Category Archives: Windows

Windows 7 driver update from internet automatically

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One thing about windows seven that i do not understand is why unlike vista, it does not give you the choice of checking for a driver online as the hardware is being installed

So if your hardware’s diver is not in the driver store, you have to go get it yourself !

Also the steps to enable the driver availability check and download are not so intuitive, i have found a few ways, here is the simplest

click start
click devices and printers
Your computer should be listed under devices
Right click your computer in that window, and select device installation settings
Fix it so that it would download drivers

And you are done

Superfetch has stopped working

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This is a Windows Vista SP1 (Upgrading now to SP2) that displayed a crash screen that reads “Superfetch has stopped working”.

Superfetch crash screen

The computer keeps going, but surely without superfetch.

NOTE: Here is the bottom line, error event log says problem is with C:WindowsPrefetchAgAppLaunch.db so i replaced it with the one from the Windows.old directory, the file itself was unreadable even with notepad probably due to filesystem corruption.

Going online for a solution does not seem to come back with anything, so i went to the windows Event Viewer

In the event viewer, i found an error message such as

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Windows cannot access the file C:WindowsPrefetchAgAppLaunch.db for one of the following reasons: there is a problem with the network connection, the disk that the file is stored on, or the storage drivers installed on this computer; or the disk is missing. Windows closed the program Host Process for Windows Services because of this error.

Program: Host Process for Windows Services
File: C:WindowsPrefetchAgAppLaunch.db

The error value is listed in the Additional Data section.
User Action
1. Open the file again. This situation might be a temporary problem that corrects itself when the program runs again.
2. If the file still cannot be accessed and
- It is on the network, your network administrator should verify that there is not a problem with the network and that the server can be contacted.
- It is on a removable disk, for example, a floppy disk or CD-ROM, verify that the disk is fully inserted into the computer.
3. Check and repair the file system by running CHKDSK. To run CHKDSK, click Start, click Run, type CMD, and then click OK. At the command prompt, type CHKDSK /F, and then press ENTER.
4. If the problem persists, restore the file from a backup copy.
5. Determine whether other files on the same disk can be opened. If not, the disk might be damaged. If it is a hard disk, contact your administrator or computer hardware vendor for further assistance.

Additional Data
Error value: C000009C
Disk type: 3

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Right after every one of those above, i will get an error that reads

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Faulting application svchost.exe_SysMain, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x47918b89, faulting module sysmain.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp

0x4791a770, exception code 0xc0000006, fault offset 0x000190cf, process id 0x104c, application start time 0x01cad870934b6597.
this is for
superfetch has stopped working
surely, after
SVCHost.exe has
crashed.

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Now that i can see the error is about reading C:WindowsPrefetchAgAppLaunch.db, i try to open it with notepad, but strange noises come from the hard disk when i do, S.M.A.R.T. Data does not say anything about a faulty hard drive so i am assuming the hard drive is fine and that the problem is with the FileSystem

I opened the windows.old folder that a previous installation of windows left me with, and replaced the file with the file from that directory, and up to now, it looks like it is working

To be on the safe side, i am installing SP2 at the very minute, but i have no idea if SP2 resolves this issue anyway.

Stay tuned, and take care

Other things to note (For my own reference)

The crash screen displayed the following information

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: InPageError
Error Status Code: c000009c
Faulting Media Type: 00000003
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: fd00
Additional Information 2: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
Additional Information 3: fd00
Additional Information 4: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160

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And searching Microsoft’s KB results in No results were found for your query. Please see Search Help for suggestions.

MySQL Windows VS MySQL on Linux

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Comming across Robin Schumacher’s “MySQL on Windows? Absolutely!” i have some stuff to say

First, I absolutly LOVE windows on my Desktop, and i LOVE Linux on my servers, and i have nothing against windows servers or Linux Desktops, i like Operating systems that get the Job done faster and with least effort, so what suits a job suits me, having never used a mac, i would jump to a mac if they tell me it can help you develop application X faster, why not, but the article here http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql_on_windows.html does not seem to make sense to me. Here is why

In the comparison of number of downloads, it clearly reads that windows has 600K downloads VS linux that has 200K downloads, but are you serious ?

On Linux, MySQL is hardly if ever downloaded from mysql.com , while on Windows it is always downloaded from MySQL.COM and therefore i beg an explanation on why you say this statistic tells anything, Also, most developers are like me, they use the Windows edition for development on there development PCs, and then deploy the actual application on a Linux server.

For example, on a debian system i would simply issue

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server

this will get MySQL binaries from Debian, not from MySQL, and therefore making the statistic not available to you.

Then the article talks about how insignificant the differences between the Linux and Windows edition is, to tell you the truth, this is not the case at least for me, here are SOME examples

Most of my applications can not make good use of RAID because RAID does not help with disk seek time (And therefore latency), My answer to this is usually separating tables to more than 1 hard disk , and although having databases moved to other hard drives is supported in windows by creating a text file, moving individual tables on windows is not, On linux, i simply create a symbolic link to the MYD file, and one to the MYI file, i can even split a single table to 2 hard drives with the indexes on 1 drive and the actual data on the other.

Clustering anyone ??

For a longer list check out http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/windows-vs-unix.html , this is certainly is inferior to the Linux counterpart for something like a shared hosting environment (See number of open files and connection timeouts etc..)

Now to add more to that, Linux is a free OS, you install and upgrade it for free, and MySQL is also free, if your business uses many many MySQL servers, your savings on Windows Server licenses can be significant.

The bottom line is, when a company like Oracle (Since it has acquired SUN) gets hold of an open source database engine, you can rest assured objectivity will still be there only when it supports the paying product.

Thanks for listening.

Multi Disk MySQL

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For performance reasons, separating DBs to Multiple hard disks can be beneficial

In Linux, when you want to include a directory for a database, you add a symbolic link ( Using the ln -s targetdir command), in Windows, there are no symbolic links, and Windows Shortcuts ( Via right click create shortcut ) don’t work

The truth is, MySQL enables Symbolic Links in Windows by default, but you have to do it the MySQL way

MySQL is a file based database engine, you should be able to see a folder for every database run by your database engine, Now to move one of those DBs to a different directory or hard drive, you just copy it to the new destination and create a file db_name.sym then, within that plain text file, you can add D:datadb_name where D:datadb_name is the folder containing the MySQL files.

You should be good to go if you have moved the directory of the database to d:data, but if you copied it, the copy in the original MySQL data directory will be used

You are done, Now you should experience the extra performance of combining disks, the closest it gets without RAID and a reformat, surely this is assuming the DBs are used evenly

But there are other reasons why you may want to do this, one of which is, when you want to compile all user data in a directory, So DBs that person creates using your server management software puts all that person’s software in one place so that when he or she requests a backup, you know what to send him/her

Enjoy

Windows 7

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Not so impressed with Windows 7, i must admit some features like the native VHD support are nice, but it will all depend on the pricing to me, most of the changes are very welcome if they dont cost a fortune !

I have started looking around Windows 7 already, and i plan to write all my findings on a website about Windows.

So, my review of Windows 7 is still in the makes, So stay tuned

Windows Vista and the CRCDISK.SYS error

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in most casses, you got this error due to a driver malfunction of a system device that is critical for booting your operating system.

You can always use Windows PE to get into the disk and play with the drivers, but it is really not that simple, Unlike Linux, Windows does not load files according to directories !

What about PostReflect ?

So i am having this problem after using TrueCrypt to protect an operating system , i did this because my most valuable data is my mozilla firefox passwords and files, and simply put, the best way is to encrypt the system volume !

So, right now, i need to access the disk on another computer, Run postreflect and come back with the results here, if this don’t work, the sollution will be much more lengthy, i will let you know what happens anyway