or anything about computers, or are a technophobe, then I suggest that you do install the client. The wireless connection manager software provided by BT is a waste of space IMO, and sometimes conflicts with the Windows equivalent – which is all you need. I suggest if you can that you totally disable the BT wireless connection manager and use the equivalent built into the operating system instead.
Please comment on this article and give your views and suggestions. Addendum I’ve had a few enquiries about the BT Home Hub from Google that I feel I should just mention: First: Should I leave my BT Home Hub switched on all the time? Yes and no: I would suggest that you don’t leave it on 24/7 week in, week out. Give it a few hours’ break now and again, otherwise it gets funny at times. Other than that I’d say yes; use it to your heart’s content: If you want to go up and watch whatever on the computer in your bedroom then doze off and leave the Hub on all night why not? It doesn’t use much power, and if you’re worried about someone hacking your wireless while you sleep you could set it to switch wireless off at a certain time. Also it updates at night sometimes: Around 1AM time: Whatever you do; don’t switch it off while it’s updating or it’ll never work again. Read your handbook. If you have questions about using certain services with it then you can use pretty much any service with it: DSL, TCP/IP, FTP, HTTP, Peer-to-peer, (Watch out though: I happen to know that BT have set up sensitive equipment, set up to record illegal file downloaders’ IPs; so if you do it via BT you’ll probably get caught. I realise that not all P-P involves illegal downloads; and that there’s also a highly ethical side to it: Just to let you know that you’re being watched by electronic eyes.) but you’ll need to set it properly in some cases: Refer to the handbook that was packed with it when it arrived. If you have a question then why not scrawl it on the wall in the sidebar? It might as well be used.
The BT Home Hub 2.0 has an internal antenna and will connect to your computer via a wireless connection within most properties. If your property is so big that it’s out of range then you can probably afford a second BT Home Hub anyway. If you can’t get a signal due to a blamk-spot then you’ll have to move your computer to a different location. I’ll probably continue adding more to this article from time to time as I notice new searches coming in from Google. I can’t answer all of your queries based on this method; but I’ll endeavour to attend to the most frequent and numerous searches. A couple more points I should mention: The Home Hub doesn’t show up in Device Manager: It’s not a part of your computer as such; it doesn’t need your processor or BIOS to help it operate. It’s sole function is as a signal-source delivering bandwidth in ethernet mode; TCP-IP and various protocols, to your computer. It doesn’t show up in Device manager any more than your ISP shows up in Device Manager. You can, though, get it to show up in My Network Places in XP. (I haven’t tried this or similar in Vista so you can do your own experiments with that.) Call up the My Network Places folder and click on “Show Icons for Networked UPnP devices”. After a few seconds an icon of a screen with a globe behind it should appear as your Home Hub icon. This is a rather useful icon to keep there actually, as it saves you from having to type the Hub’s IP address into the command-line whenever you need to access the Hub’s GUI – So rather than opening a command-line and typing 192.168.1.250, (I think is the default) you just click on the icon instead. Another thing: The Bt Home Hub has a USB socket on the back as well as 4 ethernet ports. This is meant to be for networking USB drives and the like to your Hub. I’ve so far been unable to do that; although I’m sure it’s possible by means of some obscure method. I have, however, connected a computer up to it by installing a remote NDIS device (software) into the computer and connecting to the internet via USB to the Hub’s USB socket. For now that’s all I can tell you about that. I pulled my digital multimeter from the toolbox and read almost exactly 5 Volts. – So if anyone else is curious I’ve saved you the trouble. – At least, that’s the voltage used to charge the handset on the Home Hub 2.0. I would imagine that it would be the same with earlier models, but I can’t be sure: Neither can I be bothered to set one up to test it right now, so if you have an earlier model and want to know then you’ll have to do your own tests. It’s a regulated DC voltage, so set your meter accordingly. Remember: BT are a sales-oriented organisation: They want your money first and foremost. After you’ve renewed all your equipment at your cost and their profit they’ll help you if the problem continues, because you’ve effetively paid for their help. Me? I’m still learning and will never stop learning. I’ll never know it all, and neither will anyone else. That doesn’t stop me from learning as much as I can though. Hopefully I can share some of that knowledge with you through this medium. Knowledge is power: Share your knowledge and more knowledge will come to you by default. Download my FREE 5-page .pdf report on 3-Day Money ——————————————————————————————— Advertisment Powerful New Antivirus with built-in Antispyware
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Online Security Precautions: Pffft – Who Needs Them?
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In short – Everyone needs them – That includes YOU!
I have seen people using an old computer running Windows ME without any firewall, antivirus, antispyware; totally unpatched. I was so shocked that I commented out loud about having found the local computer virus maternity unit: The owner, who was in the nextdoor room, came scurrying in with a look of puzzlement combined with anger on her face. This person had been merrily using a totally unprotected computer for years and spreading viruses to all and sundry across the internet for years; totally unaware of any threat to herself or others. "Oh but I only use it online about an hour a day." She exclaimed. – How thoughtful of you. NOT! Some computer users I’ve encountered have no idea what a firewall is. Others have said that they think they don’t need antivirus software because they only have a dialup connection. Still others have antivirus software but didn’t realise that it had to be updated. And yet others even have complained to me that the security bug fix that "Microsoft" emailed to them didn’t do anything but slow their machine down. The worst instance was a person who had had their machine "upgraded"- Allegedly from a single-core to a dual-core processor, and had supposedly moved from a 32-bit to a 64-bit installation of Windows XP, which they’d paid a sizable amount of money for the privilege of having carried out. On my examination the operating system disk packaging didn’t shed any light on the question of exactly what this person was running, as there was only a clear case with a home-recorded CD inside it. The contents of this CD included a virus that had been rewritten to defeat the Microsoft Genuine Advantage software and reported a legitimate key. It soon became clear that this was an unprotected, non-updated, unpatched pirated copy of Windows Vista, which was being run on a machine that was hardly capable of running it: The "upgraded" "dual-core" processor was a 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 single-core processor and the RAM it was using was still the old DDR rather than DDR2. The motherboard was a rather ancient Asus board made to run the early 1st generation Athlon 64s, which was what it was still doing. The system was riddled with viruses and malware: In fact I was surprised that it was still running. The operating system was totally unprotected and all the software that they were running was pirated also. Both the cases I’ve written about lived within 15 miles of me, and are just two worst-case examples of the many similar cases I’ve seen that close in proximity to where I live: The possibilities from those statistics frighten me no end. I would estimate that there are nearly a million internet-connected users in England alone who are not using any online protection and whose computers are virus and botnet nurseries. On the basis of that estimate alone it should be fairly obvious to you why a computer needs protection. In general I think that most computer users are too lax don’t take security seriously enough. I am fairly certain that the number of machines that are still unprotected by any kind of firewall is fairly big. I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines unprotected by any kind of anti-virus and anti-spyware software is quite high: Higher than you’d imagine. I am fairly certain that the number of people who have anti-virus and anti-virus software installed, but whose databases have never been updated is quite colossal. I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines that have not once taken any update to Windows or Windows components is probably in the twenties. I am also fairly certain that there are a number of people who’ll click on links or open attachments from unknown sources without giving it a second thought. Owning a computer could be likened to owning a car: Both require maintenance, both need attention, both need care when using them. When you drive a car you don’t just get in and drive off taking any route that you fancy. There are do’s and don’ts; there are things you can do and things you shouldn’t do: For instance if you don’t stick to the roads and drive cross-country you’re likely to end up stuck in a rut or broken down in the middle of nowhere. If you try to drive through tree trunks you’ll end up with a busted car. (I know this: I didn’t try to drive through a tree, but I lost it on a corner and hit one once. In that instance I discovered that evolution fashioned trees in a stronger design than Ford fashioned cars.) If you drive recklessly you’ll end up hurting yourself financially and/or physically. Maybe you’ll end up hurting others too. The same is true when using a computer: if you don’t bother to maintain it and just "drive" it in any old fashion you’ll get reputation and you’ll end up with a computer that’s slow, faulty, and full of malware. That malware will spread from your computer to other users because that is what it is made to do. If a person doesn’t use anti-virus then their computer will become a virus nursery and infect other computers: That is carelessness and selfishness on their part. likewise with anti-spyware, firewall, etc. People do exactly that though: they don’t bother, they don’t care. They might not mind having a machine full of malware; but other people don’t want that. As a result, we have botnets, spam, and constant virus and spyware attacks. My advice to every computer user – Whether they run Windows, Linux, or Mac; but especially if they run Windows, is: Get behind a firewall Always run anti-virus software and keep it up to date Always run anti-spyware software and keep it up to date Always keep your computer software, particularly your operating system, as up to date as possible Ensure that you take responsibility for your own actions and get educated: Learn to recognize what is and is not "safe" computing. Windows is a targeted operating system; but other operating systems are by no means immune to attack. Everyone needs education: That includes computer users. What do YOU think? |
Weekend Boob Sorted
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I must try and get one of those T-shirts…and a boob-job.
Carrying on from yesterday’s post; I’m pleased to report that, despite setbacks, the operation is complete and a total reinstall has been achieved, including all third-party software and files that I’d backed up on the other computer in whatever format. To be honest the backed-up files were copies of backups of backups that were getting a bit old and stale – A whole new system was called for anyway, which hadn’t actually been done fully since I built the original computer in March 2007. The original computer had a hardware malfunction relating to the BIOS, and I had the motherboard replaced under warranty; installing a backup of the original system straight to it. That software has crashed and been repaired twice since. To be honest it was like a patchwork quilt – So I’ve done the right thing in starting again. I encountered BSOD’s soon after reinstalling Windows XP and SP3. I had added a few pieces of third-party software at this stage, but I was unable to account for the stop errors nevertheless. At this point I make a strong recommendation for Ad Aware 2008 from Lavasoft; which was the only program able to find a hidden virus and another piece of malware which somehow mysteriously got onto the system and caused the crashes. I built this machine; so I’m rather familiar with it. It uses an Asus M2VTVM motherboard which appears to be rather finnicky about software compared to my other machine which runs very stably under virtually all conditions with a Shuttle motherboard. As you have read from the previous article; the operation was made somewhat difficult by, and a total reinstall was virtually forced by, a catalogue of errors and dysfunctions both on the part of Windows as well as to a certain extent on my part. These lengthened the operation somewhat, causing me to dedicate the entire weekend towards getting the machine running again, which has reduced the amount of time I would otherwise have spent on this blog. Nevertheless the show must go on; and I’ve endeavoured to bring something rather than nothing to you despite this minor catastrophe right on top of the illness which put me out of action for a while a week before. Hopefully with a bit of luck normal operations will be resumed forthwith. Have you ever had a hard-drive clap out on you? What was your experience? |
Enable Transparency of Icon Text on your XP Desktop
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Rather than have a solid-coloured box surrounding the icons on your XP desktop, you may prefer to have transparency instead. Maybe you’ve changed the desktop theme or background has caused your transparency to become solid? It’s fairly easy to change between solid and transparent; but Microsoft, in their wisdom, made it difficult by badly-naming the required setting as “Use Drop Shadows For Icon Labels On The Desktop”. To add to the confusion they buried it in the Performance Options dialogue box. Here’s how to do it:
1. Click Start > Control Panel > System, and select the Advanced tab.
2. In the “Performance” section click the Settings button.
3. Make sure the Visual Effects tab is selected and scroll down the list in the performance options dialogue box to the Use Drop Shadows For Icon Labels On The Desktop check box.
4. Check the corresponding check box to enable transparency or uncheck it to disable transparency
5. Click OK twice—once to close Performance Options dialog box and once to close the System Properties dialog box. - ‘Simple as that; Target neutralised! (This tip can be used for both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.) |
Open-Source Season
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Today; in a change from my usual Windows-adherent policy, I decided to browse some Open-Source projects – having downloaded Firefox 2.** yesterday and finding that it surprisingly renders this site better than IE7 in Windows XP Professional!
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While I was looking through my stats I noticed that I’d had 2 visits in the last 12 hours from a visitor using a browser that I’d never heard of before called K-Meleon. I Googled, and found that everything was available from Sourceforge.net, including a full, well written and prepared, multi-page linked write-up with history, download page, the works (fun-ny). (Which saves me from having to do it.  ) : Quite obviously the team which have been working on and off on this project since 2000 have put a lot of time and work into it.
(One thing I have just noticed; which pissed me off a bit, is that on install, K-Meleoninstantly assumes the position of default browser without asking permission. It’s maybe a minor thing; but I understood that one of the functions of Open-Source software was to put the user in control rather than the computer or newly-installed program. It appears that this is going against the grain somewhat. I combated this in Windows XP Professional by going to an already-opened IE window, selecting Options>Internet Options>Programs tab, and making IE the default browser again.)
That minor annoyance aside; having loaded and tested K-Meleon to a small extent; including loading the Welcome page of this site, (It renders it exactly like Firefox 2.** does: Better than IE, in Win XP.) I give it the thumbs up so far. I also encourage all you Open-Source people, Linux zealots, and even us Wintards why not, to download it and give it a try: It can’t hurt to do so. If you like it then I suggest keeping it as a second or third or whatever, browser, and donating to the development project using the link on the page which is the target of this link.
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Another Open-Source project I stumbled upon while testing K-Meleon was http://browsershots.org: This is a very useful website to bookmark. With this website you can see exactly what your site looks like in a number of different browsers at 2 resolutions using a variety of operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Free BSD… It could do with a tweak or two overall; such as the estimated amount of time for the operation being perhaps more specific and accurate, but in general this site is functional and useful. I put the site through its paces using the K-Meleon browser by asking it to render my Welcome page in every available browser using every available operating system.
After 1 hour 9 minutes it had resolved 71 of the 74 views asked for, and it still told me I had 3 minutes to go, as it had done for the last 30. 5 minutes later I decided that I had defeated it as it still said exactly the same, and again four minutes later – Seeming to have crashed: So it failed the benchmark test I gave it; but I still give it the thumbs up – just.
For the privilege of so testing their site I’m going to make a donation to the cause: You no doubt see the donate linkin the screenshots, so it would be good to give it a click when you get there and chuck a few bucks into the development coffers if you feel like supporting them. -Nope; their system just isn’t working: I’m waiting on a confirmation email which it seems I have to click a link on to sign up before I can donate: What a strange system!? They’ll have to wait. perhaps I just got confused because I’m multitasking – Consisting of browsing, blogging, and cooking, including having accident with sharp tin, all at once.
Life’s a bitch; which is why I always try to be a bigger one.
 Here are some more screenshots:- |
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What do you think; of K-Meleon? Of browserhosts.org? Did you test neither, either, or both? What are your results? Your remarks? Your comment below is welcomed. |
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And now; the adverts. – Don’t just leave without clicking one though: Something has to pay for this site; and it’s not going to be me forever:-
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Windows in a Box (Free Software)
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The Windows operating system’s GUI can be like a complicated maze that takes years to get used to finding your way around. I’ve personally been using XP for years and still occasionally struggle to remember where certain things are. A remedy for this is a little icon that you can unzip to your desktop that, when clicked, brings up a click-able listing of features in a box; some of which are buried deep in the operating system – and if you’re like me you can never remember the command-line for them to save time either. It’s called “Windows in a Box”; that’s Windows; not Window’s: The person who developed it must be one of those people who inserts an apostrophe before the s in every word that ends in s. Forgetting the spell-lames for now though, this little box can be most useful to virtually anyone. – Oh; and it’s free too BTW. For example; if you’re not aware that to run the Direct X Diagnostic program (in XP) you need to open a command prompt and type “dxdiag”, or find the link to it buried deep in the GUI, then the shortcut is right there in Windows in a Box, and only requires a click. The following text is quoted from the Softpedia website, and includes a download link:- “Access all the features of windows XP on your desktop”“Ever get tired of searching for a setting inside the control panel?
Softpedia Secure Download (US)
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