I was at my parents house the other day and was experiencing some connection problems with my laptop. The WiFi access was working well but i couldn’t browse. Other online-aware programs were fine but the browsing was gone. Since my laptop was the only device with this issue i though that somehow vista or other program - i install a lot of them - was causing this.

To make a long story short, i ended formatting my laptop. The problem was still there and i was very frustrated. During lunch i suddenly thought of making some tests and pings to the ISP dns servers.

Well, it turned out that one of the two DNS server was down and oddly enough my laptop was the only device being assigned that one on the network by the WiFi router.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, read the following lines to learn how to manually change the DNS server settings in Windows Vista or XP.

You need to know the DNS server addresses of your ISP in order to manually enter them. In this case, i just entered to the router’s configuration page and looked for the addresses under Connection Settings.

• Go to Control Panel - Networks - Network Connections.
• Right-click the network connection you are having problems with and choose properties.
• Select Internet Protocol (IPv4) and then click on the properties button.
• Manually enter the preferred and alternative DNS server addresses here. You can try and change the order.
• Click OK.
• Do the above step for IPv6 protocol.

You now should be able to browse normally if at least one server is working.

Take into account that this manual configuration will only work for the Internet connection that is having problems. If you need to connect to a problem-free connection, undo the steps and choose Automatic DNS settings.

CCleaner, a wonderful program for cleaning all kinds of traces from your PC, has new builds available. Previously there only had one installer which bundled Yahoo! Toolbar.

Thankfully, we can download other installers for it.
Just go to their download page and click on other build. You can download the Toolbar-free installer or the portable version wich is the one i recommend because you can use it on your usb drive.

Me, i’m making a custom MSI installer for using on unattended installations.

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Adobe newest Creative Suite 3 installs Apple’s Bonjour service even if you don’t install Version Cue. Its main goal is to provide zero-configuration connectivity between Version Cue server and the suite’s applications.

When installed by Creative Suite 3 applications, the name used by Bonjour for Windows in the services control panel is:

##Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##

If you are using Version Cue, you can correct the service name just by running two commands at a run prompt box (Start - Run):

• “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe” -remove
• “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe” -install

The service will now be displayed with the correct name in the Services control panel.

But if you don’t need it, you can get rid of it easily. Just follow this simple steps:

• Open a Windows Run prompt box (Start - Run) and type the following command: “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe” -remove
• Navigate to the following folder in Windows Explorer: C:\Program Files\Bonjour
• Rename the mdnsNSP.dll file in that folder to mdnsNSP.old
• Restart your computer
• Delete the the Program Files\Bonjour folder

Note: Please take into account that if you are running Windows in other language, the path to Program Files maybe different.

Also remember that if the path to the file contains spaces, you need to enclose the command in ” “, or double quotes. Just as it is shown above.