TECH SATURDAY, BECAUSE ON TUESDAY, STUFF HAPPENED – KILLING AN UNWANTED OR FAILING PROGRAM (THREAD) IN MICROSOFT

Where the Cable Cars really DO go half-way to the stars. . .

A few weeks back, I got my panties in a wad, because some idiot hax0r came up with a terrible scheme to “spoof” the public and buy his stuff, which was worthless and bug-ridden and a security threat. While that in itself was not particularly dangerous, his method for doing so was, and I, being ever alert to such chicanery, decided to start “Tech Tuesdays” for people who aren’t necessarily all that familiar with what’s under the hood of the family time-waster. 

There’s a reason for this; I live in a strange neighborhood, that’s one-half ‘bangers and ‘hos and the other half sweet grannies and their grandkids. Then, there are folks like me, who have, shall we say, “interesting and storied pasts” and live rather comfortably between the two. My business partner is a former DOD employee who mustered out after the start of the second Gulf War. He’s my hardware guru. I have been in the business long enough and traveled the back alleys and by-ways of the computer universe to keep abreast of the threats and oddities and transmogrifications of various software worms, viruses and Trojans to keep the little old grannies and their kiddies safe.

I host a network called “FBI Surveillance Van” for all the would-be internet thieves near me (It's protected by a hexi-decimal cypher, so unless Einstein has been reincarnated as a crackhead, I'm safe) . The CIA is going to be setting up shop soon. I love to keep ‘em guessing. Anyway, after the nasty “spoof” found here, I decided it would be a nice thing if I just put up some simple things for folks to help keep their own systems free of mice, lice, tics and bugs. I can’t help you with Microsoft; it’s a giant bug-patch, all unto itself. I don’t touch Apple. It’s a JAVA nest of Hell and I hate their processors. Call me a Luddite, but I use no smart-phone, however, I’m home most of the time.

Today, I wanted to talk about what happens when something just stops, goes into a business loop, contemplates it's navel, refuses to run, or crash completely, and just sits there, eating up your CPU, or Central Processing Unit. This is where all of the instructions are carried out; the literal brain of your computer. You can have the cleanest, leanest, meanest system in the world and if your Candy Crush Client (why?) seizes up, you are going to sit there until Doomsday, waiting for the bitch to do anything. I don't care of you have an AMD Quad Core or an INTEL hoo-ha processor, that brain is going to churn and churn over some stupid command, caught in an endless, infinite, "do loop". 

While not necessarily the fault of the gaming code within Candy Crush, certain outside elements on your system itself, will produce "do loop" results. Or, knowing Candy Crush, it's just shitty programming (again, why?). The one executable command will repeat into infinity, unless you, the weary and aging user, step in to halt the bitch. 

Here are the simple steps for that; I actually used SETI@home for the demonstration, because, they are astronomers, not programmers, and after you make SETI 'snooze', there is no way to halt the client. In my case, I 'snooze' first, because I do NOT want to corrupt my data, so I suspend the operation:

Once I see that red bar to the left of SETI@home v7, I know my work is saved and I can continue.

courtesy: Cracked.com Photoplasty        

Unlike Scotty here; the poor bastard in the Transporter never knew what hit him.

Aight! Fun time over! Now, do a RIGHT mouse click on your Windows task bar at the bottom of your screen, or at the side. You're going to be looking for "Task Manager".

It works in Windows Vista and 7. To get to it in Windows XP, use keyboard strokes <CTRL> + <ALT> + <DEL> at the same time, and select "Task Manager". I don't know nothin' about no Windows 8. Windows 8 looks like a pretend OS. Screw Microsoft. 

Windows Task Manager Processes screen shows all of the "threads" of the applications you are running, or more aptly, not running at the time. Look for your offender and highlight it. Click "End Process".

You will always see this message; if you clicked on something else by mistake, and the process is crucial to the running of your system, Windows will NOT allow the killing of the thread to take place!

Once I "kill" the boinc.exe process, all subordinate processes will die as well. You can do the same with Chrome, or any application, but ALWAYS kill the *.exe. It is a cleaner way to exit the program and you lessen the chance of corrupting any *.dll files or any other subordinate files. 

That's all there is to it. Of course, if it happens continually, shoot me a line, or try closing other programs before running whatever it is that freezes on you. I can't help you with your Candy Crush addiction. Level 70? My, my, my, my, my.

Don't forget! March 21st is the date for the Great Theme Reveal! The A-to-Z Challenge is almost upon us and you don't want to be caught theme-less! Check us out at #teamDamyanti on  the A-to-Z Challenge Blog! I am one of the fabulous Damyanti's assistant's this year, along with my great team members, Vidya Sury, Anna Tan, Samantha Geary-Jones, Guilie Castillo Oriard, Csenge Zalka, and Jemima Pett, who at this very moment has a post about her own Theme Reveal!

  

 

TECH TUESDAYS -- KEEPING YOUR PC OR LAPTOP IN TOP-TOP SHAPE FOR WORK

A typical clan conversation in SpiRitZ_CC on Runescape whilst skilling

 As you can see by the above, I have a very busy life and do many important things, usually at the same time. The key to being able to being a successful multi-slack-er, uh, multi-tasking individual is making sure my computers are running happily along, with no hiccups. We addressed the downloading weasely programs problem last week, but just how often do you all clean out all those stupid *.tmp files, run Disk Cleanup (in Windows XP, Vista and 7) and defragment your disk?

Ideally, this should be done at least once a month, and with the newer releases of Windows, you have the option of transforming your file system from FAT (File Allocation Table) to NTFS (New Technology File System) and is run on all systems utilizing Windows 3.1 server and higher. The system is more robust and scalable, therefore more forgiving of errors on the hard-drive, where files are stored. In the past, FAT was the standard and a computer with Windows 3.1 client would have to have the *.tmp files deleted, and the disk would have to be defragged about once a week, to keep it running optimally.

So, now that the history lesson is behind us, here is what you can do to keep your little monster running at peak performance.

Start by making sure all programs are closed, including any browsers and chat windows. Go to your Windows Start in the lower left hand corner and select "All Programs". Then, select Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. You'll bring up a window that looks like this:

The Default Drive is C: unless you've partitioned your drives yourself. If this is the case, you don't need my help. Press "OK" to continue.

You can pretty much delete any files on this list, unless you have a burning need to look at the hex dump of your last application/system crash. Trust me, it makes for extremely boring reading. Select a bunch of boxes and click "OK".

This screen will give you a chance to get rid of "Crusaders from Outer Space" that you downloaded in 2011 for free and the kids played once. You will also probably find that stupid "Free Greeting Card" program that wasn't free and has been nagging you for the last 4 years. You can annihilate it from "Programs and Features" too, as well as from your Control Panel, which amazingly enough is called "Programs and Features". 

System Restore and Shadow Copies should be approached with CAUTION. Not all versions of Windows automatically create a new system restore, every time a change is made to your system, i. e., adding or removing a program. BEFORE doing anything here, if you're trying to free up space and speed up your computer, MAKE SURE you have at least one System Restore created, or your data backed up somewhere. Most PCs come with 2 drives; C and D. D contains the "shadow" drive which is the mirror image of your Windows program that was put there when the system was loaded. It does NOT contain your pictures of your kids, or cats, or receipts, videos of Grandma on her floaty in the pool, so approach with caution, or skip it, if you're not sure that you should remove ANY System Restores. Better safe than sorry!

Once you have all of your options click "OK". 

The computer goes off and does this "dancing baloney" thing, while the little brush swirls on top of the disk. I guess Bill Gates thought we were too dumb too figure out that if the whole bar is green, the bitch is done. Enough editorializing. At least, it's not "Bob the Paper Clip" from Word. He creeped me right the hell out!

Now, that that arduous chore is done, it's time to run Disk Defrag, or Disk Defragmentation. Briefly, when the computer is opening and closing files and performing operations, it "seeks" for information on your hard drive, analogous to an old 33 1/3 turntable. In the days of FAT, the "stylus" or "arm" would read the information and and write it to any available space, regardless of whether or not that space was contiguous to information that was similar to its neighbor. 

Think of waking up living next door to a family of people and coming home to find out that you live next door to a family of cats. It gets really bad when your home is moved across town to the city Zoo and you're cheek-by-jowl with a family of monkeys! But that is how data is picked up, used, transformed and saved, and not always in the same place. In time the files fragment and need to be neatly scooped together and made contiguous again. "Disk Defrag" does that. In XP, you can run a report first and I will say this: Windows LIES! Big fat LIES! Any fragmentation over 2% should be corrected. This will prevent a hard crash and damage to the drive itself.

I stand corrected. Windows 7 does have the ability to run a "report" but there are no statistics, percentages, or number of stacks, so I tend to not trust it; but then, I worked for IBM, so anything Microsoft is suspect. Did I mention Windows lies? Don't get me started on Apple.

So, in Windows, you got to Start > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defrag. If you are doing this for the first time, do it before you go to bed, or at a time when you do not have to use your computer for several hours. The last time I did this was on the 19th of February, 2014 and I think when it was done, it just went away, no message, no nothing. Typical Microsoft. So there you have it!

Next week, I'm going to look at some of the issues that plague users the most on Google and Chrome and see if we can't make some headway on some of the thornier issues that trouble users. If anyone has any ideas for future posts, or needs help, please feel free to comment, or drop me a line, here.