Freezing when overheating with Windows Media Centre

A couple of weeks ago (bank holiday Monday) my laptop suddenly froze. I was busy typing a WordPress post when it happened. The only application that I was using was Google Chrome. It happened a couple of times that day. So the next day, after running Windows memory diagnostics all night and nothing being reported, I took it into some people to have a look. They said it was overheating. It would take a couple of days to strip down and clean out. I said I'd prefer to take the machine home; I wanted to take copies of files rather than attempt to recover from a backup. When I got home I thought I'd perform some additional diagnostics of my own.

1. installed a program called speedfan444.exe 
2. didn't do any configuring - just left it running
3. when the machine locked up it was no longer visible - DOH!
4. so I paid more attention when I'd restarted it.
5. restart temps were showing at 56 to 61 degrees C
6. when it appeared to lock up the CPUs were running at approx 70% -temps were higher
7. I could see some fluctuations and realised I was just about able to do things
8. So I started Windows Task Manager, and viewed processes from all users
9. and found wmpnetwk.exe to be using 50% CPU
10. I had to kill it - service stop didn't work
11. then I disabled the service
12. restarted
13. temperatures and CPU have been much lower since.

So why did this problem appear now? Well I'd only just played with Windows Media Centre (WMC) a couple of days before. I was trying to do something with one of my customer's radio interviews; convert from wma to mp3. I thought WMC might do the trick. It didn't, but I did find an Aussie prog to do the job.

Anyway, it appears that WMPNetwk.exe was now resident in my machine and it was trying to do a lot of stuff. It may have been attempting to find details about the n thousand files it had wanted to add to its library. 

I'm not going to give it another chance. 

Thunderbird losing messages when compacting after Detach

I'm using Thunderbird 3.1.10 

When the following happens, then the message that I was working on seems to disappear

• I choose to Detach an attachment from the email
• After the attachment has been detached Thunderbird offers to compress the Folder
• I agree to the compaction, which is performed
• Then the message appears to disappear

This has happened to me at least twice and both times it was when I was detaching Golf Society results.

I have now recovered from the problem. So thought I'd write this up.

Recovery method:

1. Go to the folder in which the message was
2. Right click over the folder name
3. Choose Properties...
4. Click on Repair Folder

Workaround:

There might be an easier solution but this seems to work. Perhaps it's because I don't have auto compact on the target folder.

1. Move the message from the Inbox to a target folder - where the message will be permanently saved
2. Right click over each attachment and choose Detach
3. Save file where you want
4. With luck you won't get prompted to Compact now

Resources that helped me find the solution

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

Working well at 9:04 am

I thought I was making good progress today. I'd  breakfasted, watered the plants, updated a load of nodes on my www.bobbingwide.com website, had more cups of tea than James Potter had of coffee and it was still only 9:04.

USB - unplug and play ?

Some strange things happened recently. I'd been taking a backup of my desktop's hard disk drives using my Seagate external drive because I thought I might need to attempt to recover a file from an earlier backup and safe is better than sorry. 

But I didn't quite get around to it on the first day, nor the second. Eventually I noticed messages saying something like "unable to save on J:\$mt".  

A while later, after rebooting the machine, things stopped working big time. I had another external hard disk drive (Freecom HDD) on which I had my backup versions of  Apache, MySQL, WordPress, Drupal and static sites. PLUS all my music. I'd never got about to finding space within the box. BUT the machine refused to accept the drive. It just said "Unknown device - device not recognised". 

I unplugged it from one USB port and tried another. No luck. I unplugged all the other USB devices (even the keyboard which was a bit silly) but still no luck. Then I noticed that my desktop refused to acknowledge my HP Photosmart printer.

Well I went into damage limitation / recovery mode.

1. Tried system restore. Nothing.
2. Tried an earlier date. Nothing
3. So I had to make it work the hard way... I copied all required files from the Freecom drive to the desktop's internal disks using FTP from my laptop.
4. Reconfigured the internal drive's letter to become what was the external drive's letter 
5. Rebooted and got my local webserver working again
6. So I was partially happy but the USB devices still didn't work.
7. Reinstalled HP drivers. Nothing.
8. Fiddled about with the registry. Nothing.
9. Hunted on the internet. 
10. Lo and behold I found a story from someone who had something similar. His solution. 

TURN THE MACHINE OFF AND UNPLUG IT. 

A b*gg*r me if it didn't work. 

So the moral of the story is...

If your USB plug and play device stops working you should UNPLUG rather than play.

And the other good thing that came from all this effort is that my desktop is much tidier. And I now only rely on the Freecom drive for the music. 

Setting up a New laptop [and how to survive it]

When my trusty old desktop had finally had enough, Herb treated me to a new laptop. I was quietly pleased and a bit excited, but I had witnessed him helping my sister 'set up' their new laptop. I do not, after experience, now trouble myself to try to deal with technicalities which I cannot really hope to master!

Herb did 'do it' for me and I happily now can work away fairly happily.

Here are instructions on setting up a new laptop!

I do hope we have covered as many probabilities as necessary.

Of course you can pay the boys in the PC shops to do it for you, but you may be brave, intelligent, stupid or crazy enough to do it yourself, so...........

• Start Up --let it do it's own starting up
• Create a set of recovery DVDs of whole installation of machine
• Windows Easy Transfer Programme to transfer all data from old machine to new
• Windows 7 Back up onto appropriate device eg Seagate External disc drive
• Work from a list of software you may want to install eg KeePass [more later]
• Sort Anti-virus and Firewall software solution
• We uninstalled the free trial of Macafee, and downloaded AVG for free
• Run full virus scan - we has 25 warnings within our first minute when installing AVG.
• Windows Easy transfer Prog. report and get report of files and you'll notice that some files have changed location from 1 folder to another, be aware this will happen - look out for it!
• Go and check that all files you hope have been transferred, have actually been transferred.
• Look at Windows Easy Transfer list and decide which programme you then need to install eg KeePass - superb safe way to have a secure check list of ALL your passwords for anything you need!
• Then decide if you want to pay money for OFFICE or switch to Open Office [ I was told to by Herb, so far so good- more notes later- if it causes me grief I will let you know , I'm afraid I was a miscrosoft word girl, and slow to give it up!
• Update your favourites folder
• Which browsers do you want to install?- we use Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Opera and Safari. Again I was an Internet Explorer fan but have become quite attached to Google Chrome- quite amazingly Herb finally informed me that in Google Chrome- the www. bar - if you type what you think you're looking for, it acts as a google search for you, without laboriously going out and in to Google itself. This will be relevant to lesser mortals,for those who know that- great!
• Set up printers
• If you choose to do it yourself, [maybe a skilled friend could sit by you] you will learn so much more!

Good Luck, if you have a positive, determined attitude, this could help, do not be frightened.

[even with all my reiki knowledge I was I'm afraid of a negative persuasion but of course we cannot all be good at everything!!! ]

Oh look theres' a broken graphic

This must be a hangover from the troubles I had trying to follow instructions to make use of a custom domain name for this google blogger blog. The graphic that's missing is the one that appears in the comments block after each post. Course you can't tell it's broken in Firefox and I haven't checked IE, Opera or Safari lately.

Something for a rainy day... which thanks to St. Swithin will be all of the next 30 something days.

We don't do hardware but we know a man who does

Yesterday we had to call in a PC specialist in order to fix problems on two of our aged desktops.
For Herb's machine there was a very noisy fan on the newish graphics card.
Simple fix: unplug the electric lead to the fan so that it no longer attempts to whizz

For my machine: well... it was OK if I just wanted to look at the sign in screen, but as soon as I started it up the whole displayed charged from left to right so you couldn't see a thing.
When I've learnt how I'll try to paste an example of what it looked like
Fix: reset the whole system to default settings and then reduce the screen resolution from (blah) to something less.
Explanation: the machine was not designed to handle a super duper 20" wide screen so has a tantrum throws its toys out of the pram.

... but today... we have migrated from BT internet to Utilities Warehouse broadband and it's playing up again.
I may soon be the happy owner of a shiny new laptop.

Oh, and the man who does (fix hardware) is called David Somma ( www.microsomma.com )