Disabling Windows Autoplay

Have you ever been infected by a virus from someone’s flash disk even before you have open any file from the flash disk? Ever been inconvenience by your antivirus auto detecting viruses from someone’s flashdisk when all you want to do is to give them a file? I have and the reason is windows’ autoplay feature which starts executing a default program as instructed by the flashdisk the moment you insert it into your computer. This means before you even have a chance to scan the flashdisk, if infected, the flashdisk is already tryin to infect you!

 

To disable autoplay, edit your computer’s group policy by click start -> run then type gpedit.msc and click ok. This should open the group policy console from which you should click computer configuration -> administrative templates->system. After clicking system, scroll down to where it says Turn off Autoplay and doubnle click. A window such as the one below appears.

 

Click Enabled and choose All Drives as show below. Click OK then close the group policy console and that’s it!

Recovering from other Windows XP boot errors

Like they say, windows XP can crash for no apparent reason. Besides the registry, the other likely cause of a crash is a corrupt boot initialization file (boot.ini). To recover from such an error, you may boot into the recovery console and execute the folling commands in sequence to rebuild Windows’boot configuration.

CD \

C:\> ATTRIB -H C:\\boot.ini

·         C:\> ATTRIB -S C:\\boot.ini

·         C:\> ATRIB -R C:\\boot.ini

·         C:\> del boot.ini

·         C:\> BOOTCFG /Rebuild

·         C:\> CHKDSK /R /F

·         C: FIXBOOT

 

That should rebuild the Windows boot configuration and allow you to log into windows, hopefully saving you from doing a repair install or a full fresh installation of Windows.

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=307545.
If you access the System Volume Information folder by booting from another operating system, you should be able to view its contents.
After you have access to the System Volume Information folder, you should be able to see one or more folders that have long file names made up of a long string of numbers and letters, such as: _restore{98CD7788-3445-567B-978G-F97G40B3E8F9}. When you click on each of those files, you should see a series of folders called RP1, RP2, RP3, etc. These are the restore points. To see the date on which each of them was last used, right-click on an empty part of the folder and then choose View => Details.
Choose a restore point that has a suitable date. There should be a folder called snapshot under each of the restore point folders.
Each snapshot folder contains several files, including the following: _REGISTRY_USER_DEFAULT, _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY,_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE, _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM, REGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM.
Replace the corresponding files in windows/system32/config and windows should be able to boot correctly.

Unable to uninstall Adobe 9 or other software? Use Windows Uninstall Utility

After evaluating acrobat standard 9, I couldn’t view PDF files so I installed Acrobat 9 reader and things started working fine. Unfortunately, every now and then, Acrobat 9 standard would nag me about purchasing it so I decided to remove it. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a series of annoyances.

My uninstall suddenly freezed somewhere in the middle such that I had to click cancel. I went back into the control panel and to try to remove Acrobat standard again but it complained that there were no uninstallation files. I gave up! From here, right clicking on a file within windows explorer resulted in a Windows installer pop up claiming that “the feature you are trying to use is on a network resource” and asking me to point to “acrostan.msi”.

To resolve this, I picked up my copy of acrobat standard CD and browsed to acrostan.msi. Afterthat, it gave me the right click menu but demanded the CD every time I right clicked! Clicked cancel twice could also make the pop up go away.

After many days tolerating this nonsense, I finally got fed up and googled for a solution. After many searches, I finally stumbled upon a simple solution really – Microsoft's windows uninstall utility. Why didn’t I know of this tool before?

Simply download this tool from the link above and install it onto the troublesome computer then run it. It will show all the installed software on your computer. Select the software you wish to remove, in my case acrobat 9 standard, and click remove.

The next time I right clicked, my computer was back to normal again! And now currently working as a sysadmin, I have one more tool in my kit!

How to disconnect network services on the Windows command line

There I was, trying to join and XP professional computer to a Windows 2000 domain. The computer kept giving me an error, something about access to multiple services using the same username being disallowed. I fumbled around changing usernames until I realised that I had previously logged onto the domain to access a shared drive.

To disconnect from all network services, Open a command prompt (run + CMD) and type:

net use * /d

You should receive a prompt to confirm that you want to disconnect your connections and it may also show you the current connections. Type “y" for yes and its done!