Windows Explorer slowdown on video files

I've been getting some frustrating behavior from (File) Explorer in Windows XP while working on a video project. Selecting an AVI file spikes the CPU and locks the file for 30 seconds or more. If it's a corrupt AVI file, my computer can hang for several minutes. I finally tracked down a way to disable whatever preview or statistics Explorer is building. I'm not sure what else it impacts, but so far it's been great. Now I can move and delete video clips without an aggravating pause.

To remove media preview, run: regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
To restore media preview, run: regsvr32 shmedia.dll

CMD as Local System Account

The other day I was doing some testing with different Windows accounts and needed to run a bunch of tests as the Local System Account. Normally I can use runas to get a CMD window for each user I need to test with. But Local System Account is special and you can't just do a runas for it. I don't know why I didn't think of these, but there are at least two ways to get a CMD.exe running as Local System Account, setting it up as a service or using an "at" command.

http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2004/11/29/271987.aspx

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Windows Media DRM Problem

Today I was trying to get Windows Media Player 11 to work with the OverDrive Media Console so I could listen to some free (as in beer) audio books from the library's OverDrive service. It worked fine the first time on my desktop, but when I tried to listen to one on my laptop, I got an error from both OverDrive Media Console and Windows Media Player itself.

"A Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) component encountered a problem ..."

Not very descriptive. Most of the suggestions were to reinstall Media Player. I've had really bad luck with the Media Player install before. It made my laptop unbootable with a persistant blue screen of death. I never could repair it and had to reinstall Windows completely. So I wasn't interested in reinstalling Media Player.

I finally found the solution here. I went to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\DRM and removed everything there. (Actually, I copied the files off to a different directory.) Make sure you have all the "show hidden files" and "show system files" settings set or you won't see what's in there. I didn't have to reinstall anything. It just worked.

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Technocrati tags: Windows fix DRM

Knoppix Rescues Windows Again

Knoppix saved another Windows box for me. This weekend I trashed my laptop a little. I tried installing Ubuntu 7.10 to an old USB hard drive and wasn't paying attention to how the install skipped over the boot loader options. The next thing I know, Ubuntu's wrecked the master boot record (MBR) on my laptop's internal drive. Booting up gives me a painful-looking:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 2

My first attempt was to boot up an XP install CD and try to run FIXMBR. But since it's my company's work laptop, I don't know the local Administrator account's password so I can't even get into the recovery console at all. I was thinking of pulling together all the pieces to download a DOS or Windows 98 floppy image and boot from that to run FDISK /MBR, which supposedly will still work to boot Windows XP.

Then I had my first useful idea in all of this. Knoppix. I popped in an old Knoppix DVD and booted it up. I struggled for a bit with trying to find an XP MBR to dd onto my laptop hard drive, thinking "surely there's an archive of MBRs out there on the net". Then I stumbled across my final answer, ms-sys. Ms-sys can write any of the Microsoft MBR's to a hard drive. I ran "ms-sys -m /dev/sda" and rebooted. Windows XP came up fine.

I've since gone back and tried to make Ubuntu boot from that portable USB drive, but I can't get a machine to even get to the boot loader no matter how I fiddle with the partition table. Maybe I need to try a different drive. I'd love to have a full-blown Ubuntu install on a bootable USB drive, especially since Wifi support finally works so well.

Technocrati tags: knoppix fixing Windows MBR

The Wrath of the Three Year Old

A few months ago my 3 year old boy destroyed my wife's laptop. I walked into the room and he was there on the couch with it on his lap. We'd recently replaced the keyboard he'd slowly been picking apart. Wanting my wife to continue enjoying typing with the whole alphabet, I told him to get away from her laptop. Big mistake. He clawed desperately at the keyboard, like some bizarre Tasmanian devil starving for little white-on-brown letters. Stop that! Even worse. He stood up, screwed up his face, and lifted the laptop up high. As I tried to close the gap across the room, he threw it down hard. Right on the plugged in power cord. At least he didn't use a Phillips screwdriver on it.

I inspected the damage. The screen was intact. We'd lost some plastic around the power jack though and it wouldn't run off of the power supply, just the battery. An hour and 200 tiny screws later, I'd disassembled the entire laptop to get to the power jack. It looked fine. A little bent, some broken plastic shroud, but the solder joints were fine and everything seemed connected. I connected the mish-mash of components together and got it to power on fine. Problem fixed? 30 minutes and 200 tiny screws later it was back together. It powered on and ran from the adapter. It even booted up into Windows fine. I gave it back to my wife.

3 seconds later it locked up. Every time the cord moved it locked up. 30 minutes and 200 tiny screws later, I figured out that the slightly bent jack must be shorting out against an adjacent board. I noticed that eBay was full of power jacks for the Dell Inspiron 8600 so they're pretty fragile. Two layers of electrical tape solved the shorting problem. 30 minutes and 200 tiny screws and back to my wife.

It worked. If she was at all careful with the power cord, it ran fine and stayed charged. Problem solved.

Then she got a blue screen. Then the WinXP chkdsk on bootup screen. Disk errors. I spent a couple hours re-running chkdsk and eventually some other disk tools trying to get the drive working enough to keep going, but Windows was quite offended by this and would have no part. It didn't even like me copying her data off and kept thwarting me partway through by constantly taking those 3 minute "not going to do anything but make hard drive sounds" breaks that XP likes to do even when it's running fine.

I gave the laptop the finger and popped in a Knoppix DVD. With very few complaints, I was able to run two different backups of the laptop: a complete drive image using partimage and more useful file-by-file copy. With those safely on an external hard drive, I tried to make the laptop's drive work. I ran some destructive disk testing tools that seemed to think it was fine. I reinstalled Windows XP and got blue screens. I ran some more disk scan passes and it said it was fine. I ran memory scans for days. Nothing wrong.

So is it the hard drive or something really wrong in the laptop? I cleared off another laptop drive, put it in and installed Windows. It won't boot. I booted up Knoppix and checked that the partition was marked bootable. I installed Ubuntu on the drive and it booted and ran fine. I reinstalled XP but it still wouldn't boot. Maybe the drive controller is bad somehow. I cleared off a USB drive and pulled the laptop-size drive from it and put it in the laptop. I reinstalled Windows and this time it booted fine. It ran for a few days of light use with no problem.

I bought a new-ish hard drive from Geeks.com and got XP reinstalled and it's running fine. I was able to recover almost every file but still haven't tried to fight the battle of getting iTunes to recognize it's DRM protected content my wife purchased. I wish I could make the 3 year old do that for me.

Stop That Windows Automatic Reboot After Updates

I just came back to my rebuilt XP laptop after a meeting and found that it had rebooted itself, losing some code changes I was working on. One of the most annoying things about Windows XP is the way it will automatically reboot after installing a Windows update. Every time I set up a new Windows machine I forget about it until I suddenly find my machine rebooted and all my work-in-progess lost or in a questionable state. Thanks guys.

But there's a way to fix it besides running Linux or Mac OS X.

There are two settings we can change. One is to disable the automatic reboot. The other is to slow down the popup prompt that keeps reminding you to reboot.

1. Start->run "gpedit.msc".
2. Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
3. Change the "No auto-restart..." setting to "Enabled".
4. Change the "Re-prompt for restart..." setting to "Enabled" and change the wait period to 1440 minutes (the max).

Now when an update requires a reboot, you'll get a popup reminder window only once a day and more importantly, no automatic reboots.

VMWare Beep

Somehow my latest work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) has a PC speaker circuit that bypasses mute settings and the headphone jack. I was finally able to silence the base Windows XP I have installed, but I still had issues with different systems running under VMWare Workstation. I'd get a nice loud beep on a reboot, Solaris X86 somehow locked up into an ear-splitting squeal, FreeNAS beeps on every boot, etc.

After a lot of tinkering, I finally came across the answer here, which now seems to be a dead link:

Go to the global VMWare settings:
"\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini"

And add:
mks.noBeep = "TRUE"

That finally did it, at least in v5.5.

UPDATE: Ethan says it works fine for v6.0 on Vista except his config.ini was in:
"C:\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini"

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Technocrati tags: Windows VMWare

BEEP

Somehow my latest work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) has a PC speaker circuit that bypasses mute settings and the headphone jack. Windows loves to BEEP on certain events, whether it's just control-G ASCII characters in the console, or a bell in a PuTTY window.

The quick solution is to run the secret: "net stop beep". That stops the secret beep service from running.

But a more permanent fix is to go into the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System, Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button). In the View menu, pick "Show hidden devices". Now down in the treeview, under Non-Plug and Play Drivers, there is a "Beep" driver. You can change the properties on it to disable it and stop/disable the service. Ignore the prompts to reboot now.

That's it. No more beeps. Well, unless you run VMWare. See my other post about that.

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Technocrati tags: Windows Dell D620 beep

Windows driver for Linux disks

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

This is only for ext2 (and 3?) filesystems, but that's still pretty
cool if you dual-boot or otherwise share physical disks between Linux
and Windows.