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Category: Things

Rogue Anti-Virus Removal

Over the past few years I’ve had a number of clients who have been hit with ‘fake’ Virus alerts/warnings that are intended to alarm the user into scanning their system and eventually paying to have the fake virus removed. I

Posted in Computers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to switch to Microsoft Security Essentials Anti-Virus

Most of my clients and friends want an Anti-Virus solution that’s simple and cheap, and I have found myself installing Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) on more and more Windows systems.  It has a small footprint, doesn’t drain a lot of resources,

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Seagate ST35000620AS Failure

I received a call from someone with a two year-old Hewlett Packard Pavilion Slimline who told me the system would no longer boot.  I started talking him through some troubleshooting procedures so I could get a better handle on what was going

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Magellan Roadmate Loose Power Plug

Recently I received a call from a friend of mine who said the power plug on his GPS had “fallen off inside….” and he asked if I would be interested in taking a look at it. I thought: “Cool, a

Posted in GPS Tagged with: , , ,

1999 GMC Yukon Intake Manifold Gasket Leak

I noticed some time back that my Yukon was stumbling under loads, and tried several repairs and diagnosis techniques without success (I don’t have access to a scanner/reader), so I nursed it along until one evening it was really acting

Posted in Automotive Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Please avoid Symantec/Norton

In the late 90’s I started questioning the quality of Symantec/Norton products as they started showing a large amount of support time (while IT Director at a Video Game Company supporting over 200 workstations)… Norton support was lacking, and we

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Make ColorZilla work in Ubuntu – Firefox

ColorZilla has the ability to work with Ubuntu, but not the way it is packaged. If you install the regular ColorZilla_1.x.xpi the library that does not work with Ubuntu gets installed and you get the ‘mode not supported on your

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Cleaning up WordPress database after UTW

After upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and trying to re-evaluate tag usage, I decided to re-visit an old pet-peeve of mine: The relatively massive (read: gi-normous) size of my wp_postmeta table. It was always the biggest table in my database (thanks

Posted in Computers, Things, WordPress Tagged with: , , , , ,

Recent site and forum issues

Between the theme change, settling into 2.3 final and trying to bring some style continuity from the new theme into my forums, there have been some short periods of down-time. Last night and this AM were more significant however, so

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Recent changes here at samdevol.com

I have been meaning to post a note about some of the recent changes here, but have been busier then a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (been dying to use that phrase for some time ;’)…

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