Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt […]

I think at one point I’ve said that once taxes are put in place they tend NEVER to go away. Well, I must admit I’m wrong. 108 years ago in an effort to help finance the Spanish American War, long distance telephone taxes went into place. The tax will no longer be in effect as […]

There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on […]

Fines and prison time are among the penalties envisioned under a proposed house bill. The requirement would be that businesses with database holding information on more than 10,000 people (or federal employees) would have to inform either the Secret Service or the FBI of a data security breach. (The maximum sentence would be five years.) […]

This isn’t necessarily tech related, but modern life related I guess. I can’t count how many credit card offers we receive in the mail each month. I have visions of a few acres of forest land somewhere being tagged with our name and the subtitle… “credit card offers”. I’ve never followed up on an unsolicited […]

I mentioned this a while back, but I didn’t go into much detail on a long term solution. Let me re-set the situation. Linux server running apache2. It’s Mandrake (now Mandriva) (an older version.) When the system has suffered abrupt outage (power loss). Everything starts up normally with the exception of httpd2. It claims that […]

I normally don’t follow updates for Oracle, as I don’t have an installation running Oracle to support. Right now, I’m quite glad of that… The Security Fix is talking about the 82 patches they released Tuesday in their quarterly patch release. The fact that they released 82 patches is not what’s disturbing though. According to […]

Since this is a simple tip I’m including it in the basics category. I ran across a pc with a Dell Multimedia Keyboard and they wanted to disable the hotkeys (sound mixer was always popping up because the key was in the way.) Anyway, on older systems, there would be a standalone program running to […]

At this point, I needed to rename or delete some files that windows would not let me touch. I had this winlogon.exe running from a suspect directory c:\windows\inet20001 and windows wouldn’t let me kill it, or remove it’s start entry in the registry. So, I booted my image from a dsl linux cd and opted […]

OK, so, I’m busy killing off running processes and fire up MSConfig to try to keep them from coming back on the next boot. To launch msconfig go to start, run… type in msconfig and click ok. The startup tab is where we’re looking for programs running at startup (makes sense…) This is a bit […]