McFang – Exercising Futility

Posting drivel that is not of interest to anyone.

Posts Tagged Microsoft

Windows Updates Hate

Dec 10

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

After “updating” to IE7, shared drives are treated as internet zone – prompting you to confirm every single time you try to copy a file.

This knowledge-base article describes the problem, however the “fix” does not work.

This registry hack appeared to work: 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\YOUR_SERVER]
"file"=dword:00000001

Then obviously reboot after update the registry, because Winblows can’t seem to get anything done without a reboot.

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Problems adding SP3 to WindowsXP

Jun 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

I was unable to upgrade WindowsXP to SP3, given an access denied error. It was not hard to find a relevant kb article from Microsoft:
kb949377: When you try to install Windows XP Service Pack, you receive the error message “Access is denied” or “Service Pack installation did not complete”

The only given solution that worked was to reset the registry and the file permissions (as given in the kb article):

cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools"
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

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SP2 cripples Windows XP

Feb 18

Posted by mcfang in Operating Systems | No Comments

SP2 brought with it a rather annoying tweak to the TCP/IP stack: a 10-connection-per-second limit.

I can’t remember exactly what alerted me to this problem, it may have been when a link-checker application stalled, or could have been the multi-threaded ftp client I was using.

Either way, the effect of “hitting the wall” was damned annoying and I need to find a way around it. Thankfully I found an article that offered a few solutions.

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