In reading over Chris Pirillo’s daily newsletter this morning, I tripped over an interesting item entitled “Is Maximum PC right about Vista?” For those not already in the know, Maximum PC is a serious PC enthusiast publication, built around a glossy, high-concept monthly magazine and a Web site to match, with coverage of all kinds of high-end PC hardware, systems, peripherals, toys, tools, and more. I almost got lucky about four years ago when one of my publishers decided to go after some of this company’s related book business, but alas the project never came to fruition. I provide all this by way of explaining why this little blurb grabbed my eye and my undivided attention.
I bought a Dell All-in-one (AIO) 968 printer a little over a month ago, to replace the aging Brother fax/printer I purchased almost 10 years ago for my business. Some of the vendors for whom I work require me to fax contracts back to them to get paid, so I’m quite naturally eager to retain fax capability. Alas, however, Vista sent me a “Print Filter Pipeline Host” error every time I tried to use this device, and despite uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, I was not able to make it go away. Each time I re-tried my print job, however, the output would be produced, despite this initial error. Now that I know what the cause was, I’m pretty impressed that anything worked at all.
A number of users have encountered and commented on a flaky “flooding” error on ViztaView.com over the last couple of weeks. They’ve also complained about issues registering for the community, long page waits, and other oddities. Today you might notice that all these troubles have disappeared. That’s because our Managing Editor (yours truly) discovered that we had installed a redundant component under Joomla!1.5, the content management system that runs this site.
I spent some time poking around at techsupportforum.com in their Windows Vista Support area. For those not already in the habit, let me observe that it’s amazing how much you can learn from reading through other user’s problems along with the tools and techniques that knowledgeable experts suggest to help them ease their afflictions, or at least start shooting back at what troubles them. While reading through a thread from a person suffering from driver problems, I learned about the Windows Driver Verifier, aka verifier.exe. But that’s not all I learned…
Thermaltake makes some terrific products for PC enthusiasts and professionals inclined to pick up tools and computer components and indulge in a little do-it-yourself activity. In another recent review, I examined their nifty eSATA/USB hard drive dock, which led them to send me an actively ventilated and much more attractive eSATA/USB drive enclosure: This device is known as the Vi-ON ST0008U 3.5 External Hard Drive Enclosure with Active SMART Cooling System, and it retails for between $44 and $50 online (list price on the Thermaltake product page is $60). For the rest of this review, I’ll simply call it the Vi-ON for brevity.
In case you don’t already know, I make my living by writing articles, white papers, books, video scripts, help files, technical documentation, and other forms of information about computer software, systems, and networks. I’ve been doing this for a long time (since 1986 part-time, and since 1994 full-time). Over the years, I’ve seen some terrible things happen to PCs when users decide to uninstall some particular piece of software, use the vendor’s uninstall utility, and then start encountering problems.
The Windows system configuration tool, msconfig.exe has been around for some time. The easiest way to launch this utility is simply to type msconfig in the Start menu’s search box, but you can also access this utility by typing “system configuration” into Windows Help and Support, then selecting the “Start System Configuration” item that appears in response to this search. You must have administrative privileges, or be able to elevate access, to run this utility.
After a new Vista install, you’ll find there are numerous clean-up tasks that must sometimes (or always) be performed in its wake. Two weeks later, I’ve gotten far enough past major post-install clean-up issues that you’ll find documented in other recent blog posts and articles here to dig into my Event Viewer logs to see what else needs cleaning up. So far, I’ve found and fixed two common sources of Error events in the Application log: WMI, aka Windows Management Instrumentation, and Windows Search.
In the last week, I’ve reinstalled Vista on my primary production PC. Over time, this has led me back over ground that I’ve crossed many times before. It’s also helped me to recognize some differences between Vista and XP behavior, in all kinds of interesting ways. Take printing, for example: I’ve got an old but incredibly reliable HP LaserJet 4M hooked up to my wife’s Windows XP PC, which is available to machines on our household LAN.
One of my favorite long-time haunts on the Web is http://www.blackviper.com/. It’s the work of computer enthusiast Charles M. Sparks of Yreka, California, USA. Its main attractions are a series of detailed Windows Services lists with multiple recommended levels of settings. The draw comes from a simple statement about Windows “Disable unneeded services to reduce resource consumption.” Yeah, right! How do you know which ones you need and which ones you don’t? To give you an idea of what’s up here, my “clean” Vista installation lists 102 local services inside that runtime environment. This site lets you know which ones to keep, and which ones to reset or disable as your needs or wants dictate.
