Tonight I had a problem that's fits into the description of "a small thing you have to know". When I arrived at the workstation, I saw a fake anti-virus programm that looked like a real one. But that wasn't the worst part, the programm said the workstation was infected with a lot of differend virusses and it was willing to delete them when I donated 10 dollar....

Believe it or not, just this message deliveres a whole lot of money to the owners. Such companies mostly operate from countries where legislation is not yet adapted to this type of crime and things can not be tackled.

Enough about this, we should talk about the safe mode of Windows. In order to tackle the problem mentioned above, I had to boot the workstation in safe mode boot. Unfortunately, the virus prevented me from doing this (unless I paid the 10 dollar)...

I booted the computer again in safe mode boot, but choose for "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" at the starting screen. After some rattle appeared a screen with the "good old Microsoft-DOS command prompt". When you give the "Explorer" command in the command window, the graphical interface of Windows will start, without the fake virus programm this time. 

Once the GUI was started I could eventually take action to remove the fake virus ...

Some things in life are simple, an installation of Java is a perfect example of this. To install Java on your workstation you go to the website http://www.java.com/nl/download/

My work started at the point where a Java application didn't start. A website offered a .jnlp file (Java Network Launching Protocol for the diehards) but when you selected the file.... nothing happened.

I started a search and installed both the 32- and the 64-bits version of Java on the 64-bits of Windows 7 system. None of the combinations delivered a proper solution. 

When I visited the Java website, I saw that a .jnlp needed the Java Web Start application to get started. In my software list in the control panel, was no separated product like "Java Web Start".

The Java Web Start application is simply installed by the installation of Java in the way I mentioned before and will be on your computer by the name of JavaWS.exe

The most simple solution to this problem is to open a .jnlp file once by the option "open with" which will show up when you select the file with a right mouseclick. When you are asked to select a program to open the file, you search on your local harddisk for JavaWS.exe and select it (don't forget to select the flag "always use this program to open this type of file").

After this action, you can open Java applications without any problem.

The next problem exists in all versions of Microsoft Windows. In a way which I can't explain the computer is checking the harddisk for errors or other problems everytime when he is started.

Even when no errors or problems are found, the computer decided to check the harddisk at the next boot.

To stop this behaviour, you have to make a change in the registry. To do this you have to start de registry editor (Start -> Run -> RegEdit) and go to the next key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
   system
   currentcontrolset
   control
   session manager

Have a look at the value of the BootExecute key, normally the value of this key is autocheck autochck * 

When there is more information in the value of this key, you have to delete that.

The next time you start the computer nog harddisk check will be performed.

Now using Tomtom is already a few years a normal habit in my nomadic existence,  the number of saved bookmarks with fun, useful, convenient and even necessary places has grown considerably.

Like any other important information (like photos, documents, etc.) it is wise to make sure you make a backup of those favorites.

Favorites always belong to a particular card and are stored in the file mapsettings.cfg located in the same folder as the maps themselves are stored. By moving this file with ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Connection Center to your PC you create a backup copy so favorites after the loss of your Smartphone, PDA or TomTom are not gone forever.

This time a tip or a trik (depends on how you will call it), but nevertheless a problem which occurs often.

When you have to type an e-mail adres, an other symbol as the @ shows up, or the equal sign shows up where you expect a questionmark.

All these problems are caused by a wrong keyboard definiton. How strange this may be, in the Dutch version of Microsoft Windows you have to use the "United States - International" keyboard definition.

Often is during the installation of Microsoft Windows also the keyboard definition installed of the country the user is in (Dutch in this case). At that moment the problems start and the keyboard definition goes in a (for me unpredictable way - and not only by the use of the ALT-Shift key combination) from "US-International" to Dutch with the problems above as a consequence.

The best way to solve this problem is to remove the so called local language. This can be done with the option "keyboard and languages" of "country settings" in the configuration screen. How this option is called depends on the version of Microsoft Windows you use.

Hopefully I have brought a little bit of light in the darkness!

a couple of people may have noticed the next problem,  another part of the population will never notice the problem, simply, because they don't use the Windows Live Moviemaker. 

Within the Windows Moviemaker kunnen videofiles can be imported, the disadvantage is the fact that these file may not be stored on a networkdrive. The Moviemaker has by default no option to access the networkdrive (despite the current networkspeeds are high enough to access then without a lot of delay).

To get around this problem the next registry hack has been found. Start the registry editor(Regedit) from the command prompt and go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Movie Maker. In this folder must a new DWORD named AllowNetworkFiles has to be created. The value of this DWORD has to be 1

According to the rules you have to reboot your workstation, but then, another problem is solved and you can access your networkdrive from within the Windows Live Moviemaken !

Things in life can be so simple, a perfect example of one of those things is changing te language of your Hotmail interface. In a inaxplicable way the language of some anonymous user changed from English tot Dutch.  Despite the fact the Dutch language is beautiful, het wanted to change the language back to English.

To change the language, in the upperright corner of the screen is a menu option called "Opties" ("Options" in English). When you click on this option, the screenshot below appears.

To change the language of the user interface, you click on the language ("Nederlands") in this case. After that a list appears of all available languages. Choose your preferred language and the Hotmail interface will change to the selected language.

As I said earlier, the solution to this problem is to simple to be true. But.. it works again..

For uploading files to a website I am using FileZilla, a well known programm for making fast connections to various sites. Last week, a usual day, I wanted to upload a content management system en made a connection to the website, normally a simple job and the most easy part in the creation of a new part of the internet.

While it wasn't even friday the thirteenth, this job had a lot more struggles in mind than normally. After the job was done, I looked at the website and noticed a lot of pictures were gone and CSS stylesheets didn't work (or partial).

I contacted the hostingprovider to have a chat and see if they had a solution to this problem. They saw that the original file was 1 byte bigger than the file on the webserver. There must be a problem during the transportation.

Finally I found an incorrect option in FileZilla, the type of transportation was ASCII and with that setting al the files are threated as ASCII files and that's often not a problem, this time it was....

In FileZilla there is an option to set the type of transfer to ASCII, Binairy or Automatic. As a precept you can set this option to Binairy, when this causes troubles, you can set it to automatic and if even that won't work, you use ASCII.

I have no idea how the option on my workstation is set as ASCII, and, to tell you the truth, I don't mind. My experience in FileZilla has grown and... it works again ! 

Using the page file and virtual memory is for a lot of people scary, they don't know what it is and what they can do with it. They freak-out when Windows shows the message "u don't have enough virtual memory".. where can i buy it ?

The idea of virtual memory has everything to do with the amount of physical (RAM) memory in your computer. When there is less memory available than Windows needs, the operating system decides to write parts of the physical memory to disk in order to get free space in RAM.

So, basically we have two kinds of memory. The real fysical memory and the virtual physical memory (do you get it ;) All of this memory (real and virtual) is divided into small memory pages and Windows controls these pages. It takes care that frequently used pages will be held in memory and less frequent used pages will be written the pagefile on disk. When an application requests a memory page that is on disk, the operating system generates a page fault and "blocks" the application till the requested page is loaded from the pagefile on disk into RAM.

Loading and unloading page to the pagefile on disk is a slow operation. When we think harddisks are fast, they are a thousand times slower than RAM memory. So make sure you have enough RAM memory installed in your computer, otherwise you will regret it and your computer will respond like a snail..

So, it is obvious that your computer needs a virtual memory. But how much memory is needed ? By default Windows will configure a pagefile with a size of 1.5 times the amount of fysical (RAM) memory. But that's just a guess of our operating system.. Why should i need a pagefile of 12 Gb when i have a computer with 8 Gb RAM installed ?

A more reliable way of calculating the size of your pagefile is using the process explorer of sysinternals (you can download this free tool here). After starting this tool you select "view" and "system information" and you will see the next screen:

 

In the screenshot above the "commit charge" values are important. This value specifies how much memory the system is using. When the "commit charge" is higher than the available RAM, the system is using it's pagefile and can be relatively slow.

The value that you should focus on is the commit charge peak. This is the peak the system has had since it was booted. This however indicates that your system should be up and running sometime before you start the process explorer, that is the only way you will see reliable values.

Now you know how many memory you need (RAM and Virtual memory together), you can make a decision how many (expensive) RAM you have to buy or (when this is going to be expensive) how big your pagefile should be (in this case your system will be somewhat slower, depending on the speed of your harddisk).

To view the configuration of the virtual memory, go to the configuration panel and select system and advanced configuration settings

Pieter Janssen
PEJANSSEN.nl

On a computer was a problem when logging on to the Windows Live Messenger. While logging on the following errorcode showed up "8E5E0152 - Login to the Windows Live Messenger has failed while the service is temporary unavailable. Please try again later".

The problems were caused bij an error in the contact map, that is the map where the contactinformation is saved. Please follow the next steps to get this problem (at least this one) out of the world. 

1. Close the Windows Live Messenger.
2. Make sure that hidden folders appear in your explorer (use the map options option in the control panel).
3. Delete all the maps in de map C:\users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live
4. Try to login to the Windows Live Messenger and you will see... it works !

The real "die hards" will go further and put the deleted maps in reverse order back in a ultimate attempt to discover the map with the error (and save as much contact data as possible).