Beijing, China hosts Intel today for the 2009 Beijing Intel Developer Forum (IDF) and it has been kicked off with a series of keynote addresses on vision and leadership, mobility, and the enterprise. While Intel has been a consistent and powerful presence in these markets, it is the meteoric popularity of the Atom CPU which makes the mobility keynote the most interesting of all.

As you may or may not know, the typical Atom platform for netbooks marries the Atom N270/N280 (Diamondville core) to the Intel 945GSE northbridge (which includes the GMA 950 GPU) and the ICH-7 southbridge. This combination of components represent the Menlow platform, and it serves as the foundation for most netbooks and the heart for Intel’s arrestingly successful mobile strategy. As a strategy that has outgrown predictions of obscurity to consume 30% of total notebook sales it will then come as no surprise that the Atom being primed for a significant refresh.

(more…)

At Icrontic, we are no strangers to the infamous 0×0000008E blue screen. In fact, we have discussed the issue so often that Google has pegged us as the first or second most relevant result for this particular stop error. At the time of writing, our incredibly popular thread on the topic has been viewed more than 400 times a day for over two years. Yet for all that has been written about this topic, the computing community at large has moved no closer to a definitive answer. It’s time to clear the air about the 0×0000008E error: There is no magic bullet. Read on to find out why, and what you can do to fix the issue.

(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor explores how to fix a Windows Installer Service that has gone on the blink.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor explores how to suppress the login screen to automatically log a user into a Windows XP-based system.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor discusses the uselessness of the ubiquitous blue screen of death and the futility in troubleshooting one.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor explains how to get those fussy RealTek, VIA, SigmaTel, and ADI high-def audio solutions working on Windows XP.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor explains how to recover access to directories that give an “access is denied” error.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week, the good doctor explores how one might delete a file that Windows believes cannot be deleted.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week the good doctor explores the impact that a broken Cryptographic Service has on Windows XP.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to offer the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week the good doctor explores DOS commands that are reported as invalid internal or external commands.
(more…)

Icrontic is proud to reintroduce the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week we explore the case of the incredible disappearing optical drives.

(more…)

Recently there has been a rash of spyware that is capable of infecting Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista with one payload. In most observed cases, these infections owe their lineage to the rogue malware engine Trojan.Zlob which is ancient, prolific and ruthless. As a spyware platform it has given birth to many of computing’s more endearing infections, including Spylocked, which we wrote about on July 30th, Smitfraud and Spydawn. On 2000 and XP, the symptoms of infection are fairly benign — a tray app, fake alerts and a false program — but Vista users will find that their explorer.exe process is stuck in an infinitely-looping sequence of crashing.

(more…)