Volume automatically lowering in Windows 7 when you receive a call (from Skype)

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Hi there, been a while.

I’ve been having problems,

Make Windows 7 & Vista launch UAC restricted programs at startup with Task Scheduler

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I’ve been having issues getting MaxExchange Remote v8 to run at startup on Vista and Win7 computers because of the new restriction on running programs as an administrator on startup.

I’ve yet to be able to find a way to run MaxExchange Remote without admin privs so when I stumbled on this trick to get programs to run at startup via the task scheduler I felt inclined to post it here.

Cheers.

Make Vista launch UAC restricted programs at startup with Task Scheduler.

Second migration

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Evenin’. Just finishing up my second migration in a few months. This time, the website is moving to a VPS at Wiredtree.

Site Changed

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Evenin’

I changed the URL of this site today to takingupspace.com. I had an unused personal blog on this URL previously and have been wanting to get rid of it for ages. Four cups of green tea with my sushi dinner gave me to motivation to do just that. I’ll try and put a few more updates up here to express my joy at removing that craptastic old site.

Recover from an corrupted XP registry

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Hello again, its been a while since my last update. I was repairing a laptop this weekend, one that had a corrupt registry. It was displaying the following error message when booting: “Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”.

I brought up Google and found a number of sites that describe the error, some from MS itself, but most of them are overly complex and offer little in the way of help. I was just about to resign myself to reinstalling when I ran across a link from this site: Recover from an XP Corrupt Registry.

It covered everything that I needed and worked like a charm. I did make one change from the posted instructions; instead of booting into recovery mode each time (which takes forever via the CD) to copy files, I just plugged the laptop’s hdd into an external enclosure and did it that way.

Easy peasy.

Enabling AHCI on Vista

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Greeting.   I ran across this the other day and immediately thought of this website.  Its one of those things that I will use now, then forget about and in six months to a years time when I need it again, it’ll be gone.

I hadn’t bothered to use the AHCI drivers when I installed Vista a while ago, but I’ve been hearing more and more how its a good thing (as long as your hardware supports it), or more to the point, the NCQ is a good thing.

Some time in the past, I tried to get XP to switch to AHCI after install but never had any luck; there are instructions out there and I don’t doubt they work for most people, but I either had some sort of incompatible hardware or pebkac (problem exists between keyboard and chair) going on because it just wasn’t meant to be.  After that incident I’ve been a bit leery of AHCI.

Anyway, I decided to try it all again and this time it was remarkably easy to do.  Just a simple registry tweak, reboot and change your SATA controller to AHCI in the BIOS and that’s it.  I was reasonably impressed that it went so smoothly.  I”m still waiting for some catastrophic data corruption; I’ll let you know if that ever happens.

I’d rate this a 3 on the difficulty scale, and a 6 on the potential bad idea meter.

Instructions:

  1. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
  2. Modify Start
  3. Change the value to 0
  4. Reboot
  5. Go into bios and change sata controller to AHCI (its probably on IDE right now)

That’s it.

Reference (from Microsoft):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Welcome

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Hi there, welcome to my new blog. I am an IT consultant by trade and am always finding things that I’d like to keep somewhere: solutions to problems I come across; good programs that make my life easier and any tips and tricks that I run across. I’m going to post them all there.

Enjoy.