Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Windows

  • Exception OE Has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01)

    Ugh…. you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as follows

    An Exception OE has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01) + 0000019A. … Was Called From 0028:C004BD2E in VxD VFAT(01) + 00009CB6

    For starters I loved the detail that got recorded by my client – you feel like you can sink your teeth into that much better than “my computer crashed – it gave some strange error message – could you fix it?” Of course, when I looked at it I couldn’t reproduce the error and was told that it was maybe once per day.

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  • Internet Explorer Mandatory Update

    Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?

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  • Hard drive testing utilities

    Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

  • Windows XP repair install problems

    I’ve run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

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  • HP Vista CLFS.SYS error

    I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0x00000050” The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.

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  • Smartmontools on Windows – emailing warnings

    For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

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  • Symantec Internet Security 2007 antispyware protection off….

    and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)

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  • Windows Vista upgrade clean install workaround

    You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media at hand. The install would stop to validate the install media and you could proceed. Very handy if recovering from a full hard drive failure, virus infestation, etc. Well the word was, Vista upgrade requires the previous OS version that you upgrade from to be installed on the Hard drive. This makes the rebuild process from such failures sound VERY nasty and tedious (read: just go buy a new pc…) However….

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  • Windows updates for February could set record

    There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security Fix.) Tuesday February 13th is the date scheduled for the release of updates. One critical udpate will affect Microsoft’s security software (onecare/defender/etc.) 3 patches will affect Office. Most of the updates to be released are rated as critical.

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  • Ipod warning for Vista owners

    If you’re upgrading to Vista and use an ipod (true Apple branded iPod)… you might want to refrain from hooking the ipod up to the Vista pc. theregister has reported that Apple is sounding the alarm over a serious data corruption issue due to an incompatibility with Vista. It sounds as though users should wait for the next release of iTunes before using their iPod with Vista… there is a workaround….

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