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The LangaList
Standard Edition

2005-12-08

A Free Email Newsletter from Fred Langa
That Helps You Get More From Your Hardware, 
Software, and Time Online

Please visit our sponsors and help keep the LangaList S.E. free!

1) Grab This *Before* You Need It!

It's something I've wished for many times: a list you can copy/paste to a laptop or pda, or print and carry in your wallet, that contains a careful selection of URLs for free, easy-to-use, but advanced web-based route-planners/mappers. That way, no matter where you are, as long as you have access to *any* PC--- even in a library, kiosk, or coffee shop--- you can get fast, accurate, and free maps and directions for driving, walking, or even for oddball things like making sure that cab drivers take you by a reasonable route rather than by a needlessly expensive one.

I'm not alone in finding it useful:

Fred:  Thank you, thank you, thank you...

I have been using a Garmin III+ for several years and am quite happy with it. It's not a street level automotive GPS; I use it for backpacking, too, besides in the car.

My only gap in usage was being able to have coordinates from a street address.  Oh, the hours I have spent trying to find an easy solution to what seemed to me to be an easy to solve problem!  I have Delorme Topo USA which is big and clunky and several years outdated for addresses.  I tried a Rand-McNally program only to find that their coordinates feature is about a mile in diameter!  I pondered paying for Expert GPS, but I never did.  I have suggested such a feature to the new Google maps.  I have tried a private party website for this, and the info is not up to date and the page rather clunky.

Now, thanks to you, I have maporama.com!  Type in an address, there it is in the lower left!   I tested a daughter's address, it is only two years old and it stops every other site cold.  Maporama had the decency to list probable options, and there it was (the suburb name was incorrect, but that happens a lot there.) 

And best of all, OK, two best of alls, they will send the map hyperlink to a phone AND I can access the site with my Nokia Communicator! 

Thank you, thank you, thank you! ---Paul Verizzo

You're very welcome. <g>

The FREE clip-n-save list in this week's column, plus capsule reviews for many separate mapping/routing services, are all at
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174402923

And best of all, these services are equally useful whether you DO or DON'T have a GPS!

Even if you don't think you need it right now, click on over and grab the free list. Sometime, somewhere, you'll be glad you have a copy! <g>

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2) Cleanup Problems

Hi, Fred! I so thank you for what I found on my very first newsletter from you!  The http://safety.live.com came at a time when I sorely need help with my ailing computer.  I am certainly not a sophisticated user, but have tried to be responsible, as I learn.  I have kept a firewall, run virus scans regularly, as well as AdAware, Window Washer, defragmentation, System Works, files deletion, etc.
 
The Windows virus scan from your url found 2 virus, and 4 infected files that did not show on my own program scan.  I took care of them, but am puzzled by the cleanup scans.
 
The complete scan showed 4378.4 KB of Temp. files cleaned.  I then have been running a cleanup scan one after the other, 15 times so far!!!
 
They have ranged from 2714.3 KB, to 517.3 KB, in random amts!  Should I keep doing them until I reach none, or what?
 
The "ailing" computer is still ailing!  Every time I click on the cleanup scan button, I have to wake up the requested page with varying counts of hitting Alt, Ctrl, Delete!  (This has been happening with various page requests of late!) 
 
I don't mean to ask for a free tech lesson, but I do need help, if you have any offering, or direction for me to turn.
 
Already appreciating your newsletter! ---Ray

It sounds like there are several things going on with your PC, Ray.

First: No single tool, or even a suite of tools (if from the same company and team of programmers) can or will find everything. Every single tool has its strengths AND weaknesses, so it's not at all unusual for any given tool to find some items that were ignored or missed by others. That's why using more than one scanning tool makes a lot of sense.

By analogy: You can make your house safer by using a common ionization-type smoke detector. But you make it safer still by also using a photoelectric smoke detector. And safer still by also adding a carbon monoxide detector. They all do the same thing--- detect byproducts of combustion--- but they look for different things in different ways. Combined, they protect you far better than any one alone possibly could.

It's the same with security software. The fact that an online scan finds a few items that other tools missed isn't terribly alarming: In fact, that's why it's good practice to rely on your primary AV tool all the time, but also to scan your system periodically with a completely different AV tool from a different company.

The Temp file issue is different: Temp files, by definition, come and go as you use your PC. There's no set, fixed number that's optimal; and no particular baseline amount that you'll reach and stay at. Flux and variance is normal.

And the first time you do a major cleanup--- or if it's been a long time since the last--- it's not unusual for things to take a while, especially if you have the "disk cleanup wizard" set to compress old/unused files. Once you're doing the cleanups on a regular basis, they're quite speedy, but that first time can be a killer. Same for Defrags and similar operations: The first time's almost always the worst.

You're relatively new to the newsletter, so this may help: The article at http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174300458 pulls together a ton of info on setting up and/or maintaining any PC. It covers both the recommended tools for cleanup and security; and the techniques for using them; on both new and older PCs.

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3) Shutdown Option From Locked Screen

Hi Fred, Maybe I'm asking the wrong question, or the right question the wrong way, but there just doesn't seem to be a solution to this problem.
 
I have a small network, sharing an internet connection with my teenage kids PC. I have included some significant limitations on their PC to try to control the activities of viruses, trojans, etc, and if I'm not around for any length of time, I lock my PC so they can't actually access that. Their PC still has access to the internet through mine, but they can't do anything on it. Problem is, if they stop using the internet and go to shutdown my PC, there isn't a 'shutdown' option on the dialog box that appears when they use the ctl-alt-del key combination. There is only the message 'This computer has been locked', 'Only <ICS PC owner> or an administrator can unlock this computer'. Of course, there is the password entry, an okay, or cancel.
 
Is there a registry entry that provides a shutdown option for this dialog?
 
Thanks for the fantastic newsletter and the seemingly endless source of hints and tips. Cheers, Andy.

The system is actually designed to do the opposite of what you want: For security, it's intended NOT to let anyone by the Admin/ICS-operator shut down the PC because the connection may still be in use by others.

Here's what I'd try: I'd create a secondary login on your PC, and set it up with relatively safe, minimal privileges (ie: NOT an Admin account). You also can set up your files so the kids won't be able to see them (no "file sharing").

Install the free "Wizmo" utility on the system (
http://google.com/search?as_q=wizmo&as_sitesearch=langa.com ) Open Notepad and write a one-line batch file:

wizmo shutdown!

(Include the exclamation point.) Save the file to the kids' account's Desktop, and then name it something like "shutdown.bat" or some other obvious name.

When the kids want to shut down your PC, have them log into their limited account and click on the "shutdown.bat" icon: The command "wizmo shutdown!" (with the exclamation point) will run and should force a shutdown, even from the non-admin account.

Alternatively, you could run the same batch from your account: set it with a "wait" or "delay" command, or with a Task Scheduler entry, to take effect at some designated time in the evening after you've left your PC. Then, the PC should shut itself off with no action required from the kids at all.

A caution: the "wizmo shutdown!" command is powerful; make sure you leave no files open or unsaved on your PC, or they may be lost.

And finally, if you don't want to use a third party tool like Wizmo, you can accomplish the same thing by using the command line in XP: The command "Shutdown -f -r" (minus the quotes) will force any open apps to close, and then shutdown Windows.

More info:
http://google.com/search?as_q=force+shutdown&as_sitesearch=langa.com

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Your information saves me hours, days and probably years of my life
having to do all of the research and trial and error myself!"
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Thanks, Lorna!

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and contains even more content--- tips, tricks, advice, downloads....---
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4) Life Expectancy Of Flash Drives?

Good morning, I would like to start by thanking you for the tremendous service you provide with your newsletter. I find items that are of both professional and personal value in every issue and I shall remain a Plus Subscriber until either you or I retire.
 
My question relates to thumb drive failure. I am aware that a thumb drive may only be written to a finite number of times. I would like to determine the nature of how a thumb drive fails when it reaches the end of its' life expectancy. I have been unable to craft a search string for Google that will yield information as to whether one might expect total, catastrophic failure wherein the entire device would become unreadable, or whether one might experience data corruption of individual files which might yield a clue that "the end is near".
 
Have you any tips as to how I might find information of this sort? As always, thank you for your time and for your excellent newsletter. ---David Chambers

There actually are several interrelated variables at play here, such as MTBF ("mean time between failures"), "expected write cycles," "data retention," and so on. If you can find the actual manufacturer of a flash drive (not necessarily the seller--- many consumer electronic devices are made by one company, then branded and sold by another...), you can look up the original specs, which often include detailed information.

You can think of MTBF as a rough guide to a mythical "average" unit's life expectancy as a whole. No, it's not really that simple--- what it really means is that half of all drives will have failed by the MTBF datum, and the other half will fail after that point. But in very crude terms, you can think of it as "average life expectancy" for the electronics. It's typically a very large number for solid-state devices--- I've seen some flash drives claim a raw MTBF of 1,000,000 hours--- that's 114 years! ( http://google.com/search?q=usb+flash+mtbf ) In any case, the basic electrical guts of a flash drive probably won't wear out in any reasonable time frame. But when it fails, it probably will be a total failure; it just won't work anymore.

Data retention is another variable: That's how long--- again, on average--- the device will retain its data in a usable, readable format, assuming it's just sitting on a shelf or in a drawer someplace, safe and powered off, and not subject to environmental extremes. Claims for this typically run to around 10 years. ( http://google.com/search?q=usb+flash+data+retention  ) That is, of course, a guess, because flash drives haven't been around that long. And even that seems long to me--- USB Flash drives simply aren't meant for long-term, archival storage. If you need to store data for a long time, I think CDRs or DVDs, suitably checked and re-recorded every few years, are a much safer choice. In any case, this kind of trouble could show up as gradual corruption of files; or as something worse if it's the master tables or boot records that decay.

And then there's the "write cycle" life you refer to. Reading data from solid-state memory is a lightweight event that places little stress on the components. But writing to Flash memory requires erasing what's there and re-recording new data; both of which involve higher energies. That's harder on the memory cells. Estimates vary, but many vendors seem OK with guaranteeing a conservative 10,000 write cycles or so; and some industry insiders say that the devices are actually good for about an order of magnitude or even two more than that--- perhaps as much as a million write cycles. (eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:USB_flash_drive ; http://google.com/search?q=usb+flash+write+cycle ) But when the drive "wears out" from rewrites, you could see anything from "soft" errors in individual files to a wholesale mangling of the master tables or boot records, depending on which data cells go bad, and in what quantity. There's no way to know in advance.

So what does this all boil down to? I suggest you treat Flash drives as short- and medium-term storage devices. They're relatively cheap and getting cheaper, so I don't think they're worth fussing over too much: If you're conservative about data-safety, plan on replacing the devices (or at least moving them out of front-line service) every two or three years. If you're more relaxed about data security, a 5-year replacement cycle is probably safe.

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5) Stuck In An Activation Loop

Hi Fred, I regularly read the Langalist, and have a very serious problem. I am running Windows XP Pro. I went to the Microsoft Update site to download an update to Media Player, and was asked to validate my copy of XP through their Genuine Microsoft Product page, which I did successfully.
 
However, on rebooting the PC the next day, I received the message that my copy of XP must be activated, and did I want to do it now. I said yes, and up came a screen which told me that the product was already activated! Told to press OK, which I did, and I was returned to my logon screen, and on re-logging on, the process was repeated. I can no longer get into my PC! Is there any fix available other than re-installing XP? I can get into XP in safe mode with no problem!
 
Thanks a lot, Stan Kurowski

The Product Activation data is kept in c:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl . If you have access to an imaged or backed-up copy of that file when it was working OK, you can boot into safe mode and copy the known-good wpa.dbl file to your current setup. Reboot, and you should be OK again.

If that doesn't work, go back into safe mode and delete the wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files, and reboot: You'll have to re-activate then, but it should "stick."

(Note: In both the above, it's best to turn off "System Restore," "GoBack" and similar tools to prevent them from restoring a corrupted file over a good one.)

More info:
100% Legit, Partial Workaround For Product Activation
http://langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-03-28.htm#1
http://google.com/search?q=wpa%2Edbl

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6) Three More Winners!

"2Liz," "yarbr" and "jkrishnayya" each won a FREE full one-year subscription to the LangaList Plus! edition by using the "Recommend To A Friend" form at http://langa.com/recommend.htm .

You see, each month I choose three winners of a FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTION to the LangaList Plus! edition. To have a shot at winning, just use the following link to recommend the LangaList to a friend. Your friend just may find a new source of useful information; I just may gain a new subscriber; and you just may win! (Full details also available via this link): http://langa.com/recommend.htm

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7) Hidden File Foils Defrag

Hi Fred, There was a big red block on the defrag graphic and the file could not be moved by the utility (OS is XP).

Checking the report:
    Percent free space = 19 %

The main culprit was also shown in the report:
Files that cannot be defragmented
\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\CD Burning\<filename>.nrg

In preparation to burn a CD, I had accepted the default path for the image and forgot to remove it. I had a duplicate .nrg. in the same place because I created another file with a different name instead of overwriting the file when I burned another CD. So that should be taken into account with the changes in free space that I am listing. I usually, but not always, avoid adding anything on C:.

After deleting the file:
    Percent free space = 33 %

Then I found an option to remove all but the most recent restore point, and ended with:
    Percent free space = 39 %

One reason I am writing is that I spent some time before looking at the report, which should have been the first recourse. Also, someone else might have a file in the same location and not be aware of it. Best Regards, Evander

Thanks, Evander. Although the older Win9x/ME versions of Defrag don't generate a separate report like that, XP's does, and it's worth checking from time to time, especially when there are large blocks of 'files that cannot be moved" or defragged. See, for example, "Big Surprise In Defrag Log File" http://langa.com/newsletters/2004/2004-09-16.htm#4

Also note that defrag may not run properly when you get down to less than about 15% of free disk space: It needs some room to work.

If you want more options and info on running defrag, see:
http://google.com/search?l&q=defrag+site%3Alanga.com
http://langa.com/u/6a.htm

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8) Another Code-Load Success Story

Code-loader Matt writes:

Dear Fred, I wanted to thank you for adding my blog to the "Loaded the Code" section of your newsletter.  I've noticed a steady stream of new traffic coming from your site, and from webmail programs around the world. Thank you *very* much for the link -- I appreciate it! Best, Matt

Do you have a home page or website? (It doesn't matter what size.) Please click over to http://langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join the thousands of LangaList readers who have "Loaded the Code!" (If you've already "Loaded The Code" and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web site, please see http://langa.com/link.txt )

Speaking of which: Here's another eclectic sample of reader sites--- some professional, some very personal:

View A Randomly-Chosen Reader Site
http://langa.com/randomlink.htm

Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting At
http://langa.com/readersites.htm

Mac Setup Info
http://tylermacman.info/

Barb Motto
http://www.freewebs.com/barbmotto/index.htm

Vets Helping Vets
http://www.dav37nc.org/

Royalty-Free Images (and more)
http://www.ct-graphics.com/Store/store.php

Online weblinks
http://www.onlineweblinks.com/home.php

"Premier Webguide"
http://www.premierwebguide.com/directory/597.html

Sand-Box
http://www.brianball.info/wordpress/

Home PC Security Website
http://falcon21.vze.com/

Computer Wallpaper
http://terry-witt.com/

cosmic echoes
http://www.cosmicechoes.org/

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9) Normal Fixes Just Won't Work

Hi Fred, I hate to admit this, but I've encountered a problem with a computer of mine that I haven't been able to solve.

Whenever I run Windows Update, IE starts up and then begins the "Checking the Version..." step, then almost immediately stops.  I get a screen that says:

"Administrators Only: To install items from Windows Update, you must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure."

The screen then goes on to tell me what to do if I'm running Windows XP or Windows 2000.  The problem is that I'm running Windows 98, and there is no administrator!  I've been running Windows Update just fine for years on this computer; this just started happening a week or two ago.

There were a couple of articles in the Microsoft Knowledgebase which did not help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316524/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324513/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319585/
(this last one looked promising, but ultimately did not help.)

I Googled around and found some suggestions:

- Delete IE cache, history, and cookies.
- Delete all instances of iuctl.dll and iuengine.dll.
- Use this URL: https://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ instead of WU.
- Reset the system clock (even if correct), reboot, and retry.
- Deleted everything in C:\windows\temp folder.
- Delete all files in C:\Program Files\WindowsUpdate.

All tried and all failed.  I've also done virus scans, spyware sweeps, scandisk and defragmentation, which also didn't help.  Any ideas?

Thanks for your great newsletter! ---Ralph

You did well in finding what you did, Ralph--- those steps usually do the trick. But there's still more you can try, and we detailed some of those steps almost two years ago in the Plus! Edition:

"Administrators-Only Error?" in http://www.langalist.com/Plus/newsletters/2004/2004-02-09plus.asp
and "Administrators-Only Error, Alternate Fix" in http://www.langalist.com/Plus/newsletters/2004/2004-02-12plus.asp

The latter, in particular, suggests:

1. Click on Start and choose Run.
2. In the Run box type in "regsvr32 softpub.dll" (without the quotes) and then click OK.
3. You should get a message that it succeeded.
4. Do the same process using the regsver32 command for 2 more files: initpki.dll and mssip32.dll.
5. Try the Windows Update site again.

More suggestions here:
http://google.com/search?q=%22Administrators+Only%22

And, if you come to suspect it's the ActiveX Control itself that's causing trouble, see:

A Free And Useful ActiveX Diagnostic Tool
http://langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-10-18.htm#7

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10) Just For Grins

I will seek and find you . . .

I shall take you to bed and have my way with you .

I will make you ache, shake & sweat until you moan & groan.

I will make you beg for mercy, beg for me to stop.

I will exhaust you to the point that you will be relieved when I'm finished with you

And, when I am finished, you will be weak for days.

All my love,

The Flu

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11) Plus! Edition Highlights:

Today's LangaList Plus! Edition contains all ten items above, plus about 40% more content including:

• Useful, Powerful, Free Utilities
     (recover mangled partitions, and more!)
• Free HandyFind
     (faster replacement for Ctrl-F or Edit/Find)
• More Tools For Saving Corrupted Files
     (bring back files that otherwise are dead and gone)
• Not Hard, But *Impossible* To Delete?
     (extreme fixes for extreme problems)

The Plus! edition is only pennies per issue, and comes with a MONEY BACK
GUARANTEE from Fred. You can't lose!

Plus! Edition info: http://langa.com/plus.htm 

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(Give a gift subscription to the LangaList Plus edition!
Click <a href= " http://langa.com/plus_gift.htm ">here</a>)

The LangaList is published about 72 times a year, or about 6 times a month. See you next issue, 2005-12-12!

Best,

Fred
( Editor@Langa.Com )

Please recommend the LangaList to a friend! (And maybe win a prize!)

An easier-to read formatted HTML version is available in the "Current Issue" section of http://langa.com.  (The HTML version of each issue normally is available by 9AM EST [UT-5] of the issue date.) All past LangaList issues are also available at the Langa.Com site.

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