Above is what I started my day with: one handful of dirt, tar, paper and god knows what else from a customers computer. This is only one clump out of about 4 or 5 though. Seriously, how can people use or be near computers in that sort of shape? And if this is in a house, I shudder to think of the state of it.

Edit: I was sick for the next week after this. Ick.

Ever wondered if a site was really down or was just blocking you (or there was some sort of routing problem between you and the site)?

Well, Down for everyone or just me and Is that site down are two sites that can help you quickly see what the real deal is. I'm sure there are plenty of other sites like it, but these are two quick loading sites that are also quite popular.

Here's a quick tip that comes in handy fairly often for me. I use it most after someone has forgotten their password and my usual method of removing their user accounts password has failed (linux boot disk and editing the hive, which is quite a bit more complex and will be outlined in another post) but can be used at other times too. Read on for detailed information on enabling and disabling the administrator account.

The account is created in Windows 7 or Vista but not actually enabled. To enable, open a command prompt in administrator mode by right-clicking and choosing .Run as administrator. (or use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut from the search box) and type in:

net user administrator /active:yes

Technically, you don't need to run that in a command prompt, but you wouldn't see for sure if it worked or failed as it will automatically close the program after running it whereas the command prompt will stay.

So now you can log out of the current user and back in as Administrator, no password is required even. Now you can do whatever you needed to and then disable the account again as it's not recommended to run under that account all the time.

To disable, log out of the Administrator account and back in as a user. and open an administrator mode command prompt as above and type:

net user administrator /active:no

Personally, I have a USB drive with a bunch of utilities and scripts such as this command on it to speed up common things like this or resetting tcpip stacks or clearing the upper and lower registry entries.

This post is mostly just for myself and a couple others that might be interested. There.s a pretty in depth review of the Nokia N900 over at Shivaranjan with screenshots, videos, pros and cons and lots of useful information. If only I could even somewhat justify me having it and could afford it, I would go buy it right now

Had this problem the other day. Basically, some optical drives don't work right with Windows 7 and some of the newer power saving functions. In my case it was a Gateway laptop with a TS-L633B drive and I couldn't find a firmware upgrade for it (there is a Dell update though) which has fixed it for other people.

So in the end what I had to do was run the following:

powercfg.exe -setacvalueindex 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0
powercfg.exe -setdcvalueindex 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0
powercfg.exe -setacvalueindex 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0
powercfg.exe -setdcvalueindex 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0
powercfg.exe -setacvalueindex a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0
powercfg.exe -setdcvalueindex a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 DAB60367-53FE-4fbc-825E-521D069D2456 0

which I found listed at Softpedia

This seemed to fix the problem, but of course if the customer re installs Win7, it will do the same thing until Gateway upgrades their firmware or I find one that is right for that drive.