Can’t Turn on Windows XP Automatic Updates

This happened to me recently. Some forums said it was due to some program I installed or a virus…blah bleh bluh. I have uninstalled everything. Now I just have a browser and a media player. That’s it! Whatever the problem was, i don’t know if it was me or a program or greatmj, there’s a simple solution. Download dial-a-fix.  Unzip the downloaded zip archive, run dial-a-fix. Now, check  “Fix Windows Update” under the WU/WUAU section and press Go. It will fix everything, and the lil yellow-bandwidth-eating-updates-downloader will be back. And, I’m so happy.

Disable Windows Mobile 6.1 SMS autocomplete

I recently switched to my WM 6.1 (ASUS p527), a touch screen mobile with a keypad. But messaging was quite difficult. Removing the stylus each time is cumbersome, and windows mobile didn’t let me use the keypad the way symbian based mobiles would let me to. I searched a lot, some said there’s some fix, downloaded various keyboard layouts, but wasn’t satisfied. It’s very simple to turn the windows mobile messaging dictionary. Go to Start> Settings> Personal> Input. Set the input method as XT9 and tap on options. Now uncheck all of them (If u lk 2 typ lk ds [if you like to type like this]). Now tap done. And, it’s done! Simple, no patch needed. Note: After you do this, it is possible that whenever you start yping a new message, the on-screen keyboard pops up and thus you can only enter numbers using the keypad. And when you hide it and start re-typing the numbers you erased would reappear. There’s a solution for this. Do as I’ve mentioned above and then select keyboard as your input method. This way if you accidently type numbers and erase them, they won’t reappear.

MDU Rohtak B.E./B.Tech. Results, 2009

EDIT: RESULTS FOR SEPTEMBER 2009: CLICK HERE

Here are the links to the results of MDU Rohtak B.E./B.Tech. (All Semesters) Results, 2009. I have uploaded the files here as the MDU site is not working (exceeded bandwidth).

When you’re done checking, please comment on the results.

Also, don’t you think subject B77’s papers were checked by watchmen of the university?

EDIT: My neighbor tried to look up and it seems from this site that B77 is DSA(Data Structures Algorithms)
B.E. Roll No. 110001-137952
B.E. Roll No. 137953-162672
B.E. Roll No. 162673-184485
B.E. Roll No. 184486-204341
B.E. Roll No. 204342-221084

Gmail Drive! Free 7 GB(And counting!) Storage!

Recently, I was working with my college’s tehno-management fest team (More info at virus2k9.msit.in),  I made all the posters (!!). I constantly needed to send files to my head (the designing team head, i mean). The sad part was, Gmail allowed 20MB max file size limit. And all of the posters were >20MB. Some files being almost 250 MB. Now,  uploading to rapidshare was a choice, but then, I had to send the link to him, or every other person who wanted a copy, etc etc. Arrgh.

I once used a firefox extension called Gspace. It used the gmail account and provided an FTP manager. So, you can upload the files from your Hard disk to your account.  So, this was a solution. I could make one common id, say posters@gmail.com, and upload all the posters there. Then, anyone who wanted the posters could download from there. But, open firefox everytime, then explain how to use it, pain in the ass. ( Though the FTP feature is quite nice!)

So, I looked a bit more and I found GMail Drive. It adds another drive called ‘Gmail Drive’ to my computer! Now I can just drag and drop the files, use the same common account, and that’s it.  Everyone knows how to copy paste stuff from one hard drive to another. \m/

To download Gmail Drive, click here.

Extract the files, and double click Setup.exe. It will finish in seconds. Now, open My Computer, double click ‘Gmail Drive’, a window would open up wherein you have to enter your account details.  Hit Enter and you are done. Now, just copy paste files to this drive, they’ll be uploaded to your gmail drive. \m/

Happy Uploading!

Seagate + Windows = Death?

(What to do if Windows XP Home/Professional(-suicide-bomber),Vista Home Shit/Business Killer/Ultimate Disaster/Stupidity has died the trillionth time? The Windows version of FreeBSD(Blue Screen of Death)? Are you using Seagate? (No, I’m not totally against Windows or Seagate! Its just fun to make fun like this! But yeah, having successfully tried Ubuntu/Linux-and I love it now- I can very well say I DON’T need Windows or any of its latches!)

Strange but true. Especially if you are an Indian, you might already know this(I said Indian because I’m not sure if the whole world gets the Seagate products from the same place or the third world countries are treated “specially” ).

Seagate is probably the most popular brand out there, possibly losing the top spot(or has it already?) to Western Digital. As Abhishek says, Seagate has a huge market now and thus they’re losing on quality, and quantity is the only focus now it seems. I personally have been traumatized enough in the last two months, hence this post from this lazy bum. I have a Seagate ST3500320AS, Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 500-GB  7200 RPM SATA drive. I think I bought it in June or July 2008. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate and it took me 30 seconds(time taken in booting) to admire how good it is. Yes, even now I think it’s pretty neat and cool. With all the effects and ultimate specials, it was like getting freedom from the chains of misery of XP. Also….blah blah(Shit. I get diverted easily.)

(Skip the story and read the problem and solution. However, I think the story might be interesting! )

Stage 1 of death(Lead role: Seagate): Anyway, so as I was saying, I use a Seagate HDD. I have always trusted Seagate. Then came the shock of my life(!). With about 450+GB’s filled with movies, games, critical data(<10GB ), dad’s documents and a lot of other stuff, the hdd one day died. Literally. The drive wouldn’t show up even in the boot menu. I tried many options but only to find that I was phurked. I tried connecting (as secondary) on a Windows 98 machine(LOL!), Windows XP, Vista’s billion variations. Also tried USB casing. Nope. The drive had met its ultimate destiny too early.

After a while, on a bright sunny day, I installed Ubuntu on another hdd(thanks to Abhishek and others at college). Skipping my first time experience on linux/ubuntu, just let me tell you this: THE HDD WAS THERE AGAIN!(I connected it via usb) However, I could see only 2 partitions of the 5 I had!

I used this tool called TestDisk suggested by Sudhang. AMAZING tool for recovery! It took exactly 1 second to recover and then another second to write the recovered partition table. Boom! I could see all 5 partitions again! ALL 5!

Stage 2 (Windows magic!):

while(!DEAD)

{

I set up the hdd as my first boot device and then Windows Vista was up and running! After about 2-3 minutes of working, Vista started being irresponsive. It didn’t “hang” or “freeze” but nothing was working or “Not responding”-ing either. I restarted and Vista greeted me with BSD. A series of restarts had no change… the same scary BSD!

I ran the recovery console of Windows XP to run chkdsk. It worked.

}

Yes. Windows successfully killed my HDD once again. Now all the partitions were visible(via USB) BUT every folder was now EMPTY! And the files wouldn’t open. Dead. As a stone………………..

Gist:

Problem:

1. Hard disk crash

2. Damaged boot table/lost partitions

Cause: Windows. Why I’m so sure is first, I was using Windows Vista while the HDD stopped functioning. Then, in the course of recovery, at many stages I tried connecting on Ubuntu and XP via USB and running Vista from the damaged HDD itself. In the latter two, the computer would stop working in a couple of minutes. Also, I lost partitions numerous time on Windows. It seems the way Windows accesses media is weird and it messes up the volumes if it is already messed up. On the other hand, Ubuntu(or Linux or Mac) don’t do this. These don’t unnecessarily access the volumes and hence don’t cause problems.

Solution(s):

1. Try to buy only Western Digital or Samsung hard disks. Seagate has been great, no doubt. But now they’ve many faulty hard drives. I am not the first one. Three of my friends have lost their HDDs(though they got replacements very soon. Still, they lost data and time!) My neighbor has a 500GB too, Seagate. It’s much newer and he too had Vista Ultimate. His HDD crashed much before mine and it’s completely bad now. It crashed a single time and no hint of data ever.

2. (Im saying this as I havent used Windows 7 yet) Use Linux or Apple OS. These have totally different ways of working and probably I wouldn’t have had to face any of this. Well, right now I’m fully able to access all my data, except that one of the partitions isnt perfect anymore. A lot of it has gone bad.(it was a 50GB partition and i can’t read and write some of the files now because it fails to start the action.) Other advantages: no viruses so no anti-viruses, better interface, easy to use OSs….

Comment about your experiences here(and this post!)!! Thanks!

mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline,G_DIR_SEPARATOR(usually /)

You changed the mount options to “-rw”, “/Local Disk” or something illegal like this and you get the above error when you try to open the partition/drive… Simple solution.

WARNING: Follow the steps as a normal user in terminal. Using root access (sudo or su) might (will?) not work.

1. Open terminal (In Ubuntu, which I use…  Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. It’s a called Konsole in KDE)

2. Type:

$ gconf-editor

3. In the left list pane, go to / -> system -> storage -> volumes.

4. Most probably there’ll be only one entry. If more than one, then select each and right click the “mount_options” key that shows up in the right. Click on “Unset Key” or modify the key to a new value if you want.

I suggest you just unset the key and then first check if you can mount the volume before setting a mew value for the key,  by doing this:

$ mount /dev/sdXN

(Here X can be ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ and N can be a number between 1 and 9. Sample: sda3, sdb4 etc. To know exactly what it is, go to the partition editor of your OS (In ubuntu, type parted or gparted in terminal.). The device should be the one which has no mount point defined(blank). )

Now:

$ mount

This will show you a list of mounted devices. Now try accessing the device.

If it works then great! Now you can experiment with setting up new mountpoints!

Please comment if this does/doesn’t work. (I’m a noob!)

Windows 7 Beta: Public Release

Yep, after a lil delay, Microsoft did launch Windows 7 Beta. Microsoft guys saw that more than expected people were going to download the beta release, so they added more servers and delayed the launch. It’s available in 32-bit and 64-bit too. Here’s the link,

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

Before you begin, here’s the minimum system requirements for Windows 7,

• 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
• 1 GB of system memory
• 16 GB of available disk space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)
• DVD-R/W Drive
• Internet access (to download the Beta and get updates)

Happy Testing!

AVG 8.0 Update Error – Invalid Update Control CTF File

Recently I was trying to update AVG 8.0, but it kept saying Invalid Update Control CTF File. Well, there’s nothing much to fix this. Navigate to “C:\documents and settings\all users\application data\avg8\update\download\”. Here, rename the two ctf files avginfowin.ctf and avginfoavi.ctf to avginfoavi.ctf_old and avginfowin.ctf_old  or delete them. Now, right-click avg 8.0 icon and click update. It should update this time.

Bush loves shoes. On his face.

This is so awesome!!! While Bush was on his farewell visit to Baghdad on Sunday as the President, he got served! And what a nice parting gift he got! An Iraqi reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw EACH of his shoes one at time, on Bush’s face. BUT — I hate this part — he missed!! I read a whole lot about (stupid) stuff Bush said to save his face but I liked the following best:

“So what if the guy threw his shoe at me?”

“Let me talk about the guy throwing his shoe. It’s one way to gain attention. It’s like going to a political rally and having people yell at you. It’s like driving down the street and having people not gesturing with all five fingers. … BLAH BLAH!!”

“These journalists here were very apologetic. *Some crap said by bush missing * “

Bush said it was “a size 10 shoe he threw at me…” I bet he must be pretty proud because he’s had too many shoes thrown and now he can make out the size too! Lol!

Best: “All this basically says is we made good progress, and we will continue to work together to achieve peace.” Yea right. Or maybe he’s always dreamed of dying by a shoe-shot(huh?). That’ll give him some piece of peace in the bushy grave.

“This reminds me of Gates getting cake in his face!” — I said this. Heehee.

Poor al-Zaidi is currently in jail. Stupid governments.

May God bless Bush with a hint of brain. Amen.

Btw, the video is out everywhere. Just google Bush shoe and see how (un)lucky a shoe can get!

Get more seeds for your torrents

WHAT ARE SEEDS? – The number of people with a full copy of the file(s) in the torrent being downloaded. Higher the seeders, faster is your download. (A detailed post on torrents later on)

How to increase seeds:

A) (For experienced users… however if you were one, you wouldn’t be reading this!)You can directly go to the trackers list in your favorite torrent client and add new trackers. (Mine is uTorrent. Double clicking a torrent brings up the tracker list)

OR

B) Follow the steps:(Seems like a lot of steps but is really easy and more importantly, fast.)

1. Go to the BtReannouncer site
2. Click on the browse button and find the torrent on your computer you want to add seeds to.
3. Click upload. Wait for a few seconds.
4. On the page that comes up, put a check in front of every tracker (the names with check boxes in front of them). Click ReAnnounce
5. Find where it says “Download ReAnnounced torrent” and below it, the link which is the name of the torrent. Click on the link to download the reannounced torrent.
6. After downloading, just open it and if the torrent was already started, select the option to load the trackers from the new torrent file.

I have tried this and it has worked every single time. And it does help. Obviously, you should make sure this doesn’t violate the terms of the private tracker you might be using!