I came across an interesting one in the last few days. This system was a Windows XP system with current updates – SP3, IE 8…. and among other things there was a complaint of very sluggish behavior. I updated the antimalware software installed and ran scans. Malware Bytes antimalware actually found and removed two suspect files, but that didn’t seem to sole the sluggishness. The web browser (internet explorer) would take what seemed like a minute or so to respond to any action. One thing I discovered is that Internet explorer 8 can behave VERY slowly if there are a lot of sites in the restricted zone. (Spybot S&D immunization puts lot’s of sites in restricted zones.) So, I found a way to remove them all and retry and things seemed quicker, but… after running for 15-20 minutes the system really started to become unresponsive and so I had to start looking for another cause…. services.exe was running at 99% cpu or 100% cpu from time to time and the memory footprint was growing – the high mark I saw was 350MB of memory in use for it (!)
Tag: windows xp
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Custom livecd’s, virtualbox, seamlessrdp and sata dvd burners…
I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I’ve built a couple livecd’s (that I still use) for tech support, but I’m always thinking of one more tool that I’d like to have. After looking through their wizard it seems a bit limited in the granularity of what can be chosen (at least for what I’m thinking of.) But… it might introduce a new interest in the use of livecds.
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Hiding a user from the Welcome screen in Windows XP
So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn’t working correctly without administrator priviliges and in this situation, upgrading to a newer version wasn’t a great option. So, I created a new user account with higher priviliges and used runas to launch the application with greater priviliges. But that left me with another problem…. how do I hide the new priviliged user from the Welcome screen?
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Windows XP Print what’s on the screen or make a screenshot using the … print screen button
This is one that’s not as obvious as it should be. Every keyboard has a “print screen” button – usually it’s in the group over above the insert/home/pageup/delete/end/pagedown block. Sometimes (especially on laptops) it’s shared with something else. But…. most people will notice if they press “print screen” on a windows pc… not much seems to happen. (On my KDE/Linux desktop it pops up a program called ksnapshot…) If the print screen key is shared with another function (say on a laptop) you may need to press the function button at the same time as the print screen button to get the following to work.
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Running Google Earth under Wine on linux
A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…
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Zotob.b may be affecting some XP SP2/2003 installs
As I noted yesterday, virii typically get updated and improved. Yesterdays reports about the zotob virus noted that Windows Xp service pack 2 and Windows 2003 were not affected by the new worm. Today however, the sans institute is reporting that zotob may be affecting some XP sp2 and 2003 installs. It appears that it uses something called NULL sessions.