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.

Continue reading Network Discovery Doesn’t Always Confer Network Access →

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.

Continue reading Configuring Windows Vista Services →

Having installed and reinstalled Windows Vista half a dozen times or so in the last month, it’s finally dawned on me that there’s a clean-up, post-installation step that Microsoft has not documented as an explicit part of that process. The symptoms of the problem that this step addresses are straightforward: when you run Windows Update, and use its Check for updates left-hand menu option, instead of getting the typical “Windows is Up to date” status window showing in the next screenshot, you get an error message that reads “Windows Update error 87002EE2: Unable to access Windows Update!”

Continue reading Help! Windows Update Won’t Work After Vista Install →

OK, so I’ve been forced to bite the bullet earlier than planned, and am now starting into reinstallation of Vista on my primary production machine. Here’s what propelled me into an emergency rebuild: I run my system disk in a RAID 1 (mirrored) array of two drives, and yesterday morning, one of the drives in that pair failed. I didn’t have another drive of the same type, size and model with which to replace the failed member, so I first had to drive down to Fry’s where I scored a pair of Samsung HD502IJ 500 GB drives for $80 apiece. Then I got home, and plugged them into a couple of SATA drive caddies to format them for NTFS. It turns out this was unnecessary and I could have saved myself some time by skipping what I thought was a mandatory step because the Intel raid utility automatically reformats any drives you place in its clutches to turn them into “RAID drives.”

Continue reading Forced into Vista reinstall →

CPU-Z is the work of Franck Delattre at CPUID.com, the same outfit that also offers the excellent freeware programs called PC Wizard and HWMonitor, (I’ve also reviewed HWMonitor on this site; see my article on TJMax). I’ve been using CPU-Z for years, thanks to its widespread use at Tom’s Hardware for reporting on PC hardware and related configuration settings.

Continue reading CPU-Z Offers PC Hardware Insight and Info →

In trying to troubleshoot vexing Windows Explorer problems, I encountered one piece of advice repeatedly. It is best summarized as “Turn off unnecessary Explorer extensions.” According to the company which makes ShellExView, NirSoft, “Shell Extensions are in-process COM objects which extend the abilities of the Windows operating system.” In plainer English, this means that shell extensions in Explorer add to the range of objects you can access, and operations you can perform, using built-in menus and commands inside Explorer.

Continue reading ShellExView Shows Windows Explorer Shell Extensions →

Since the late 1980s I’ve used the TCP/IP-based File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, to upload and download tens of thousands of files for hundreds of book and Web projects. Along the way, I’ve transitioned from command-line FTP (anybody else remember put, get, mget, hash, and all the rest?) to numerous GUI FTP tools. I have yet to find another one that I like as well as FileZilla, or that costs the same to acquire (nothing!).

Continue reading Filezilla: Fast, free, and easy Windows FTP →

After spending some more time at the Uniblue Process Library site, I discovered that they also offer a free process scanning tool that offers another, possibly more usable and expeditious way to conduct active process research on your Vista PC. You can download their Process Scan tool (901 KB) and install it on your PC (see note at end of blog for an additional helpful tip on installing freeware/shareware on your PC).

Continue reading Uniblue Process Scan Tool →

Back when I still did software engineering, one catchphrase I learned that has stuck with me is: “Fast, cheap, and good: Pick any two, and you’ll probably get them. Pick all three, and you probably won’t.” By that metric, Revo Uninstaller succeeds in delivering a highly improbable hat trick, along with great functionality, good support, and frequent (self-installing) updates.

Continue reading Revo Uninstaller: Fast, Good, and Free →

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got more disk drives than you have installed in your systems at any given moment. Until recently, I accessed these drives using an Antec MX-1 Hard Drive Enclosure with its top off for quick’n’dirty access to various SATA drives. Then I happened upon the Thermaltake BlackX ST0005U, a plain and simple SATA drive dock that accommodates both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives.

Continue reading eSATA Drive Dock Offers Handy Outboard Storage →