Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Often I will get a call that someone has Windows Updates set to download and install automatically, yet that yellow exclamation persists in the system tray.

If you click on that yellow icon and choose “custom” then you can see the update that fails.

If you have not rebooted recently, or even if you have, try rebooting.

Hop over to support.microsoft.com and enter that update (usually KB followed by 6 numbers) in the search box and click “search site”, then manually download and install the update.

Not always, but many times that will do the trick to get the failed Windows update to install.

Yesterday I was doing some installs and upgrades of Comodo’s free antimalware software BOClean, now version 4.27.

While I don’t expect anything to go wrong, here’s what I did anyway.

• Quick System State Backup just because these workstations haven’t had one in quite some time. That updates the C:\Windows\Repair directory with current copies of the important registry hives.
• Created a restore point, labeled it “Before BOClean 4.27″
• Shutdown any current copy of BOClean running
• Uninstalled old version of BOClean
• Installed new version

Fortunately nothing did go wrong, but it never hurts to protect yourself with a few simple, free insurance policies against a current or future problem.

I have how to videos for the system state backup and restore point if you are unsure how.

In part 1 of How to Change Screen Resolution in Windows XP I covered just the basics. Since I have had many people contact me with more advanced questions, I thought I should do a more advanced video.

So here it is:

How to Change Screen Resolution - Part 2

I have chosen over the years to not let Windows do Automatic Updates on its own. The reasons are simple. Typically, I am working in a corporate environment with anywhere up to 100 computers. Some of these reasons do not apply with your home PC or a smaller environment.

• Some updates, like service packs, are huge. I will update those once either manually or preferably through Windows Software Update Services - a server application that controls updates for a network. If you let automatic updates handle it on an individual PC basis, your internet bandwidth will suffer as each of these workstations downloads the same huge files. I download once to a shared location and install from there.
• Microsoft, especially of late, has a habit of releasing updates that break things. I don’t want a call at 8am one Wednesday (after a Microsoft Patch Tuesday) from each of my clients telling me all of their workstations are broken in some way or another. I let other experts test the updates and when they say it’s all clear, then I release the update from WSUS on the controlling server. Recently a SQL Server update crashed the main line of business software for one of my clients - not good. And that was after I waited. The other day I had to fix a home PC where an automatic update screwed the machine up royally because Trend Micro Security Suite was installed. Not Trend’s fault. Just 2 weeks ago a Microsoft update cause people with ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite to be locked out of the internet. Hard to lookup or download a fix that way, isn’t it?
• I don’t trust Microsoft, nor hardly any other vendor for that matter. I don’t want them phoning home for anything without my knowledge and permission. I don’t want them hogging my CPU power without me knowing and approving it and I bought broadband so I could access the internet, not them.
• And I certainly don’t want mass updates going out to my clients any time I am not going to be around to fix a problem should it arise. Automatic updates from anyone, anytime just make it hard to answer the question “what changed”. That’s the first question I ask someone when they tell me their PC stopped working properly.
• Add up the companies that want to hog CPU and bandwidth from you, then tell me you have no idea why your PC seems so slow. Microsoft (windows updates, office updates, installer updates), Sun (Java), Apple (Quicktime, iTunes), HP (whatever printer you have that will never have any updates available for it anyway but they want to check for some reason regardless), RealPlayer - who have I forgotten? You don’t really wonder where all of your performance, system resources and bandwidth have gone, do you?

I still like scheduled visits to secunia.com which checks a whole bunch of things in one shot, with links to any needed updates. It’s free (they will offer you another service, but you don’t have to do that); and works like a charm.

I hate Remote Desktop 6.0, but love Remote Desktop’s earlier version with XP.

Primarily:

• Annoying security prompt (which you have to disable on each connection)
• Clipboard transfers not working
• mstsc /console command not working (just gives an ordinary desktop, not console)
• The way it saves passwords

If you have gotten the new version with update KB925876, just go to the control panel, make sure “show updates” is checked, and uninstall the update.

But since my PC was just reloaded with XP and I decided to use SP3 instead of cluttering everything up with individual updates, Remote Desktop version 6 cannot be uninstalled that way.

Fortunately, it’s easy to revert. Do a search for mstsc and you should see something like the screen shot below:

The files marked with the .new extension are the version 6 files of mstsc that I don’t want so I renamed them. You can then either expand the old files from C:\i386 (or your CD) into the locations of the similarly named newer versions. What I did was just copy the files from the $NTServicePackUninstall$ directory (.chm to the Windows Help directory, the other two to System32.

Seems to work fine. If I find any other steps are needed or any gotcha’s, I’ll update the post.

What do you think about the new Remote Desktop? Please feel free to leave a comment.

For all of you out there using Windows Vista (I know, small audience), I thought I would pass along three tricks that I read in a blog over at InfoWorld.

The tricks are these:

1. Navigating Shortcuts
2. Multiple local GPOs (yeah, I know, what’s a GPO you ask)
3. CompletePC backup creates .vhd file that is mountable - I prefer Acronis True Image

If you use Windows Vista, it’s probably worth your time for the quick read about Windows Tricks from the Vista Masters over at InfoWorld.

Hard disk defragmentation is debated often, why I don’t know. It’s like an old Catholic joke about Ash Wednesday - “Might not do any good, won’t do any harm”.

The truth is, though, it’s the hard drive that keeps Intel from making Microsoft look good with blazing speed. Jumping around the drive to get all parts of the monstrous files created by inefficient programmers takes take. It wastes our time.

Defragmenting your hard drive with Windows defragment utility is good; using a third party is probably better, but make sure it uses the Windows API so you are protected from data loss if the process is interrupted.

Sysinternals and its key programmer Mark Russinovich are well known in my trade. Sysinternals was the developer of many valuable Windows tools, some paid, but many absolutely free.Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft but they haven’t ruined it all yet. Microsoft’s website is still a source for some of these great utilities. PageDefrag is one of them. Defragmentation programs cannot defrag a file that is locked by Windows; the page file and registry files are key examples.PageDefrag installs a driver that suspends the boot process after you run PageDefrag and then reboot. During this time before Windows locks the files, PageDefrag defragments these files that otherwise can’t be touched.

Another cool tool is Contig which lets you specify an individual file to defrag.

Find out more about PageDefrag here. Contig here.

If you have a large monitor, perhaps 20″ or larger; or if you have a super high resolution laptop screen, then perhaps you have encountered the small text that a high resolution screen can leave you with.

The Tip of the Week from Bill Myers Online offered a solution.

Bill’s idea is this:

You can right click on your computer desktop, select properties, select ‘appearance’, and change the ‘text size’ from ‘normal’ to ‘large fonts’. Then click ‘apply’.

Doing this will instantly increase the size of text in Windows displays - and you’ll finally be able to realize how great your large screen monitor really is.

While this probably works fine for Bill with the applications he uses, let me warn you of what you are likely to encounter. Applications that are not 100% Windows aware & compatible, which is about 99.9% of the applications out there, will have trouble rendering the larger text properly in menus, dialog boxes and button text. In fact, you may find the buttons now have inadequate text on them to know what they do.

If you use strictly Microsoft applications and other high end graphics applications, this may not be a problem. But with my clients I have seen this problem in spades.

My solution? Simple. Set the resolution to something you can work with. With older or cheap laptops, this isn’t as easy. Or with el cheapo flat panels, either. Flat panels and laptop screens sometimes have limited resolutions that look good enough to use; or that work out with their widescreen format.

For instance; I use a pair of Samsung 204B 20″ monitors. I could set the resolution to 1600 x 1200 and put all kinds of stuff on the screen. I couldn’t read any of it without squinting or using binoculars, but I could sure get a bunch of stuff on the screen.

Instead, I set the resolution to 1280 x 1024; a nice compromise that lets me utilize the larger screen real estate, yet renders text large enough to read.

A friend called the other day with a Windows XP computer that all of a sudden wouldn’t load Windows. Apparently it was reporting that a couple of key files were missing.

He booted from the CD into the recovery console (must not have had it loaded, I always load on any installs I do). But he could not get the files to copy.

I suggested trying a different CD drive, as often that seems to fix the problem (what do you expect for under $40 these days?). That fixed that problem.

Next issue: why did this happen in the first place? Well, when he told me that he could boot with a Windows 98 floppy and read the files I knew his drive was formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS. NTFS is a more secure file system, but it also has error checking built in that makes it less likely to fail in the first place.

To convert your drive to NTFS:

• Backup your PC
• Verify your backup - This conversion is NOT prone to problems; but what if the power goes out, or someone kicks the plug accidentally?
• At a command prompt, type (without the quotes) “convert [drive letter]: /fs:ntfs” which will likely be “convert c: /fs:ntfs”

Now, in all fairness, this could lead to a small performance penalty. This is due to cluster sizes with NTFS, potential fragmentation and some overhead for the file system; but, trust me, it’s well worth it.

Anymore, I almost always download video that I want to see. I got frustrated with too many videos starting and stopping, or maybe worse, stopping right before the end - with no way to restart at the point I left off!

So I did a little research some time ago and found out that most videos worth watching can be downloaded to my hard drive. I then make sure the video is complete (as near as I can tell) before wasting my time watching it.

It also avoids embarrassment. Ever gathered 4 or 5 people around your computer screen to watch something cool, then 5 or 10 minutes later the last holdout finally gives up on you and walks away as you’re trying for the umpteenth time to get the video to play?

Once, downloaded, you can then replay at your leisure as well - or save it for later. Heck you can even put it on a flash drive and send it with someone else or take it to another location yourself.

Downloading the video is pretty easy, there’s even a Firefox plugin that makes it a snap.

And the list of sites you can download video from is expanding all the time. YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Dailymotion, MySpace, Revver…and the list goes on and on.

For complete details and instructions, see Video Download on my website.