Windows Scripting used to be horrible. You got a lousy language to write in – Visual Basic (especially coming from C-like languages) – and it just didn’t seem all that powerfull. Any action you wanted done, required quite a few lines of code, a healthy supply of patience and.
But now, there’s a new kid in town; Windows PowerShell.
And they choose its name right; PowerShell. It IS powerful. Read more…
Users who recently updated their AVG to the latest Virus Definitions, could find themselves in real trouble when rebooting their PC.
Apparently, the latest definition automatically quarantines and deletes the file user32.dll, a Windows system library needed to successfully start your computer. As a result, the computer will display an option list, with choices of boot-up (safe mode, safe mode with networking options, …). A screenshot can be found below.
AVG's Missing user32.dll Effect
The problem only spread to 5 European countries: the Netherlands, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Although some users in Belgium are effected too, for using Dutch software. It only seems to effect Windows XP SP2 users.
AVG’s Support Pages: “In case you are not able to run your Windows XP operating system after AVG 8.0 virus definition update, it may be caused by a false positive on a specific “user32.dll” system file. The file was moved to the AVG Virus Vault and deleted. Therefore it is not possible to start Windows. ”
The result: hundreds of thousands of computers world wide won’t start, because of that missing file. There’s a fix, of course, but it’s quite technical and won’t be sufficient for your average facebook-myspace-youtube-generation. They’ll have to call their ICT guy, and pay royally for a screw-up some other company made.
The fix tool can be found on AVG’s Support pages. Dutch people can find an answer here (or mirror’d).
Could you charge Grisoft (owner of the AVG virusscan) for this, given the fact that most people use AVG’s free virus scanner? Will their EULA cover this sufficiently?
By default, reading a .FLV file from another flash-file doesn’t work because the MIME-type of the .FLV file is missing. You need to explicitly define this (ie: in IIS) to allow these files to be interpreted as flash-files.
You can do so by logging into the IIS Manager, and right-clicking the particular website. Select Properties.
At the tab “HTTP Headers“, at the bottom, there is an option to define “File Types“. Add a new MIME type, and define it as “flv” extension and “video/x-flv” as content type.
Save it, and you’re good to go.
This has got to be one of the weirder features ever made:Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music
During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.
How do you come up with this stuff?!
It’s a security risk in most situations, but for a home network this can really be useful (where not every computer _needs_ a password). So, what to change to allow empty passwords to be entered when making a remote desktop connection to another computer/server? Read more…
Here’s an awesome animated gif that’ll show you how to bypass the security system on a Windows ‘98. How easy can it be? This would’ve been worth gold back in ‘98! Read more…
By default, whenever you pick “thumbnail” or “tiles” view, in your Windows Explorer, a local cache of a pictures thumbnail will be stored in that directory, in a file called Thumbs.db. It speeds things up next time you open that directory, because it can load the image from the cache – but it also creates an extra file in every directory …
This can be annoying when you’re used to publishing things through SVN, or when uploading several directories. The silly Thumbs.db will be uploaded as well. Read more…
When you suddenly find your Default SMTP Virtual Server stopped in your IIS Manager, you could find it throwing the following error when you try to start it manually.
The service has returned a service-specific error code. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.
It’s one thing to detect evil processes running on a linux system, it’s quite another to detect them when they’re hidden from the system itself. A rootkit does just that. It runs one, or several, processes and hides them from the system so they become undetectable.
I’ve recently shared how to detect bad processes if they’re not hidden on a Linux system, but how do you go about discovering processes that are inherently hidden to you, on a windows device? Read more…
If you’re using Plesk on a Windows Server, you might get to see the following error:
Unable to create MailManager object: mailmng failed: MEAOPO.Mailbox.AddMailbox failed
You’ll get this error, probably because you’re trying to create a new mailbox for an e-mail address that was once an alias to another mailbox, but was removed. Read more…
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