Windows on Inactivity
Here’s a little tip for anyone like me still using Windows Vista who’s having trouble with the system logging/locking you out after a certain period of inactivity (usually 5 or 10 minutes). The two most common culprits for this are the screensaver settings or possible power saving options, both accessible from within the Control Panel. However, what isn’t obvious and what drove me mad trying to find, is that even if you have None selected as your screensaver of choice, it appears Windows still sees fit to still log the user out after the allotted period of time. This despite the fact that the On resume, require logon checkbox is greyed out.
One minute to read
Fixing a Broken Network Printer
There’s one problem which was driving my parents nuts on XP for some time before we finally got around to finding a reasonable solution. For whatever reason, one of their computers insisted on automatically adding the shared network printer on the other machine as the default printer in the list. This regardless of whether we had already assigned a local default, and whether the network printer was already in the list.
2 minutes to read
Deleting the Undeletable
It’s a fairly common problem with Windows. Somehow a program manages to create a file with a name containing illegal characters or otherwise outside the file system’s parameters. No matter what you try, you just can’t rid yourself of it. The file certainly isn’t in use and being locked up by another program. Trying to delete or rename the file only results in Windows telling you the file cannot be found: “This is no longer in . Verify the item’s location and try again.” Even running the Command Prompt with administrator privileges doesn’t allow you to move, rename or delete the blasted thing!
One minute to read
Juice on Vista
Whilst installing the latest version of Juice, a cross-platform podcast receiver on Windows Vista, I came across a rather simple error that prevented the program from functioning correctly on the first load, and then from loading thereafter. The error log generated the following output (where xxx indicates the username):
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'
Fortunately the fix seems to be quite simple and pain free (though a bit of a hassle to implement manually), found courtesy of Randall’s Life .
One minute to read
Strange Mouse Cursor Issues
A friend of mine was having a strange problem with her Dell XPS system, whereby the active area of the mouse cursor would move with apparent randomness, occasionally being located as it should be at the arrow’s point, sometimes at its middle, other times half an inch below. This post
led us to the solution that a simple graphics driver update was required, coincidentally for the same ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card.
One minute to read
Windows Vista User Profile Issues
Windows Vista
3 minutes to read