Don’t forward virus warnings, delete them

If you’ve ever received a virus warning from your friends, family or co-workers, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These virus warnings are hoaxes and are untrue reports.

For example, the Olympic Torch virus is a hoax and was identified back in early 2006, according to UK based anti-virus company Sophos.

You are encouraged NOT to forward these types of warnings to people as not only is it a waste of time and bandwidth, but it can also confuse or worry the recipient.


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Internet

Bare LFs in SMTP 0×800CCC0F

Recently one of my clients received the following error in Windows Mail on Windows Vista:

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Subject ‘Fw: ‘, Account: ‘BT Yahoo! Mail’, Server: ‘mail.btinternet.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: ‘451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.’, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 451, Error Number: 0×800CCC0F


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Internet

Alternative name servers

If you’ve ever had a problem with your ISPs DNS name servers then you’ll probably find this very useful.

The domain name system (DNS) is a way of resolving a host name to an ip address.

* Dns resolved example.com to 208.77.188.166

To do this, you need DNS servers or name servers, which are usually provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Sometimes the domain name servers provided by your ISP go down or get overloaded and stop responding.

If your computer is unable to resolve a domain name to an IP address, generally this means that you will be unable to browse the internet. Very annoying, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So what can I do if my ISPs name servers go down? Use alternative name servers often known as public nameservers or public dns servers.


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Internet

RemoveWGA

Back in 2007 I briefly wrote about Windows Genuine Advantage Removal.

I have decided to revisit this topic after Microsoft released Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) recently and writing about how to remove the OGA notifier.


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Software

ERROR 5 (0×00000005) Copying NTFS Security to Destination Directory

Got this error today using ROBOCOPY to copy files to a SAMBA share.

ERROR 5 (0×00000005) Copying NTFS Security to Destination Directory e:\xxxx\
Access is denied.

I figured out a workaround…


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Software

Remove OGA Notifier

I had a call today about Microsoft OGA (Office Genuine Advantage) Notifier becoming an annoyance for a client.

Office Genuine Advantage covers Office XP, Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

It had to go…


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Software

Ways to prevent malware infection for free

There’s lots of ways to prevent a malware (virus or spyware) infection for free, here’s a list:
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Software

Error 1747 : The Authentication Service is Unknown

Today I had a newish Windows Vista machine that had the following error:

Error 1747 : The Authentication Service is Unknown

This error occurred when I attempted to start the “Windows Event Log Service”.


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Software

Fix Adobe Illustrator (.ai) and Photoshop (.psd) Thumbnail Icons for Windows Explorer

If like me you don’t like using Adobe Bridge and instead like to see thumbnail icon previews of your Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop (.ai, .eps and .psd) files in Windows Explorer then this is the fix you need.


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Software

How do I make Yahoo Mail default mail provider in Vista?

Many users, particularly users of BT Yahoo! Broadband (btinternet.com) are having trouble understanding how to get to their BT Yahoo Mail on Windows Vista.

This is because on Windows XP BT Yahoo used to provide the BT Yahoo Browser, which was based on Internet Explorer 6 and now outdated, which means that BT Yahoo Browser is no longer available.


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Software