Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin’s website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
1-20-05
Back in the dark ages of DOS you had the command line, that flashing curser on a black screen that makes modern day users cringe. You had to know the arcane language of the day which included abbreviations and switches like cd\dos to enter the DOS directory (today’s folder) or chkdsk /f to run the equivalent of the modern Scandisk.
While command line has kind of gone by the wayside in favor of easier to use GUIs, or Graphical User Interfaces, it still resides in various forms in every version of Windows. While you likely will avoid it like the plague, it can actually save your bacon in a time of crisis.
In XP there are two ways to get to the command line and both have certain uses that are unavailable in the other method.
If your PC just flat refuses to boot into Windows, or if you have an infected file that your antivirus program can’t remove, you’ll want to boot with your XP CD and choose R for Recovery Console when you get to the installation screen.
You’ll be asked which Windows load to log into (usually there’s just the one), then prompted for the Administrator password. If you haven’t set a password just hit Enter at that prompt and you’ll come to the command line.
You type “help” without the quotes to get a complete list of commands available but a few are the most useful in this mode. From here on I’ll use quotes around commands to separate them from the rest of the text, just ignore them when you type the command in.
First up is the aforementioned chkdsk. Windows 2000 and XP lack the usual scandisk feature and instead rely on this DOS throwback. At the command line type “chkdsk” for a quick check or “chkdsk /p /r” for a full forced surface scan. This is useful if you get any errors during a failed boot that might indicate damage to files or the hard drive itself.
If booting from the hard drive gives any errors about a non-bootable disk, non-system disk or disk errors you may have a corrupted boot sector or master boot record. For that you can use fixboot and/or fixmbr. As their names imply, fixboot will repair the boot sector (“fixboot c:”) and fixmbr rebuilds the boot record, no other switches or parameters needed.
By far the most useful utility in the Recovery Console is expand. Often a problem that prevents Windows from starting involves a missing or corrupted file. Let’s say you get the error “Bad or missing system32\hal.dll: System Halted”. One of the options to fix this error is to replace the file with a fresh copy. From the Console type “expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll” and hit Enter. In this example d: is your CD drive.
As for the rest of the odd looking entries, most of the system files for XP are stored in compressed form in the i386 folder on the installation CD, and the compressed file usually have an underscore instead of the last letter of the file name, thus hal.dl_. Obviously this may be a bit beyond beginners and non-geeks but being familiar with the procedure can be an enormous benefit if you’re getting telephone support to fix a problem, although you’d likely need to get to Level 2 before you found a tech who knew how to do it ;)
A lot of the old general DOS commands are also available from the Recovery Console. Change directory (cd), delete (del), rename (ren) etc. are all there so those of you with DOS experience will be comfortable.
For less disastrous use, you can get to a command prompt from within Windows by clicking Start and Run and entering “cmd”. Click OK and you’ll see the old DOS box.
The commands you’ll likely find most useful from within Windows are sfc and ipconfig. Sfc is a variant of the graphical System File Checker in Windows 98. With it you can check the status of all of the core system files and replace any that go missing or become corrupted. The command is “sfc /scannow” and you need to make sure you have the Windows installation in the drive before you run the utility.
Ipconfig shows the current IP address for the network devices in your computer but the main use if for requesting a new address in case your router or cable/DSL modem crashes and has to be reset. After you get the proper lights on your peripheral devices you enter “ipconfig /release *”, which will reset all of your addresses to zeros, then type “ipconfig /renew” to ask for a fresh address.
For a complete list of commands and parameters see http://www.ss64.com/nt/.
Next week I’ll not be so geeky, I promise ;)
Kevin Mefford, Editor
As further proof that there are people in
this world who have no soul,
a new worm that spreads itself as an appeal for
tsunami relief aid is
on the loose:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119331,00.asp
Google
has released Picasa2, a free application that helps you
organize and touch up
your digital photos:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Jan/gee20050119028745.htm
From
the "If I Don't Like It, It's A Fad" department comes an
interview with
Dell's newish CEO, Kevin Rollins:
http://news.com.com/Dells+Rollins+Unfazed+by+iPod,+IBM/2008-1082_3-5540420.html
Just
when you thought you couldn't do anything more with your cell
phone, Toshiba
has announced mobile software which allows you to
control your PC from
anywhere:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/68187/toshiba-brings-pcs-under-the-control-of-mobile-phones.html
Copy
us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
The Recycle Bin is a repository of files you have deleted, held there for safe keeping in case you deleted something important by mistake. The Bin spans drives, so each hard drive partition has one, but they are all linked and all will be emptied at once if you empty the Bin. Ordinarily this is a good thing, but if you have a drive letter strictly for document storage you might want to leave files in there a bit longer than usual, just in case.
Recycler from Karen Kenworthy’s Power Tools collection gives you full control of the Recycle Bin, allowing you to empty it per drive letter. You can do it manually or even automate it if you’re a neat person and hate drive clutter.
You can download it for free from http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptrecycler.asp, and get several nifty tools from her main list at http://www.karenware.com/powertools/powertools.asp.
Kevin Mefford
Tam Cavadias is one of the earliest members of the original 84 Online radio crew, adding the show to her other media duties with then ZDTV and Leo LaPorte. Sadly she moved from the Louisville area a few years ago and currently resides on the east coast but she remains an active member with answers to email questions and visits to the chat room.
From http://www.thepcgurus.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1#tam:
Tam took an interest in computers in 1995 and being the curious type just had to find out what it could do. Within the first 9 weeks of owning that computer, she managed to crash it 18 times and got to be on a first name basis with the tech-support agent. He knew her voice.
Tam finally decided to expand her interest past just what makes a computer crash to what doesn’t make it crash. She joined ZDNet in 1996. In 1997 she joined ZDNN and ZDTV (now known as G4TechTV). In 1999 Tam joined Oxygen Media. She currently does contracting work for building online communities, to writing manuals, to online data researching, and has a special interest in keeping children safe online as well as in viruses/spy-ware/mal-ware and hijackers, and naturally in trouble shooting computers.
In her spare time, Tam enjoys reading, scouring the Internet and playing on a 9 ball pool league. Additionally she recently purchased a motorcycle and still has yet to get it past first gear :-)
I am selling my computer and would like
information on removing my
personal information. I have removed
most of the programs which
contained pictures and documents, but I find out
how to change the
system properties which contain my name as registered
owner.
Just uninstalling programs and deleting files from a hard
drive
doesn't mean they're really gone. They can be recovered pretty
easily
by anyone who's just semi-familiar with PCs.
If you're
selling the PC to a friend, especially someone who is
older with no kids
around, and if the stuff you've removed is pretty
innocuous like vacation
pictures and what not you are probably OK as
is but if there were ANY files
that you wouldn't want others to see,
you need to do something more
drastic.
I'm talking
files like tax and financial data, credit card
numbers, personal email or
letters etc. And if you're selling it to a
stranger you want even the
irrelevant stuff erased.
I can write a
little file to change the owner's name for you but
think about what you've
removed and let's deal with that first.
I won't be able
to do a lot via email but I can at least point you
to files that will scrub
the hard drive and reload Windows, so let me
know your situation.
Hope that helps
and keep me posted :)
Kevin Mefford
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