The Windows Registry is a central database that stores huge amounts of settings for just about everything your operating system does. From changing the way the desktop looks, or information about all the devices and drivers, to registration information for your programs. You don’t need me to tell you just how important it is that for a smooth running system, a fully functioning and error free registry is one of the most important factors. Just a few rogue values inserted into some important registry keys can bring your system to a grinding halt or turn it into an unstable nightmare.

Because a lot of malicious software will attack various parts of the registry, and just about everything you touch causes reads or writes to it, making sure it is backed up is still an important way to keep problems and downtime to a minimum. There are also times when you are going to reinstall your system and would like to transfer some settings on to the new operating system. Things like registration information for software like perhaps a Giveaway of the Day program or a highly customized look for your desktop could do with being copied to save a lot of time.

I think it’s pretty safe to say, that at some point during our computing lives, there has been, or will be problems with a Windows installation which are simply not repairable by going into the registry or performing certain file operations. Sometimes the problem is related to an error on the hard disk drive which can easily occur by a sudden loss of power to the machine or is simply caused by a piece of software writing to the drive in an incorrect way. The worst case is a problem with the hard drive itself and it is creating the errors.

Windows has always come equipped with a way to scan the hard disk for errors and quite often an easy way for anybody to do so, is right clicking on the selected drive in explorer, going to the tools tab and clicking ‘Check Now’. Another way of scanning is through using the Check Disk command line utility as it offers a greater array of options and information to look at, but puts a number of people off when they see a command prompt window pop up.

Pop up ads window can be annoying if it is too obtrusive. Writing a software can be easy but writing a good one is definitely tough and it is just fair that a good software should be rewarded via advertisement. GOM Media Player is the second most popular video player in CNET Download.com. In fact, GOM Media Player has slightly more total downloads if compared to VLC Media Player which currently takes the first spot but has lower weekly downloads. In the recent GOM Media Player, it comes with a pop up ads window when you close the program. The popup’s title bar says “Thanks for using GOM Media Player!” while the content advertises third party software.

Even though there is a checkbox at the bottom of the advertisement window that allows you to stop showing any more ads for today, some may find it annoying and would like to permanently stop showing the ads when they close GOM Player. One of our forum member Sujay has suggested to move the GrLauncher.exe away from the GomPlayer directory but I think it’s not safe because that file is also used to check for the latest version of Gom Player installed on the computer. Open up GrLauncher.ini, visit the link that is in the file and you should see some version numbers being displayed on the page. I also found another solution by moving away the popup.exe file. This method should work but I cannot guarantee doing this will or will not break any other functions in GOM Player. I have personally discovered another method which I believe is the safest in removing the pop up ads window in GOM Media Player permanently without deleting or moving any files from the program directory.

Windows XP has now been out of general circulation for desktops and laptops for about five years now, but there’s no doubting it stills holds a massive share of the PC market, around 40% looking at some recent figures. One of it’s features was the Repair Install option which in the event of a major PC crash allows you to keep your personal data while the core Windows files are replaced and hopefully allowing the PC to get back up and running.

A lot of people have used this option, a large number will have worked but some will have failed. One of the biggest causes of the repair install failing to work is Internet Explorer. As all official XP CD’s come with IE6 pre installed, that’s what gets reinstalled when a repair is performed, or at least some of it does. If you have IE7 or IE8 still installed, the files get overwritten in the Windows ‘System32‘ folder back to the older version, but they DON’T get overwritten in the Program files ‘Internet Explorer‘ folder! This can lead to a number of problems especially with black screens during the repair or activating Windows when you have completed the repair. As Windows now has a mix of Internet Explorer files, this can break the OOBE (Out of box experience) which is needed to reactivate.

When I started this blog 7 years ago, webmasters don’t really need to put much effort into making the website friendly for the search engine robot. Having a lot of unique content is all it takes but since last year, Google is focusing more on quality content and pages that are useless should not be indexed using the noindex meta tag. Since this blog started as a personal blog, a lot of the earlier articles were very thin in content and without quality. Spotting them is not really that difficult because this blog only has nearly 2000 articles after 7 years.

The biggest problem is actually the forum itself because it generates tons of index pages that refers to the threads created by members. I was able to implement a code at the header that automatically inserts a noindex meta tag for those pages but I still need to remove the URLs from Google search engine via Webmaster Tools.

Hard disk drives might be getting bigger these days, but it’s still quite easy if you’re not careful to fill them up with all kinds of data without thinking about it. This is especially true with SSD’s because of their smaller capacities, every Gigabyte is still expensive and a waste if not used for something useful. Someone who has only small boot drive really needs to be conscious of everything that goes onto their system.

Finding out where all your hard drive space has gone can be a nightmare if you’re trying to do it through Explorer, but there are several third party tools around to help you out. The one I use and have been using for a while is SpaceSniffer. Apart from being incredibly quick at scanning the drive and coming up with the results, it’s the virtualized tree map layout that really lets you quickly spot the areas visually which are taking up the most space.

Loosing your internet access or having general connectivity issues is not much fun, especially when it doesn’t seem to be the fault of the router or modem. Tracing these issues can be a real pain even if you know where the blame might lie, but worse still, is having no clue as to the cause. If the system has recently been the victim of a malware attack, then the reasons why the connection is having problems become quite clear. But there are many other reasons why this could happen such as internet security or other network related software not playing nicely upon installation / uninstallation, or even tweaking software being over zealous and touching something it really shouldn’t.

There are just so many parts of Windows that deal with the internet and what connects to it, trying to sort these problems out yourself, even if you are pretty techie minded, could run into hours. DNS settings, IP address conflicts, DHCP service issues, TCP/IP protocol corruption, and a problem HOSTS file are just some of the things you could be trying to repair or resetting by going through the registry or tapping away in a command Prompt. A lot of you will remember a small utility called WinsockFix which cures some of Windows XP’s connectivity issues and probably is still a part of a lot of people’s USB toolkits even today.