menu.

I recently noticed that my CPU fan on my Acer Aspire 5002 WLMi notebook was running at full speed much more than it normally should and the system itself was running more slowly than usual. When I opened task manager I was finding a process called Monitor.exe was hogging anything up to 99% of the CPU. I terminated the process and that solved everything - usually until I rebooted.

But what to stop this happening again? It turns out that monitor.exe was related to Acer eRecovery - a tool that helps recover your laptop from a major crash. However after a bit of googling I found out that it needs the D: partition that comes with the laptop (apparently it needs to be in FAT32 as well, but I don’t think this is true because mine had been NTFS for months and I hadn’t noticed any problems).

The problem seemingly arises because I recently reformatted the D partition into a few ext3 and other partitions for installing Linux (Ubuntu to be precise). Since Windows can’t read Linux filesystems, eRecovery can no longer find the D: partition which it, for some reason, seems to need.

Simple solution? Well I disabled Monitor.exe using Start -> Run -> msconfig and disabling Monitor.exe, which was listed at the bottom of the list under the Startup tab.

Inspired by Tech Chick (aka Gabrielle Atticus), I’ve decided to start listing some interesting if well-hidden sites on the internet so this will be the first in a series of nerd. links.

This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date.

Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful:

—- Original message —–
From: sender@provider.com
To: recipient@provider.com
Subject: something
Date: 01/01/2005

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be listed at Mozilla’s plugin site, so I only stumbled on it after googling a bit and reading a few forum pages.  The home page (linked above) isn’t very well designed, but there’s a more user-friendly description of the plugin at The Extensions Mirror.

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Following my earlier rant about the trial that is installing Vista with a Netgear wireless card, I thought I’d offer an update on that story.

Firstly, my new Linksys (WMP54G v4.1) wireless card is working fine. Thanks Amazon.

Secondly, I updated the Windows Experience Index score just now. Still the same graphics card in the machine, so I don’t know how but suddenly my desktop graphics rating jumped from showing 2.1 to 4.1, pretty sweet! On viewing the details I also noticed that the graphics card apparently has 334MB of system memory available on top of the 256MB of dedicated RAM. I don’t know if this was the case before or not so can’t say if that influenced the change in score.

Anyway, this brings my overall Windows Experience Index up from 2.1 to 3.0, now based on the Gaming Graphics score (WEI bases your overall experience rating on the lowest score it finds). My system now looks like:

Processor (AMD Athlon 2800+): 3.4
RAM (1.5GB @ 266MHz): 3.7
Graphics (256MB eForce 6200): 4.1
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary Hard Disk (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm): 4.4

Now if anyone can tell me of a Protowall/PeerGuardian substitute that works with Vista I’ll be sorted.

I feel so dirty, but for a project I’m working on at the moment I have to use ASP.NET instead of PHP; “why?” is a question for another day. Anyway, I’ve installed IIS before so that wasn’t a big problem… or so I thought.

I already had the .NET 2.0 framework on my XP machine so went straight to installing IIS (5.1 comes with XP Pro). It installed easily enough and my hello world html file was served without any major problems (actually that’s not true, before I copied my own files across I tried to check the IIS default pages served ok only to discover, through more googling, that if I used IE instead of Firefox that annoying box asking me for a password would go away).

Now my ASP.NET issue. I got a Server application unavailable error message in big red letters when I tried to run any .aspx (ASP.NET) scripts and couldn’t figure out for the life of me why. The Event Viewer, where IIS errors are logged, gave little more by way of help: Failed to initialize the AppDomain:/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT

Err… What?! I worked out that it wasn’t affecting html pages, just ASP ones - and only .aspx ones at that, suggesting it was .NET-related.

As it turns out the problem was that I had installed .NET before IIS. It’s easy enough to fix, but it took 20 solid minutes of googling to find the solution in a Microsoft community newsgroup (and then realise that I’d have found it already if I’d just read to the bottom of a 4 year old forum post I’d already found).

Anyway, what you need to do if you’re getting this “Server application unavailable” message is navigate to your .NET directory (something like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727) in a command prompt and run the command aspnet_regiis.exe -i which will register ASP.NET with IIS. If that still doesn’t work, there’s always PHP.net

Back in October/November time I got myself a new laptop for university and general showyness. I didn’t want to spend too much money and, following a recommendation from a friend, decided to check out LaptopsDirect.co.uk. Soon enough I’d plumped for the Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi - a 64-bit AMD-based laptop with 512MB of RAM. Having taken note of the 64-bit Turion mobile processor, I initially found it highly strange that the laptop shipped with a 32-bit version of Windows XP Home, rendering the 64-bit processor about as much use as a chocolate teapot (OK, as much use as a 32-bit processor anyway). Then again, this is the same machine which for some reason has a hard drive partitioned into two 40GB volumes, both formatted using the FAT32 file system. Honest to God.

I realise there are issues with drivers with x64 machines and put the perplexing decision to ship 32-bit Windows down to that, however after a lot of hunting a thread Planet AMD64 provided links to x64 drivers for both Acer’s Ferarri 4000 range and their Aspire 5020, which seem to work for the 5000 series too. Maybe it was just laziness.

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I managed to get a copy of the 32-bit Windows Vista Business from the MSDN Academic Alliance program through university and, after a RAM and graphics card upgrade, and a lot of moving of files to clear a partition for it, I was ready to install Vista. The installation itself went reasonably quickly. After about half an hour I was choosing desktops and playing with the control panel.

I was disappointed to notice that my initial Windows Experience Index (Microsoft’s measure of how pimped your PC is) was disappointing at 2.2, let down by poor graphics performance, considering I’d just spent about £40 on a new 256MB card from Dabs. Maybe it’s because I’m only running AGP4x, I don’t know. Anyway, Vista told me my system was rated as follows:

Processor (AMD Athlon 2800+): 3.4
RAM (1.5GB @ 266MHz): 3.7
Graphics (256MB eForce 6200): 2.2 4.1* - yay!
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary Hard Disk (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm): 4.4

The first spot of trouble came as I tried to get my wireless connection going. The device manager was reporting my Netgear WG311 v3 present and correct, but it wasn’t picking up my network. Oh dear. Anyone familiar with my previous exploits with this card will probably guess I wasn’t very surprised by this.

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Microsoft tell you that it’s not possible to run IIS, the Windows Web Server, on Windows XP Home Edition (see note 1). In previous versions of Windows, the home versions (Windows 98, ME etc) included something called Personal Web Server, which was a bit like a cut down version of IIS. Imagine my horror when I had to create a website using ASP (not my choice, I’m a PHP kinda nerd.) only to find that my shiny new operating system couldn’t even do something my mum and dad’s old Windows 98 box could do.

Having paid seventy odd pounds for this ‘upgrade’ I was a bit miffed that Microsoft had discontinued PWS. Then, after a bit of Googling, I discovered Win XP Home could run a web server after all - and IIS at that. As a bit of a bonus, you can also access the Windows XP Pro / Windows 2000 style advanced security settings (see note 2). Here’s how it’s done.

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