http://msmvps.com/blogs/installsite/archive/2009/07/25/don-t-clean-up-your-pc-with-windows-installer-clean-up-utility.aspx

… describing why the utility is NOT to be used for “cleaning up” your PC. It’s 110% correct – I’ve seen too many idiotic, uninformed bloggers posting “cleanup guides” with absolutely destructive advice (like disabling themes, services, etc). This is one of the more rare ones but I want to throw this out there in case there are some think-they’re-geeks out there that use the Installer Cleanup Utility as a “cleanup” tool.

The only thing this utility does to “clean” is to clean in the “what was dirty” sense, to gut a program’s configuration from Windows Installer, not from your computer! It just makes Windows Installer “forget” that a program was ever installed, so that installation issues can be resolved to re-install and cleanly uninstall the related program. It does NOT “clean” your computer of the installed program – hell, it doesn’t even uninstall it in the formal sense. All its files will still remain.

Personally, I use its “msizip G” as part of a cleanup routine, which removes orphaned Installer files – product packages that are located in the Windows\Installer folder, but not associated with any product that’s installed. Usually from failed Office updates or the like.

Just a public service blog post. =P

So here’s the thing… first I want to make sure all responsible contributors get taken care of. Patching it all together and making it all play nice was only half the story! If you think these guys’ contributions are worth it, drop them a part of your contribution:

• Hiren’s BootCD, the core of utilities that F4UBCD was originally founded on: http://www.hiren.info/pages/contactus
• HD Tune: http://www.hdtune.com/
• Kon-Boot: http://www.kryptoslogic.com/
• TreeSize Personal: http://www.jam-software.com

… to name a few. If you use their software on the disc routinely, please at least have the decency to buy a license! You should, after all, only be using software you’re licensed for – I have a license for each one myself.

Finally, if you have some money left over after all that gratuitous gratuity , here’s the big magic button! You can drop a couple bucks – say, $10 for “Thanks!”, $20 for “This CD saved my arse!”, or maybe $50 for “This CD saved my PC repair business!”

Or via Bitcoin to address: 19U5krMNrScHWdVurD8dHAUmd9Hb9onLJV

And if you do feel like donating… thanks for your support!!

Please learn to write a proper multi-touch interface driver. Copy Apple. I don’t care. Apple got it 100% correct in every way. I don’t even own an Apple product. In fact, I discovered this in reverse. I got an Android phone (LG Ally), and found its multitouch gestures somewhat useful. I remembered seeing something like that on the iPhone. But the experience… is entirely different on Android. The pinch zoom is freaking terrible.

Just try to use Google Maps on a (Google) Android phone. Impossible. Pinch zoom to where you want, you pinch to where you want and let go… BLAM, the screen explodes to some totally ridiculous zoom level. OK. Pinch zoom back out, can’t even pinch to the level you were just at… let go… BLAM, you’re zoomed into a pebble in the road. I give up and start hitting the +/- zoom buttons to get back to reality. This behavior is all over Android, especially in photos.

Same with my “Elantech” touchpad. I have a pinch-zoom function that does the same exact thing, bouncy zoom. In Picasa (wait, is that another Google app? Yes it is!), I can pinch-zoom. But what’s it do? Release fingers, and BOUNCE. Snaps to some random-ass zoom level, usually orders of magnitude out of range. And it’s always zooming “in”, too… it never zooms “out”.

Then I used an iPhone 4 with Google Maps. WOW. Perfect. Everything zooms and pans directly and instantly, as if my fingers were manipulating the map itself. Web, everything pans and zooms beautifully. Apple did it right, they implemented proper input filtering to detect those out-of-range values and remove them. Why the hell hasn’t Google and friends done the same?

There seems to be a parallel-universe thing going on somewhere. Like the reality in my own world, expressed through clear and well phrased statements, is skewed through the forum, and appears on the other end like some kind of gibberish newbspeak.

I just don’t… freaking… get it. It really has started to bug me lately. It seems to involve expressing ways a product or service could improve, or to correct a problem, or pretty much anything that’s not 100% pure ass-kissing.

Here are some recent and past examples (recent first)…
http://androidforums.com/lg-ally/304806-dalvik-cache-fatal-design-flaw-just-boneheaded-oversight.html
There, I start off with a little rambling/rant about how the Dalvik-Cache folder is unmanaged in the Android OS and seems like a second-thought add-on with dire consequences. The thread quickly goes nuclear and everyone basically beats their chest and grunts “NOOOB NOOOOB”. Only at the very end of the thread do people begin to become civilized, but nothing is ever really made of the thread (other than one developer, who now hates my guts, somewhat-silently admitting acceptance and creating a script to help fix the problem). It’s the most baffling one to date, really.

Second most fresh on my mind is this one, that still eats away at me to this day, some years later:
http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?id=3515
This one… I mean, I don’t even really remember what went on here, haven’t actually read over the thread again but I just remember it’s there (actually saved as a bookmark). That forum… those people, I don’t get it. It’s a simple thing… the DriverPacks distribution is improperly fragmented for common usage, requiring people to download all three packages to get a usable set of drivers, except it now includes a bunch of unneeded drivers as well. It would save them bandwidth and save the users some headache to split them up differently. Simple, logical thing, right? Nope. The mods/admins/members stoop to base insults and random remarks, shitting all over *their own forum*, and giving me the middle finger. That’s just another one I’m totally stumped on.

Another forum, http://sevenforums.com, I simply can’t log in at. I give it my usual login, and it accepts it (so I apparently do have an account there), but it barfs back that I’d been banned for “fanboy behavior”, forever. Really stumped there. I emailed the forum admins and asked about the ban, and I exchanged 1 or 2 emails before they said that they “never lift bans”. Quite a primitive and shortsighted policy, but still… WTH for? I never even had an account there that I know of, let alone posted anything, let alone “fanboy” (of what, Windows? Sure not Mac and HELL not Linux… wtf fanboy of, then?). Still unresolved.

I post on ImgBurn forums that the ask.com bundled malware is really killing ImgBurn’s reputation, especially while presented along side some UniBlue system-destroyer garbage (clean registry! fix errors! OMG!). What do I get? A whole bunch of backlash about not knowing how to uncheck the installer, LUK supporting his work, blah blah. I thought it was pretty common knowledge that reg-cleaners and toolbars are malware. There are about a million other ways he could be supporting… just… I mean, WTF? I don’t get how that isn’t obvious…

I mean, this list goes on and on. All kinds of random things-I-say-in-good-intention, just met with boatloads of totally random and unexpected backlash from the members or admins. Most of the time I’m left frustrated, confused, and wondering what-the-hell-went-wrong. It was really just that last post about Dalvik-Cache that pushed me over the edge into thinking I must have a “kick me” sign posted on my head.

And it’s not just my posts on forums either. I always Google the things I’m curious about first, and I often find pages and pages of forum posts… 90% unrelated to my search. But of those rare 10%, about 7% of them are either unanswered (no replies), or worse… has some moron in the forum telling the OP to “search”. Then the thread is left hanging with no resolution (as that search result obviously didn’t show up for me, being there reading that now), and I’m left looking elsewhere. But then, there’s that third dead-end… the people that post exactly what I’m thinking, but either get nowhere, or are greeted by the same sort of angry mob I get in my posts. WTF?

Can anyone out there in internetland throw me some clues? I mean, there’s really not much we can do after-the-fact. Or even really much we can do to fix it, for that matter. I write in clear, verbose, easy-to-search posts, that make it easy for others to find info on the same situation I’m in right now. I’ve even stumbled across my own forum posts a few times in trying to solve a similar issue. But somehow, the 20,000-post, “fills every topic with the same pasta” members start off with some negative backlash, and the rest of the forum snowballs from there. The entire point of the topic is lost, the issue remains unresolved, and often the topic gets locked so people can’t even contribute in the future. What kind of internet am I visiting here? o.O

Downloaded, installed… and it picked up my stale, rotten old Firefox profile. Ugh. I’d rather it ask me if I want to start a new one.

Then I look for the import function. Since anyone that switched from FF to Chrome some 6-12 months ago would have done the same… stale FF profile, fresh Chrome. I’d think this would be easy to find. Nope. Nowhere to be found.

Ahh… “Import” isn’t placed under the “Options” submenu like it damn well should be, but instead is hidden under the legacy alt-menu bar. Despite their best efforts, they just can’t get that trivial detail right. I shouldn’t have to use the alt-menu at all, mmkay?

“Import”. Import from MSIE? Or from MSIE? I’m sure you’re using MSIE. Are you using MSIE? NO, I’M NOT. I’m using Chrome. And I wanted to give FF4 a chance. But, since it won’t let me, I don’t have much of a choice. Chrome imports from Firefox… there’s your user path: Chrome eats Firefox users. Until Firefox imports from Chrome, users won’t even consider going back to FF. Enjoy Chrome kicking Firefox’s ass as usual, then.

And that was my trial run of Firefox 4. Good night Firefox… once again. /facepalm

http://hostfile.org/WindowsXPSoundscomponent.rar

Spent way too much time compiling this. Extract, right click winsnd.inf, choose “Install”, then go select “Windows Default” in your sounds control panel. Voila. Sound.

Extracted from XP SP3.

Of course, on an unsupported system, this may just BSOD you forever, then you’ll be pretty much hosed since your ntoskrnl.exe, ntkrnlpa.exe, and hal.dll will have been replaced with ACPI versions – something “Last Known Good configuration” will not help you with. So BE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN your system supports ACPI mode (e.g. “oh crap, I switched to Standard PC and now I can’t get out!”) before changing this.

Not even gonna give that “omg registry editing is dangerous” BS, because every geek should know their way around the registry. But this is another good place to mention: you could f’ing hose your system if you do this. I’m actually in the process of re-installing Windows on the PC I tried this on right now, because it’s a 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64mb RAM, originally Win95, far from ACPI. The most recent BIOS update (in 2001) provided ACPI compatibility, so I figured I’d give it a try. Since it was installed with the Standard PC HAL (no ACPI), it installed all its hardware support under that key. So, it just BSOD-looped me (0x7b, curiously enough – couldn’t find the HDC driver?), and since 64mb isn’t enough to load MiniXP, and the HDD is too old to work with a USB-adapter, I’m screwed. Meh, I just installed it an hour ago anyway.

1. Regedit. Browse to:
   HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\PCI_HAL000
2. Right click the 0000 key and choose “Permissions…”.
3. Check the “Full Control” checkbox for “Everyone”. This allows you to edit this next value…
4. Open the “HardwareID” value and change it from “e_isa_up” to “acpipic_up” (followed by one line break, the cursor should be on the line directly under “acpipic_up”).
5. Open Device Manager, open the “Computer” key, right-click “Standard PC”, and select “Update Driver”.
6. You’ll pick from a list, don’t search, answer accordingly.
7. Select the ACPI entry, which will now be shown in the Compatible Hardware list (joy!), thanks to the reg-tweak.
8. Once again, if you actually CONTINUE with this, and your system is NOT originally an ACPI system, it very well may make it unbootable.
9. Select “Next” and let the new HAL install.
10. Reboot, and you’re done! Enjoy your ability to select the multi-processor HAL once again if you were curiously poking around. Since hal.inf locks you into only “compatible” HALs, you can now update again and select Multi-Processor PC if your system supports it, then you’ll have multi-cores again.

Hope this helps more people than it harms… please be careful with this. I’ll update this if that reinstall works and ACPI mode works after all… there might just be more stuff I need to tweak to make it work right. Not entirely clear on how the device-driver handling works… seems very strange that I would get a 0x7b BSOD instead of an ACPI-based BSOD… that tells me it’s not finding the HDC that it just booted with 10 minutes ago. That is, perhaps something is screwy with the hardware IDs it’s now detecting. I’ll look into it… but this should work for anyone that switched from ACPI to Standard PC and now needs a way back

In this boot CD are the most popular and useful tools anyone would ever need. The best of the free software, the best of the commercial software, and it all fits on one CD-R that’s readable by any computer worth booting on. Not everything can read a DVD, and USB booting is hit and miss at best.

It’s been a long time. How have you been? Things have changed since we last met… I got myself a corporate IT job, still doing computer repair on the side. But being a side thing, kinda has its pros and cons. On one hand I don’t have constant first-hand experience using the disc anymore. On the other hand, I can also take a step back and look at it from a designer’s point of view… how well does it work? What does it do good, what’s bad, what could be done better? How can I make this the ULTIMATE BOOT CD it claims to be?

This disc, a minor half-version revision, is the answer to those questions. Scoured through every option, considered the usefulness of some tools, added others, collaborated with users over Facebook, gutted some functions and built others. A launcher here, a script there, and about 1,500 WIM captures. I imagine I went through some 20 ISO re-burns, 150 virtual machine boots, 200 VHD mount/unmounts… I can’t even count how much time has been put into polishing this thing. All for the love of making computer repair accessible to anyone that wants it.

Of note… let’s see here. Virtual Floppy enables you to mount images from your USB stick to be used in a boot selection like MiniXP (for F6 SATA/RAID drivers) or DR-DOS (BIOS flashing). VFD with file copy allows you to make a <1mb RAR file accessible to DR-DOS or Hiren’s DOS in a virtual floppy. Wireless drivers in MiniXP along with improved Ethernet and storage support. Mini Linux provided by RIP Linux. Bootable partition and imaging utilities provided by Acronis True Image and EASEUS Partition Manager. Improved Memtest86+ with failsafe mode to resolve startup hangs. Kon-Boot 1.1 is really v1.1 now, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Tons of new utilities in MiniXP with new launchers to provide easier access. ERD 5.0 is integrated with MiniXP for offline system restore and service/driver management, and Microsoft DaRT 6.5 (x86 and x64) are added to support Windows Vista and 7. Antivirus scanning with real-time updates is provided by DaRT 6.5′s Standalone System Sweeper, and allows you to load definitions to a USB stick for live updating.

This ain’t yo mama’s BartPE compilation.

Based on Hiren’s BootCD 13.0 Rebuild by DLC, minus some unnecessary clutter.

• MiniXP gutted and rebuilt with new, flexible on-disc scripting, for easy mods.
• Active File Recovery 7.5.1
• CCleaner 3.04CPU-Z 1.57
• HWMonitor 1.17
• MS DaRT 5 / ERD Commander 2005 utilities
• HD Tune Pro 4.60
• ImgBurn 2.5.5.0
• Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder 2.0.8
• MyDefrag 4.3.1 with FullOptimize script
• NirSoft collection 3/1/2011, now with 90% fewer antivirus false alarms
• SoftPerfect Network Scanner 5.1.2
• TreeSize Personal 5.4.4
• Firefox Portable 3.6.14
• SpinRite 6.0 (under DOS -> Hard Disk Tools)
• Shiny graphics that make the room smell nicer

And of course, a slew of utilities from Hiren’s disc, some updated, including:EzPcFix, Acronis Disk Director, ATF Cleaner, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware updated 3/7/2011, Bulk Rename Utility, Combofix updated 3/2/2011, Defraggler, Speccy, Content Advisor Password Remover, Recuva, Diskview, Filemon, Regmon, Procmon, DriveImageXML, GetDataBack, Recover My Files, Ghost32 11.5.1, ISOBuster, GImageX (ImageX GUI), SUPERAntiSpyware, IrfanView, NTPWEdit, Partition Magic, TeraCopy, TightVNC Server/Viewer, Unstoppable Copier, Victoria, MHDD, WinRAR, and 7-Zip

ISO:
CRC32: F3E0B3FD
MD5: 225435D19B1D134892BD2057C5F4490F
SHA-1: 6980D5906295AF28475260FEE9395D4D35E3DFB8

Download the torrent (preferred, saves both of our time)…
Or download via the web (have fun clicking all 28 links!).

And, on Facebook: http://facebook.com/F4UBCD

You pre-load Office 2010 or Office 2007, and yet also install Office 2003′s compatibility pack for Office 2007 files? What’s your damn problem? How do you not understand that Office 2007 and 2010 can ALREADY OPEN their own file types? Why do you keep installing “Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System” on these PCs?

The ONLY thing it can do is cause compatibility PROBLEMS. It’s ONLY supposed to be installed on computers using Office 2003, trying to open a 2007 document (xlsx, docx, pptx, etc.)

p.s.: stop loading computers with BS software nobody wants and will never use, e.g. amazon links, toolbars, Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Works, Toshiba ConfigFree, Face Recognition, online backup, “PC Health” checkers, blah blah blah.

Replace the cable between the power button and the motherboard.

That cable powers the speakers (hence the buzzing sound), and if it’s unplugged from a working & running system, the system shuts off. There ya go. It turns on because it gets a signal from the button, but turns off likely because the lid switch wires are broken in the cable (hence it thinks the lid is closed, hence it shuts off). That’s just my theory, but still, pretty reliable fix since I just resurrected a dead motherboard with that theory.