XP Update KB977165 Crash Pc

just thought I would let everyone know, that some windows XP machines after installing the update KB977165 released February 9th 2010 will cause a BSOD on windows XP with the stop message STOP Error 0×0000007E. Its unclear whether a Malware infection has to be present on the machine to conflict with the update. Haven’t gotten that far yet.

Some say the patch issue is on computers already affected with the issue that the patch supposedly resolves .  I know that at work, we had a series of computers that would not boot properly. Many of them showed would run really slow or not access our network ( may not be related stuff but timing is right)

This guy gives a smaller version of the fix, I think I have to go through both of them and see what one works. Oh BTW did I tell you my mother’s pc is BSOD ?

We’ll have to walk around the office and run the patch fix when it comes in, because man….. the people at work sure do surf like madmen.
They just click anything and everything like they have nothing to worry about. Guess that’s like job security for me.

Evolution of Microsoft – Windows

I know this old stuff but I have to show it as I found it.
I have been using windows since 3.11.
Broke my first pc within days of getting it.
butter knife in the floppy drive.
Ewps. Hey I was a newb.

Here is the guy who did it best .
Evolution of Microsoft

I still think he should have said Windows.

In the video, wait for win 3.1 . Does that not bring back memories? .. lol memories of aps/gadgets.

Sound recorder never really changed did it??? I wonder why that is!

Windows 7 At home, good, bad, it’s ugly

Ok for starts,

I did do a big full test of windows seven at work on a machine and threw everything at it that makes vista and xp crash. the version we used for that test is windows 7 32 bit, here is  Windows & in Workplace Environment.

I have to say that anyone who preaches on about 7 being better than windows Vista, You really did not even try both with an open mind. I like vista, Seven is not impressing me at all. All the stuff about vista I heard everyone complain about but never noticed myself, I am seeing it in Windows 7. I think by now it’s just common enough to blame everything on George Bush and Windows vista, it’s the first two things out someone’s mouth. But ok here is what I get in the trial at home on  windows 7 64bit.

Well I am on day two of windows 7. The default drivers it installed, amazed me, almost as much as windows vista did. Video card drivers, not so much. I am forced to use almost one year old nvidia drivers. Fine.
For the record, my machine is a mid way between work horse and light gaming machine, nothing to brag about in either direction.
Specs are
AMD 5600+ 2.9g dc
3 gigs pc6400 800mhz
Nvidia / evga 9500 gt 512 mb
some ecs motherboard
air cooled.

Well the video drivers have been iffy on me and would not let me use the manufacturers drivers. This has always been my special sweet spot, using EVGA drivers instead of nvidia drivers has always givin me a cooled advantage. but no, win 7 rc is forcing me to use the ones they have from the update service at Microsoft, if I install anything else I look at 8 bit graphics at best.

Well I tend to do my benchmarking at pc pitstop.com (full test) . to say the least, my scores drop dramatically over my vista scores. I usually use the old test , it’s hard to find but it’s there it’s a link in the description kinda hidden there. my scores have been i the 3000’s for about a year now. With windows seven they dropped to 1500. strangely it shows my 2d fps increased by nearly 100 fps. Well that’s cool…..
So I turn to my faithful typical benchmarking methods of real testing. :-)
I crack open every version of Grand Theft Auto and install them all.
On gtaiii I get the same hesitation I used to get about 6 years ago. While passing under bridges and through tree covered areas there is a lag that comes in spurts. with vice city, the yellow almost takes over the screen and the cut scenes are jittery just like it was the day the game came out and I was on out dated hardware. San Andreas, well not much better.
GTAIV For me to achieve the 23 FPS at best in game I had to turn everything off or all the way down. When I was on Vista I was seeing 35+ FPS with some things turned to medium. Yes I know my video card is not the best in the world, but it was the same one I was using on windows Vista and it makes a great “before and after” comparison.

Now for the lock out issues everyone complains about with windows Vista.
I head to MVPS Hosts site to update my hosts file to block bad sites and advertisements. Nothing fricken happened. Wouldn’t block anything, So I head to the ETC folder to modify the file by hand. HA! No administrator rights to modify that file. Meanwhile in the background I am playing myspace mobsters. I refresh a page and bam new advertisement, all my browsers drop and fricken notice comes up telling me my computer might be compromised, and it offers this virus scan. then it scans my computer anyway and says I have a virus then tells me to update. I freak out and try and close the page and notice, it’s not windows explorer, it’s Mozilla. it’s a fricken spam scam. See if I could have changed my hosts file, that never would have happened. so I head to bit defender to scan my disk onlline. would not allow me!!!!!! WTF!!!!!
So I head to emsi and get a-squared and do a scan, sure enough… I am infected with 4 types of Trojans. I am upset now.

The hardest thing for me to find, I still have not found it yet, is how in the blue hell do you turn it so that you can see your file extensions? Have they disabled so much user ability that they have turned that off? I feel as if I am being dumbed down and pacified with big shiny buttons.
You can like windows seven all you want, but I really have this whole thing figured out.
Either it’s going to turn out to be Mojave, or windows ME 2.0

still the same issue with Windows Seven that bothered me most with Windows Vista , No Ftp. You have to download Fire FTP for firefox and use that . You no longer have direct access with windows Explorer.  I find this unacceptable. It really feels like we are being dumbed down.

After some help, someone linked me to how to use notepad as administrator to modify files such as the hosts file
Here

Windows 7 Work Environment Install day 4

Strange event of coming out of hibernate. Happens approximately every thirty minutes

The issue with peach tree and esc Was not caused with Microsoft, It was clarified as an issue between the two versions.

Well after plenty of hassle, all printers and scanners are functioning. All networking is functioning.

About the same amount of issues if we had gone with opensource. Ubuntu,open office and Peachtree Linux

Day one windows seven at the office.      Day two windows seven at the workplace.

More will come

Testing Windows 7 on a Work Environment

Day 1

Splash screen

Splash screen

screen two of install

task bar and full install background
We use an Intell(R) Pentium(R) p4 2.81 GHZ with 1.5 G Memory

Stats/Specs
Full format deleted all partitions Let 7 control partitions
Our install of course was the 32 bit version of Win7
First install screen

Splash Screen says Windows(R) 7 Ultimate, that was free one year from Microsoft’s(R) website. Thanks guys. We appreciate that.
Boot up was fast , about 17 seconds.
3 printers and one plotter on the network.
We have the goal to test all drivers and handling of certain used machines.
At first boot we saw all printers, but when we started the test page to print, there was no printers in the list.
We are now manually installing drivers. Last we tried with vista, the drivers would not install. with seven The Gestetner 525 installed within seconds. Smooth. We now go back and try the Lanier LD122. Next will be Ricoh Aficio mp w2400 Plotter copier

Ricoh Printer. Server Driver spoiling, is not an option , finds drivers on the server and installs them. Be sure and install the drivers. Twain untested as of yet. Scanner issues will come.
Test page 1 on Gestetner now. print was good on Gestetner.

printed one test page on netwrok win7

printed one test page on network win7

Testing windows 7 printing color

Testing windows 7 printing color

We have now consumed 10 gigs of storage. So far we have not installed anything Except printer Drivers

Windows typical keystrokes working as we try.
Loading Symantec Endpoint 11 Work Station Virus Scanner and Firewall To test compatibilities.
noted incompatibility issues, we selected “install anyway”. . So far no prompt for install and no shortcut in quick launch for Symantec, nothing in programs area either, it has been 7 minutes since we started . We are restarting manually to see if we get a boot error.
after reboot, no sign of Symantec.
They did make it clear that Symantec was made for Win Xp, Win 7 is x86/32 bit
Offered to check solutions online, Note is “no solution found” Incompatible. Now we try the 64 bit version of Symantec to see if there is a difference.
Right off we get the “ehh dude, it might not work, doesn’t work for anyone else” notice.
This time it did create the directory for symantec, but quickly uninstalled it. and said that it was interrupted and nothing was modified.

Next we try installing Symantec Server sbe11

More testing to come throughout the week. We want this on our work machines pretty bad. Interesting point, Win7 Identified that the version we have we got from the symantec website, even though it said we had compatibility issues. hmm odd.
Over the next few days we will check Symantec’s site for help on the issue/matter.
We do find a help saying “copy to desktop, run lusetup.exe, reboot, run setup.exe” and all should be good ?????
Maybe ???? Tomorrow we will see.

We install Mozilla Fire Fox 3.0.10 , No Thunderbird today.
good , no notice of compatibility issues. We import nothing, because explorer is a clean install. FF as default.
Install is fine. Fire fox is running well. No issues.

Day one is complete, next tests tomorrow, More writing.

Day Two of Windows 7 Workplace Test.

Mac and Windows Dual Desktop

From Life Hacker:

First off, i have to say, the screen shots are remarkable.

Reader Dylan Boom shows how to mix operating systems environments with style in his Mac Meets Windows Dual-Desktop. Dylan is running OS X with XP in a virtual machine, and each system is completely customized to form a beautiful transition between Mac and Windows. Frankly, neither system puts the other to shame. Here’s a rundown of all the hardware, apps, and tweaks Dylan made to both operating systems to pull off this pleasant coexistence:

Check back with Life Hacker:

for full specs.

Sorry for the lack of creativity, i am currently at work right now and don’t have a bunch of time. But I do like the article. I don’t like mac, but i love seeing mac people want to use another operating system. Kinda proves how useless a mac is.

Windows Mojave Commercial Flaw

If you have no idea what I Mean. Read This.
As a tech guy who works for a company with the word “Tech” In it’s name. As a tech guy who owns two websites with the word ” Tech” in their name. I have to point out an issue I noted when watching the commercial.

There is an issue they do not point out. I can directly point out which of the people they showed in the interview where not techy people. And I can point out the ones they picked because they looked like the stereo typical “computer geek looking” people. Fat guy, Oriental, middle eastern,skinny white guy with glasses.

First off, No tech knowledgeable person could for one minute sit in front of a computer with an unexplored operating system, without diving head first into exploration. No knowledgeable techy person would ever  accept an operating system as “fast” form watching someone else use it, or watching a video of someone else use the operating system.

Typically there is a blank look in someone’s face when they are bsing you into believing they know  more about computer than they really do. They also keep their hands near their face or wrench them with an anxiety of “please let me leave, I just signed up for a random survey  and figured I could bs my way through it, I had no idea it was about computers. Please just pay me and get this over with so I can leave.” .

Some of the people in the video, they just show a briefing of them, but no show of reaction, either those people are  just people who looked like nerds so they used them, or, those nerdy people really where nerdy and  ended up  ragging the operating system, so they didn’t show much of them.

It is clear the crowd was selected.

I myself have the operating system on the computer I am using. I really do like and enjoy allot of the features, But I also turned off a mess-load of useless resource hogging items off  Meet Black Viper.

I have followed black Viper’s instructions, for many of operating systems.

I hope you see what I noticed and raise a stink saying ” Hey I am observant, not an idiot” .

No more fees for Windows live gamers

Microsoft said late Tuesday that it will no longer charge a fee for PC game players who wish to connect with each other over the company’s Games For Windows Live online service.Games For Windows Live is “now offering completely free online multiplayer” service, Microsoft said in a statement posted on the service’s Web site. The company previously charged a monthly fee of $7.99. However, the emergence of several free online gaming services may have prompted Microsoft to drop the monthly charge.

.

.

Microsoft introduced the Games For Windows program last year in an effort to bring console-like dependability to the PC gaming market. Titles bearing the Games For Windows logo are guaranteed to be playable online or offline on systems that meet certain specifications, according to Microsoft

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209600008&subSection=News

I will be passing this on to my kid. I found this on Digg.com

Working On “Her” Computer

Well it seems the lady has come into a few cooties.

She has an xps m1210 laptop.

Since neither of us know just how long the stuff has been on her machine or where or how they all got there, I believe it would be in her best interest if we just back up everything that is important and whip out the reinstall discs. Easy? lol. Newp. No chance. Seems back when she got the computer she lived elsewhere with someone else and obtaining the drivers discs and o/s and all teh bundled software discs had to include a spy. Her little sister had to sneak the border and play friendlies… Now she snuck out with the baggy thing that all the discs are in which of course no one there claims to have seen. We have done some searches and find that one disc on the bag, is not for this laptop that we are about to work on. Ok. Now we have all the discs.

The hard part is deciding what to do after we install everything and well, does the sister go back and act like nothing happened? ( I mean this is a close as family issue, I am not in the family so I have to step back) I am thinking of burning the discs as a back up and bundling some jacked up progs with it.. but will they hate me for it?

well whatever

Ok So now the back up is not going so well. I have been to virustotal ,virscan.org and jotti’s a million times and man, I keep finding malware in everything she wants to backup. I am half tempted to just format and cross my fingers and lie like a dog. I am getting sick of each time they find stuff in the files I end up having to delete them anyway because they are beyond repair. Meanwhile I have a million more files to scan…one by one….. It’s hardly worth it. Then again she is fricken hot and I know what I am doing.
Well I also looked around and saw that ubuntu installs pretty good on this particular model. If I can assure her that open office is just as good as microsoft office/works then I got it made! I wouldn’t have to delete anything!
Tell you what, I will do something with this pretty machine and post it here later ;)

to be continued…….