12.19.08
Posted in Technical at 11:03 am by Olrik
I thought I’d write up another technical post on my blog. Today I want to write about the repair utilities built into Windows Vista. A lot of people already know about the fact that Microsoft had built a few repair utilities into Windows XP. The “Windows Repair” and “Recovery Console” are tools that are frequently used by technicians to get machines running again.
Now Microsoft did a great job with the recovery tools they built into the Vista disks. A few weeks ago I had a crashing hard drive and had to replace it with another one. After copying my data across my Master Boot Record was broken. In Windows XP a Technician would have to go into the Recovery Console and use the ‘fixmbr’ command usually paired with the ‘fixboot’ command.
Now I never worked with the Vista repair utilities until then. I was looking around for the Recovery Console, or something similar, and found a little graphical menu that I could do all my work with. There was one simple selection “Fix Boot” which fixed the MBR and made me able to boot into Windows Vista again without any extra fuss. I was really pleased with the way it worked and I am sure that it would make a technician’s life a lot easier.
I will probably be writing a few “How To” guides in the future and this will probably be one of the parts I will be covering. It is defenitily an advance in making the complicated commands easier for the ‘average joe’.
Regards,
Olrik
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Posted in Personal at 11:03 am by Olrik
For the people wondering where I was the last 2-3 days, I have been at my mother’s home and sadly, when I came back home on wensday I noticed I had no internet connection. I immediately thought my router had one of it’s weird days so I decided I’d do a power cycle. Turned the devices off, turned them back on. Now normally, the network would be back up and I could log into mIRC, MSN, Gmail and all the other applications that I have online, sadly though, this was not the case. I figured something was wrong at my ISP so I checked the log of my modem and noticed that the modem had no Internet IP address anymore. The beautiful numbers “0.0.0.0″ appeared for me.
Well, of course you then call the helpdesk to find out if there are any known malfunctions or something but even there, no known issues. The guy ran me through all the steps (which I already did..) and eventually escalated the call to the technical service. I was quite pleased to find out that the technical service called me back within 2 hours and had me check a few things on the modem. I was SO happy to notice that once I mentioned looking into the logs of the modem the guy figured out I was a techy and started talking to me in a way my mom would never understand 
After some troubleshooting and thoughts between the two of us we figured out it was the hardware. JOY! Modem replacement needed which takes up to 5 days for the delivery. I wasn’t pleased at the fact I needed to live without the internet for a couple of days considering I’ve got a lot of college work to finish up. Though I was really pleased at the fact that my ISP responded quickly and to the point.
Well, I think I’m going to round this post up. I would’ve posted this on wensday itself, but sadly I couldn’t. (Duh ;)) I’ve written this post offline in good old fashion notepad.
Regards,
Olrik
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12.17.08
Posted in Personal at 10:11 am by Olrik
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post.. The reason behind this would be a couple of things.. One of those being my college at this time. It has been a stressfull two weeks as I have been trying to get all my work finished in time and even now I still have work to do.
I still have my Geeks to Go course to finish up, My college work to complete, Figure out how to tell this girl I fancy her without creating odd situations AND ontop of all that I’ve got things at home which aren’t all sunshine. Sometimes I wish I could live on an Island to hide from all the worries I have, but sadly we can’t run away from our problems or hide from it. Instead we must solve our problems, and that can be stressful.
All in all.. this is going to be a great 2 weeks!
Regards,
Olrik
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12.03.08
Posted in Rant, Technical at 1:41 pm by Olrik
A question that has been tormenting a lot of technicians and malware removal experts. I guess it’s the constant adds /everywhere/ that scream: “Click here to fix all your problems!”. Most of the times, people don’t even know what they are fixing, or why. Sometimes, people know they are ‘cleaning’ (note the quotes) the registry, but don’t know what consequences it can have.
Registry Cleaners, are bad!
I just can’t say it enough. There are so many people that run a registry cleaner at the first sight of an error. If you’re experiencing an error, either trace down the problem and fix it, or ask help on a tech site. (A few links to Tech Sites are at the bottom of this blog) Running a Registry Cleaner isn’t the ‘cure to all’ and will most likely not fix your problem.
Miekiemoes (A valued expert) wrote an interesting article on her blog here.
Please take the time to read through it and solve your problems the correct way, and don’t use Registry Cleaners.
Regards,
Olrik
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12.02.08
Posted in Technical at 3:51 am by Olrik
Right, the first technical post on my blog. I hope there will be more in the future.
I want to talk about blue screens, or ‘Blue Screen of Death’ as most techies say. I think most of the people reading this would know what I am talking about, One of the really pretty blue screens with black text and it’s all jibba jabba to you. Well, today I shall tell you that to a lot of the techies this ‘jibba jabba’ is actually useful. I don’t know how many times I have ran into some people that ask me for help with their computer and didn’t write down the information on the blue screen. (And this not only counts for blue screens, this counts for ANY error they get).
To us the stop codes that blue screens show (the part that says: STOP: 0×0000000A (0×009F1465, 0×00000002, 0×00000001, 0×81CADC56)) are the most usefull information a technician could get when you are having a blue screen of death. Aside from the Stop Code that you get, there is a possibility that the screen will show something like “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” (the same format, uppercase letters with underscores in between words). If you can see this on the Blue Screen, please write this down too. The more information we get the better. And finally, on the same blue screen, it might show a filename. This is usually the file causing the issue, or the file has to do with it. If you can find a filename in your blue screen, please write it down.
As a final note, I want to ask everybody that reads this to PLEASE (if I could make this flashing red with big exclemation marks, I would) write down error codes if you get them. It makes our life so much easier!
Regards,
Olrik
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