Ever since Microsoft began offering Virtual PC for free to download, a lot of users have been installing it to test out the usefulness of virtual machines. A couple laptop users complained that their machines would blue screen while starting up Windows with the wired network cable plugged in, although Windows would start up fine with the cable unplugged (which could then be plugged back in after login). I couldn’t figure it out but did narrow it down to Virtual PC 2004 being installed. I finally had the chance to work on one of these laptops for longer than five minutes and began my search on Google for the answer since I sure couldn’t do it myself. (more…)
January 5th, 2007 at 03:04pm
Explorer.exe started using 100% CPU about 5 minutes after login. The user had run Spybot, Ad-Aware, and Trend Micro scans and nothing showed up. I took a look at the startup items with msconfig and couldn’t find anything myself. I first ran Process Explorer and couldn’t find anything obvious that was hooked into explorer.exe that would cause the problem (moral of the story: I didn’t know how to use Process Explorer). I ran TCPView and noticed that at login, explorer.exe was trying to connect to an intercage.com IP address (which didn’t respond to pings). As soon as the TCP connection died, explorer.exe CPU usage jumped to 100%. If I end-tasked explorer.exe and re-ran it, it wouldn’t try to make the connection again and it would never use 100% CPU again. If I booted up without a network connection, everything was okay. Once I connected though, explorer.exe would try to make the TCP connection with the mysterious IP again.
After tons and tons of troubleshooting (Filemon, Regmon, SFC, etc.) and searching for solutions (”explorer.exe 100% cpu”, “explorer.exe 99% cpu”, “explorer.exe 90% cpu”, “explorer.exe syn_start”, “explorer.exe close_wait”, “OMG!”), I took a deeper look at Process Explorer’s features. (more…)
January 12th, 2006 at 04:32pm
While visiting a secure trusted site in IE, you may encounter links to files which cannot be opened or saved. You receive the message: Some files can harm your computer. If the file information below looks suspicious, or you do not fully trust the source, do not open or save this file. You search Microsoft.com and come up with KB840386: Cannot open an Excel 2003 workbook by using Internet Explorer 6.0 but it’s no help. The page says there’s a hotfix but you need to have a service agreement with Microsoft to download it.
The solution? I found this page (brianmadden.com) which contained a solution posted by an anonymous user. Go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab > Uncheck “Do not save encrypted pages to disk.” What’s really happening is that the file is being served over a secure connection so with that option enabled, IE is not allowed to save it to the disk. Therefore you can’t download the file or even open it since it cannot save it temporarily to disk. This option is disabled by default.
Unfortunately, the page that contains the solution isn’t found when searching for the exact error message. Instead, I found it by accidentally searching for “some files may harm your computer.”
December 12th, 2005 at 05:28pm
Boy did I have a hard time getting PHP and Apache to work under Cygwin. I had to set the environment up for a class project so first I did what any reasonably lazy person would do–check for a Cygwin package. I only saw the Apache package but I needed PHP too so I decided to hold off on installing it. So next I did what any reasonably lazy person would do next–Google for a page posted by someone who did the work already so I wouldn’t have to.
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May 31st, 2005 at 10:15pm