Author Archives: Mike-Hansell

Why I won’t use a ‘Registry Cleaner’

Computer Aid Posted on by

What’s a registry, and why would you want to clean it? Good questions, and I’ll try to answer them.

In older versions of Windows, and today too (in varying degrees), each program (and Windows itself) had to keep some settings that governed how things worked (or didn’t). Windows maintained 2 main file for this purpose, being win.ini and system.ini. Ultimately Microsoft considered this too unwieldy and changed their collective mind (not in the Borg sense 🙂 ) to use a different construct to hold settings. This became the registry. The registry is basically 2 files (for each local user) that is a database. It holds way more info than system.ini and win.ini ever did. Like a good cup of coffee it is dark and mysterious, holding many secrets within.

Because of its complexity it is easy to hide things there. Sure, things are named but what does
“My ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMControlSet003Enum NextParentID.2682c4c5.4” mean to you? No, I didn’t make that up and yes, to some degree I do understand what it is.

Who would want to hide things in the registry and why? Many software companies put settings into the registry in an awkward way for 1 very good reason. Protection. Protection against theft of their software (oh yes, it’s their software, not yours), protection of intellectual property and other reasons too.

Now, as to why you’d want to clean it… well, that’s a bit of hocus pocus I think. Many so-called experts claim that over time the registry can become fragmented, filled with junk or holes and perhaps invalid entries. That may be the case but does it need to be ‘cleaned’? Microsoft have never produced a cleaner so it makes me wonder. I’ve never seen them actively promote the use of one either.

One such company is … nah, I’d better not name them but I will discuss my experiences. This company has several accounting software packages on the market. Some of the home versions are relatively cheap, under $100. My wife keeps the home accounts in this product so is rather protective of it and doesn’t like anything happening on her computer. At the time it was the one that I used too.

As was (but no longer is!) my way I decided to test this new program I’d found on the internet. Yep, a registry cleaner. It merrily purported to scan my registry and produced a reports showing all manner of oddities. So many that it was impossible to even guess at the outcome. Hey, maybe it did wonders for the system, but one thing I can say for sure, it broke *******, that program that shall not be named. Clearly, it had embedded an entry in the registry that the cleaner thought had no business being there. One way or another the cleaner broke it, big time! Wifey was NOT happy.

The software would not reinstall claiming it was already installed (most of it least still was) and uninstalling did not allow reinstallation either. There was nothing left but to call their ‘tech support’. At $4.95 per minute (yep, nearly as much as Bill Gates) I got mucked around backwards and forwards. The best line I got was ‘Can you hang on a minute’. No, I can NOT! Grrrr! Anyway, after several minutes they claimed we must have done a certain action (that definitely was not the case), and that was that. Couldn’t use the software and the data was nuked. Not a great outcome 🙁

I try to not base an opinion on one experience, but that was a very bad experience that I don’t intend to go through again.

Registry Cleaners…? (I) just say no!

Workshop shenanigans

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve been working in electronics for a long long time. In that time, I’ve seen some funny things and heard some great stories.

Way back when the Tandy (maybe Realistic for Americans) TRS-80 model 1 was really something ( it was a computer), I used to work at the Sydney repair center. At that time there were 3 computer tech’s, including myself. We each had a cubicle where we toiled. One particular day I was working in a different area and was facing the low dividing panel behind which colleague was working… let’s call him Manuel. Manuel was working on an electronic project for home, in his own time of course. I heard a pop, bang, and a sizzling sound. Looking up I saw a cloud of white and grey smoke rising from Manuels area. Slowly, as he stood up, his bald head rose through the smoke with the most quizzical look on his face. He’d done something that didn’t work out too well.

Years later I was working on a 300 watt open frame power supply. Lots of exposed electronic components with nasty high voltages just waiting to bite. I had found a simple fault, replaced a component but not tested much further than that. When I switched the power on, things got really ugly. A large 2 watt carbon resistor decided to turn into a roman candle. It didn’t just burn out and die quickly… it put on 2 minutes of fireworks spitting hot bits of itself left, right and center. The power switch was behind the power supply so I had to reach over it. That was easier said than done with Mount Vesuvius erupting in front of me. It was then that I heard my colleague John laughing his head off. He had seen the whole thing and what was even more embarrassing was that he had heard the stream of expletives I had blurted out. Looking back on it now I can see the amusement value, although I am still really skittish when it comes to working on power supplies or nasty voltages.

At another time I used to work with some Germans at the importer of a very expensive (German, not surprisingly) TV brand. I don’t know whether a tough breed or maybe some of them a little crazy, but one of them told me how back in the FatherLand they had an odd use for the workshop Variac. A Variac is a variable transformer. It is generally used to vary the AC mains voltage up and down to see if that can cause an intermittent electronic device to show its symptom. Apparently it can also be used to test your manhood by seeing how high you will let your mate wind it up. He told me another story concerning techs working on TV’s that had remote control problems. Their colleagues would walk up behind them with a remote control in their pocket and press buttons at random thus sending the ‘malfunctioning’ TV, and the tech working on it, crazy.

At another electronics company I was feeling a little kookie one day. I used to work with an Engineer who had the silly idea to leave his desk unattended while he went to lunch. I couldn’t help myself. I got to work with a roll of clean Sellotape (sticky tape as we call it). I taped his pen to his desk. That was obvious. I taped his drawer shut. That wasn’t. I taped his clear plastic ruler to his desk and that wasn’t so obvious either. But the coup de gras… ah, that was a masterpiece. On the way home, stuck in traffic he fancied a cigarette. You know I taped his cigarette packet up don’t you? The next day he gave me a bit of a serve, but we shared some laughs too.

And you thought computer techo’s were a serious lot.

You have a Blue Ringed Octopus in your PC!

Computer Aid Posted on by

You may think you don’t, but you do – figuratively speaking. It doesn’t have 8 tentacles or live in the water. It’s your registry.

blue ringed octopus

So, what is a registry and what is a Blue Ringed Octopus? As I’ve discussed before, the registry is basically a database where programs (especially Windows) can put various settings.

When I was a kid, nobody (apart from Marine Biologists it seems) had heard of a Blue Ringed Octopus, hereafter referred to as a BRO, but not the sort of bro you’d like to have. I remember the day well. It was a hot summer Saturday. The news reported that some young kid was playing in a rock pool by the ocean when he suddenly and mysteriously, convulsed and died. That kid had found a BRO. Not just found it, but pulled it out of the water and ‘played’ with it. An angry BRO, is a nasty beastie. They are relatively small and would easily fit in the palm of your hand. When they are antagonised they show their characteristic blue rings on the surface of their body. These rings are small (only about 5mm’s or ¼” in diameter and electric blue. Kinda pretty actually. Pretty but deadly. They carry a fatal neurotoxin. Suddenly, everybody in Australia had a quick biology lesson and learned new respect for small creatures.

What has that to do with the registry? Poke at the registry enough without being very careful (and sometimes even while being extremely careful) can get you bitten and your pc becomes unbootable. While many tweaks, fixes and good things can come of manipulating the registry, it can backfire too. Microsoft often issues software fixes that require registry changes but always issue a warning that bad things can happen, and of course if they do, you can be in real strife.

If you want to poke around with a Blue Ringed Octopus, or the registry, be REALLY careful.

I’m a fan of fans.

Computer Aid Posted on by

It’s true. I like them. If I were an electrical apparatus I’d like them more. Electronics and heat go together, but they don’t like it.

metal fan

Heat in electronic gear causes many problems. They can often be subtle, like the gear ‘acts up’ after a while. It could be the VCR or DVD player that produces streaks in the picture after some time running or the hanging/rebooting pc in the back room.

Recently my own DVR started carrying on. The first symptom was it wouldn’t play any previously recorded material. A closer look showed that it thought the program names were written in a mixture of 5 foreign languages and were 350GB long. That would havebeen great except I knew it had only a 160GB hard disk drive in it. I tried to delete some of the old stuff but no, it wouldn’t delete. After some time I thought I’d try to format the hdd, but oh no, it wouldn’t allow that either. At that point I was getting quite frustrated and started to pull it out of the timber entertainment unit it was in. As soon as I put my hand on it I could feel that it was quite warm. Not really blazingly hot, but way too warm. After letting it cool in free air for a while it magically worked normally and has continued to work normally since. Another victim of heat causing problems with electronics.

Consumer electronics like DVD players, HiFi gear and most TV’s (Plasma’s are an exception) are made cheaply and generally heat disappation is not of paramount concern in the manufacturers mind. Maybe they’re made for a cooler climate than Australia, where I live, but here things get hot.

Computers on the other hand have at least 1 fan, in the power supply. Well, unless you’re a noise freak, that’ll be the case. That fan has a dual purpose. Not only does it extract warm (or hot) air that has been heated from the components inside the power supply, but the air that it draws in (if it can! ) is already warm from the other electronics inside your computer. So now we’re drawing in already warm air over warm components that need to be cooled. Hmmm…. Not good. As I said before, if the power supply in question, as is common, has its intake vents partially clogged with dust and crud then less air can be drawn in.

Modern computers have more than one fan. As computers get faster they generate more heat. It’s a fact of life with electronics. CPU’s (the “brain” inside your computer), the Pentium 4, Core 2 Duo, Centrino, Phenom or what have you, all do it. They get hot. In some designs if they get hot they go slower, others destroy themselves.

To get rid of the heat, metal heatsinks are fitted. These come in many designs but generally have some sort of fins that extend away from the heat source to allow the heat to dissipate. Modern multi-gigahertz (fast) cpu’s generate a whopping amount of heat and not only have a heatsink but an integrated fan too. So now we have the cpu stirring warm air around that will be drawn into the power supply. If your computer is used for modern 3D games, then it very likely has a fan (or 2) on the video card too. Fast video cards, like fast CPU’s generate a LOT of heat. Now we have several sources of heat in the computer. Don’t forget hard disk drives too. They get quite hot but their heat is generally drawn away by the metal chassis of the computer that they’re mounted into.

Some computers may have a fan mounted at the front to draw in (hopefully) cool outside air. They may also have 1 or more extra exhaust fans at the rear of the case. It seems that no matter how many you have, it’s not quite enough.

Now let’s throw into the mix a warm summers day. As I’ve often said to clients, if you are uncomfortably warm, your computer is frying. Should one of the fans fail you are in strife.

The most common fans to fail are the power supply fans. While CPU fans don’t tend to fail, their heatsinks do get heavily clogged up with dust and fluff. Regular cleaning is a good idea, but don’t do as recommended in a local supposedly hi-tech magazine and wash your motherboard under running water. Can you believe that nonsense? Call a professional (and I don’t mean a maid) to do it.

Get to know how warm your system runs. It may save you a lot of heartache.

The smell you’ll never forget.

Computer Aid Posted on by

In my many years servicing electronics be it, TV, industrial electronics or computers, there’s something that ties it all together. That oddly enough is a smell. The smell you’ll never forget.

One day I came home from a hard days work to find my wife quite upset. Just an hour earlier she had found the house full of smoke. In a near panic she called the fire brigade who dutifully sent a crew around to investigate. They found no flames, just smoke. They looked in every room, in the roof space and under the floor but found nothing. They declared it safe and left.

As soon as I walked through the front door it hit me. The smell you’ll never forget. I went straight over to the TV sitting in the lounge room which was located not far from the front door. The odour, as I expected was much stronger there. Pulling the back off the TV revealed the source. No, not a dead cat or even a dead mouse, but a dead line output transformer. Not just dead, but burnt, melted, black and smelly.

The smell you’ll never forget is the smell of burnt electrical insulation. It’s quite acrid and imprints on your brain forever.

What does this have to do with computers? As a computer technician I encounter many ‘nogo’ faults. The computer simply won’t turn on. This is often a dead power supply. A good indication of a fried power supply is …. You guessed it… ‘The smell you’ll never forget’. Just sniff near the exhaust fan at the back. Not always, but generally that smell indicates cooked components.

A computer power supply normally comes out fairly easily so is an easy component to replace and get a client running again. Once it’s out flipping it upside down often reveals the presence of ‘bits’ floating around inside. That’s bits of destroyed electrical components. These days you just wouldn’t bother to repair a pc power supply. Well, I have been known to replace a fan in several but that’s a different story.

So, when you smell ‘that’ smell, expect problems.