Missing CD/DVD rom drives in Windows?

Trying to write a cd,
I noticed my DVD writer was missing,

Looking in device manager i got the following error message :

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

very strange, as this device has always worked perfectly before.

After some googleing I tried things to update the drivers, deleting the device from device manager etc.

Finally i found the answer :

Open regedit
Go to key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Find the "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" (and "UpperFilters.bak" "LowerFilters.bak", if they exist) values and delete them.


After that reboot or delete the devices one more time from device manager and voila they were back!

WARNING : some CD / DVD writer programs may have to be reinstalled!!! but that's a small price to pay i find :)

Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0 Beta 1

Kaspersky has released a new beta version of their antivirus & internet security suite.

I have just updated the virusscanner on my Vista x64 machine and my XP SP2 machine,
and it is working great!

New things are  (this list is for the KIS suite):
what's new from v6:
1. Application GUI has been enhanced.
2. New heuristic analyzer detecting unknown threats has been added.
3. An opportunity for quick application setup with default settings has been added.
4. A new protection component (Parental control) has been added for supervision of user access to Internet resources.
5. Privacy control (Anti-Spy) has been supplemented with a module protecting confidential data and guarding against unauthorized access and transfer of such data.
6. Security wizard has been added for quick correction of problems in the application settings and operation.
7. Delivery of news from Kaspersky Lab via a new component (News Agent) has been implemented.
8. Proactive defense has been enhanced with a mechanism for detection of the newest keyloggers.
9. Protection against new types of leaktests has been added.
10. Extended search for the new generation rootkits has been added.
11. Firewall kernel has been improved and optimized for performance.

You can find the information to the beta FTP server in this forum thread : 
http://forum.kaspersky.com/index.php?showtopic=11188


Be aware that this is an early beta and may contain bugs !

Vista slowing you down?

vista file actions (delete, copy, move, ... ) are very slow (calculating time remaining)

Not anymore!

When I reinstalled vista it had made a windows.old folder on my c: drive,
and when I was cleaning it out it took ages to delete a folder, 
then I found the solution ! 

HotFix 931770 (normally intended for network copying) fixed my local worries also,
it's blazing fast now !

Install at your own risk, it is not officially released,
but I didn't have any negative side effects, and I didn't read about somebody else having any. ..

You can find it at : http://thehotfixshare.net/download/index.php?dir=Language%20Neutral/Vista

Automatic updates bugging you to restart?

Getting tired of having to click away the restart later button every 10 minutes when there is an update? 
I was,  and after some searching I found a solution on the internet,
you can't turn it off, but you can make it appear only once a day 

(that way you can shut down at the end of the day and the next day the reboot is done, 
when you boot the computer)

press Start, run
type in gpedit.msc
at the left side of the screen,  under the Local Computer Policy, choose Administrative Templates,   Windows Components, Windows Update

at the right side of the screen, doubleclick  Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

You can disable it (Thanks to Charles : disabled means the default 10 minutes.),
or put a value in the enable field, I put it at the maximum value : 1440, so it will only bug me once per day.

Unfortunatly, this is only active when windows restarts, so you may still have the annoying screen for the moment.

To get rid of that temporarily :
press start, run, services.msc

then right click the Automatic Updates service en choose 'stop', it will now stop bugging you :)
(it is best to leave it at automatic, so it will restart when you reboot your pc, and the other 'fix' is active)

I could only test this on a Windows XP Professional with SP2, 
I don't think the home version has the gpedit.msc tool. If I find something for that I will post it.

Edit: This also works in Vista Ultimate (I tested it on the X64 Ultimate edition), but Vista lets you select to notify only every 4 hours