A Microsoft Energy-Saver quick-wash Linkpost

The Valca family is recovering today.

Lavie has bloomed again after a three-week battle with a nagging flu.  Alvis is recovering from homework and adjusting to having a TV in her own bedroom.

And me?

I’m trying to catch up on blog posting, several hours of DVR recordings, and the regular Sunday laundry offerings.

It’s cloudy outside but warm and cozy inside.

Wash, Rinse, Recycle

• Process Explorer v11.32 - “This update fixes a bug in the process security page's name resolution and uses history graph tooltips that track the mouse.”

• Autoruns v9.38 - “This fixes a bug that prevented v9.37 from viewing the system account's profile on 32-bit Windows.”

• ZoomIt v3.0 - “This major update to ZoomIt, the Sysinternals screen magnification and annotation utility, adds a LiveZoom mode on Windows Vista and higher, allows you to change the typing and break timer font, adds the ability to copy the magnified screen to the clipboard with Ctrl+C, and introduces a new configuration interface.”

• The Case of the Crashed Phone Call – Mark’s Blog. Mark Russinovich presents a new case where VOIP calls keep crashing David Solomon’s Vista system.  Great troubleshooting exercise.

• How do I Fix a Corrupted Virtual Hard Disk? - Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog.  Ben Armstrong provides some great information regarding the structure and troubleshooting of VirtualPC VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) files.

• Cross Platform Sysprep’ing with XP SP3  - David Remy’s “Ping” blog.  David is one of  my prime go-to sources for information and answers with Sysprep.  In this guide, he shows how to deal with cross-core hardware cloning (AMD <—> Intel) deployments with Sysprep.  Not a common situation, but good information to keep handy.

• Fix for Windows Vista Black Screen of Death, aka KSOD - the back room tech.  Julie does it again with a great find for Vista support staff.  When the black-screen-of-death occurs just after reboot, you are presented with “a black screen with a white mouse cursor and nothing else ever loads (no logon screen, etc). Safe mode does the same thing. Last Known Good configuration and System Restore do not fix it except in rare cases where performing a System Restore to 1 month ago or earlier does…”  The fix Julie found involves the off-line editing of the system’s registry, and a particular registry key.

• Download details: IE App Compat VHD – Microsoft Downloads – I know I posted it before but I’m sticking it here since I keep coming back for it.  MS has updated their free VHD builds of XP and VIsta for IE testing so that these don’t expire until April 09.  I keep these handy for quick and painless testing of software and applications.

• The Internet Explorer 8 User-Agent String (Updated Edition) – IEBLog – Brief info on how the User-Agent string is presented to web-servers in IE8.

• IE8 in Windows 7 Beta – IEBLog – Turns out that Windows 7 Beta actually is using a modified version of IE 8 beta.  This post gets into the particulars.

• Make Microsoft Remote Desktop A Portable App  MakeUseOf.com – We use a Novell remote desktop support product in our shop, and at home I use ShowMyPC.com as a free and easy remote-support solution.  But I do like portable applications, and learning the elements that make it up was interesting, although as a post commenter stated, I’m not sure what purpose this fulfills.

• Howto: Use msizap to remove orphaned cached Windows Installer Data Files to increase free disk space  - the back room tech – Julie also guides us in some sweet CLI work with msizap which I did not realize is part of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility which I do use fairly regularly at work on systems.

• RSS-powered Windows 7 desktop slideshows – istartedsomething – Long Zheng dishes up some clever work for W7 and provides us the method (and packages) to serve up RSS image feeds directly to the desktop.  Still hack/beta level work at the moment, Long does show us the possibilities that W7 may offer in the future.

--Claus V.