David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Task Manager says svchost.exe uses 100% of my CPU

    It is hard to believe that this tiny (14kb) program originally created by Microsoft has been the source of so much controversy. Also known as the Generic Host Process for Win32 Services, svchost.exe has been exploited by a slew of computer worms and viruses because it is such an integral part of Windows XP. Throw…

  • Paranoid about hard drive crashes? Just clone it!

    Working in the help desk and computer support industry for past 10 years has taught me one important lesson about hard drives – they will fail! Some fail after 6 months, others take longer, but eventually that photo and music collection is going bye bye. Here’s what you can do to protect your stuff without…

  • Dell bloatware slows down Microsoft Outlook

    I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron E1405 Notebook loaded with Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 Professional. Everything on the notebook worked as expected, except Microsoft Outlook 2003. Almost every task in Outlook took much longer than expected, especially when opening calendar events or displaying reminders. Turns out the fix was removing software pre-installed by…

  • Fix DST appointment times in Microsoft Exchange

    As you may have heard on the news and/or radio, the DST (Daylight Savings Time) change will occur 2 weeks ahead of time in 2007. Unfortunately this change is apparently also causing a chaotic panic similar only to the Y2K frenzy in IT departments everywhere. So if your IT guys like many out there haven’t…

  • My computers svchost.exe is 0x745f2780ed

    So the other day, I’m playing around with my new Bluetooth headset and skype when my computer decides suddenly decides that I’ve had enough fun for the day. It gives me the following error and slows to the pretty much UNUSABLE speed setting. (X) svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0x745f2780” reference memory at…

  • Google DOCS: Online document collaboration done right

    Google Documents (or docs) formerly known as Writely.com are essentially free applications that are hosted on the Internet and work in your browser. Cloud computing is the term often used to describe these applications because they sit somewhere on the Internet and can be used from any computer with a browser. Google docs functions similarly…

  • A weekend with Windows VISTA and Office 2007

    I had some free time this weekend, so I decided to install latest Windows VISTA release candidate along with a trial version of . So far I’ve been relying on XP and Office 2003 because that’s what the majority of my clients use, but lots of people have been talking about upgrading so I figured…

  • Remote desktop connection 6 authentication fix

    My last trip to Windowsupdate resulted in Remote Desktop Connection version 6. For those of you not familiar with this tool, it basically lets you remote control other desktops or servers from your computer using Microsoft RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol. To my dismay, I discovered that the updated RDC added an initial authentication prompt…

  • Transfer mp3’s from a friend’s iPod to your iTunes Library

    I recently got my sisters iPod Mini and wanted to get its songs onto my iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t let you just copy music from a strange iPod to your library…or does it?