My loathing for it got worse as it didn’t seem to be closing gracefully on quitting besides causing software restores which all ended up with iTunes.exe taking up 100% CPU. I decided to stop swearing at it and search around for the root cause as this behaviour wasn’t replicated on my work machine and on colleague’s variety of machines.

Turns out it wasn’t iTunes, but the antivirus (NOD32 2.7) which wasn’t playing nice. After adding various iTunes paths to AMON/IMON exclusion lists, there has not been crashes or 100% CPU since (instructions on how to do this here). Guess I was cursing the wrong software but anyhow..

Just a note, this is a fairly belated post as I was having this issue with iTunes 7.x and have since upgraded to 8.0.1 which may no longer require this workaround. ;)

Taken from here:

Important information regarding the CD-ROM software supplied with the following WALKMAN: NW-E013/E015/E016/E013F/E015F/E016F

Some CD-ROM provided with the above mentioned models may not be used. Therefore, the Hardware Operation Guide (PDF) may not be opened and the Driver for Microsoft Windows 2000 users may not be installed.

If you’re having the same issues, just get the drivers from here and it should install fine. ;)

And here‘s the link to SonicStage 4.3 which is the software used to transfer your music to the device (similar to how iTunes works with the iPod).

Sony Asia Pacific’s announcement regarding this issue can be found here.

1. Go to Start->Run, and type ‘gpedit.msc ‘ without the quotes and hit OK.
2. Browse down to Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update.
3. The settings which I changed are:
   • Enabled ‘Configure Automatic Updates‘ and set it to ’3 – Auto download and notify for install’
   • Enabled ‘No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations‘
   • Disabled ‘Allow Automatic Updates immediate installation‘
   • Enabled ‘Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations‘ and set it to 1440 minutes

Screenshot of my Group Policy Object Editor:

As far as I know, Windows XP does not install updates automatically by default, so that might only be a default for Windows Server 2003 which I’m using. However, I believe the restart prompt is defaulted to 10mins for XP and 2003.

Jokes aside, ck has a review up at spherebox if you’re interested to read more about it. :)

First issue I had was the inability to connect to Google Talk, which HMMaster solved it for me by sending me this link. Next issue I had with it is the groupings I had with my contacts in MSN are not available in Miranda. According to HMMaster, he said there might be a plugin available for that as Miranda as heaps of plugins available, but I have not checked on that as yet.

Apart from those issues, it’s a rather good alternative to other multi-network IM clients such as GAIM and Trillian. :)

Mr sysadmin AsenDURE didn’t have an answer for it either, so I went back to do more googling which one of them actually fixed it. Although the installer (msi) file was on the hard disk locally, it was in a network share which Windows Server 2003 disapproves of. After moving the file to an unshared directory, the install process was completed without any issues. That’s Windows I guess. ;)

Another thing which I’ve learnt after the first week is not to run services/applications which were built for *nix on Windows. I had heaps of problems in migrating CVS to SVN which would never have been an issue had it been a *nix box.

To avoid this problem, one easy way is to generate PDFs of your document which you can then distribute which you can be sure they would be able to view it without any issues.

Adobe‘s PDF format is probably the de facto standard when it comes to document viewing. The Adobe Reader software which is used to view PDF files is free and is installed in most computers nowadays. Another free PDF viewer which you can use instead is Foxit Reader.

So now to generating PDFs! Just follow the steps below and you should be able to start generating them real soon:

1. Download PDFCreator from here (get the .msi version, i.e. zPDFCreator-0_9_3-AD_DeploymentPackage-WithoutToolbar.msi).
2. Install PDFCreator by running the .msi file which you downloaded earlier. If you go to ‘Printers and Faxes’, you should see a new ‘PDFCreator’ printer installed.
3. Open your document as usual, get to the print dialog, choose printing preferences and then select the PDFCreator printer.
4. Hit ‘Print’ as usual and you would then be prompted on the filename of the PDF file and where you want to save it to.

With PDFCreator, you can practically generate PDFs from any application which supports printing. There are other settings you can choose from in PDFCreator such as having the PDF encrypted to prevent unauthorised copying.

Another PDF generating software which you can try out instead is CutePDF Writer which does the same thing, but requires you to download and install the Ghostscript converter separately and does not have that many features as compared to PDFCreator.

1. Go to Start, run, then type “regedit”
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies
3. Delete the key “contacts.msn.com”
4. Then, try launching Windows Live Messenger again.

Apparently the full uninstallation I did the last time did not remove any of the messenger registry keys (I forgot to check on that either).

I guess you could say this is probably one of the very few M$ software which I would gladly choose to use over other alternative software. :P Do try out the excellent Messenger Plus! Live extension if you’re already using WLM (adds heaps of features like tabbed chats, etc). Just remember to refuse the installation of the sponsor program unless you want adware/spyware installed on your machine. ;)