Notes about Windows software and hardware issues

Updated: 2007-02-28
Created: 2000

Some resources about MS Windows XP SP2

Some resources about MS Outlook

MS Outlook is with MS Office the real current (2004) source of Microsoft customer lock-in, rather than MS Windows. It is the killer app. Well, it often kills e-mail :-). If you can, just avoid using it. Otherwise here are some resources, mostly related to dealing with PST files and archiving and converting them.

Some resources about MS IE

Some user has made a list of MS Knowledge Base articles about MS Internet Explorer that contains well selected, useful and interesting entries.

It also appears that MS IE cache troubles are so common that there is a program that is devoted solely to work around MS IE cache issues.

List of selected Mozilla or Firefox extensions

Refer to the Mozilla extensions and Firefox extensions lists in my Linux, as thanks to XUL they are essentially OS/hardware independent.

Deleting default multicast routes

When enabling a network interface MS Windows by default creates a multicast route on it which cannot be deleted.

Apparently it cannot be deleted because it is some kind of virtual route. But adding a similar route just overrides the virtual route, and it can then be deleted.

Something like this works:

route add 224.0.0.0 mask 240.0.0.0 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.1
route delete 224.0.0.0 mask 240.0.0.0 10.0.0.1

Deleting such a route can be useful to prevent packets being multicast on some of the interfaces of a multi-homed node.

How to find which processes have a lock on a file

Someone has written a nice utility called WhoLockMe that lists the processes that hold a lock on a file, and thus prevent file operations on it.

And someone else has written a nicer alternative unlocker on a page that even has a table of the features of similar utilities.

Amazing site on Windows tips

Axcel's is one of the best sites on obscure and useful Windows tips.

He also as an impressive list of freeish Windows utilities.

Interesting list(s) of freeware or cheap utilities

TBC

Creating a bootable Windows 200x CD-ROM

It is possible in some way to create a bootable Windows 200x CD-ROM.

Removing the Microsoft Java VM

Apparently a bug in the Microsoft Java VM allows an adware exploit to install itself.

It is in any case a good idea to completely remove the Microsoft Java VM, and there is a description of how to remove it

Interesting list of patches for Windows

Many sites have lists of the patches that are needed to make Windows versions slightly less unreliable and this australian one seems to have nice list.

There is also an official Microsoft FTP site for hotfixes for which there is a convenient HTTP mirror in Germany.

Windows 9x hangs during shutdown

This is actually somewhat well known, and there is a Microsoft knowledge base article about it. The fix is to get an updated version of the USER and USER32 components as follows: 

Date        Time    Version    Size     File name   Platform
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
04/21/2000  11:33a  4.10.2227   55,296  User32.dll  Windows 98 Second Edition
04/19/2000  04:02p  4.10.2227  549,760  User.exe    Windows 98 Second Edition
08/24/2000  05:05p  4.00.954    44,544  User32.dll  Windows 95 (all versions)
08/24/2000  04:54p  4.00.954   462,560  User.exe    Windows 95 (all versions)

They also suggest the workaround of disconnecting all mapped network drivers before shutting down. There have been reports that mapped network drivers may cause other problems with games like MechWarrior4 on AMD/VIA based motherboards.

Windows Update download points

In an article in PC Pro, January 2002, David Moss says that the automagic Windows Update site, which can only be used from Windows and only using IE, is also actually rather behind the times. There are a number of places in the Microsoft web site where updates can be downloaded manually, using any OS and any browser, that are usually kept more up-to-date as they are used by corporate users, and they are:

SoundBlaster Live! problems

The SoundBlaster Live! and its variants seem to have a badly misdesigned hardware and software interface, that really poften manifests itself in lockups and incompatibilities with various motherboards, graphics cards, operating system drivers, both under Linux and Windows. It is also rather overpriced.

It is particularly dangerous to leave the SoundBlaster 16 emulation mode enabled.

Some of the problems are described here including a procedure on how to perform a full unistall of the SoundBlaster Live! drivers.

It is usually best to avoid such a poorly misdesigned card, and to get a replacement. Generally, Yamaha and Crystal chipset based cards are good replacements; the Turtle Beach brand ones (e.g. the Sonic Fury mentioned in the link above) seem to be pretty good.

It might help to try disabling ACPI mode, as described below.

Norton Utilities NDD is extremely slow during the directory scan phase when checking volumes after a Windows crash, during Windows 95 or 98 startup, while the GUI version of NDD is very fast, once Windows 95 or 98 has started up.

Apparently NDD for DOS, the version that runs to repair volumes after a crash, before Windows 95 or 98 are fully started, does no disk caching of its own, and it rereads the same blocks on disk over and over; thus one needs to start smartdrv in the autoexec.bat file. This probably has no adverse affects after Windows 95 or 98 have started, and it seems to me it speeds up the loading of Windows 95 or 98 too.

It is impossible to manually set the IRQ used by a serial port in Windows 95 or 98: when clicking Change Setting... one gets This resource setting cannot be modified.

Thanks to another tips site that I cannot remember, here is the really obscure solution: there are several possible default manually selectable configurations in the properties for a serial port device (Basic configuration 000n), and only on the last the IRQ can be modified. The others are fixed. Just select the last then, and you will be able to set any IRQ. Note: even this is not allowed for the first two serial ports.

Switching off ACPI support can be done without reinstalling

ACPI support under MS Windows 9x or MS Windows 2000 can cause a number of problems, including IRQ conflicts and sharing.

The safest way to make sure that ACPI is disabled under MS Windows 2000 and 98 is to reinstall them with an option that disables ACPI handling.

Making sure that MS Windows 2000 is installed without ACPI usually requires reinstallation with the /NOACPI option to the setup program.

However while replacing a non ACPI HAL with an ACPI one is very unadvisable, replacing an ACPI one with a non ACPI one is less risk, and Lindsay R. Ritchie has described a way to switch off ACPI support without reinstalling:

In order to achive this the Windows 2000 computer configuration has to changed from being an ACPI PC to a standard PC. One way of doing this is by updating the COMPUTER driver from being ACPI to Standard PC in device manager (NB ACPI should also be turned of in the BIOS). A few re-boots are required as Windows 2000 then creates a new hardware profile and will detect all hardware again. The proper way of doing this is to cleanly install Windows 2000 on a newly formatted partition. (This of course takes time, but is STRONGLY recommended).

While reinstallation is better, switching ACPI off for MS Windows 98 is safe, unlike for MS Windows 200.

To switch ACPI off in MS Windows 98 the system drivers must be updated similarly: the ACPI BIOS entry in the System Devices subtree of the Device Manager must be removed and the Standard BIOS installed in its place.

For MS Windows 98 enabling ACPI at (re)install time can be done by using the /p j switch to setup; similarly, disabling it can be done with the /p i switch.

In all cases, ACPI support also should be turned off in the BIOS setup screens.

In any case ACPI is essentially useless for desktops (it may be useful for laptops) as a column about ACPI says:

Even once you have a new machine with ACPI support enabled, however, your worries are not over. If you add a new peripheral that is not ACPI-compliant, then you could "break" a previously functioning ACPI setup. Unless every piece in the system is ACPI-compliant, you can't take full advantage of ACPI power savings. This problem also explains why early tests have shown that ACPI was not offering any battery life enhancements over APM on notebooks. (See "Windows systems suck more juice" for more.)

There is also an interesting presentation of ACPI registry entries, that I think was inspired by a Microsoft article for OEMs:

During Windows 98 Setup, ACPI is installed only on systems that are listed on the retail compact disc as good ACPI systems. However, if you have had the system BIOS updated to a fully functioning ACPI BIOS, you can have ACPI installed by using the following procedure.
To install ACPI:
  1. Flash the BIOS to the latest rev.
  2. Run Regedit.
  3. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Detect, add a String value called ACPIOption, and set it to "1" (or use the ACPION.REG file from the downloads page).
  4. In Control Panel, click Add/Remove Hardware and have it run full detection.

To remove ACPI support perform steps 2 through 4, but set ACPIOption to "2".
The settings for ACPIOption are as follows

It has been reported by a reader of this page that setting that registry entry to 2 is not sufficient, and one should also delete the acpi.sys driver file.

Other resources:

The DirectX installer does not allow downgrading to an earlier release.

In theory downgrading DirectX can cause problems, but usually it does not. There are several possible solutions, but the simplest is to make the installer believe that it is actually upgrading, by looking at the registry key HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\DirectX and setting "Version" to for example to "4.06.00.0000", which makes the installer believe that DirectX 6 is installed, thus allowing to upgrade DirectX 8 to DirectX 7.

The other method is to use a DirectX uninstaller, of which there are a few, for example: