Analyze Windows 7 System Resources
How To Quickly View And Analyze System Resources When Using Windows 7
While using Windows, it may become necessary to find out CPU usage, memory usage , disk as well as network usage especially when trying to troubleshoot performance issues.
Windows comes with a handy dashboard that shows all of the above information at a glance. Continue reading »
Windows 7 Taskbar Icons
2 Ways To Enable Or Disable System Icons on Windows 7 Taskbar
The default Windows 7 settings for taskbar includes all the system icons like clock, volume, network, power and action center as being active and displayed.
In order for any of these system icons to prevent from being displayed in Windows 7 taskbar: Continue reading »
Parent Password for Home Access Laptop
Home Access Grant
We recently did a complete system recovery on an Acer Extensa 5235 that had a dead hard drive.
This was one of the ‘Home Acess’ computers provided by Becta the now closed government funded grant scheme to help low-income families own a computer.
The client had neglected to make her recovery DVDs whiled the system was up and running.
Usually if we don’t have the recovery DVDs or CDs we can install an OEM version of Windows using the product key on the Windows sticker attached to the laptop, resulting in a nice clean Windows install without all the crap that the manufacturers install alongside Windows. However, the Home Access laptop in our care didn’t have a product key on the sticker.
The license sticker reads: “Windows 7 Pro Natl. Academic Only OA” with a few tracking numbers and bar codes on it. Not very useful for installing Windows!
Luckily we had created a set of 3 recovery DVDs on an identical model that had come in months ago – just in case!
So Windows installed – no problem there, but… When it was time to log into Windows, we were presented with two preconfigured user accounts – Learner and Parent. Learner had no password and was a ‘Limited Account’ which basically means we couldn’t install anything or even update Windows using that account. Parent was a password protected administrator account but we had no password since the client had misplaced the original documentation provided by Comet. Continue reading »
Windows 7 won’t Log Off or Shut Down
Shutting down......still shutting down....
After spending ages disabling things like sound card, LAN, Avast Internet Security, Malwarebytes and everything in MSCONFIG, we still couldn’t get the Packard Bell iMedia desktop to log off or shut down. This was a machine running Windows 7 perfectly for the last six months.
Apparently MSCONFIG cannot disable all third-party services because there were still quite a few running on reboot.
Avast and Malwarebytes were then completely uninstalled but the machine still would not log off or shut down.
Process Explorer was then used to find what else was running when the machine started up in Normal Mode.
Turns out the culprit was something called Rapport from a company named Trusteer. There was no way to disable the Rapport services but once we uninstalled it all our shut down problems vanished.
Hope this helps someone else from wasting a few hours!
* Update- Another Rapport problem on an unrelated system…
Today (25th October 2011) we got a Toshiba laptop in that would consistently ‘blue screen’ (BSOD) everytime it was booted into Normal Mode. In Safe Mode it booted fine. The BSOD referenced: “A Driver has overrun a stack-based buffer”
The dump files were analysed and it was found RapportEI.sys was the cause of the blue screen fault. The Safe Uninstall tool from the Trusteer Rapport website was used to uninstall Rapport because the Windows Installer would not run in Safe Mode. Consequent Normal Mode boots successful. (This system is running ESET Internet Security – not sure if this is relevant).