Symantec Thursday released a free tool that wipes spurious entries from Windows’ registry that had crippled some PCs running the company’s security software after they were upgraded to Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Vista SP1.

The tool, SymRegFix, had been promised by Symantec two weeks ago when users reported that upgrading to XP SP3 emptied Windows’ Device Manager, deleted network connections and packed the registry with thousands of bogus entries.

Symantec initially blamed Microsoft for the snafu, but later accepted some responsibility. Last week, the company said the combination of a Microsoft process and the SymProtect feature of its Norton-branded consumer security software had added the errant registry entries, and it told users to turn off that feature before upgrading.

If you have experienced some problems when using Symantec products and upgraded to XP SP3 or Vista SP1, download this tool and run it to correct the issues.

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The day before yesterday, i talked to a cousin that was having problems with his dvd drive. Windows didn’t show it in explorer and in device manager there was this error: Device Cannot Start (Code 10).

Then, i remembered having to face this problem more than once before. I offered my help as usual and the problem was solved. I thought of posting about it just in case someone needs a quick fix for it.

This problem can have many possible causes. The most common ones are that programs for burning or ripping, like Nero, AnyDVD and others sometimes left drivers installed when they are removed.

The first solution is to re-install the program. About a year ago, AnyDVD caused this, so re-installing it would solve the problem, same with some old versions of Nero. Try this to see if a program you installed/uninstalled was the cause.

The other solution involves deleting two registry entries and restarting your computer. It works for XP and Vista.

• Open the Windows Registry Editor. Type regedit in the Run box of the Start Menu.
• Navigate to this path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
  Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
• Go to File and choose Export. Then select Selected Branch and save this in case you run into a problem. You will be able to restore these values if something goes wrong.
• Right click these two entries and delete them. UpperFilters and LowerFilters. If you only have one of them there, don’t worry, delete it.
• Restart you computer. You should be able to see and use your CD-DVD drive again.

In case deleting the key causes you more trouble or conflicts, double click the file you saved and restart Windows. The entries will be restored as they were before deleting them.

Yesterday i read this on some sites: Windows Live Messenger is blocking sites like YouTube and Deviantart, among others…

People went crazy on this because many thought that Microsoft was behind this “censorship” of website url being sent in Windows Live Messenger. You can imagine all the complains that were posted on major news sites and forums.

Just a few minutes ago i went to the official Inside Windows Live Messenger blog and learned that this was just an error and it wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. Instead, they posted that a third-party partner of them handles the blocking system.

According to them, the problem is now gone.

As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses. We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users. And we want to thank those of you that reported this problem to us so that we could quickly fix it. Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours. [...]

Source: URL Blocking: Problem now fixed

Since Microsoft released Windows SP3 to the general public, some users are reporting an endless reboot cycle when installing the service pack.

There is a discussion already going on in Microsoft TechNet forums regarding this problem.

Jesper Johansson, a Microsoft MVP in Windows Security posted on his blog an extensive article about this particular problem, which seems to affect AMD-based computers only. The article has been updated to include some possible workarounds.

I haven’t tried SP3 in AMD-based computers yet so i can’t confirm this, but if you are experiencing this issue, please refer to both that article and forum topic to search for answers.

Source: ComputerWorld

It seems that more often than not, we encounter ourselves with internet connection problems, computers that can’t see each other on the local network and problems that appear suddenly after everything was working well.

There is an easy way to try something before checking something else or calling for help.

This is called Power Cycling and can help you with your internet connection, booting problems and local network issues. It consists of turning off/on your equipment exactly in order. Follow this steps to do a complete Power Cycle:

• Turn your computer(s) off. It is important to unplug the power cords. If you have a laptop, unplug it and remove the battery for a few seconds.
• Turn off your router(s) and/or internet modem. Unplug the power cords, it is important.
• After you have all your equipment turned off, wait from 30 to 60 seconds for any residual power to drain from your devices.
• Now you have to turn on, in order, all your devices. Turn the internet modem on and wait for all its status lights to show that a connection has been established successfully. Turn the router on and wait about 30 seconds for it to initialize properly. Then turn on your computer(s).

Now you should be able to connect to the internet or see other computers on the network. Do this everytime you experience slow speeds, intermittent signal on the wireless network and local network computers can’t see each other after they were fine.

If this does not solve your problem, you will have to contact tech support or call someone to help you out.

I was reading the other day a blog entry from the developer of Xplorer2 and i remebered that i suffered the same problem when i was traveling some time ago.

The problem is that some times, one can’t send email when outside the region of our own ISP. I don’t remember where i was but i could’t send any email. I returned home frustated after that and i forget the problem until recently when it happened to me again.

The solution is to change the port for the Outgoing email server. The default in all email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Eudora is 25. Chage it to port 587 and give it a try. I was able to send email this way without any problems using Outlook 2007.

Read the article here.

If you ever encounter yourself stuck in a file operation that cannot be completed, like moving or deleting a file or folder this program can help you. It is called Unlocker and it adds an entry to the shell context menu.

When you try to delete or move a file or folder and windows says it cannot do it because another process or person is accessing it, you right-click the file or folder in question and choose Unlocker.

It opens a windows where you can see which process are locking the item. You can either kill the process or unlock it. The latter works great for 99% of the cases. If you still can’t do it, well, kill the process and you are ready to go.

Its freeware

Website Download

I read about some users having problems when installing Vista SP1. The problem i had with it was post it here.

Some users ran into problems because they had installed a language pack in windows prior to installing the service pack.

If this is your case, read the following article which describes the error and offers a solution.

I already tried a new disc image that microsoft released with an existing spanish language pack. It worked great but some items were not translated to spanish from the english disc image. This is because some things has changed in SP1 and microsoft will release updated language packs in the near future.