Today I had a call from a guy who said… “My internet isn’t working on my main computer.” I said ok, expecting a virus, corrupt winsock, wrong tcp/ip settings, or a bad nic or something…

When I got there I found that none of the above was the case. Instead the deal was that IE was using a massive amount of memory when viewing certain websites. One of those websites was yahoo.com, and that was also set as their home page.

See the screen shots for the memory useage, and then following for the resolution:

I tried several things… Including removing and reinstalling IE7. I removed the only version of flash player that was on the system – an it was an old one. Finally, what seemed to actually fix the problem, was installing the latest flash player version – 9.something…

For your reference, here are links both to remove all Flash player versions and to install the latest:

Remove: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157

Install Latest: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

So, there you go!

All the best,

Luke

So today I was working on this lady’s virus laden computer.  I thought it was clean.  Until I suddenly realized that it was making a massive number of connections to port 25 on random IP addresses all over the globe.  Check out this nestat:

Spam Bots

All of this to say…  this is why a “flatten and restore” aproach to virus removal is ALWAYS the best.  I thought it was clean.  It ran clean, it “felt” clean – anyone who has spent over 40 hours in their life removing computer viruses will know what that means.  BUT IT WASN’T CLEAN.  So, if in doubt, or even if not in doubt, reformat.

Best Wishes,

Luke

So yesterday a friend who is a an amateur videographer said that even though he has a DVD burner, and even though Adobe Premier Elements has burnt DVD’s for him in the past… It is now saying that there is no DVD burner present with which to do the job.

After some troubleshooting, I decided that it was time to go online and see if anyone else was having the same problem. I found that they were. If you haveing this problem, do yourself a favor and visit this site: http://premierepro.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ:Why_can%E2%80%99t_I_burn_a_DVD%3F.

Just to help you out here is the solution in a nutshell:

1) Open regedit.

2) Navigate to this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

3) Go to the “LowerFilters” key

4) Add “PxHelp20″ and “PFC” to the list in lower filters. They should both be on separate lines and PxHelp20 should be at the very top of the list.

Hopefully that will get your friends wedding into her DVD player a bit sooner!

All the best,

Luke

Ok, I’ve been having this problem on a user’s workstation only with certain word documents located on an external web server. I couldn’t quite determine what caused some to do it and others not to… but here’s the symptoms and the resolution:

Symptoms
A user clicks on a link like this: http://www.somedomain.com/somewordfile.doc and either saves the file to a local location or IE will say “404 not found” if IE is configured to open the Office documents in the same window.

Resolution
Install Office 2003 Service Pack 3. Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85AF7BFD-6F69-4289-8BD1-EB966BCDFB5E&displaylang=en. That fixed the problem for me!

By the way, if you are wondering how to get Office documents to open in Internet Explorer, go to My Computer, Click Tools, Folder Options, File Types tab. Go to the doc file type (or xls if that is applicable in your case). Click on the “Advanced” button. Check the box that says “Browse in same window.” That should do it!

Best wishes!