Tag Archives: windows

Crazy ass HPTLBXFX.EXE problems are coming back to haunt me once again. You may or may not remember it from my last encounter with this crap back in January. It almost, kinda-sorta got resolved back then. Almost… Today it hit … Continue reading →

Most users of linux based laptops will encounter this issue at one point or another. You bring your laptop into a rudimentary residential Windows based network composed of 3 or 4 machines and a router that acts as a gateway … Continue reading →

One thing that always amazed me was how WinZip managed to maintain it’s shareware status after Windows XP included zip functionality in the explorer interface. I always figured that WinZip business model of nagging you untill you pay would crumple … Continue reading →

I noticed that on one of the servers the MySQL Admin was behaving weird. When you tried to inspect the schema of some tables by double clicking on it’s icon it would generate the following error: Access violation at address … Continue reading →

Here is a windows tip that may save you from re-installing games in case of a Windows meltdown. Simply, make it a rule to install all the games on a separate partition. I started doing that a while ago because … Continue reading →

One of the things I love about Linux is the idea of package management. Most modern distributions use this approach of distributing packages to their users. Debian and Ubuntu have Apt, Red Hat and Fedora have Yum, Gentoo has Portage, … Continue reading →

It seems that Dell is shipping broken windows installs again. Just like that time when they shipped machines with corrupted Flash libraries which would somehow cause Windows Update to fail. This time their Latitudes boot to a lovely error: tcsd_win32.exe … Continue reading →

Do you often find yourself missing common Unix utilities such as grep, awk, sed or touch when working under windows? Do you keep typing ls when you really meant dir? If you do, you are in the same boat as … Continue reading →

I have always said that the biggest problem with Windows security is that everyone is running as an Admin by default. I never really preached the LUA principle on Windows machines though. Unfortunately, I’m guilty of using an account with … Continue reading →

If you own XP Home you are probably painfully aware of some of it’s limitations. The home edition of the OS for example won’t let you have a detailed file access control. The security tab where you can give or … Continue reading →

As you may have read, my windows box has suffered a hard drive failure after a power outage yesterday. Well, my machine is back – at least in a way. I’m running on a bare bones windows installation with just … Continue reading →

I have seen this happen this happen to several machines lately. Look for these sympthoms as they are an indication of a failing RAM chip, or a bad DIMM socket on the mobo. The system freezes up at random times … Continue reading →

Fun times! One of our users upgraded to Office 2007 and we already have bunch of un-openable xlsx and docx files floating around. Oh what a joy! Good news is that I figured a quick fix for this in Word: … Continue reading →

Here is a quick registry hack to add a new entry “Run PNGOUT on Folder” to your context menu. It will iterate through all the files in the directory, and run PNGOUT on every PNG file it finds. It will … Continue reading →

I installed Safari on a spare WinXP laptop that I had lying around in the office. I only played with it few minutes, but I already noticed stuff I didn’t like. The laptop I used was a fresh windows install … Continue reading →

Subversion stores the state of your working directory in special hidden folders. Each subd-directory of your project will have exactly one hidden folder named .svn containing Subverion meta-data. When you want to archive your code or share it with someone … Continue reading →

I was rummaging through the contents of my hard drive and I found PerfMonG – a minimalistic performance monitor that I wrote sometime back in 2004. At the time I wanted something like GKrellM on my Windows box, so I … Continue reading →

If you use Windows – even if only for few hours a day, you should learn to love the Run command. It is a hassle free gateway to all the applications and control panels on your system. All you need … Continue reading →

User’s computer exhibited the following symptoms today: System would boot fine, and work without any problems when offline As soon as you connected it to the internet you would see a drastic spike in CPU usage, mainly caused by the … Continue reading →

There are two kinds of people in this world – those who are always on the lookout for the nifty tools that will convert the xyz image format to Encapsulated Postscript (eps) and those who have no clue what Encapsulated … Continue reading →

One of the most annoying context menus in Windows is the stupid Send To menu which lets you send the clicked file to various programs, or special folders. Personally I never use it. Some of you may find it extremely … Continue reading →

If you read some of my previous posts, you might remember that I inherited some old laptops back in December. One of them was a really old Compaq with 200 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM. I managed to … Continue reading →

This cracked me up: comic © control alt delete I guess great minds think alike. :mrgreen: [tags]windows, vista, xp, pain, horrible, sucks[/tags]

Did you ever had a job on your printer queue that just couldn’t be deleted? I find that this happens quite frequently with shared network printers on Windows networks. This stuff can be a pain in the ass, so here … Continue reading →

Anyone uses AIM around here? I finally downloaded the most recent update of their Windows client few days ago. Yes, I know I’m way behind the times, but you probably noticed that I’m not a big IM user these days … Continue reading →