http://www.bootdisk.com/ 250 January 2006
The BootLIST
Welcome to the 250th Edition of The BootLIST
INDEX
1) Guestbook Spam Gone Wild
2) MS Has Update ISOs For Download
3) Changing Drive Letter Assignments
4) Overclocking Or Failing Power Supply?
5) Find Fast Strikes Back In Win98
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1) Guestbook Spam Gone Wild
Paul telephoned - My wife spends a lot of time on her personal webpage that she does for family and friends. But recently she is getting a lot of spam in her guestbook for sex and drug sites. And even in the past week or so postings for all other types of products have started appearing. Banning the IP or keywords has had no real effect.
Deleting one or two spams per day wasn't a problem, but in the last 2 weeks she is getting a dozen or so spams per day and it is really annoying. Please help.
*** Yes, the bots have been real busy lately. It seems even the average Joe can now use a Bot to spam their product on personal
webpage guestbooks. I too was affected by this, and the only way to avoid it, as far as I know, and assuming you want or need to use
a third party service, is to find a service that has one of those "qualifiers" eg. where a Human has to read, then enter in a code in
order to post.
For example:
http://www.bootdisk.com/temp/guest.gif
This week while shopping for a new free service, none of them had this feature, and all their "sample" guestbooks were filled with spam. I ended up paying $10 for an account at:
Note that I have no interest in internet.com nor jupitermedia, ie the owners of this service, but it was easy to pay for, install, and tweak. Yes I understand that my webhost most likely has a guestbook in the Cpanel but personally I just seem to like using the third party options better.
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2) MS Has Update ISOs For Download
kenny posted - Microsoft now releases, as of January 10th, 2006, ISO-9660 CD image files that contain all the security and critical updates that are released on the Microsoft Windows Update Web site for Windows and for other Microsoft products. The ISO image files are released at the same time as security and critical updates are released on the Windows Update Web site.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=913086
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3) Changing Drive Letter Assignments
chillster13 asked - My seagate 80GB hard drive messed and I replaced it. I managed to install win XP professional after partitioning the hard drive using the partition tool that comes during the setup of winxp. I installed winxp in C: drive. During Installation however I had my DVD drive and my CD-RW drives attached because of which they assumed the next D: and E: letters while the remaining 3 more partitions had to assume F: G: and H: . Although I'm pretty sure this isn't any problem I want to change the DVD and CD-RW drive letters to the last ie G: and H: [like most others have] and rearrange the others.
Also I have many programs and softwares installed on my computer now. Will changing the drive letter affect them? [system reg and stuff?] Please tell me how to safely make the change whilst not affecting the software.
Unk wrote:
Login as the Administrator or as a Member of the Administrators Group. Right-click My Computer, Manage, Computer Management,
Disk Management, right-click the drive, Change Drive Letter and Paths, Change, Assign the following drive letter,
OK.
If you want to change the letter on a drive which is already assigned to another drive, you may have to assign an unused letter to the other drive first. In other words, shuffle the drive letters around until you have the desired combination. You may have to restart Windows to complete an assignment before making another one. One cannot assign a new letter to the boot partition/drive. Some programs reference the drive letter of a CD-ROM drive etc. and will have to be reconfigured or reinstalled if the drive letter is changed.
Reference: HOW TO: Change Drive Letter Assignments in Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307844
*** Next time you install a new hard drive and OS, as soon as windows is running I'd suggest changing the drive letters for your
cdrom drives immediately to far down the alphabet. I'd suggest Drive R: for a CDrom reader and Drive W: for your cdrom writer, or
in your case I'd suggest Drive V: for the DVD and Drive W: for the RW. Of course, if you do this now it'd be easy to get your hard drive letters back in "line". Also, if you didn't install any of your programs to F:, G:, or H:, then changing them to D:, E:, and F: should not present any registry/program problems.
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4) Overclocking Or Failing Power Supply?
FingAZ inquired - I know this is becoming a common problem with computers these days (I wish they'd scrap the feature) but anyway, within the past 2 months I've been getting a large amount of MACHINE_CHECK_ERROR BSoDs, with a STOP error of something like 0x0000009, and they are getting more common.
I know that its commonly associated with PSU or RAM issues, but I would just like to know whether these values for my PSU are acceptable, and whether it is more than likely to be my PSU:
12V = 11.55v
5V = 5.16v
3.3V = 3.408v
Vcore (1.45 I think- AMD64 3000+ venice core) = 1.488 / 1.504v
I mean, to me all of these values seem a little high which isn't a problem, but the 12V rail does seem quite weak?
*** Actually, you have it in reverse. The "high" values are the ones that often damage hardware. Let's start with the basics first. As
a power supply ages, most often the 5 volt line gains volts and the 12 volt line loses volts. Use a 5% tolerance. eg when I go to
replace a failed hard drive I always check the 5 volt line with a digital voltmeter. If it reads 5.25 volts or higher I WILL NOT put in a
brand new drive and guarantee it for a year unless the PS is also changed.
I'm not about to take the chance of the customer's "out of spec" PS ruining the new drive I've just installed as our guarantee also includes reloading Windows and ALL the customers apps. Thus far, this business strategy has worked fine. Perhaps it's because on about 25% of the hard drive replacement jobs I've done over the last ten years did have the 5 volt line over 5.25 volts. Thus far, we've never had a callback when the job is done right, which includes replacing the PS if it's out of spec.
The other thing my partner and I insist on in order to guarantee our work is one of those ten to twenty dollar surge protectors. Yes of course any tech who's done some time and installs half a dozen drives/week knows that any brand of HDD sometimes has a bad run of drives, and there is nothing you can do about that until the problem is discovered.
With all this said, it appears that your PS is still in "spec", but, the 3.3 line _is_ cutting it close. And, the 5 volt line is on its way to "out of spec" also. Quite possibly, that "could" be a reason you have started to get errors more frequently, ie as said before, as the PS ages it gradually gains volts on the low volt line, and loses volts on the 12 volt line.
Old Jon added:
So is your machine overclocked?
FingAZ comes back:
It actually is at the moment lol. It isn't usually - the problem occurs anyway as far as I remember, plus its only overclocked by 54 Mhz using the 3% AI setting in the BIOS. But I think that the overclock may actually increase the possibility of getting the BSoD.
*** How OId Jon guessed that correctly I dont know, but it does appear that this problem has now been properly diagnosed :)
Perhaps it was from one of the Stop Error Messages webpages:
http://tinyurl.com/23w5h
http://aumha.org/win5/kbestop.htm
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5) Find Fast Strikes Back In Win98
My wife uses Windows 98SE and suddenly noticed a real slowdown in performance. Slow file copying, even web pages loaded up slowly. I initially thought perhaps some ram may have gone South and is no longer recognized, or the hard drive is filling up. Or in a worst case the CPU has throttled down due to heat or a case fan has failed, or a hard drive is failing.
Turned out it was that old FindFast thingamajig. Turned out she had to reinstall MS Office a few days ago [eg always ask what was the last thing the customer did]. So, using msconfig, I turned off the findfast entry, and then went to Control Panel, hit the Find Fast Logo, deleted the index, then selected Close and Stop. Fixed it.
Find Fast will install/run automatically if you install older versions of Word/Office. I'm not sure if later versions do the same on XP PCs. It's a file indexing service which most home users do not need. Tho some law and/or accounting firms I deal with find it very useful.
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