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Windows service (svchost.exe) is downloading constantly

Life and People, Technical 13 Responses »

Nov 072012

Now this issue is truly interesting. For starters, who will actually notice that some Windows service is producing permanent internet traffic? Secondly it was really kinda hard to find out what was causing the download.
I don’t know which Windows versions do have this scenario, but I’m guessing Windows XP and all later versions are “affected”. I’ve experienced it with Windows 7 x64 and Windows 7 x64 with SP1.

It hasn’t been the first time that I had noticed something was causing traffic for which I couldn’t come up with an explanation.
While I’m on holiday my main computer will keep running however pretty much idle – I can connect via VNC and check emails and instant messengers. I also get a daily report email from my router which includes the amount of incoming and outgoing bytes.
So this one time I noticed that the incoming data was round about 1GB – needless to say I was away not using the computer. This amount kept showing up for the following days on which I was still out of town.

Weird wireless network connection problem in Windows

Technical No Responses »

Sep 292012

Yes, I admit it, there are a myriad of reasons for any sort of problem with the wireless network connection. I have encountered many, for all of which I could give you more or less an explanation and which could be solved or were gone after a reboot. Which is also a Windows thing, a reboot usually solves everything – however, of course, you take away the possibility to debug and actually find the problem itself. Nevertheless, the problem at hand could not be solved by a reboot.

When the Windows XP activation dialog fails to open

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Jun 282012

I guess this is a rare issue – and considering that we’re approaching Windows 8 will make it even rarer. However, this is so absurd that I’m dedicating a blog entry.
The symptoms are quite simple: I was trying to activate a (legally bought) copy of Windows XP Professional with SP3. But whenever I tried to access the activation window in order to activate within the first 30 days, nothing really happened.

Disable compressed folders in Windows Vista and Windows 7

Technical 3 Responses »

Oct 192009

When you’re using an “external” tool for handling ZIP archive file (and the likes), it can be really annoying when you double-click on such a file in Windows Explorer (or other file browsers) and Windows treats the file as a compressed folder and doesn’t start the external application even though file associations are correctly set.

Some tuning tools like XP-Antispy are able to disable the functionality of compressed folders, however it didn’t work for me on Vista the last time I tried.
After a while of research I found the solution how to edit the registry, so that double-clicking associated files will truly be opened with the external application:

Use customized shortcut keyboard setup in Opera browser

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Sep 032009

Throughout these past weeks, I’ve installed Opera on a few new systems (with various operating systems btw) and had to make (just) a few adjustments. One of them included setting my own keyboard setup. Even though making my custom shortcut settings was easily done each time (via Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> “Keyboard setup” Duplicate + Edit, see Tamil’s blog for a nice description), embarrassingly I had forgotton how to actually “enable” the modified keyboard setup.

File association for certain filenames without file extension under Windows

Technical 1 Response »

Jul 242009

Recently I was facing the issue whether it’s possible to associate files with a certain filename to be opened with a particular program in Windows operating systems. These could be files named TODO, README, INSTALL, LICENSE and the likes, as they are widely common in the unix world.

BCDboot and BCDedit

Technical 4 Responses »

Jul 082009

After the first complications with the quadruple boot, I was facing new ones when I tried to do everything again on a new hard drive.
The installation order was 1. Windows XP 2. Windows 7 (which recognized the “old” XP and integrated it in the boot loader) 3. Ubuntu 9.04 4. OpenSolaris 2009.06
(for detailed partition info see quadruple-boot blog entry).

The boot process would then be like this:

load OpenSolaris GRUB from third primary

boot OpenSolaris from third primary
load Microsoft bootloader from first primary
load Microsoft bootloader from second primary

boot Windows 7 from C: (as first primary)
boot Windows XP from E: (as second primary)

boot Ubuntu (several entries for different kernels) from logical

Quadruple boot

Technical 1 Response »

Jun 272009

Setting up my new computer (AMD Phenom II X4 810 (Deneb), 4×2.6GHz, 8192MB RAM, 500GB WesternDigital, GeForce 9400GT, 1GBit+54MBit) was a bitch. Especially since I wanted a very specific OS setup.

The primary targets were Windows XP (SP3) and Ubuntu (9.04) for coding purposes, secondly Windows 7 RC for testing purposes and OpenSolaris for experience.
I did a lot of installing and reinstalling this past week, until I finally managed to get all four systems working and accessible.