Eddie On Everything » windows xp

Windows Desktop Icons Keep Flashing On & Off? In my case, VNC was the cause.

eddie — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:20:13 +0000

The icons on my Windows XP machine have been flashing on & off intermittently for quite a while. The problem would come & go, and it wasn’t my primary computer, so I never bothered looking into it, though I did have a few suspicions as to the culprit.

I had a little extra time today, and the desktop icons were flashing so much it looked like a little icon disco over there, so I decided to look into the problem a little bit further.

I suspected that the problem was related to VNC, (UltraVNC in my case), and as an experiment, I shut down the VNC daemon. Sure enough, the icons stopped flashing.

I figured that the icons were flashing each time a remote machine tried to make a VNC connection to my computer, so I did a second test. The second part of my test was to restart the VNC server & choose the option to to “Display Query Window.” What this will do is pop up a little notification each time the machine receives an incoming connection request.

After enabling that option, it didn’t take long until I got the following pop-up:

So, who is this remote machine? A “hacker,” of course. Actually, more like a script kiddie. In case you’re unaware, people use scripts to scan your computer hundreds of thousands of times per day, looking for vulnerabilities. Since I have my VNC running on the default port (5900), it is a prime target for these unsophisticated rubes.

Not that I’m too concerned about it – I have a strong password and am not worried about an intrusion. More than anything, I just want the flashing to stop.

Here are few ways you can fix or minimize the problem

Only run VNC when you have to. This isn’t a great solution for me, as I like to have it running 24/7. But if you use VNC infrequently, it may work for you.
Change the default port to something other than 5900. Many of these scripts are configured to only check the default ports. It won’t stop the more sophisticated port scanning apps, but it’ll stop most. Of course, you’ll have to configure your VNC connection software to use this alternate port.
Configure your router to only accept connections from certain remote IP’s, if you know the remote machines you will be connecting from. (Or only from your local LAN, if you only use VNC on your local network.)
Turn off VNC port forwarding on your router, and configure your router so you can connect remotely & turn it back on when you need it. This eliminates the flashing problem & keeps VNC running, but adds another level of security headache by making your router configuration accessible to the public. If you have a good username & password, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Change the “Display Query Window” settings to timeout after a longer period, and then accept the connection by default. These kiddie scripts work on brute force, and many time out after 10 or 20 seconds. Configuring the server to wait 60 seconds before replying will cause many of them to go away uninterested after the first timeout. When you connect remotely, you’ll have to wait 60 seconds for the connection, obviously. And you may have to deal with a pop up notification about an incoming connection every once in a while, but it’s better than the constant flashing.

Right now, I’m experimenting with option #5, with good results so far. I’ve had a few pop ups, but after that first initial inquiry, the remote machine just goes away. (Instead of trying its list of 100 common passwords, causing 100 flashes.)

Number 4 is a good option (for me) too, but if #5 works, I’ll stick with that because it’s only less step to perform when connecting remotely. (Just have to wait that extra 60 seconds.)

How to Set the Window Size and Position of a Chrome Application Shortcut

eddie — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:05:54 +0000

Now that I’ve moved into the Android world, I’ve been using Google/Gmail’s “Tasks” feature to keep track of my To Do Lists. I prefer this method to a separate stand-alone ToDo app because it’s clean & simple, and it’s one less app to manage.

I created a Chrome Application Shortcut to my Task List for easy desktop access to my To Do lists, but was dismayed to discover that the window that opened was much larger than I wanted, and it was always in an inconvenient position. I would have to resize & move the window each time I used the Application Shortcut, because Chrome never seemed to remember the previous window settings.

I searched around for a guide on how to set the window size for application shortcuts, and to my surprise, there are no solutions out there. Not only does the “Application Shortcut” feature lack this functionality, but Chrome itself doesn’t even have a startup switch for setting the window size. Both seem like they’d be pretty essential features for “Application Shortcuts” to be useful, don’t you think?

I created my own method of automatically setting the window size and position using an intermediary javascript file. It sets the window size & position, then loads your preferred target URL. Here’s how to do it.

Step One: Create the Application Shortcut as you normally would.

In my case, I wanted to create an Application Shortcut to Gmail’s Tasks, so I browsed to the appropriate page:

https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig

And in Chrome, choose Wrench->Tools->Create Application Shortcuts.

Step Two: Create the intermediary HTML file on your local computer.

Next, you need to create a local HTML file on your computer that resizes the window, moves it to the desired position, and then redirects to your application shortcut URL. Here’s the file you’ll need to create:






If you see this, the redirect did not work properly.

Edit the file to reflect the size & position you’d like to set. The format is window.resizeTo(WIDTH, HEIGHT) and window.moveTo(X POSITION, Y POSITION). If you don’t want to set an initial startup position, just remove the window.moveTo line.

You’ll also have to set the redirect target. The one listed in the above example is the one you’ll want to use for the Gmail Tasks application. To get the link for other applications, check the properties of the shortcut that you created in step 1.

Save the file somewhere where it won’t get deleted & remember the name & location. I created a directory within “My Documents” called “Google Tasks Shortcut” and named the file “google_tasks_launcher.html”.

Step Three: Change the Application Shortcut to point to the intermediary file.

Now edit the Application Shortcuts you created in Step 1 to instead point to the intermediary HTML/javascript file. Right click on the shortcut and choose “Properties.” Then from the shortcut tab, change the Target field to point to the file you created in Step 2.

You need to change the value after the “-app” switch. In my case, I changed it as follows.

Old Value:

“C:\Documents and Settings\eddie\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –app=https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig

New Value:

“C:\Documents and Settings\eddie\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –app=file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/eddie/My%20Documents/Google
%20Tasks%20Shortcut/google_tasks_launcher.html

I’ve bolded the parts that have changed.

You can also change the Application Shortcut icon on this screen if that strikes your fancy.

Hit “OK” and you should be set. Your shortcut should now open at the size & position specified in the javascript portion of the HTML file.

“Press Ctrl-I to enter configuration utility” Boot Failure Caused by Kindle

eddie — Sat, 07 May 2011 15:45:15 +0000

I had to reboot one of my computers, which a pretty rare occurrence around here.

The machine is a few years old Dell Dimension e520.

The problem: The computer wouldn’t reboot. After running through a little RAID dialog, the computer just hung, right after showing the message “Press Ctrl-I to enter configuration utility”.

The solution: I discovered that the problem was caused by my Amazon Kindle. Yes, you read that right, my Amazon Kindle prevented my computer from booting properly. I unplugged the Kindle, rebooted, and everything was magically fixed.

Discussion: I was a little nervous when I saw that this computer wouldn’t boot. I assumed that I had a hard drive failure, or hard disk controller failure. The message isn’t helpful at all, it just happens to be the message that gets spit out right before whatever caused the hang caused the hang… Anyway, I only use this computer as a media manager, so I wouldn’t have lost any irreplaceable documents, but it would have been a pain in the neck to deal with.

After rebooting a few times, and getting the “Press Ctrl-I to enter configuration utility” error each and every time, I started the process of narrowing down the problem. Fiddle with BIOS settings to verify everything is in order. Boot with some hard drives disconnected, in an attempt to narrow the problem down to a particular hard drive.

After about 15 minutes of messing with it, I noticed that my Kindle was connected via USB cable to the computer. I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if this Dell is trying to boot from the Kindle or something…” So I unplugged the Kindle. Voila! Problem solved!

Was the computer trying to boot from the Kindle? Probably not. I assume that the BIOS was trying to get information from the Kindle about what sort of device it was. The computer was asking, “Hey, you there on USB port 1, it’s KIndle, right? Ha, that’s a funny name. Anyway, what are you? Can I boot from you?” To which the Kindle probably replied, “DuuuurrrrrrrR?”

So anyway… If you’re having problems booting your computer, and if you’re getting the “Press Control –I to enter configuration utility” message, try unplugging all of your USB devices before you spend a lot of time troubleshooting.

Chrome Crashing Immediately on Startup

eddie — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:39:53 +0000

Well this is a fine way to start the morning.

I grab my laptop, sit down in the front of the fireplace, open Chrome, crash. Open Chrome again, crash. And again, crash.

Ugh.

I did a little searching (in Firefox, not Chrome) and found that this is a pretty common problem as of late. Here’s one bug report that show lots of users having the issue.

That thread, and others like it, recommend uninstalling Chrome, along with all of your user data, then re-installing. Unfortunately, that solution didn’t seem to work for everyone, so I didn’t want to jump to it immediately.

I did get my particular Chrome crash problem to go away by… get this… restarting my computer. Seriously. I just rebooted, restarted Chrome, and voila, the problem was gone. I don’t know why, it’s like PCs are becoming Macs or something.

But here’s something terrible – after starting Chrome, my computer just CRAWLED for about 15 minutes straight. I’d click on the Start Menu, count to 20, and it would then show up. I ran Firefox, 3 minutes later, it appeared on the screen. I’m not exaggerating. The Windows Task Manager showed me that chrome_update.exe, GoogleUpdate.exe, and setup.exe were all running. I can only suspect that this is all related to the seemingly widespread Chrome crashing issue. I don’t know what this update did, but it was some real heavy lifting.

I really wish they would have asked my permission before hijacking my computer though. Sure, it was nice to have the problem fixed, but my computer was more or less unusable for about 15 minutes, and the worst part is that I had no idea why – Google gave me no notification that an update was taking place. I came close to simply rebooting the machine again, or killing the update processes. If I had something important to do with my computer, this would have really slowed me down.

I did collect a little information about the problem I was having, and I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else finds it useful.

0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74   Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c   ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 63 68 72   ure chr
0018: 6f 6d 65 2e 65 78 65 20   ome.exe
0020: 30 2e 30 2e 30 2e 30 20   0.0.0.0
0028: 69 6e 20 63 68 72 6f 6d   in chrom
0030: 65 2e 64 6c 6c 20 38 2e   e.dll 8.
0038: 30 2e 35 35 32 2e 32 38   0.552.28
0040: 20 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73    at offs
0048: 65 74 20 30 30 30 34 36   et 00046
0050: 65 35 65 0d 0a            e5e..

Getting Windows Live Writer to Show Your Template Properly

eddie — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:36:59 +0000

Bogging can get cumbersome. Logging in to each blog individually, using the online Wordpress editor and working around its quirks, positioning your screen so you can see everything at once, etc. Not to even mention that if you maintain multiple blogs, you’ll need to do this a little bit differently for each blogging platform that you use.

Oh, and the lack of keyboard shortcuts when blogging in a browser – that kills my productivity right there!

I was looking for a standalone blog editor that could be used for maintaining multiple blogs. Enter Microsoft’s Windows Live Editor software. I know what you’re thinking, “What? Microsoft? Really, Eddie?”

I thought the same thing, believe me. But after much digging around I found that most people think that Microsoft’s Windows Live Editor is the best package out there. I was skeptical, but after trying out a few packages, I think I agree.

I did have one problem, though – I couldn’t get Live Writer to properly recognize my blog template. In my case, it did show something that generally resembled my blog template, but it was pretty unusable. For instance, the background was dark, not white like it should have been.

Most frustrating for me is that when I first set Live Writer up, it showed the blog template properly, or at least close to properly. I then “re-discovered” it, and things broke.

A few steps that I discovered that may help you in getting your templates work properly.

1. Make sure that your blog is publishing “Uncategorized” category articles to the main page. The Live Writer software uses a temporary post to help discover your blog’s layout. In doing so, it will create a temporary post and look for that post on your main page.

This is the sort of post it’ll be looking for on your main page.

Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (9da721da-98d5-43b9-9a4b-2741f4da30fa – 3bfe001a-31de-4114-b8b4-4005b070f6d7)

If it can’t find that post on the main page, it won’t work. Check your Wordpress “Trash” posts to make sure posts like that are being created. Restore one of them and look for it on your home page. Is it there? If so, great. If not, your theme is not displaying those posts on the main page. You’ll probably have to edit your theme’s files to temporarily allow the “Uncategorized” stories to appear on the home page.

2. The Windows Live Writer log file is located at:

%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Windows Live Writer.log

Check that file for any errors that may be popping up. (You can also get to the log file by choosing “Help –> About Windows Live Writer –> Show Log file.”) In my case, I saw a bunch of errors that looked like this:

WindowsLiveWriter,3376,None,00015,09-Nov-2010 11:33:44.477,”Failed to download template Framed: System.Exception: Unable to locate blog post elements using most recent post
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Detection.BlogEditingTemplateDetector.
ParseWebpageIntoEditingTemplate_OnUIThread(Control uiContext, BlogPostRegionLocatorStrategy regionLocator, IProgressHost progress)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Detection.BlogEditingTemplateDetector.
GetBlogTemplateFiles(IProgressHost progress, BlogPostRegionLocatorStrategy regionLocatorStrategy, BlogEditingTemplateStrategy[] templateStrategies, BlogEditingTemplateType[] templateTypes)”,”"

I’ll have to admit, I’m not entirely clear on what most of this means. However, I do understand that “Failed to download” probably meant that it was unable to download something or other. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point.

In my case, I was getting the error message, but I had no idea why. As far as I could tell, the temporary blog posts were being created and displayed on the main page. Why then wasn’t it able to download some things? I can only guess, but I thought that it may have something to do with speed – perhaps the Live Writer was checking for a post before it was actually posted.

3. The template files are located at:

On Vista:
%LocalAppData%\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\

On XP:
%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\

Manually delete those directories and then try updating your settings via “Blogs –> Edit Blog Settings –> Update Account Configuration”. Live Writer will try to re-update your blog’s template files.

4. Things that may or may not have worked

I played around with getting things to work for a while, and in the process, I tried things like temporarily commenting out my javascript code, including Google Adsense ads. I have no idea if this had any effect or not, but I did eventually get things to work. Your mileage may vary.

5. You are limited to only using your main page as a “template” page.

Yes, this is annoying, particularly if you have a “magazine style” main page that displays short article excerpts only. The support forums seem to indicate that there’s no way around this, sort of…

6. Edit your theme files manually.

If you know HTML, you can edit the theme files that Live Writer uses manually. To do so, browse to the appropriate location (as shown above in #3) and start editing.

While I have had some issues like this in getting Live Writer to work properly, overall, I’ve been pretty happy with it. I’ll update here if I change my mind. And, as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer.

US Daylight Saving Time Ends Nov 7, 2010 – Windows XP Is Wrong

eddie — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:10:54 +0000

Confusing morning here at the On Everything household.

Half of my computers went ahead and adjusted themselves an hour back, presumably for the end of Daylight Saving Time. But the other half didn’t. I even had XP sync the time with a remote time server, but I was still seeing different times on different computers.

Not wanting to miss any football due to a clock error, I had to figure out what time it really was.

I did a little web searching and found that DST (Daylight Saving, or “Savings,” Time) doesn’t end until next week – Nov 7, 2010. But didn’t it always used to end before Halloween? I thought so.

Confusing matters more, it looks like today is indeed the day that Daylight Savings Time ends in the UK.

Here’s what I learned:

Through 2006, Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. ended a few days before Halloween (October 31). Children’s pedestrian deaths are four times higher on Halloween than on any other night of the year. A new law to extend DST to the first Sunday in November took effect in 2007, with the purpose of providing trick-or-treaters more light and therefore more safety from traffic accidents. For decades, candy manufacturers lobbied for a Daylight Saving Time extension to Halloween, as many of the young trick-or-treaters gathering candy are not allowed out after dark, and thus an added hour of light means a big holiday treat for the candy industry.

OK. Makes sense now.

Turns out there is a Windows XP patch that will fix the clock error with older versions of XP.

AcrobatInfo.exe is as bad as a Virus – How to remove it

eddie — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:16:43 +0000

I’ve noticed that my older laptop running Windows XP has gotten much slower when browsing files in Windows Explorer.

I did some research and found that every time I did anything within the Windows Explorer shell, a process called AcrobatInfo.exe was firing up, eating up system resources, and just generally slowing things down. The result was a lag of about 2 seconds whenever I moved my mouse over any document – not just PDF files. Any document whatsoever.

Seems that Adobe snuck this AcrobatInfo.exe file into one of its automatic updates, without asking. It slows down my whole computer. It runs when I’m not even using PDF files. If you delete the file, it magically comes back. Adobe doesn’t care that this thing is hosing up my whole computer, and that I don’t want it. If any other company did this it’d be termed malware or a virus. But because it’s Adobe, they somehow get a free pass.

This thing is a pain in the butt to get rid of, too. Thankfully, I found a step by step guide here.

In relevant part, you need to delete the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\21C0FC0AB3C24344FB30C34266AA5E09]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{98D9A6F1-4696-4B5E-A2E8-36B3F9C1E12C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\AcrobatInfo.exe]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\{AC76BA86-1033-0000-7760-000000000002}]

Change the value of these keys to false:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document]
“BrowseInPlace”=-
[ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document.7]
“BrowseInPlace”=-

And unregister the shell extension “service”

regsvr32 pathTo\pdfshell.dll /u

For me, the path to the PDFshell.dll file was :

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll”

How to Fix the clock’s “An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with” Error

eddie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:14:05 +0000

Ah, daylight savings time.

The time of year that reminds us all that our computer’s automatic clock setting mechanism may not work as expected.

I’ve been getting the error message “”An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com” error message when trying to manually sync my clock to the Windows time server.

A screenshot of the error:

If you’re getting this error, here’s an easy way to fix it: change the value in the “server” field.

How to fix the time clock’s “An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with…” error.

Open “Date an Time Properties” by double-clicking the clock (in the system tray area) and choosing the “Internet time” tab. (Alternatively, you can get to the same screen by going to Control Panel->Date and Time.)
Change the value in the “Server” field to another valid time server. First try “time.nist.gov”. If that doesn’t work, try one of the following:
ts1.aco.net
nist1-la.WiTime.net
ntp.alaska.edu
utcnist2.colorado.edu
tick.ucla.edu
ben.cs.wisc.edu
time.xmission.com
If none of the servers listed above works, you may have a network problem. Either check your firewall, or keep trying servers from this list.

Hopefully one of the servers in this list will work for you!

How To Get a Kingwin USB Drive Enclosure To Work In Windows XP

eddie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:51:16 +0000

I foolishly purchased a Kingwin Blackjack BJK-35USBI from Newegg for the low price of $14.99 + Shipping and Handling.

Big mistake – this thing is terrible.

First, the documentation says nothing about it working with Windows XP. And it doesn’t – most of the time.

That said, I did discover a trick to get it working some of the time.

The manual (if you can call the little piece of paper containing instructions for other systems a “manual”) says that you should set your Hard Drive jumpers such that your drive is the “Master” device. I tried this with 3 different drives on 3 different computers, and it never worked. (For real.)

What DID work, though, was setting the drives to “Cable Select,” or “CS.”

Don’t ask me why, but this works, while setting the drive to “Master” doesn’t. I tried this with drives from three different manufacturers – a Western Digital, a Seagate, and an IBM made by Hitachi. Setting each of these drives to Cable select made the Kingwin work. (Sometimes.) But none of the drives would work when set to “Master.” Ever.

Go figure.

I’d be interested to hear if this solution works for you. If it does, let me know in the comments.

Here’s something else I’ve discovered about this Kingwin USB drive – when it does work, you can only connect it to your computer once before having to reboot. ONCE. Fortunately, I found a work-around for that, too.

How To Run Device Manager From The Windows Command Line

eddie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:52:27 +0000

Microsoft went and hid the device manager.

It’s buried beneath at least 5 separate click events.

Fortunately, it is possible to run the device manager from the Windows command line. (That is, the box that pops up when you hit Start->Run.)

This should save you a lot of clicking around, particularly if you have to access the device manager frequently. (As I do, because my external USB drive doesn’t show up unless I disable then re-enable the USB Mass Storage Device service.)

How to run the Windows Device Manager from the Command Line or Start->Run prompt

Go to Start->Run.
Type “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and hit “OK”
The device manager should now pop-up on your screen

Eddie On Everything » windows xp

Windows Desktop Icons Keep Flashing On & Off? In my case, VNC was the cause.

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How to Set the Window Size and Position of a Chrome Application Shortcut

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