My production Vista machine is still acting screwy. When I leave it running all night, as I usually do, to let it run automatic updates for Windows itself, anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and to conduct all kinds of automated housekeeping tasks (disk defrag, file system cleanup, and so forth), this PC hangs every night. Alas, I get no entries in the Windows event logs to tell me what’s causing the problem and I still haven’t been able to pinpoint a definite cause. But when I leave the machine alone for two hours or more, then sit back down to get back to work, the GUI essentially quits responding to user input, and I have to resort to extreme measures to get things working properly again.
Part of my daily routine consists of visiting online message boards for IT and technical classes for instructing online courses for companies that currently include HP, Sony, Radio Shack, and Motorola (I’ve also taught online courses for Symantec, IBM, Forbes and Business Week, and others). One topic that I’ve built courses for and teach regularly has to do with Windows Firewalls, not to be confused or conflated with the Windows Firewall Program introduced with SP1 on Windows XP, and now included with both Windows XP and Windows Vista.
In putting my production machine back together, I noticed that my disk drives and my passively cooled graphics card were running a bit warmer than I might like. So as I took the machine apart to replace the drives I also popped the front cover off and installed a ThermalTake 120mm TurboFan in front of the drive cage at the bottom of the case.
In reading over Chris Pirillo’s daily newsletter this morning, I tripped over an interesting item entitled “Is Maximum PC right about Vista?” For those not already in the know, Maximum PC is a serious PC enthusiast publication, built around a glossy, high-concept monthly magazine and a Web site to match, with coverage of all kinds of high-end PC hardware, systems, peripherals, toys, tools, and more. I almost got lucky about four years ago when one of my publishers decided to go after some of this company’s related book business, but alas the project never came to fruition. I provide all this by way of explaining why this little blurb grabbed my eye and my undivided attention.
I bought a Dell All-in-one (AIO) 968 printer a little over a month ago, to replace the aging Brother fax/printer I purchased almost 10 years ago for my business. Some of the vendors for whom I work require me to fax contracts back to them to get paid, so I’m quite naturally eager to retain fax capability. Alas, however, Vista sent me a “Print Filter Pipeline Host” error every time I tried to use this device, and despite uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, I was not able to make it go away. Each time I re-tried my print job, however, the output would be produced, despite this initial error. Now that I know what the cause was, I’m pretty impressed that anything worked at all.
A number of users have encountered and commented on a flaky “flooding” error on ViztaView.com over the last couple of weeks. They’ve also complained about issues registering for the community, long page waits, and other oddities. Today you might notice that all these troubles have disappeared. That’s because our Managing Editor (yours truly) discovered that we had installed a redundant component under Joomla!1.5, the content management system that runs this site.
I spent some time poking around at techsupportforum.com in their Windows Vista Support area. For those not already in the habit, let me observe that it’s amazing how much you can learn from reading through other user’s problems along with the tools and techniques that knowledgeable experts suggest to help them ease their afflictions, or at least start shooting back at what troubles them. While reading through a thread from a person suffering from driver problems, I learned about the Windows Driver Verifier, aka verifier.exe. But that’s not all I learned…
Thermaltake makes some terrific products for PC enthusiasts and professionals inclined to pick up tools and computer components and indulge in a little do-it-yourself activity. In another recent review, I examined their nifty eSATA/USB hard drive dock, which led them to send me an actively ventilated and much more attractive eSATA/USB drive enclosure: This device is known as the Vi-ON ST0008U 3.5 External Hard Drive Enclosure with Active SMART Cooling System, and it retails for between $44 and $50 online (list price on the Thermaltake product page is $60). For the rest of this review, I’ll simply call it the Vi-ON for brevity.
In case you don’t already know, I make my living by writing articles, white papers, books, video scripts, help files, technical documentation, and other forms of information about computer software, systems, and networks. I’ve been doing this for a long time (since 1986 part-time, and since 1994 full-time). Over the years, I’ve seen some terrible things happen to PCs when users decide to uninstall some particular piece of software, use the vendor’s uninstall utility, and then start encountering problems.
The Windows system configuration tool, msconfig.exe has been around for some time. The easiest way to launch this utility is simply to type msconfig in the Start menu’s search box, but you can also access this utility by typing “system configuration” into Windows Help and Support, then selecting the “Start System Configuration” item that appears in response to this search. You must have administrative privileges, or be able to elevate access, to run this utility.
