Tech Tip Daily

I got a call from my Mother the other day, stating that her computer was having problems.  When she opened ‘My computer’, it would often take 30 seconds to a minute to load up and display all of her network drives.  During this time, the window was blank and the entire computer would hang.  While you could move the mouse, nothing would respond until after ‘My Computer’ finished loading.  While I had seen this before on other machines, it was never a big enough issue for me to warrant fixing it.

Like all problems, I started by searching google.  I quickly came up with a few solutions, none of which seemed to help the problem.  In an attempt to self-diagnose, I tried the process again, opening ‘My Computer’, while immediately opening ‘Task Manager’ to monitor network and CPU performance.  Surprisingly, neither was working exceptionally hard.  I had figured all along that this issue had something to do with the 7 network drives she had mapped, but I wasn’t sure quite what.  She said that her coworkers had the same drives but had no problems.  In addition, she was experiencing the same problem on all of her machines.

Given these circumstances, it seemed that the culprit lay somewhere within her user profile for the network or in her scheme for mapping drives.  Before having her System Admin rebuild her user profile, I decided to try a few more things.  I began opening the network drives to check the contents, and found that 3 of the drives were not available (receiving errors when attempting to open them).  On a hunch, I disconnected those 3 drives and restarted.  After logging back in, opening ‘My Computer’ displayed the drives almost instantly, and additional attempts yielded the same results.  So Apparently, having a “dead” drive mapping can cause ‘My Computer’ to be slow to respond.  At any rate, if you’re having the same problem, here are a few things to try.  Keep in mind that this symptom usually occurs on a workplace computer, and it may be against your organization’s policy to make changes to the system.  Check with your System Administrator prior to performing any of the below steps.  And if it’s your personal machine, then by all means, go nuts.

Note: I should mention, I have no idea what the two services mentioned below actually do; I’ve not ever taken the time to figure it out.  As it’s usually my personal policy to try anything, and then fix any problems as they arise, I don’t recommend this for everyone.  Disable these services at your own risk.

To speed up ‘My Computer’:

1. Verify the connection to each of your mapped network drives.  If you receive an unwarranted error connecting to the drive, right click and select ‘disconnect’.  Repeat this for each erroneous drive.
2. Disable the “Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)” service (Start->Run, type “Services.msc” and hit enter.  Scroll down to the aforementioned service and right-click -> disable)
3. Disable the “WebClient” service.  Follow the directions from step 2

Hopefully, this fixes your problem.  If not, comment.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

Skype is great.  I’ve been using it for over a year now and I love it.  With the SkypeOut package, I can conveniently place calls to land line phones for a flat (cheap) monthly charge.  One of the things I’ve used Skype for is podcasting.  A group of buddies and I have a weekly podcast (a link to follow – once we get the site up).  Skype is a stable, robust platform to host podcast sessions over.  Of course, we need a way to record our ramblings, so how does 1 go about doing this?

The science of PC audio is a complex one.  Aside from just “playing” sound, your audio card is capable of (sometimes) multiple outputs and inputs.  While most people are familiar with the traditional “speaker” output and “microphone” input, you might also have separate outputs for each channel of sound in a surround sound system and a line in input.  And that’s just on the hardware side.  Within the sound card, it has the capability to take all inputs and outputs and mix them together into one accessible channel.  This is referred to as the “Stereo Mix”.  While the only required input for Skype is your microphone, your recording software will need to hear more than just your voice.  What we’ll want to do is record the “stereo mix” channel from the sound card.

Now that we have that accomplished, all we need is a recording program.  While there are many available, the best I’ve found is audacity.  It’s free, lightweight, and easy to use.  Once you download and install audacity, we’ll want to tell it to record audio from your stereo mix.  All done, right?   Not quite.  Because of the nature of the “stereo mix” channel, Microsoft often times disables it by default within the audio properties (assuming your sound card supports it).  The reason for this is due to the fact that stereo mix greatly increases your chances of producing a feedback loop – where your audio input is sent back through your audio ouput, and in turn back through your input (and so on).  Before you tell audacity to record your stereo mix, we’ll need to be sure to enable it from within windows.

To enable stereo mix in Windows:

1. Go to Start -> Control Panel
2. In Vista, go to the recording tab and find “Stereo Mix”.  Right click and select enable.  Once enabled, right click it again and select “Set as Default Device”
3. In XP, go to “Sounds and Audio Devices” (If you don’t have classic view enabled, you’ll need to go to “Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices” first, then the former).  Click the “Advanced” button in the volume tab to bring up the “volume control” mixer (alternatively, if enabled, you can always get here by double-clicking the volume icon in the icon tray).  If you see a “Stereo Mix” section in the mixer, ensure that Mute is unchecked and the volume is turned up.  If it isn’t there, go to Options -> Properties, and ensure that there is a check next to Stereo Mix.
4. Dell, in their ever-increasing attempt to capitalize, decided they would charge users for the ability to stereo mix, so these instructions won’t work.  However, follow the instructions here to enable it.

Once you’ve enabled stereo mix, Audacity should record from it (since we set it as default).  Try placing a few test calls and recording them from Audacity.  If you’ve done things correctly, it should work.  As usual, comment with questions or problems.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

One of the more common problems I’ve seen people come across has to do with “disappearing” thumb drives.  Often times, users have put their USB key into the front port of their computer, only for nothing to happen.  When they go to “My Computer” their drive is nowhere to found.  Puzzled, most of them assume their drive has broken or become corrupted, and they purchase a new one.

It just so happens that this happens most often in office environments; Office environments with network drives; Many network drives.  Contrary to popular belief, this situation isn’t really a big deal.  Amongst other things, Windows doesn’t always do a fantastic job at disk management.  When a drive is connected to the computer, Windows assumes you want to access it (of course).  So to give it a unique identity that sets it apart from the other drives on the system, it chooses a drive letter assignment.  Once assigned, you can access the drive and its files.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.  For some unknown (to me) reason, Windows doesn’t always pick the next free drive letter to assign to a new drive.  Perhaps it has a “preference” based on size and file system type, or perhaps it’s just a matter of what letter the drive had previously.  Say you get a brand new laptop with a standard hard drive and DVD burner (most commonly drives ‘C’ and ‘D’).  You plug your USB drive into the machine and it’s given a drive letter of ‘E’.  You work off of it for a while and then disconnect it.  The next day, you take your laptop to work and decide to place it on the company network.  The network assigns it 5 brand new network drives so that you can access your company resources (it just so happens to pick letters E,F,G,H, and I).  Later on, you remember you need a file off of your thumb drive, so you plug it in.  Only nothing happens.  Most likely, the computer attempted to assign it the same letter it had before (’E') but couldn’t.  But instead of trying other letters that are free, it just plain quit trying.

Ok, so enough yapping.  How do you fix this?  Easy…

To reassign a drive letter to your external drive:

1. Open the Start Menu
2. Go to Control Panel
3. Open “Administrative Tools”
4. Click “Computer Management”
5. On the left panel of the window that opens, click on the “Disk Management”
6. After a few seconds of loading, the window will populate with all of the different Volumes (fancy for drives…kinda).  Here’s the tricky part.  One of those is your external drive.  In the list at the top of the window, look for a drive that doesn’t have a drive letter assigned to it (Each drive letter is placed in parenthesis after the name of the volume.
7. Right click that drive and select “Change drive letter and paths”
8. In the window that appears, click “Add”
9. Make sure that “Assign the following drive letter” is selected and then click the dropdown box on the right, selecting a letter to assign to the drive.
10. Hit Ok (You might need to restart the machine)

And that’s all there is to it.  This usually isnt’ a recurring problem on a machine.  But if it is, you now know the steps to fix it.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

Out of all of my recent acquisitions, my “coolest”, by far, is the 8gb flash drive.  Aside from high-definition DVD rips and a few “miscellaneous” files on P2P sites, I now have the capability to store at least 1 of the largest files in existence; a DVD rip (Ok, so I realize this statement consists of very little truth).  But still, 8gb of data is pretty cool.  And almost right away, I had use for it.  I needed to get a video file from computer A to computer B.  This file just so happened to be a 5.3gb, 720p version of the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics (legally obtained, of course).

When I went to move the file from my PC to the thumb drive, I received an error stating that the file size had exceeded the available space on the destination.  “What?”  For a short time, I was completely confused, checking the properties of the drive to make sure that they hadn’t mislabeled/mispackaged a smaller drive in an 8gb container.  Suddenly, I remembered that the drive was formatted with the FAT32 file system.  Silly me…

In reality, it was by complete chance that I had remembered this, let alone learned it in the first place.  The quick “down and dirty” is that while this thumb drive was formatted in FAT32, it was unable to store files larger than 4 gigabytes, as this is a limitation of the FAT32 file system.  The science behind this is largely irrelevant but you may still find it through a simple google search.  Basically, the solution entails reformatting the thumb drive to the NTFS file system so that you can store larger files.

To format a drive as a different file system:

1. Open “My Computer”
2. Find the drive in question and right click it, selecting “format”.
3. Under the “File system” section, click the arrow in the drop down box and select your desired file system (NTFS, in this case).
4. Click “Start” at the bottom of the window.
5. A window will notify you that the operation has completed successfully.  Following, you may close the windows and copy your file.

It’s important to note that there are a few disadvantages to NTFS.  By nature, NTFS requires more “write” operations to the drive.  This results in slower performance of the drive, and in the long term, minimizes the life of the drive (Flash memory can only be written to a limited number of times).  The other disadvantage is that other operating systems don’t natively support the NTFS file system as much as Microsoft (some can only read but are unable to write).  Best practice would be to reformat the drive as FAT32 once you have used it for it’s large-file purpose.  Otherwise, with the price of flash memory as it is, you could probably leave it without any major problems.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

With the number of machines that I implement on a regular basis, I’ve run Windows Update quite a few times.  Periodically, some downright bizarre errors occur (hmm, imagine that).  Recently, I hopped onto a brand new machine to start downloading updates; Only, when I clicked “Install Updates”, I reached an error page telling me the updates had failed.  When I went into the updates history, I was given the error code “0×8020000e” as the reason for failure.  The certified Microsoft explanation for this error is “BG_E_VOLUME_CHANGED”.  How incredibly helpful.  So far, I’ve only run into this problem on XP.  Leave a comment if you’ve found otherwise.

The real answer (apparently) lies within corrupt data inside of the “SoftwareDistribution” folder.  “Renaming” (Deleting) this folder seems to fix the problem.  As with all things tech, there are a few ways to go about accomplishing this.

To solve this via command line:

1. Click “Start” and choose “Run”
2. Type “cmd” and hit enter
3. In the command prompt window, type “net stop wuauserv” and hit enter.  This will stop the Windows Update service.
4. Type “cd %systemroot%” and hit enter.  This will change the command line target to the Windows folder (usually C:\Windows)
5. Type “rename SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistributionOld” and hit enter.  This will rename the SoftwareDistribution folder, causing the Windows Update service to recreate it (uncorrupted) next time it runs updates.
6. Type “net start wuauserv” and hit enter.  This will start the Windows Update Service
7. Close the command prompt and run Windows Update.

If for some reason this procedure happens to make things worse, you can replace the old SoftwareDistribution folder.  To do this, follow the same steps as above.  When you get to step 5, do the following:

• Type “rm SoftwareDistribution” and hit enter
• Type “rename SoftwareDistributionOld SoftwareDistribution”
• Resume with step 6

You should have any problems doing this (it should fix the problem).  However, in the rare event that it doesn’t work, you can replace the old copy of the folder.

Not comfortable with the Command Prompt?

Here’s the alternative way to do it:

1. Click “Start” and select “Run”
2. Type “services.msc” and hit enter
3. Look for the “Automatic Updates” service in the list.  Right click it and select “Stop”.  Leave this window as is
4. Open “My Computer” and go to “C:\Windows” (If your system volume doesn’t happen to be ‘C’, you can type “%systemroot%” and hit enter)
5. Look for the “SoftwareDistribution” folder.  Right click it and select “Rename”.  Change the name to “SoftwareDistributionOld”
6. Go back to the services window and right click on it.  Choose “Start”.
7. Close all windows and run Windows Update.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!

Some time ago, I was installing XP on a new machine at the office and as a standard procedure, I ran the plethora of Windows updates.  After installing one particular batch of updates, I restarted the machine and went to open Internet Explorer to run more updates; Except when I double clicked the IE icon, the browser didn’t open.  I tried a few more times, noticing that each time I double clicked, a shortcut to IE was being created on the desktop.

On a few occassions, I’ve noticed that right-click and left-click get confused and left-clicking anything brings up the right-click menu.  I thought this might have been the case and perhaps my second click in the double click sequence had chosen create shortcut.  I tried again, being careful of what I clicked, but yielded the same result.

I went searching on Google and it was only after an hour that I began to turn up some answers.  Apparently, a hotfix was released late last year (KB943460) to fix a flaw in URI Handling.  Apparently, amongst other undesired effects, installing this update caused double-clicking on the Internet Explorer icon to create a shortcut instead of opening the browser.  Removing this hotfix solved the problem for me.

To remove the hotfix:

1. Go to the control panel (Start Menu->Control Panel) and go to Add/Remove programs.
2. Check the “Show Updates” (”Show hotfixes” in some versions) check boxes to show all installed patches.
3. Scroll down until you see “Security Update for Windows XP (KB943460)”
4. Click the remove button, and follow the prompts.

In some instances, XP will not allow you to remove particular hotfixes.  There is a manual workaround for this.  Do this at your own risk. Removing Hotfixes in the wrong order has been known to cause problems. While I had no problems doing this on a few machines, it was a few months ago and many updates have been released since.  While I don’t expect anyone to have any issues, I can’t promise anything.

To manually remove a hotfix:

1. Open ‘My Computer’ and in the address bar, type (minus the quotes) “%windir%\$NtUninstallKB943460$\spuninst” and hit enter
2. You should see an installation file called “spuninst”.  Run this file and follow the prompts.
3. Restart your machine.

It should be noted that you can use this method to remove any hotfix on your machine.  Just type:

%windir%\$NtUninstallKBXXXXXX$\spuninst

And replace the ‘XXXXXX’ with the “KB” number of the hotfix.

Months after coming across this problem, I found an alternative solution that has been known to work.  Again, try this at your own risk, as I haven’t tested it and can’t verify its results.

Alternative Fix (For advanced users only):

This particular solution involves modifying the registry.  ANYTIME you modify the registry, you should create a backup.  Follow this Microsoft Knowledgebase article for instructions on backing up your registry.

1. Open a ‘run’ window (Start Menu->Run)
2. Type ‘regedit’ and hit enter
3. Go to the following registry keys and delete the ‘LegacyDisable’ subkey within each.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}\Shellex]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Computer_User_Name\{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}\shell\OpenHome

I’ve ran updates on quite a few machines since service pack 3 came out and I have yet to come across this problem.  It has likely been fixed, but for those of you who aren’t quite ready to update yet, hopefully it will help.

That’s all! Thanks and happy computing!