Yesterday I had a user that was experiencing degraded system performance. I started out by looking at the Temp files, running a a disk defrag and then I made the mistake of running a chkdsk. The chkdsk was run outside of the windows environment and started out fine, until it hit step 4!
Step 4 took the remainder of the day to scan, luckily this client was using a spare computer set up for them in the meantime. Today I started the machine up and it took a good 3 minutes to get past the Windows XP splash screen. I finally wised up and looked at the event log.
The system event log was full of ATAPI and Disk errors (Event ID 7, 9, 11 and 51). After checking out Microsoft knowledge base for suggestions, I determined that the safest step to take first would be to uninstall the disk controllersthrough device manager. Once I did this, I restarted the PC and everything worked beautifully after that.
I suppose the moral of this story is to check the Event logs first.
Let me first start out by saying that if you are looking for a good freeware Web filter for parental controls then I highly suggest checking out Best free Parental Filters. However, if you are looking to do some simple webpage and ad blocking yourself, then read on.
If you are running Windows 2000 and higher, navigate to your windows directory. From there go to System32\Drivers\ETC. This is the location of a file called hosts. The hosts file can be opened using Notepad.
So, what is the Hosts file anyway? The hosts file is first file by default that your computer looks to for name resolution. Name resolution is what tells us that Xtremediy.net belongs to a certain IP address. For example, lets say Xtremediy.net has an address of 192.168.153.229. Name resolution basically translates the 192.168.153.229 to Xtremediy.net so that we don’t have to remember that number to type into the web address.
I’m not going any further in depth with name resolution at this time. Lets focus on the Hosts file now. The hosts file can do name resolution for you as stated above. You can put in some of your favorite sites, and allow them to come up slightly faster because they don’t have to query internet resolution servers. Of course if the website ever has a change in IP address, you won’t be able to access it.
So what does a host file entry look like? Well, lets go back to my example of the Xtremediy.net IP address. If I put that address into the hosts file, then it wouldn’t have to query the internet DNS servers to find Xtremediy.net. Please note, that the IP address used in these examples is not the actual address to Xtremediy.net.
Below is the entry example:
192.168.153.229xtremediy.net
That’s it! Enter the web address, press spacebar or tab, enter in the website name then press enter. On the next line you can continue with another address if you want.
So how can I use this to block websites and ads? The answer is already stated above. If the incorrect IP is entered for a site you will not get to that site. You will be directed to a different site. That information is more for a practical joke I suppose. So what about just blocking sites and ads? Well, you do this by using the IP address of 127.0.0.1, also known as the loopback address. This address points right back to your computer, so any sites you have pointing to the loopback won’t go anywhere.
The downside to the hosts file blocking method is that it does not allow wildcards.
For example:
If I want to block my child from going to www.myspace.com I would enter the following into my hosts file.
If my child went to profile.myspace.com then they could bypass the filter.
If you intend to block sites from your children, I really suggest checking out the link at the beginning of the article. For more information about the hosts file, check out http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm.
Think of the Registry as a database that Windows refers to for just about everything. The Registry is constantly growing to keep up to date all your preferences, software installations and more. As with any database, the larger it is, the longer it takes to query the database. So, the conclusion here is that a registry filled with old information that is no longer relevant, decreases the performance of your computer.
So, how do we purge the Registry of outdated records? Well, you could go in manually using regedit or regedt32 from the run command. I have a feeling that most people won’t know what to look for once inside the Registry Editor though. Even the experienced user wouldn’t spend countless hours going through entries to clean up junk. So, we use Registry Cleaner Programs. These programs automate the cleanup process and can search through the records far faster than a human can.
The one downside to a Registry cleaner is that on rare occasions you may get something deleted in the registry that should not have been deleted.I recommend you perform a system back up or create a backup of your registry before using a Registry cleaner. Just in case.
So, as with many of the programs I run on my computers, I don’t often buy software when there are so many open source programs or free programs that are in most cases just as good if not better.So, I have a few links to Registry Cleaners that you can try.
One item that is not often discussed about the Registry is Defragmenting the Registry. It only stands to reason that file defragmentation improves performance on your computer, so Registry Defragmentation should help as well.The following link is a free program that defrags the registry and gives a brief description on how the program works.http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/registry-defrag. This is program combined with one of the Registry cleaners are run once a week on my own computers. So far, I have no complaints about the speed of my computers.
Keep an eye out for future articles on performance optimization.
I had a client yesterday that was trying to install SP3 but was unsuccessful. So, I spent some time on it. I had run UBCD4Win to check for malware but nothing was found. I had forced Windows XP to boot into a clean boot mode. Which gave me a the same access denied error as running the SP3 update. In the end, the problem ended up being Webroot Spy Sweeper. I uninstalled it and the Update worked perfectly.
Here is where things got interesting… Apparently the client said that they could not connect online, so after some quick over the phone help I told them to go into device manager and….It was blank! I found a great list of common fixes for this issue at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1134095035. I talked the user through most of these but once I hit the Apropos Rootkit solution on the list I told the user to bring the computer back…. They live 2 houses down, so it’s not too much of an inconveinance for free IT work.
I ran the aproposfix tool in safe mode and removed some more entries in the registry associated with contextplus but that was of no help. Upon searching for the fix online, I ran across this arcticle on MS knowledgbase. After running fixccs.exe in safemode everything worked fine.
The MS article suggests the following “This problem may occur when an antivirus application is running during the installation of Windows XP SP3.” Well, this user didn’t have an AV client installed (I told them to try Avira Antivir, my personal favorite.) My theroy about this is that the Rootkit may have interferred during the SP3 update.
Hopefully this post will be useful to anyone else running into a simialr issue.
Virtualization is becoming a topic of increasingly popular discussion. This is because the technology offers great potential for cost savings. My blog today is about Virtualization (obviously). More to the point, I am going to be discussing my experience with beta testing the New Virtualization exam by Microsoft. First, a quick introduction to Virtualization for those who know nothing about it. (more…)
