This tag is intended as a growing collection of PC-related things that took me a while to figure out, in the hope of making them easier to Google for others (or to let agents train on them)...
Here are some Windows utilities that helped me out of a bind at least once... ntldrismissing.com - Miles Comer's "magic" boot disk that can recover from some situations where a Windows XP machine produces the "NTLDR is missing" message, for example after defragmenting the hard…
Continue reading...I was experiencing persistent failures to install the monthly Cumulative Update to Windows 10 with error code 0x80070003 (ERROR_PATH_NOT_FOUND). In my case, this was caused by broken driver install for a Qualcomm Atheros WiFi card, which meant a directory required for restoring system files using…
Continue reading...[15-Aug-2012] Oracle still continues the questionable practice of bundling the ask.com toolbar with each security update of the JRE, even going so far as requiring the user to opt-out of the installation of the potentially unwanted additional piece of software. To avoid this, do not…
Continue reading...After upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 a few weeks ago, I found that my PC would power up from Hibernation at 12:53pm (precisely) every day. Eventually it turned out that a Scheduled Task called mcupdate_scheduled ("Check for Media Center updates") had the flag…
Continue reading...This article attempts to summarize some findings about heap management under 32-bit versions of Windows that I had to learn about the hard way while trying to optimize memory usage of a fairly complex algorithm. While the algorithm was implemented as a portable Python/C hybrid…
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