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…)

Engines have belts, Windows has Winsock, and humans have brains. The relation between all three, of course, is that they’re all apt to get completely fouled up without explanation or prior warning. Significantly in the case of the Windows Sockets API (Winsock), the symptoms of such erratic and unprompted disarray are as varied as snowflakes.

(more…)

The amount of malware I see on PCs is absolutely absurd; infections to the point where Windows will not even load the welcome screen. These are infections that are so bad that the computer can’t even spawn the basic processes to run essential tasks on the PC. I see infections that are so bad that the OS is irreparably corrupt, requiring a backup on an external hard drive adapter and a reformat to fix the issue.

(more…)