A diary of stupid things that really shouldn't interest you
Some sites or apps (mainly badly written ones) really only like to open properly in Internet Explorer. However, anyone with half a brain would have ditched IE and set a better browser like FireFox, or my personal favourite, Chrome, as the default – which is great but can cause problems with your desktop shortcuts to web pages.
If you need to create a desktop shortcut to a web page that only works properly in Internet Explorer, [Read more...]
After upgrading from AVG free to AVG SBS Edition, I was having a little recurring problem with Vista’s security center telling me that AVG was turned off. On closer inspection (and rather worryingly) it was correct – the resident shield was not operational. A dig into the forums found this: [Read more...]
If you have just seen your site in IE8 and you feel like crying because all of your hard work has been thrown out of the window, don’t rush into that re-design just yet. You can force IE8 to act like IE7 while you work on a full time fix, by just including this in the header of your pages(s):
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />
This will get round some of the new behaviour. [Read more...]
Can’t update AVG 8 because it tells you that you have an invalid update control CTF file?
(I hate error messages that give no clue as to what you should do about it). Well, here’s the answer I found deep in the AVG user forums:
AVG 8
It really annoys me when they go missing, but it’s ok as there is a simple fix. If you used to have a CD or DVD drive listed under ‘My Computer’ but the icon has just disappeared, don’t panic, just do this:
1. Fire up regedit. (If you don’t know what that is, stop now and get some more help first).
2. Look for – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> SYSTEM, and then CurrentControlSet. [Read more...]
I saw a really odd one today. A Windows Vista (basic) machine suddenly decided that it had to be reinstalled, for no reason. It just claimed that it had to be activated (which it already was) and the only way to achieve this, according to the error message, was to reinstall the entire operating system – which seemed a little like swatting a fly with a bazooka to me.
The actual error message was “windows must be reinstalled to activate. Please insert the Windows CD or DVD to begin reinstallation”.
I guessed there must be an easier way around this, and eventually I worked this out:
[Read more...]
