Operating System Posts

Today’s question to you is, how often do you update you Windows OS?

It is important for us to update our OS in order to obtain the latest OS patches and fixes from Microsoft.

To update our Windows Vista manually, just go to Control Panel and click on Windows Update.

Since a few months ago, whenever my Windows Vista starts up, I see a notification telling me that Windows can’t perform a windows update on my machine.

Most of the time, I just ignore this error message.

Today I decided to give it a real look just to see if I could get a fix to this problem.

The problem occurs whenever I click on the check for updates button and within 10 seconds it’s telling me there’s a problem installing updates.

The only error message provided was this: WindowsUpdate_80070005

Googled for this error message “WindowsUpdate_80070005” and was quite shocked to see that many are also encountering the same problem.

I look through a few of the posts and forums and this site in particular solved my problem – Microsoft answers.

Basically the problem is caused by an insufficient permission to install updates. This might have happened after I installed some apps which could have messed up the permissions.

The solution in the site shows us a way on how to reset the permission.

For anyone having the same problem, hope this helps you too. And thanks to Shedrich for the solution.

My windows update haven’t been working since mid March so guess what, I’ve got 34 updates worth 150MB to download and install. Check yours too ya! Continue Reading »
Solution to the WindowsUpdate_80070005 problem

I just had a shock just now as all fonts within my Vista OS got messed up. photo credit: FontFont

Launching Google Chome, I was surprised to see that all text are now italic while Firefox shows text which are bold.

Initially I thought that this weird text behavior was caused by a virus. Luckily it’s not but rather caused by uninstalling a program called Left 4 Dead.

During the uninstall, it did prompt that it was trying to remove some system files which I clicked on No. Anyway, the uninstallation process messed up my fonts and now everything looks ugly. Definitely not the way I want it to look.

So I did a search in Google on “how to reinstall windows font on vista” and the first result was from Microsoft Support.

I looked through the page and this title caught my attention.

To reinstall the standard fonts included with Windows

Basically it’s saying that I need to run Windows Setup again which will replace missing or changed files. However, there was a warning which goes like this:

Warning If you run Windows Setup, you may lose programs and hardware drivers that you have installed since the last time Windows was set up on your computer

Hrmm.. I really don’t want to lose programs and drivers. There must be another way. Continue Reading »
How I reinstalled Windows Fonts on my Vista

Whenever someone ask me to help format and reinstall their machine, I would request him or her for two items. photo credit: jesus_leon

1. The operating system installer CD and

2. The CD which contains all drivers for the machine.

Problem arises when they tell me that they don’t have the CD containing drivers for the machine.

This doesn’t indicate that their machine cannot be installed to its original state, but rather I need to find, download and update the machine with its latest drivers using the manual way.

The manual way here means having to find out the model of the devices and downloading the latest drivers from the Internet.

After I complete reinstalling the OS for the machine, the first driver that I’ll install is the wifi or the lan ethernet driver. This is so I could get access to the Internet. I usually get this driver by using another computer with Internet access to download, then transfer the installer to the new machine.

Once the machine has Internet access, this is what I’ll do. I’ll install this neat little application - Driver Robot.

Driver Robot basically helps us to automatically find and update our drivers. So instead of spending time trying to locate the right driver for your machine devices, driver robot does it for you, at a COST!

The following is my version of a Driver Robot Review: Continue Reading »
How to easily find, download and update latest drivers

There are many reasons why we need to sometimes reinstall our operating system (Windows XP or Vista).

photo credit: B Rosen

Some of the common reasons include:

• It’s slow to start up.
• There are bugs in the OS caused by viruses or malwares.
• Certain common applications like the browsers just won’t work anymore.
• The windows registry is messed up and I don’t know how to fix it.

In fact, all the above are happening to my friend’s Prestigio laptop right now.

I’m pretty sure that by formatting the hard disk and reinstalling the OS would do the trick.

However, reinstalling takes up a lot of time. One of the most time consuming task is finding which files to backup. If you’re like me, a bit unorganized, I put my documents everywhere. A few here and a few there.

One solution for you is to just take an image of your entire partition. I did this yesterday via Easeus Todo Backup 1.1 and it managed to capture my 140GB C partition in within 2 hours. The only thing to do now is to test the restoration on a new and empty hard disk. Will write a post on that once done.

So, if you’re not into reinstalling your OS because you can’t afford the half a day downtime having to:

• Backup files
• Format the hard disk
• Reinstalling the OS
• Patch and update the OS
• Install drivers
• Install common applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader and Skype

Then you might want to consider this alternative to reinstalling your XP or Vista OS. Continue Reading »
An alternative to reinstalling your XP or Vista OS