Alden Bates' Weblog

I've noticed that after my computer has been running a while, Windows Live Messenger will go into some sort of funky loop and start eating up memory and CPU cycles. Allow me to demonstrate:

Time to try out one of the substitutes, I think.

See if you can spot what's wrong with the following screenshot of Google results:

Yes, that left-hand frame isn't meant to be there. Google displays sponsored results on the right-hand side of the window, not the left! Some cheeky piece of software is stripping off Google's ads and substituting its own!

The computer in question had two suspect programs installed - "SuperiorAds" and "Dcads". After I removed these (using "Add/Remove Programs"), things were back to normal. Oddly enough, Adaware, which hadn't been able to update its definition file before, was suddenly able to once the two bits of software were removed... How strange...

Shortly after making my previous post I remembered that someone had mentioned that using the Print Screen button still worked. Since it's a huge hassle to switch from UT2004 to a graphics program every time you want to take a screen shot, I wrote a quick program to poll the clipboard every few seconds and, if it happens to contain a bitmap, write it to a file.

I had a quick check around the internet, but I couldn't find any other freeware programs which would do the same thing, so I figured I'd put it on here in case it helps anyone else who's facing the same problem.

• Download Clipboarddump (size: 308KB).

You know, I swear back in the early days of the internet if you wanted something like, oh, a program to convert a midi file into a wav file, you could just go look on your favourite FTP site and download a tiny DOS program which would do it. Does anyone else remember those days? Now it seems like all the programs on offer for doing this require you to fork out $25. WTF?

I wanted to convert a midi file to a wav file, so I took the following steps:

1. Downloaded one of the many shareware midi2wav converters.
2. Ran the installer.
3. Ran up the software.
4. Discovered that pressing ENTER in the software would quit out of it without prompting "Are you sure you want to quit?"
5. Restarted the software, attempted the conversion, got a cryptic error.
6. Figuring the previous attempt had locked some audio drivers, rebooted the PC.
7. Reran the program - discovered that the cryptic error actually meant the target directory I'd specified didn't exist. Converted the file.
8. Played the resulting output file, to discover that the shareware software had produced a 1 minute long, completely silent wav file.
9. Uninstalled the software.

Is this is how software works these days? You download it, install it, and hope it works and doesn't deposit any spyware on your PC? Man.

I got the midi file converted in the end, thanks to a page which gave instructions on converting midi files to wav files using Winamp.

A couple of months ago I bought my current computer from First In who had it as their daily special (they've featured the system several times since then). So how's it looking so far?

Well, it's nice and fast, particularly when playing Unreal Tournament, and I've finally been able to play Doom 3 (I wasn't brave enough to try installing it on my old PC). It hasn't crashed except that one time but that was because XP doesn't really deal with dud drivers well and no reflection on the hardware.

The only problem I've had with it (other than the absence of a floppy drive, though that's not really much of a handicap in this day and age, plus it has a flashcard reader instead) is that every time I play a video file, I get this popup in the top-right corner of the screen saying "Powered by ASUS Splendid video enhancement technology".

Although, I've just discovered how to switch that off, so, er, never mind! (it was hiding in the display settings)

Continue reading "About my new PC"

XP is supposed to make working with devices easy, right? Right?

I have an HP Scanjet 5100c which I used successfully on my old PC for ages, first under Windows 98 and then under Windows XP. Recently I bought a new PC and tonight I needed to scan something, so I dug out the HP install disk and had at it.

Problem 1: Once I'd installed the software and plugged the scanner in, Windows XP would get as far as detecting new hardware and promptly reset. This has happened to me once before with WinFast TV2000 XP WDM Crossbar. In this case the problem was sharshtl.sys (Shuttle printer sharer). I fixed it by unplugging the scanner and then renaming sharshtl.sys so Windows couldn't load it.

Problem 2: Once that was done, XP booted up fine and the scanner was there (twice, actually). Unfortunately when I tried to scan with it, HP PrecisionScan would report that the scanner was not responding... and then the scanner would scan anyway (but the data wouldn't reach the PC).

I'm still not sure whether this is fixed or not. After a few reboots and messing about, the parallel port test is claiming "Scanner not responding", but PrecisionScan went ahead and scanned properly anyway.

Tilt.

Oh, and I downloaded an updated driver from HP's web site. When I try to run it, I get an error stating "The file could not be located", and the program quits. Real good, HP.

Sometimes I'm apt to clean up the hard drives on my PC. Last night I was doing just this and happened to notice that the directory c:\Program Files\Java was taking up some 360MB. I peeked inside and saw this:

In the Java folder were six more folders named jre1.5.0, jre1.5.0_02, etc, each apparently containing a complete installation of Sun Microsystem's Java runtime environment at 60MB each. It seems that every time JRE prompted me to update, it was installing the update into a new folder, leaving the old one cluttering up my hard drive.

WTF, Sun?

I completely uninstalled the JRE and all patches, and reinstalled the latest version, thus saving myself 300MB or so in disk space, at least until the next time it needs to update...

Here's an interesting bit of information I wasn't previously aware of: If you tell Internet Explorer that you're working offline, then MSN Messenger loses the ability to connect. Even if you're actually online. Once you tell IE that you're working online again, off MSN will go.

Computers! Can't live with them, can't insert them into Bill Gates.

Thunderbird 1.5 is a pretty cool email program which keeps getting better. 1.5 has a spell checker which underlines misspelled words as you type them and allows you to right-click and fix your spelling. As I make a lot of typos, this is very helpful. However, there's a couple of words missing from their dictionary...

Hee hee hee! :)

For a moment before posting this, I had a feeling I'd written about it before, but Google revealed nothing... So here I present to you the results of trying to update a PC using Windows Update:

"Security Update for Windows (KB839645) Could not be installed because of an unknown error."

Perhaps they'd care to elaborate?

Also on the subject of broken stuff, my PC crashed earlier on today. After rebooting, I found that Mozilla's FireFox and Thunderbird had both completely lost their settings. Not only that, but Thunderbird had completely lost all of my email. The mail was, I'm glad to say, still on the disk, but the configuration file which told Thunderbird where it was was snafu. This appears to be because Thunderbird keeps the file permanently open while running, and it wasn't closed properly during the crash.

Fortunately I was able to recover the data and get my email back, but I doubt the average user would be able to do that.

I cleaned my monitor earlier because the amount of dirt had been bugging me, only to discover that some of the dirt was not dirt at all. There are a number of fairly nasty scratches on the screen of my monitor. I'm not sure how they got there, but suspect that they might have been caused by me when I was putting the cover of my PC either on or off.

It's a CRT 19 inch ViewSonic monitor. Googling didn't help much, other than to instill a fear of imminent monitor implosion in me, so I may have to ask at stores tomorrow...

The problem we were having with the wireless network previously turned out to have a simple solution - changing the channel which the network was running from eliminated the interferance from the microwave oven. Excellent!

If you've got a wireless network set up, and your microwave oven causes interferance with it, is that normal? Or should we be worrying about radiation leaks and suchlike? Enquiring minds wish to know.

Edit: Sorted.

I've dumped TabBrowser Extensions, as it was just too buggy for my liking. On the last update it appeared to have killed something to do with Javascript, so that bits of sites (the link to empty the spam folder in Yahoo mail, for instance) no longer worked.

Instead I'm using TabMix, which duplicates a lot of the same functionality but with less code bloat. It's not perfect either, of course - I've found at least one bug to do with closing tabs - but hopefully it won't provide any unplesant surprises like TBE did...

Now, if only the makers of GoogleBar could fix its tendancy to duplicate all the controls when you upgrade Firefox.

Continued from here

I removed said card from my PC. On reboot, WinXP still detected the devices and attempted to install the drivers. Utilising Device Manager, RegEdit and System Restore, I aggressively removed said drivers and devices from my system.

Unfortunately after a reboot, Windows XP no longer recognised my CD/DVD ROM drives, and the Sound Blaster Live wasn't working. They appeared in the device manager, but were listed as not working. I right-clicked on each and chose "Uninstall", removing them from the list, then rebooted. Windows detected the devices on bootup and reinstalled the drivers for them, then asked me to reboot again. Tada! Everything fixed.

Now, I don't care whether it was Microsoft's fault or LeadTek's fault, but removing drivers for one device should not frell the drivers for another.