Feb 252011
 

To my horror after the builders have been screwing around under the stairs I found my server displaying the rather disconcerting message

Windows can not load due to bfzonfal.sys being missing or corrupt

Well a search on google for said driver found a massive total of zero.

ZERO? the collective brain of the online world has never heard of bfzonfal.sys

Well I though it sounded a strange name. After a significant amount of drinking and cursing of builders and lamenting of never having taken a backup I decided to go out and get more drunk.

On return I had an enlightening thought, just shove the windows 7 ultimate CD in as the server CD has long since been covered in builders rubble and run up a command prompt.

navigate to system32\drivers and found the bfzonfal.sys driver to be 0k. Ok so I moved it elsewhere, c:\ seemed good. rebooted and all good, yay!

To celebrate I got more drunk and puked out this blog in the hope someone else my find this useful.

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Feb 142011
 

I wrote this because I needed to know what user was logged onto what PC when remotely connecting to a supported server.

Example Output


Find Users v0.1 (c) 2011 Chris

Computer               Username               Desciption
TREEBEARD          *                         Window 7 64 Ultimate
STORMCROW        Chris.KINGS          Kings Server
BOMBADIL            Maxy                     Maxy's Laptop

Press any key to exit

Purpose

To find the users who are logged onto network connected Windows Workstations from a server logged on a domain admin account.

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Jul 262010
 

After three installations of two types of Windows 7 with Avira Anti Virus Personal edition (the free one) I found that updates fails on all installations. After some searching on the net I found a solution, here. I am posting this as it was hard to find and to enhance the ranking of this solution for a rather annoying bug.

The solution is to disable the detection of proxy server for updates under advanced setting within configuration.

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Jul 252010
 

I have a Dell Inspiron 910, bought from cash converters for £150 3/4 of a year ago. As I had tested Windows Visa and found it to be in many ways an advert not to upgrade from Windows XP I left my machine with the XP installation that the Dell originally came on. Something that surprised me was the 8Gig solid state hard disk. I bought a cheap 4 gig SD card and shoved that permanently into the side for some extra space but I mainly relied on an external 360GB Western Digital slimline hard disk.

When windows 7 came out my usual fear of learning the nuances of a new OS evaporated as I found it to be in almost every way and pleasure to deal with. After testing on a Dell Optiplex 780 for some time I though I should get my Dell Inspiron upgraded to 7 also.

Windows 7 space requirements

Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit with a standard install takes about 7gig and even though you can disable many core feature these features are not removed. After some searching I found vLite a utility that is (I assume) mainly used by companies to create tailored Windows installs that suit the corporate image. More searching around on the net and I found that Windows 7 starter was probably the best choice for my netbook. Though Starter removed many features so low powered computers can run it it seemed to be the best choice as a starting package to reduce further in size. After hacking the image with vLite and successfully installing I found that there was no domain support, you could not easily personalise the theme and there was no Aero. Finding this I used vLite to reduce a Windows 7 Ultimate installation. Below is the howto. Continue reading »

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May 282010
 

After looking at removing 4od adverts I thought I’d have a look at removing adverts from playing on the ITV player. I found out that it was significantly easier than 4od.

How To

Here is the how-to to disabled/skip adverts on ITV’s player. It is only for Windows Visa and Window 7. If you are using another operating system and you don’t want adverts then you should BLOCK 213.199.175.157 (itv.adbureau.net) with your firewall, either on your computer or router.

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May 242010
 

4OD Channel 4 television, on demand, for the UK

So 4OD has a great collection of TV series that you can watch back to back. After watching about five episodes of peep show I found the adverts repetitive and annoying and decided to have a look at removing them. A brief search on the net and I found Steve Larsen had found a method. His instructions state that by redirecting three hosts to your loopback the adverts will not be played. I did this and for some quick tests I found it to work.

My setup, following instructions

I set my router’s parental control to redirect the following URL s to 127.0.0.1

s0.2mdn.net
realmedia.channel4.com
webstat.channel4.com

I did this in the hope that I would not have to reconfigure the hosts file on the various computers around my house.

Problem

I found that on machines that had viewed 4OD then adverts did not play but on machines that have never been to 4OD they hung while attempting to play and showed nothing but a blank screen.

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May 052010
 

Sysinternals Suite for windows is a must have for anyone how knows more than nothing about the windows OS.

Process Explorer is the most useful tool. It can replace the task manager and shows you far more details about what is running on your windows box.

Process Explorer

Best of the rest

Auto runs shows you all the locations that can be set for the automatic running of programs.

Shell run as enabled you to run programs under different credentials.

VM Map shows you where your memory is going.

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May 052010
 

As usual windows includes the kitchen sink turned on by default. Having unneeded services are a security risk and also adds to the the load of your computer. The following services on my machine were started and set to either manual or automatic should be disabled if not required.

Edit the launching of services by launching services.msc via the run box (windows button + R).
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