STFU && RTFM

An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
 
One of my habits when troubleshooting troubles is to have a look at the event viewer. While event viewer allows you to see specific events, it can sometimes be difficult to see trends. In Windows XP, we don’t really have a choice, we’ll have to look through the data, and parse it ourselves.
 
Enter Windows Vista, and Windows Reliability Monitor. As the screendump below shows, it will show you, as a graph, when things have started to deteriorate. You can look through the history, and see on what days there have been many errors. It also gives you a reliability index rating, from 10 to 1 (Ten being very good, 1 being exceedingly bad. Coupled with event viewer logs, Reliability Monitor makes it that much easier to read logs, and solve problems.
 

Click the image to see the full size version

Like so many others, I am on Facebook. Unlike a lot of people, I have only a bare minimum of installed applications. The reason for this is simply that I have better things to spend my time on than Aquarium this, Zoo that and Mafia the other. Every so often, I add an app, and decide “naw”. However, removing apps isn’t very intutive to do, so I thought I’d make a neat little step-by-step guide. Here it is:
 

1. On the main page, find and press this button at the bottom:
   
2. Click “Edit Applications”:
   
3. Find the app you want to remove, and click the “X” at the end of the line:
   
4. Confirm your choice
   

Windows Media Player and iTunes do not use standard formats, such as .m3u, to store the playlists that users create. This can be a problem for users migrating to other players such as MediaMonkey, WinAmp etc. Luckily, all is not lost; Windows Media Player has functionality for exporting playlists built in, and there are tools that will convert iTunes playlists to .m3u format for you.
 
Windows Media Player

1. Click Library
2. In the Contents pane (the left pane), expand the My Playlists category, then click a playlist to make it play.
3. On the File menu, click Save Now Playing List As (Save Playlist As in Windows Media Player 9 Series), click Save as type, and then click M3U Playlist(*.m3u).
4. In the File name box, type a file name for the M3U playlist, and then click Save.

 
iTunes
As mentioned, this is not functionality that is provided by default. To convert the playlists, download and run either of the following tools:

• iTunes Export
• Export Playlist to .m3u

You know the situation; you’ve got problems with your computer, and need to reinstall it. However, you’ve got loads of software installed, and need the serial keys for them. What you need is a keyfinder. There are many out there, but the one I’ve found to be most useful is called the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder.
 
The keyfinder comes in a zipped file containing the program itself, a config file and a GPL. Once unzipped, simply run it, to see the serial keys it finds:
 

I more or less always carry a USB Flash drive with me, for several reasons;
 

• They contain EMS information about who I am, my next of kin, important medical history etc.
• There are a number of documents I like to have with me
• I run PortableApps off it

 
The habit of carrying a USB Flash drive started many years ago, and in the beginning, I simply unplugged the drive, not thinking anything of it. One day I plugged it in, and all of my data was gone. Annoyed and sad about the loss of data, I browsed around the web to find out what had happened.
 
I quickly learned that the cause was my unplugging the drive, which eventually corrupted my data, a problem I had encountered earlier with floppy disks. Ever since then, I’ve unmounted my USB drives before unplugging them. There are a few reasons for this:
 

• You avoid data corruption
• You allow the drive time to write the data to memory
• You ensure that all ties to the drive are severed before unplugging it

 
So, now that we know why, here’s how to unmount your drives:
 

1. Locate and right-click the “Remove hardware” icon



2. Click “Safely Remove Hardware”
3. You’ll get this dialog box



4. Check the checkbox “Display device components”
5. Select the appropriate drive and click “Stop”
6. Alternately, you can simply click on the “Remove hardware” icon
7. Then click the drive to stop

 
Stopping the drive will not always work, when it doesn’t work it’s due to one of a few possible culprits:
 

• Having the drive open in Windows Explorer
• Running programs off it
• Having a file located on the drive open
• Files being written to the drive
• Files being copied from the drive
• Files on the drive having been placed into the Recycle bin, but not finally removed

 
Any of these, as well as other, related, tasks could cause you not to be able to eject the drive. To resolve this, simply go through the above list, and try to resolve each possible cause (there might be more than one). This advice relates to all USB storage devices by the way, not only flash drives, although flash drives are more prone to these kinds of problems.

I’ve had a few users who have had problems accessing their local drives in Citrix. The error they get is the following:

 
The problem is, as one might surmise, one of access levels. To set the appropriate access level, do the following:
1: If in Full-screen mode, exit it through pressing Shift+F2
2: Right-click the Citrix-icon
3: Open “File Security Status”
4: You’ll get this dialog box:

5: Set the appropriate security level, No Access (Denies all Access), Read Access (Read Access only) or Full Access (Full Access)

Why?
A man in his twenties, let’s call him Bill, gets on a bus in Oslo. He carries with him a portable computer, complete with a wireless network adapter. The computer is running Windows XP Professional, and has an app installed called NetStumbler. The man is bored, and decides to have some fun…
 
Bill turns the computer on and starts NetStumbler. After a short distance, he has found in excess of two hundred wireless networks, half of which are unsecured. The man unboards the bus, and selects one which is unsecured called “Linksys”. He decides to punish the owner a little, you simply don’t leave your wireless network with default settings, onw do you?
 
He logs onto the network, and using Google, it is the work of a minute or two to learn that the config-page of the router is located at the IP-adress 192.168.0.1, and the default user name and password are both admin. He logs on, and finds another computer connected to the router. He shuts the computer out, and starts working his mischief.
 
Bill starts out turning off broadcasting of the SSID, and changes the SSID, following which he sets WPA-security. He then changes the admin-password of the router, logs off, and gets on the next bus. The entire process, from logging on to the config-page until he logged back off, took him less than two minutes.
 
How?
The above scenario is not unthinkable. In spite of it mostly being mindplay, I have myself seen close to fifty available wireless networks, many of which are not only unsecured, but also sport default values for everything. So, what does the scenario teach us?
 
If you know something of routers, you’ll know that the first thing you’ll try when unable to contact the router, is either connect directly to it with a cable (which wouldn’t help you in the above scenario, as the admin-password has been changed), or simply push the reset-button, located on the back of the router. In the case detailed above, the problem will be solved, and for the owner in question, who hasn’t bothered to set up the router, the default settings will be restored.
 
The next piece of knowledge we can glean from this, is that by doing two simple things, the security of your router will be heightened by large degrees. By changing the SSID (the name the router presents to the outside world), and changing the admin-password, much has been achieved. If you want to go a step above and beyond this, I’d recommend turn off broadcasting the SSID, and setting some sort of security, either WEP or WPA2. These simple steps will prevent trespassers to connect to the network, and secure the network even more
 
I’ll not tell you what will work best for you, but I personally feel that if the SSID does not identify you is better than a SSID that does. If your name is John Smith, I think that it is better to call the network HomeLAN than calling it JohnLAN or SmithLAN.
 
Another thing I’ll tell you is that it is better to use a randomly generated WEP-code, instead of one that can be logically disseminated. A quick Google-search for “random WEP code generator” will provide you with many useful pages, for example this one, whereas a search for “WPA2 code generator” will, among others, turn out this one.
 
Securing wireless networks is very important, so much so that even Microsoft has created a guide to help users set up their wireless networks.

I’ve been having a lot of problems getting screenshots of DVDs I am reviewing. Searching online, I’ve found many solutions, but none that have worked consistently. I decided to try out a few things myself, and here’s my solution for the problem:
 
To do this, you’ll need to have Media Player Classic installed. (You can get Media Player Classic here.) Once you’ve got MPC installed, you’ll have to set a few settings to get it to work, or you’ll get this errormessage:

 
In the Options menu of MPC, you’ll want to play around with the settings until you get it to work. You’ll want to restart Media Player Classic before testing the settings. Here are the settings that worked well for me:

 
To take screenshots, simply go to the “File” menu, and press “Save Image”. Here’s a screenshot I took, just as an example.
 

From time to time, you might want or even need to make changes to system files that are more or less critical. This can be risky business, and as a result, it is always smart to make the changes in a non-operative version of the file, then back up the file, and only then implement the new version.
 
A practical example; You want to change the OEM-info of your computer. The way you do this is first to locate and make a copy of the OEMINFO.ini-file, then make the changes in the copy. Once you’re done, you rename the OEMINFO.ini-file to OEMINFO.ini_old, and only then do you actually implement the new file, copying it back in.
 

 
The reason for this is twofold; firstly you’ll not be screwing up anything while editing, and should something go wrong, it’ll be that much simpler to roll back; simply rename the original file and you’re back up and running.

A couple of friends of mine contacted me, telling me that they had run Disk Cleanup, after which all of their emails were gone. They were naturally a bit frightened, and I told them I’d see what I could do.
 
I found out that they are using Outlook Express, and told them to search for any *.dbx-files. They did so, and I told them to right-click on the file, choose properties and go to the “Advanced”-tab, where I instructed them to uncheck the “compressed” check-box, and click OK and Apply.
 
One thing to keep in mind, is to search for hidden files and folders. To do this, simply check the boxes as shown:
 

 
The resources I used to find the solution for this problem were as follows:
Undo “compress old files” in Disk Cleanup utility? (PCReview.co.uk Forums)
Outlook Express (Wikipedia)