Microsoft Excel will not open two documents with the same name
Microsoft Excel will not open two documents with the same name and instead will display the following error:
A document with the name ‘%s’ is already open. You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders. To open the second document, either close the document that is currently open, or rename one of the documents.
Report a virus
I’m always coming across new viruses that haven’t even been added to the latest anti-virus software.
If I download a file that I suspect is a virus, the first thing I will do is check it against my internal scanner.
If that doesn’t detect it as a virus, the next obvious step is to check with a third party virus scanner. I use VirusTotal as it checks against about 40 anti-virus engines.
Once you’ve established that it might be a virus, how do you report it?
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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…
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:
Read the rest of this entry »
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”.
