I came across a problem today where some co-workers were forwarded a bunch of emails that were attached as files, instead of inline, but they couldn’t open them. They kept trying to open in Outlook Express, which we don’t use. I could have just let them open all the attachments in Outlook Express, it wouldn’t have been a huge deal. But if they wanted to respond back to them they would have to bounce back and forth between the two – slightly annoying. I googled and found this website where you can download the registry key that allows you to open the .eml files in Outlook 2003 or 2007. You just have to make sure you install the key for the correct version of Outlook and either the 32 or 64-bit version of windows (most of you are probably 32-bit).

Before you install the key, you have to make sure you have all the current windows updates associated with Outlook, it won’t work if you don’t. After you check for updates, all you have to do is download the zip file, open it, and double click on the version that matches what you have – the key will install itself. You don’t need to restart the computer and I don’t think you even need to restart Outlook, if it was open. The .eml attachment should now open in Outlook without any problems.

If the link for the .zip file on that website ever dies, I uploaded it here.

Yet another email is floating around out there trying to get you to download a file that’s really a virus. It’s sent from “The Facebook Team” and says something like “for security reasons your password had to be reset” and it tells you to download the .zip or .exe file that is attached (Facebook_Password_4cf91.zip or Facebook_Password_4cf91.exe).

If you look at the email closely enough, it probably isn’t even addressed to you. My Aunt got this email and the name they used referring to her, in the body of the email, was just a bunch of random letters. That, the random letters at the end of the file name and the fact that there is even an attachment at all should throw up red flags. But there will always be people who fall for this kind of thing or just don’t pay attention and download it anyway, which is why there are geeks like me around to fix things when this happens. Unless you reset your password yourself and triggered a confirmation email, you will not get these kind of emails, period.

My Aunt flipped out because she thought she may have saved the file on her computer so this prompted me to do a bit of research on what this virus is. I found the virus total report that shows which scanners are able to locate and eliminate the virus. Only 14 out of the 41 scanners are able to detect it – my Aunt happens to have Symantec, which if you notice is not one of those 14. I’m currently running F-Secure’s online scan and will run Microsoft’s Security Essentials since both of those are listed as being able to detect it.

Here’s the page on F-Secure’s website about the virus. There isn’t a whole lot of information on it. But it does list a registry key that is installed.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\”RunGrpConv” = “1″

If you’re comfortable working with computers you can check the registry yourself for that key. If not then I suggest running the F-Secure online scan on complete mode, if you have time to let it sit for awhile, and also running Microsoft Security Essentials. They are both user-friendly and free. Just be sure to remove security essentials once you’re done if you do have another anti-virus currently installed. Having more than one can really slow the computer down.

The good news is, from what I’ve read it looks like it’s just another virus that causes messages to pop up telling you that you need to pay to download a fake anti-virus in order to fix your computer.  So it doesn’t appear to be something that is terribly difficult to get rid of.

• F-Secure’s online scan
• Microsoft Security Essentials

I’m sure you recognize the reminder we all love to hate.  I could easily disable automatic updates altogether so I don’t get the prompt at all, but knowing me, I’d forget to check for months at a time.  I went searching for a better solution mainly because I was playing a game online one day when the prompt came up in the middle of the game, which forced the game to minimize.  There’s nothing like being in the middle of an attack by a horde of zombies (Left 4 dead, ftw!) when the game suddenly minimizes to remind me to restart my computer!  Ahhh!

Permanently stop Windows Update from both restarting your computer automatically and reminding you to restart:

1. Go to start -> run (for Vista type this in the search bar), type gpedit.msc.
2. Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components – > Windows Update.
3. Double-click No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations and enable it.
4. Then to stop that irritating reminder from popping up every 10 minutes, double-click on Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.  You would think that disabling this would disable the reminder, but it does the same leaving it not configured would do – allows the reminder to popup to interrupt you every 10 minutes.  I don’t quite understand that.  But anyway, after opening the box for this, click on enable and type a 1440 in the box.  This will set it to remind you once a day so you can restart it whenever you want.

I don’t have a Vista box here to test it on, but I’m fairly certain the directions are the same.  If not, leave a comment and I’ll update them.

We had a co-worker come to us asking if it was possible to recover some email messages she had accidentally deleted using shift+delete, which skips the trash folder entirely. I’m not sure how one accidentally presses two keys that really aren’t next to each other and happens to delete important emails, but I have learned not to ask. I googled it and came up with a simple solution.

1. Exit Outlook.
2. Open the Windows registry editor.
3. Browse to My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options.
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type the name DumpsterAlwaysOn.
Note Do not type any spaces in the name.
6. Set the DWORD value to 1.
7. Restart Outlook.

The Tools menu now has the Recover Deleted Items command for every Outlook folder.

Source: Microsoft Office Online

You would think that you would be able to Google the title of this post and easily find a link that would make this possible. I’ve spent a lot of time the last few days doing that exact same thing and not finding much in the way of things that actually work. I wanted a bootable usb drive so I could throw ghost and ghostwalk on it and whatever image we wanted to use. It would save me from having to burn a new CD every time I wanted to use a different image, this way I just delete and copy/paste.

What you will need:

• Boot disk files – you can Google boot disk and get what you need. If you still have a floppy drive in your computer and happen to have a disk laying around you can pop it in, go to my computer -> right-click on the floppy -> format -> and check the box that says create an MS-DOS startup disk.
• HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool – The weird thing is that I couldn’t even find that on their website. But once again Google comes to the rescue, there are plenty of links to it out there.

What to do:

1. Open the HP format tool.
2. Make sure you select the correct drive.
3. Choose either of the FAT file system options.
4. Under volume label give the USB drive a name.
5. Check the box for creating a DOS startup disk and select using dos system files located at:. This is where you either point to your floppy drive if you created a boot disk or to the folder where you downloaded the files to. Tell it to start.
6. You aren’t quite done yet. Go to my computer and open the location of the startup files that you either downloaded or had windows put on the floppy – copy those and paste them onto the flash drive. DO NOT overwrite any files when prompted.
7. Done. Now you can use it as is or add more files to it like I did with ghost and ghostwalk.

This is related to a previous post I did back in March about add-ons slowing down my Aunt’s computers. I don’t use IE so I never payed attention to them before. After working on her computer I messed around with mine a bit to see how the add-ons impacted the application loading time and discovered that there are a handful of add-ons that are, more than likely, completely unnecessary for the typical user.

I went through the add-ons for IE on my computer and disabled 10 out of the 15 in there. I noticed a major difference in the loading time and haven’t had any issues since disabling them. Depending on what programs you have installed on your computer, you may have different add-ons and might have more that can be disabled without causing problems.

Go to the Tools menu -> Manage add-ons and wait a couple seconds for it to load the list. The ones I highlighted in the picture below I would say are perfectly safe to disable. If you later notice something weird, you can always go back in and enable them again. On the far right it shows you how long it takes each add-on to load. Some of them may not sound very long (.29 sec), but they add up and you definitely notice a difference even when you’re saving yourself only a few seconds.

disabled add-ons

If you’re noticing Internet Explorer being slow and can’t figure out what’s going on, try this, it made more of a difference than I expected it to.

This isn’t normally something I would blog about since it isn’t computer related, but I figure enough people would want to do this that I would post it and I’m a tech geek in general so it fits.

I do have to warn you that there is a possibility that you can brick your Wii (making it an expensive paper weight), so be aware of that before messing around with this.

This is the way to make DVDs playable on your Wii, system 4.0 or above (mine is 4.1 right now and it works fine), without having to do the Zelda hack that I’m sure you’ve come across if you have found your way here.

I found this video on youtube explaining how to do it, but I had to do it a bit differently to get it to work. You can go there and watch it if you want and come back to see what I had to do differently. I’ll type out a few things here to get you started, but I won’t type everything out since he has a readme file in the download that has it all step by step.

1. The first thing you want to do is download this zip file that the guy who did the video on youtube put together and save it to your Desktop, or somewhere else easy to get to.
   a) If you don’t have an extracting/unzipping program you can go here to download 7zip.
2. Put your SD card in your computer and go to My Computer or Computer in Vista and open your SD card.
3. Open the zip file that you downloaded and open the readme.txt file. You may need to tell the zip file to open with 7zip if you just downloaded that program. Minimize the readme file for now.
4. Double-click the HackMii Installer folder to open it.
5. Highlight all of those folders and the boot.elf file and extract them to your SD card.
   a) If you already have a folder called private, you can rename it to privateold. That you way won’t delete anything if it’s important. I didn’t have any issues though.
6. Go back to the readme file from before and start from step 3.
7. After you’ve done everything in the readme file open the homebrew channel and go to the homebrew browser.
   a) You now need to download the program that will play the DVDs and not all of them work. It took me a couple hours to figure that out. Go ahead and update the browser if it prompts you.
8. Go to the Media section and find MPlayer CE (Christmas Edition) and click download.
9. Once that is done you can either look around and see what else there is to download (there is tons of stuff). Or you can press the home button on your wiimote and either reboot the wii to get back to the wii menu, or return to loader to go back to the homebrew channel. To get to the menu from the homebrew channel, hit the home button again and then exit.

Playing a DVD on your Wii:

1. Go to the homebrew channel you just installed and click MPlayer CE -> Load.
2. At the black and white menu arrow down to open and press the right arrow button to select it.
3. Go down to DVD Video and press the right arrow again to select it.
4. Use the same controls to go to Play DVD and select it to start the video or go to chapter if you want to select a specific chapter.
a) If you go down and select Play DVD (libdvdnav) instead of the top option to Play DVD, it will send you to the DVD menu so you can get to any extra stuff on the DVD (gag reel, etc.).

The only annoying thing is that there is a volume control on the wii itself that you need to turn up because it’s pretty quiet and you will probably have to turn the volume up on the TV pretty loud after that. Besides that it works perfectly. To increase/decrease the volume on the wii press the plus or minus buttons during the movie.

For controls on how to work the menu during the movie and skip forward or backward, etc you can go here and look at the little table thing. Press the B button during the movie to bring the menu up and press it multiple times to make it go away.

The SD card must be in your Wii for this to work since the programs are not installed on the Wii.

Enjoy your movie

I don’t know why it’s disabled by default and I use it quite often because I’m always playing around and installing things so it’s incredibly irritating to me that you can’t just press ctrl+alt+backspace to restart x.

To enable it you can do it through editing the xorg.conf file:

1. Open a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2. Add this section to the file:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection

3. Save and restart.

4. Yay.

A few other utilities I got from the PC World article linked to in the previous post are RocketDock and Ultimate Windows Tweaker.

RocketDock

Being the multi-tasker that I am, I found this little tool to be pretty handy along with VirtuaWin. I have a few programs in my quicklaunch bar, but I don’t want to overload that so I use RocketDock for a few more shortcuts that I access on a regular basis. I have it set to auto-hide so that it isn’t always a distraction – it’s only there when I need it.

There are different skins for it that you can use and you can go to their website to download icons, more skins, and docklets. I can’t think of a complaint about this, I’ve been pretty happy with it.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker
This is actually an easier way to adjust things that I posted about in my trimming Vista’s fat post. The three sections of the tweaker that I like the most are the personalization, system performance, and additional options.

In the personalization section you can choose which items will show in the start menu, remove some or all icons that show in the taskbar, change the window padding, along with some other features.

The changes I made in the system performance section have made the biggest difference. In there you can change the time the computer waits for services to shut down, the time it waits to end non-responsive applications, and waiting time to kill applications timeout during shutdown. My computer shuts down MUCH faster now.

Finally, the additional options section just has a few things in there that I changed. You can add some useful options to the context menus for files and folders and drives. Also, being able to remove the arrows from creating shortcuts was nice. Definitely not anything that improved performance, but useful changes for me.

There are a lot of other things you can edit with this. I only highlighted the sections that were the most useful to me.

I decided to come up with a list a programs I use to maintain my Vista laptop.  I got some from this PC World article and others I found on download.com.  Instead of making one massive post I’ll break it up into two or three.

First on my list and the most exciting to me is a cool thing called VirtuaWin.

I use Linux all the time at work, the only time I use Windows is when I have to do some maintenance for those in the office who use it. I fell completely in love with the multiple workspaces that you can use in Linux. I have a separate space for email, another for my browser, and another for whatever else I happen to be playing with or troubleshooting. Having multiple workspaces is absolutely necessary for my job, I do way too many things at once to not need that feature.

I got so excited when I heard from a friend of mine about a nifty little program that allows you to have multiple workspaces in Windows. I then read an article somewhere, that I can’t seem to find the link for, about it so I thought I’d give it a try. I was a little worried about how much memory it would suck up and whether it would slow down the start-up and shutdown process of my laptop. I noticed a bit of a slowdown but the benefits outweigh it since it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.

You can have up to 9 workspaces, which I find to be way too many. I have 4 set up but probably only use 3 of them on a regular basis. By default, the hotkey to move between desktops is the windows key + arrow key. There’s an option to make it so that when you’re mouse is against the edge of your screen it switches to another workspace, but I found that to be incredibly irritating so I stuck to the hotkey.  Another thing I like about it is that I finally have a use for the ability of the wheel on my mouse to click.  If I click on the title bar of a window with the mouse wheel it gives the option to move that application to one of the other workspaces – I use that all the time.  You can also add modules from their website to add features, although there aren’t very many.  That’s another plus, they didn’t add a bunch of useless features to the basic installation, if you want extras you can install them yourself.  This is compatible with Vista all the way back to Win98, so if you have a Windows machine this will work for you.

I need a nap, more to come.