David Vielmetter

Category: Tips

PresentationFontCache.exe hogging 50% CPU

Ran into an issue where in Windows 7 x64 the PresentationFontCache.exe process was taking an excessive amount of CPU resources and would not stop even after a clean boot. Here are the steps I took to resolve this: [step 1] Click start and type services.msc into the search bar. Now find the Windows Presentation Foundation…

December 12, 2011
Free copy of Microsoft Products for students

In the world of IT, testing out configurations is a big part of implementation and deployment. You don’t want to deploy an application if it won’t work properly…especially if your environment has hundreds or even thousands of users. That’s why I have an unhealthy number of virtual machines with various versions of Windows and Windows…

December 6, 2011
The User Profile Service failed to logon

Got this message on a client workstation last week. It was running managed Symantec Endpoint Protection client 12.1…so much for that. The message is caused by a clever virus/worm/malware application which makes a small change in the Windows 7 registry and voila users can’t log in anymore…all they get is the following message when they…

November 23, 2011
IE9 Script Error when Printing

Here’s an annoying error in Windows 7 I found recently. Certain printer drivers cause the following script error in IE9 on Windows 7 x64. Some forums mention Canon printers, but my experience involves an HP Color Laserjet 3500. Here’s how I fixed it finally: [problem] When printing any webpage from IE9 the following error is…

October 10, 2011
Windows Update: 403 – Forbidden: Access is denied.

While cleaning up an older Windows XP system got a 403 – Forbidden error after visiting Windows Update in IE7. Of course I checked the proxy settings and the hosts file to see if anything fishy was going on, but alas everything seemed fine except windows update. Even upgrading to IE8 didn’t help. Here’s how…

October 5, 2011
Dell Latitude with Unknown Device in XP

The other day someone gave me their Dell Latitude to find a driver for an unknown piece piece of hardware in the device manager. After a bit of searching around I found the tricky bugger. The device was actually the built-in free fall sensor attached to the hard disk (you know to arrest the hard…

September 7, 2011
Banish Live Messenger back to the Notification Area

Yes I still use Windows Messenger…well now known as “Windows Live Messenger” and I’m not afraid to admit it. There are several benefits I find to using a tangible instant messaging program over browser based apps like Gtalk, Facebook IM, etc. They accurately indicate whether you are busy/away/available, they work with keyboard shortcuts and you…

August 22, 2011
Multiple Gmail accounts in the same browser

The Google Apps (GA) infrastructure transition is finally complete and now Google Apps Gmail also redirects to mail.google.com. That means you can’t be signed into your regular Gmail and your Google Apps Gmail in one browser simultaneously anymore. Signing into another Gmail account when you’re already signed in on another tab yields the following message:…

June 2, 2011
Free 5gigs of cloud storage

Last week I managed to max out my free 2gb of cloud storage at Dropbox. That got me thinking…should I bite the bullet and sift through 2GB of accumulated crap to clear some space OR should I look for an alternative to continue my reckless cloud based file storage behavior? After looking around a bit,…

April 27, 2011
XML well-formedness checking in TextMate

I’ve been working with a lot of XML lately and finding out where your document is not well-formed can be a hassle. Imagine having to find an improperly typed closing node in a ten thousand line XML file with thousands of nodes. Talk about your needle and haystack type of situation, right? Well I two…

March 11, 2011