Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Intelide failes to start

I encountered another problem today regarding a service that was failing to start every day. The error message was "The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load" and was pointing to intelide.

After lots of time on the internet I found an entry from marilynbickle on the website http://www.smartcomputing.com/QABoard/QAMain.aspx?search=fq&fqid=534426&lnqs=df&qapg=5&guid= that pointed me to the right direction.

Straight away I changed the Start setting from 0 to 4 and rebooted. After the computer started I checked the logs and I couln't see the error again. The problem seemed to have gone away!! Yeaaaahhh!

Thank you marilynbickle for the help whereever you are. Much appriciated.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Excel doesn't open files from shortcuts

I had a weird problem the other day. Excel couln't open any file from the desktop or any location. It was saying that can't find the file or something similar. I said "great! Another stupid Micro$oft error. What else am I going to see?".

So I went online to try to find a solution to the problem. After some searching I found that if you uncheck the option IGNORE OTHER APPLICATIONS THAT USE DYNAMIC DATA EXCHANGE (DDE) the problem was solved.

You can find that option under Tools, options in Excel 2003 or Excel Options, Advanced in Excel 2007.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Updating KDE 4.2 to KDE 4.3

This is an
First open the list from a command console as follows:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line at the end of the file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Add the security GPG keys as follows:
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 2836CB0A8AC93F7A
gpg --export --armor 2836CB0A8AC93F7A | sudo apt-key add -


Update the packages:
sudo apt-get update

Install the new updates:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

And reset the computer for the new KDE to take effect.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Force mounting NTFS drives in Linux

Sometimes when you try to mount a NTFS drive under Linux it fails because the drive hasn't been "unmounted" under windows correctly. Well to force it to mount you can use the following command:

Sudo mount -t NTFS-3g /dev/sda1 /media/Windows -o force

Where /dev/sda1 is the HDD and /media/Windows is the label of the partition (or HDD) that you want to mount.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded

Another big problem appeared today with Vista. What new? I got the 'The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded' error message. What the heck is that? Oh well off online to check for solutions. I couldn't find something that was giving me a definate answer.

As time was getting by i was getting angry. When suddenly i saw something on the account i was trying to log in. It had became 'backup'. Hmmm. Lets go on the registry to see what that meant.

I navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and I checked the SID for that account. At the end of the string had a '.bak' to it and above it the same SID without the .bak extention. So i deleted the one WITHOUT the .bak and I renamed the one WITH the .bak not to include the extention.

And VOILA the problem was fixed. Hope this helps to anyone with the same problem.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Fixing slow Windows Explorer copy in Vista

OK i thought i had finished with tinkering on vista. I was wrong! More problems arised. 'Great', i thought, 'what else?'. This time the Windows Explorer was freezing up while copying or going through directories on a network drive. I was puzzled? The machine had a 1 Gbit NIC! Switch was 1 Gbit too. What's the problem?

I went through alot of web sites to find out a solution and as i was searching for answers i found 2-3 web sites that were refering to the same problem with different solutions to it.

With alot of trial and error i found out that if i do the following the system became alive again.

1) Disable the autotuning, as per previous entry.
2) Disable indexing on the computer. Not crucial but hey why not?
3) Disable Remote Differential Compression.
To do that go to Control Panel, click Program and Features, click on Turn Windows
features on and off
, and untick the Remore Differential Compression checkbox.
4) Open Control panel again, go to Network and Sharing Center, click Manage Network Connections. Right click your Local Area Connection and click Properties. On the new screen that appears click the Configure button under your NIC card. Click Advanced and select Speed & Duplex. By default will say Autonegotiate. Depending on the NIC it will have some values. On mine i selected 100 Mbps Half Dublex.

And that was it. The computer seems a bit speedier to respond but with a drop of actual speed from 1000 Mbps. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Enable verbose mode on Vista

OK sometimes you want to see what the heck is going on when Vista is loading up and the 'Please wait' doesn't cut the mustard. Well in that case you can add a registry entry that will show abit more information about the procedures running on the background.

Copy and paste this into a new text file with the extention .reg and double click on it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"verbosestatus"=dword:00000001


That should add the new entry. One quick reboot and you are done.

Monday, March 23, 2009

TCP Tuning off for Vista

Well sometimes Vista in a network environment misbehave. It has a new function that tries to Auto-Tune the connection. That can cause poor intermittent network performance. So what can we do to turn this option off? Easy. Type:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled


as an administrator and that was it.

Monday, March 2, 2009

You have new unopened items missing in the taskbar

People asking me all the time about the small yellow envelope, in outlook, that appears in the taskbar when a new email comes in. They keep on loosing it! Where is it? Where did it go?

Relax, it's not that bad. To get it back do the following:
Click Tools
Click Options
Click E-mail Options
Click Advanced E-mail Options
Tick the "Show an envelope icon in the notification area"
Click OK 3 times.

And that's that! Easy.