Archive for the Microsoft Category
When you are faced with a computer being turned off ‘dirty’, which means simply that you didn’t shut it down properly, you could be surprised what simple fix may lay ahead for you.
The situation is simple, you were at the computer playing XYZ Part II and the computer locked up, with the only fix being to turn it off by holding in the power button. After the horror of that happening, you turn the computer back on, hoping to kill more bad guys, when you find that the computer doesn’t get past the Windows XP logo, or if it does, it just goes to a black screen.
Most people are panicked at this point, and I even know techs that never even think of running the standard chkdsk with Windows XP, since even Safe Mode can be borked as well. The simple fix to remember is to get out your Official Windows XP CDROM. If you have a dell, it’s going to be a Blue or a Purple disk that says “Operating system”.
There is however a few things to remember:
1. If anything tells you that you are going to format your drive STOP.
2. If you are told you will loose data, STOP.
So the general idea here is that the rotating metal platter in your computer has a problem, and you need to replace it with a spinning plastic disc, called a CD. Your computer can boot (or start) off of a CD, and that CD can provide you with the tools you need to get the computer started back up again to your lovely Jessica Alba background.
Now, back to the task at hand.
If you have your XP operating system disc in your hand, put it in your top CD-ROM and restart your computer. All that matters really here is that the CD is in the computer from the time you turn on the computer, and I know that means you must put the disc in, just power off and on to ensure it’s in the computer from the start.
Once that has occurred, most computers are setup to BOOT off the CD first, then the Hard Drive which is not usefull at this point. If you have a Windows XP Operating System disc in the CDROM one of two things will occur if the computer is trying or did successfully boot off the CD:
1. You will see a “Press any cd to boot from CD” (Press any key now)
2. You will see a nice blue screen that talks about loading in all sorts of files
If you don’t see either one of those things, then you should try one of these tips:
1. If you have a Dell, press F12 when the Dell logo shows up after you press your power button.
2. If you don’t have a Dell, try pressing F8,F11 one after the other right after you turn computer on.
3. If those don’t work try pressing ‘Esc’
If those tips work, you should be presented with a screen that asks about “Boot Selection”. In any case, you should see something about a DVD/CD/CDRW drive, so select the first one and press Enter. (This is why we put the CD in the first CD/DVD Drive)
Now, you have a nice blue screen that after several minutes shows up at a prompt asking you what you want to do. The important task here is that you press ‘R’ for recovery console. After a few more minutes it will ask you to type a number that corresponds to which Windows installation you wish to repair.
If you were a tech pro, you’d have more than one windows installed. Since you need help, I’d say the #1 option is best, and it should say: 1. C:\Windows. Press 1 and Enter if it says to.
Any other questions about layout of keyboards, etc should be ignored in most cases. It will probably after this ask you for your Administrator password. Most users can just press Enter at this prompt!
When you get to the point finally that you are looking at a black screen with a blinking prompt (or not), you can type in: chkdsk /p (that’s a space between the k and the /). Sit back and wait for a while, and eventually it will tell you if you had errors, and fix them. It may take 20-30 minutes depending on the problems, and the size of your hard drive.
After you deduce it’s finished, you can type exit (then enter), and the computer will restart. Take the CD out of your drive as quickly that you can and see if your windows now boots.
I’ve found that taking these steps will solve at least 1/2 of the computer problems out there, and if this tutorial gets popular, I will add screen shots.
Ok, so you want to check and make sure you can test your IDS, or your mac address filter, but you don’t have anymore wireless cards. The simple thing to do in linux is to use the ifconfig command to change the ether hw.
On windows, it’s no so simple, but there is hope, and free utilities to change your mac address of any network card in your computer.
Try out macshift, a free XP tool to change your mac address.
You can really tell when there is blood in the water and the sharks want a taste.
Some consider this last weekend the time when Microsoft admitted there was problems in some cases with Sleep, Hibernate or call it what you will. In short it saves the amount of time you need to boot your computer up. The point being that there is always some problems with the way various devices get shut down and how that affects your kernel as it cleans up.
I remember reading this way back, then trying the different modes of sleep on my PC (AMD64, Nforce4). I had no such problems, in fact, I could do it even when I was playing games and the game would wake back up too.
Then I read notes like this about the state of the repair of the sleep process for Vista and take it to heart, knowing for sure that Microsoft is going to issue patches for things that might be better off fixed in vendor code.
This skidmark over here starts complaining about how horrible Vista is, but he really likes black boxes. You cannot see inside black boxes, you don’t know what’s going on inside of them and you don’t know why they crash. He’s ignorant, and doesn’t even know how to interpret the blue screen beyond the color and throwing google the text he sees. At least some person with moderate sense starts to wonder if it’s drivers and not the hardware causing the problem.
One does have to start wondering why so many people blame Microsoft and not the company who made the laptop. They don’t question the chipsets, or any circuitry that might be inside, trying to do it’s own power saving. Let’s not mention that the same people expect Microsoft to buy every notebook on the planet and make sure Vista works on it. Only one company makes sure their product works on every notebook it’s designed for: Apple.
I take heart when someone posts what their system is and how well it works with Vista sleep, and while granted it would have been better to have a Detailed entry a model number is good enough. (Hey, the chipsets make a good indicator if it’ll support ACPI)
I’ve seen a Dell and an HP so far that work just fine with Vista. But I digress, I do not have the model numbers in my head. I can tell you however that the Dell only had 512mb of ram, so you know how that is going to turn out…. or do we?
As always, you can consider my opinion to be that Microsoft is not the only one to blame here, and we are operating off of insufficient information. There is no non-biased repository of information that talks about the amount of systems sleep -does- work on.
The only conclusion I can reliably draw at this moment is that no company has any business releasing a product or feature that works less than 50% of the time. Saying they would do this only infers that the Titanic didn’t sink because of an Iceberg, it sank because the designers knew 50% of the rivets would come out when it turned left.
It’s like mashed potatoes without the gravy, marriage without the chain.
Outgoing security president Jim Allchin quiped today that his son is using Vista without anti-virus and you should too. He quotes a number of new security features that will stop all the viri from spreading via hacks that are in memory addresses.
Seeing as Vista is RTM now they should just tell the manufactors to put it on the damn box that ‘doesn’t need anti-virus.
Don’t say it if you don’t mean it guys.
Might need a new catagory for these if I keep getting interested in them.
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188100635
The attack, which Symantec dubbed “Trojan.Mdropper.H,” begins with an e-mail that offers an attached file that appears to be a Word document. Opening the document lets the Trojan execute; it then drops another piece of malware, “Backdoor.Ginwui,” onto the PC.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/20/BUG56IV5DK1.DTL
With the imminent release of Microsoft’s anti-virus, spyware, and their already integrated firewall features of SP2, who is Symantec kidding?
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least that Symantec is already trying to set some stage for fighting Microsoft until it finally is no more (in the anti-virus fight).
I’ve seen the effects of using Symantec’s anti-virus/security suites, and it’s at times, worse than having 100 spyware threats on the computer. If you take any computer without 512mb of ram… forget about using that computer, Symantec swamps the machine.
With better products such as TrueImage, you are left to wonder what Symantec has left of the old days. I don’t even use Ghost anymore.