Playing iTunes Music on Android Phones

If you have iTunes on a PC or Mac and want to play your music on an Android phone, then a common way to do this is to upload your iTunes music to the Google Play Music cloud and then use Google Play on your Android phone to play the music.

On your PC: Download Google Music Manager and use it to upload your iTunes Music.

On your Android Phone: Run the Google Play Music app to play your music.

https://www.androidpit.com/itunes-and-android-how-to-sync

Kernelbase.DLL Error Causing IE To Fail

If your IE fails to load or if it has a hard time loading websites, it may be due to either a bad add-on or a Shockwave installation.

The Shockwave installation problem can be a bit deceiving because you think the issue is with the browser add-ons or a BHO. However, if all else fails then try uninstalling Shockwave or Flash before you do a complete repair or OS reinstall.

Fake Tech Support Screen Lockup

A client recently made the mistake of Googling a customer support number for Gmail and letting a fake tech support guy access her computer.

After allowing the faker to access her computer — he used the remote access program Supremo — she got worried when he asked for money so she hung up on him.

Unfortunately the faker already installed a virus program on her computer so when she rebooted it came up with the following screen.

It covered the entired desktop so access to the normal desktop program icons was not possible.

Control-Alt-Delete would bring up the task window although the Task Manager itself was disabled so I couldn’t kill the program that was covering the desktop.

Although running the Task Manager would fail, it did allow me to access the toolbar so I thought I could run programs like regedit or gpedit.msc to kill the desktop task.

However when running the program they would not show up because somehow the desktop screen was controlling the desktop space.

Booting to Safe mode seemed to work OK so I was pretty sure the virus was installed as some kind of start up program or task.

In Safe mode I installed RKill and Autoruns. I then made a shortcut to the programs and added them to the Favorites so I could access them even if the desktop virus was running.

After booting normally — and getting the desktop virus — I ran RKill which detected the registry entry that disabled the task manager. After fixing the registry entry I could run the Task Manager and noticed Defender was running which I thought was odd because I typically don’t install that program. After killing that Defender task the desktop virus disappeared immediately and I could see the normal desktop again so I knew the Defender program was the main culprit.

I then ran Autoruns which showed that the fake Defender program was running as a startup task. Instead of Windows Defender the virus was called MS Defender. I removed that as a start up task and now the computer is back to normal.

How To Whiten Teeth In Photoshop

This is one of the better videos on how to whiten teeth in Photoshop.

Find What’s Loading On Startup With Autoruns by Sysinternals

Microsoft has a fantastic set of diagnostic tools at http://www.sysinternals.com. A very useful utility in that set is called Autoruns and it shows what programs are automatically loaded when yous start your computer. This can be especially helpful if you happen to see an odd DLL file being loaded and you’re not sure which program is calling it.

Docking Stations a KVM Alternative

I learned something new from a client’s configuration today. Up to now, I’ve always thought that in order to use an external keyboard, video, and mouse with a laptop you would need some kind of KVM adapter. It would need at the very least a video output and a USB from the laptop.

However, my client had a Toshiba Dynadock which required just a USB connection. Somehow the laptop could route the video, keyboard and mouse all through that one port. In addition, it also handles her ethernet and printer connection as well. All through the one USB port.

Installation for the Toshiba Dynadock was amazingly simple on her new Windows 10 Acer laptop. Just plug it in and the system installed all the drivers. Didn’t even need to download any software from their website.

Apparently these USB docking stations have been around for awhile so it must have slipped past my tech gear radar. These docking stations are also used for managing dual monitors so which I’m starting to see more for my small business clients.

Just go to Amazon and search on USB Docking Stations for more choices.

Flash Drive “You don’t currently have permission…” Error

Ran into a frustrating problem recently on my own computer. I found that I was not able to read external drives or flash drives from any of my USB ports. Interestingly enough, my wireless mouse was OK and it used a USB port for the mouse transceiver.

The error I got when trying to read from a flash drive was:

“You don’t currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to permanently get access to this folder.”

After clicking Continue I got:

“You have been denied permission to access this folder. To gain access to this folder you will need to use the security tab.”

My flash drive didn’t have that security tab which I later found out was because my flash drive was formatted as FAT rather than NTFS.

A lot of posts said to do things like play with the GPO, run USB drive cleaners, uninstall / reinstall the USB drivers, etc.

At the end of the day, I found the problem to be caused by the HP Client Security. It has a setting that can be changed to allow for full access to the USB drives. Still not 100% on how I triggered it. However, after changing the setting to full access everything is working again.

Windows 7 Stuck On Updating

After trying the multitude of suggestions on how to get Windows 7 to update, the sequence described here is the only one that worked for me.

http://superuser.com/questions/951960/windows-7-sp1-windows-update-stuck-checking-for-updates

I’ll repeat the steps here with the links in case the content above moves:

1) Install SP1 for your machine.

2) Download KB-3138612 and save it where you can find it later

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3138612

3) Download SUR Tool save it to same place

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/what-is-the-system-update-readiness-tool

Restart the PC and disconnect from internet before Windows loads, this is important because at every boot windows will check for updates in the background and this will start the checking for updates hang all over again and will prevent the install of the downloaded packages until it finishes checking, so disconnecting from the internet before Windows loads prevents this.

Once booted install KB-3138612, if reboot is required do so and stay disconnected from internet.

Now install the SUR Tool package, this is a big package and will install many updates along with cleaning up and repairing the Windows update store. It will also cut down on how many more Windows updates will need to be installed later.

After install of SUR package reboot, connect to internet and do a manual Windows Update, it should work much faster now. Even after these fixes I have seen some W7 PC’s take up to an hour to finish checking for updates if launched from Control Panel manually.

If you have other Windows updates issues and the 2 updates above are installed, download this Microsoft Windows Update fixit tool (right click “save link as”) run it and select aggressive mode to completely reset Windows updates. Reboot and try Windows Updates from the Control Panel again.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9665683

Prevent Windows 10 From Installing

Run this utility from well-respected computer authority Steve Gibson:

https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

It will disable automatic installation of Windows 10. You can always re-enable the automatic installation of Windows 10 by rerunning the program.

How To Share Linux Mint On Windows Network

Been playing a bit with Linux Mint, revamping old XP computers into network drives. Once Linux Mint is installed, you’ll need to install Samba (if it’s not already installed) and system-config-samba.

I’m republishing this great how-to article from pwoody82 on http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1861:

Linux Mint 17 Windows network setup by pwoody82.

Setting up windows user access to linux system using Samba.

Getting access to shared files on a Linux system from Windows and accessing shared Windows files from Linux turns out to be two different problems. Samba works for Windows user access to Linux but not for Linux users accessing files on Windows systems. First, samba.

Samba is installed by default in Mint 17, but in case it is not installed, do the following:

Select Menu>software manager and enter your password when prompted.
In the Software Manager dialog, enter ‘samba’ into the search field and press ‘enter’.
Locate samba in the list of apps and double click it. When the samba page appears, look at the blue bar below the title and see if it says ‘installed’ or ‘not installed’. If it is installed, you are done, if not:
Click on the ‘install’ button in the blue bar and install samba.

Once samba is installed, you need to install ‘system-config-samba’. Follow the procedure you used to install samba, but search for ‘system-config-samba’ instead. Installing this will cause a menu item named ‘samba’ to be placed in the applications menu (Menu>applications scroll the right column). Open the application, click on Preferences>Samba Users>add user. In the Create New Samba User dialog, ignore the Unix Username, enter a name for the Windows user to use to access the Linux system. Select a password that the named user must enter to access files shared on the Linux system and confirm the password by retyping it. You should also open the server settings dialog in preferences and check to be sure that the workgroup name is correct for the workgroup you are connecting into. If incorrect, change it here. (On your Windows system go Start>Network Places>View Network Connections. Locate the network icon, and pick up the workgroup name.)

Once you have set up the samba username and password for the windows user, you must share those Linux files and folders you want the Windows user to have access to. You can only share things that are yours so if you attempt to share a system file or something belonging to someone else, Linux will not permit it. To share a file or folder, locate the file or folder by clicking ‘files’ in the panel and then locating the file or folder in the ‘home’ tree. Once you can see the file or folder, right click it and select ‘Sharing Options’ from the drop down menu. In the sharing dialog box, click share this (file or folder) and, if you wish, you can permit others to create and delete files and also allow guest access to the data.

Once you have shared your files and folders, go to your Windows system, select Start>My network Places. You will see a list of everything that the Windows system sees on the network, its name and location. Double clicking one of the items you shared on the Linux system will cause the Linux system to prompt for the name and password you assigned for the windows user to use. When Name and password are correct, Windows will open a window showing the selected file or folder. You can go back to the Windows shared list, and open anything else you shared on the Linux system.

A second way of doing the same process is thru the use of the terminal. Open terminal
and proceed.

Samba is installed by default in Mint 17, but in case it is not installed, these two commands should do it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samba

The update command ensures that Samba is up to date prior to the install. Next set
up a password for your user-name (in terminal command use ‘id’ to see who you are).

sudo smbpasswd -a

My experience was that the user had to exist in order to create a password
for him. Note: In Linux Mint the beginner’s guide the author created a password
for a user named camalas and I could not get the password to take for that id,
but using my own id it took. Next, you are going to modify the /etc/samba/smb.conf
file, so it is suggested that you copy the file to your user area for a possible
restore incase the file gets damaged. Don’t forget cap letters count in Linux.

sudo cp –a /etc/samba/smb.conf ~/Documents/smb.conf

Once the backup conf file is done (check to see it’s there) issue the command to
edit the smb.conf file. The default workgroup for Linux is WORKGROUP, so if your
workgroup is different, you will need to find the Workgroup = WORKGROUP command in
the config file (near the top) and reset that to the correct name. Then go to the
end of the file and enter the commands listed. To open smb.config enter:

sudo gedit smb.conf

That will open the file for edit. Check the workgroup and then at the end of the
file enter the following commands single spaced with one space before and after
each ‘=’ equal sign.

path = /home//
available = yes
valid users =
read only = no
browseable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes

Save the modified file.

Accessing winbox files from linux. So far I have been unable to set Linux up so
that you set up the connection from Linux to the Windows system network on a
permanent basis, but on a one time basis, this seems to work fine.

On your Windows system go Start>Network Places>View Network Connections. Locate the workgroup icon, right click it, and choose status>support. From the support dialog, write down the IP address.
On your linux system, Click on Files in the panel, click on home in the menu, click on file in the menu bar, and choose connect to server from the dropdown. This should open the ‘connect to server dialog’.
In the Connect to Server dialog, change Type to Windows Share. Enter the IP address obtained in step 1 into server. Enter your Windows user name into User Name, your Windows password into password, and click connect. On my system, Domain Name fills itself in.

For me, these three steps bring up a window entitled ‘Windows shares on xx.x.x.x’, where the x’s are the IP address from step 1. If it fails, go back and check your Windows user name and password. This window is a typical Linux window like you get when opening the file system but containing a list of the files and folders the system sees at that IP address. Since I have two Windows systems on this network and the user names and passwords are different, any folder name suffixed by a $ sign is on the Windows system with a different user name and password and requires a different user name and password.

On one occasion, I was able to open any folder without a $ suffix and view the contents of the folder. On another, Linux hung for several seconds, failed to open the folder, and then displayed a dialog entitled ‘Unknown File Type’ that I could not get around. However, locating the folder name under ‘network’ in the left column of the window, right clicking the folder, and unmounting it seemed to solve the problem because clicking the folder again caused it to open properly.

In Windows if you click Start>My Network Places you get a list of everything shared on the network and where it is shared. If you choose a file or folder name (on the system you are connecting to from Linux) and place it in the ‘share’ area of the Connect to Server Dialog before you click connect, then just that file or folder will be opened.

This took me a long time to put together, shure hope it helps you.

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