Simple Trick to Keep Your Computer from Locking Up

How many times have you been working on your Windows computer and without warning it locks up. Unfortunately many of us will say that this happens much more than you’d like.   One of the key reasons that your computer locks up is due to a non-responsive program, in other words a program or file running just gets stuck.

Fortunately, windows has an option that allows you to get one step closer to avoiding those very annoying lockups.  This isn’t a cure-all, but can be helpful.  This only requires a simple tweak to your registry. Here’s how….  (note: I always make a backup of my registry before making changes, so I recommend you do this first but not required).

1) Go To Regedit: Start -> Run ->  Type: Regedit

2) Find the correct directory: HKey_Current_User -> Control Panel -> Desktop

3) Find the correct file: Look on the right side and scroll down to find WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll notice that this likely says 20000 today.  That’s the time in miliseconds that it waits before it stops an application that has locked up.  That’s 20 seconds!  But we’ll change that…..

4)  Modify the File: Double click on WaitToKillAppTimeout.  You’ll then get a new window that allows you to edit the “Value Data”.  I changed mine to 1000 (1 second).  Then click “OK” to complete the modification.

5) Close out of the registry. Click the big x on the top upper right.

6) You’re done….

One step closer to a finely tuned machine.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website that allows you to lookup and report unwanted phone calls.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

4 Simple Steps to Change Your Computer Sounds

Tired of your standard Windows Startup and Shutdown tunes?

If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day.  The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest.  Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence.  You’ll need two soundbites.

Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles.  Key to note:

1. It must be in the .WAV format.
2. The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.

Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using  any converter.  My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.

Step 2.   Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.

Step 3. Rename the old files.

1. Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
2. Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and  Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).

Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”

You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Admin’s Arsenal: PSTools

The PSTools suite is one of those things that you’ll find new uses for every time you play with it. The PSTools suite was developed by Mark Russinovich who worked on the original NTFS file system, and hence has a rather unique insight into the inner workings of Windows systems.

The PSTools suite is comprised of the following utilities:

• PsExec - execute processes remotely
• PsFile - shows files opened remotely
• PsGetSid - display the SID of a computer or a user
• PsInfo - list information about a system
• PsKill - kill processes by name or process ID
• PsList - list detailed information about processes
• PsLoggedOn - see who’s logged on locally and via resource sharing (full source is included)
• PsLogList - dump event log records
• PsPasswd - changes account passwords
• PsService - view and control services
• PsShutdown - shuts down and optionally reboots a computer
• PsSuspend - suspends processes
• PsUptime - shows you how long a system has been running since its last reboot (PsUptime’s functionality has been incorporated into PsInfo)

While these tools work locally (and in most cases work better than the native Windows utilities, or provide functionality that is not available natively), they really shine when it comes to working with remote machines. If I had nothing else but a fresh (default) Windows install, I could probably continue to administer my network using the PSTools.

Notice I said nothing but a default windows install. Microsoft has done something rather unique with the PSTools suite (in fact with the entire Sysinternals utilities collection), and made them usable from a “live” website (to get an overview of what is available, just type live.sysinternals.com\tools into your browser’s address bar).

Now all these tools are stand alone executables (no need to install), so they can be run from a USB drive (SWEET!!!), however being able to run them without even having the executables on the machine is just awesome!

Hate Telemarketers? Use This Nifty Tool to Look Them Up

  I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get a call from a telemarketer at least once a week if not much more.  They’ll call and leave no message and annoy the heck out of you.

Unfortunately, some of these calls are actually made by criminals who try to get your personal information.

News articles over the past few days discuss about people trying to scam you out of your money or your private information.  Scammers posing as US Department of Revenue employees, local bank employees, even police officers, have all been in the news over the past few days.

There’s a website called CallCatalog.com that uses crowd sourcing to grow their database of telemarketers.  Crowd sourcing is basically when you, I, and everyone else go there and upload our experiences; it then shares it with everyone else.  Sort of like a social network.  When you go to their website, you put the phone number of the caller you want to lookup in the yellow box at the top of the page.  It then presents information on what other people have written about these callers. 

You can also post your own complaint.

Their blog also provides some additional information about how to deal with telemarketers and unwanted callers.  Check them out.

A better add remove program for free. (Windows Download)

Freeware application Revo Uninstaller has both an installed version and a portable version for your thumb drives. We used the newest version release on June 17th 2008.

So I hear you all asking : “what does Revo do? Why is it better than the built in Windows Uninstaller?”

If you’ve ever had a piece of malware install itself on your machine, you can probably already answer that question. I hate malware and I hate spyware. Not because it takes time to undo what they have done, or the possible security issues. Well actually yeah I do hate those as well but I am talking about the virtual hoops these companies go through to make sure you CAN’T uninstall or disable their crap-ware. Read more »

Network documentation and inventory made easy with free tools.

For reasons I cannot fathom, the words “network documentation” are like kryptonite for IT people. I’ve seen hardened SysAdmins cringe in fear at the mere mention of network documentation, and it always makes me shake my head and wonder why.

Network documentation is your friend. Unlike tech support for your backup software vendor (who universally seem to only be available 8-5 Monday to Friday), network documentation will be there to hold your hand at 3am after you’ve been trying to restore a downed server for 10 hours, and your $10,000 tape library has just gone up in flames like it was a Dell laptop battery (taking all of your current backup tapes with it).

Everyone seems to have this misconception that network documentation is this incredibly long and difficult process. I would put forth that it is neither. Let me show you just how easy some simple network documentation can be. All of the tools mentioned here are FREE (some may be ad supported, but as is the case with Spiceworks, for a small annual fee the ads can be disabled).

First we start with the Servers. These are likely the most valuable asset in your network, and should be treated as such. The first tool we will look at is the SYDI project.

SYDI is essentially a set of scripts (extensively for Windows, some Linux as well), which will gather TONS of information about the machine they are run on, and optionally create a nice Word document from that information (you must have Microsoft Word installed on the machine you run SYDI from for this feature to work).

SYDI was created by Patrick Ogenstad, and I have found it to be incredibly useful. I currently use SYDI to generate basic documentation for all of the servers on my network (currently all of my Linux servers are Gentoo, and I was able to get the Linux script for SYDI working on them with minimal effort). I have these scripts set to run on the first day of every month, and output the resulting files to a network share.

There is going to be some information (which you will definitely want) that SYDI does not gather. I’ve found that there are a great many tools that can help you get this data automatically, and rather than attempt to cover everything available, I am going to focus on the tools that I use.

I am a big fan of finding ways to do things with the Least Amount Of Administrative Effort (or LAOAE, often pronounced “lay-away”), so when available I like to use tools that can fit multiple needs. The next tool I am going to cover is Spiceworks Desktop, and it fills several of my needs.

Spiceworks is agentless, can be installed on either a server or a desktop machine, and can be accessed from any computer on the network using a web browser (don’t worry, it has extensive security capabilities, including Active Directory integration). One caveat for spiceworks is that you should not try to install it on a machine who’s name contains any “illegal” characters (-,!,?, etc. - this causes weird issues with device discovery).  Spiceworks does many things, but the one we are really interested in here is inventory.

The inventory feature of Spiceworks will discover and attempt to identify every device on your network. Once discovery is complete you can view and categorize the devices it finds. The really useful feature for me is the ability to attach notes and files to the devices it finds. Also at this point you can fill in the information that SYDI omitted in your Server Documentation.

Among other things, I use Spiceworks as a repository for my network documentation and as an archive for system event logs. This provides a way for me to keep everyone in the IT department on the same page, and makes it really easy to keep a running changelog for every machine on our network.

No, how do we get those event logs? If you are running Windows machines, I have a script that I’ve written that I use to gather the event logs from my servers to a network share. The code for logArchive.vbs can be found here.

Now then, see how easy it is to generate basic network documentation?

Of course you will also want to eventually create a network map, an IT Service catalog, and… well let’s just say that you can follow this particular rabbit hole as far down as you’d like to go.