Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

Users of AVG Free 7.5 will have no doubt been harried by AVG with pop-up notifications telling you to upgrade to AVG8. Unhelpfully the link points to the paid version; one now has to dig through pages on the AVG website to find the free version which does still exist!

However, it’s a small mercy. AVG, the new company name for Grisoft, the manufacturers of AVG anti-virus software have decided to put a lot of bloat in their once streamlined software. A pop-up notification now greets the user attached to the bottom of the Control Centre and a new component, the LinkScanner, which may be thought of as well intentioned but it duplicates functionality that is already built into Firefox. Furthermore, when the LinkScanner is disabled it puts AVG8 into a constant sense of panic: the tray icon starts to constantly report that something is wrong, signalling this with an exclamation mark over the tray icon.

After a quick search I found this article which not only shows you how to install AVG8 without the LinkScanner but how to remove the annoying notifications. I reproduce these in my own words below.

Installing AVG8 Without LinkScanner

1. Uninstall AVG7.5 first through the ‘Add/Remove Software’ menu in ‘My Computer’.
2. Download AVG Free 8 from here, choose the link that says ‘Download AVG Free 8.0 (AVG server)‘.
3. Rename the file to ‘avgfree8.exe‘.
4. Move or copy the file to ‘C:\’ hard drive or the primary windows hard drive.
5. Open a command prompt by going to ‘Start -> Run’ and typing ‘cmd’.
6. Type ‘cd\‘ (That’s a backslash)
7. And then copy the following text and paste it into the command prompt you opened by right-clicking:
   avgfree8.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
8. Follow through the installation but decline to install the toolbar and deny permission to share information with AVG.

Removing the Control Centre Pop-Up Notification

1. Navigate to ‘C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8′, or wherever you installed AVG8.
2. Rename the files: ‘avgmwdef_us.mht‘ and ‘avgresf.dll‘ by adding ‘.disabled‘ to the end of each.
   So they will become: ‘avgmwdef_us.mht.disabled‘ and ‘avgresf.dll.disabled‘ respectively.

Found a great article that really explains a lot about “grub.conf” files which is useful practically to most modern Linux distributions however has some Fedora relevant information too. Find it here.

I’ve put it under How-To, as I think that’s how a lot of people find these titbits.

When my sister bought her Acer 5022Wlmi notebook and her Western Digital 250GB MyBook, they both came formatted as FAT32.

I don’t know why this practice persists. Although, now that I’m considering switching to Linux again, I’m sure I’ll appreciate it more because FAT32 can be easily read by GNU/Linux.

In a modern age, where people rip entire-DVDs to their hard drives; the 4GB limit of FAT32 can be encumbering.

In which case you can easily convert FAT32 to NTFS without having to reformat the drive, so you don’t lose any of your data!

Whoopee! I could copy and paste but the direct source is better. Find the information here.

I have had to replace the battery on my iRiver H340 twice now. Once as the one it came with when it arrived was not working, even though it was a refurbished player. It was the last one they had so I said nevermind and kept it in the hope of fixing it myself. Thanks to the fantastic community at MisticRiver.net and the wealth of knowledge in the community there, I have managed to diagnose many things with the player and also find out what the best tools for it are. I suggest you read around on the forums there as it’s a vibrant community for any owner of these players.

The iRiver H300 series can take 1st/2nd Generation iPod batteries. Which come with either 1700Mah or 2200Mah, at the top end of the scale. The 1700Mah is equivalent to the stock iRiver battery, garnering around 16-hours playback when new. Whereas the 2200Mah battery will get around 24-hours playback from a single charge when new. Impressive eh? All this is without the external battery pack’s use, which could easily allow the mp3 player to playback music for over 50 combined hours.

Before replacing your battery, please thoroughly read through the guide, the link to it can be found below. Furthermore if using a 1st/2nd generation iPod battery instead of one specifically designed for the iRiver H340 you must reverse the polarity (swap the positive and negative wires) for it to work in the iRiver H340! The details of how to do this, can be found in the guide.

I speak of this as I recently had to upgrade the battery on my old iRiver, before the sale. It’s a tricky operation but the best step-by-step guide is here.¹

In the UK however, it is hard to source good quality batteries. You should ultimately look for Newertech as I have read many great battery replacement reviews from satisfied customers; although they do come at a price premium. You can find a list of global internet suppliers here. Alternatively there is always eBay, but these unbranded generic-batteries are often poor quality, shipped from China and all the long lead times associated with that. So I suggest, you use Maplin, like myself. It comes with a year warranty so there’s no need to worry.

There are ways to prevent your battery dying or ceasing to hold charge however.

1. I have read, try not to use the USB charging facility but there is no conclusive proof as to whether this damages the battery.
2. When docked/connected to the computer, the iRiver’s charge will be used up instead of the computer’s, leave it connected to the computer for as short a period of time as possible.
3. Do not “deep discharge” a lithium ion battery. That means, do not drain it completely. Do this every year or so at least once, but not regularly. It is a sure fire way to kill any lithium ion battery. Use as much as you need, then recharge to full.
4. When recharging the battery, when the iRiver displays “Complete”, take it immediately off the charger. This can over charge a battery.
5. Make sure that you use a good quality charger, poor current can ruin a battery. For instance if you are using the EU charger in the UK, I suspect it is not as good as the solo UK one.²

Well, those are my tips for battery replacement and maintenance. Remember, the great thing about the iRiver H300 is that it will never die! There are so many stories of people upgrading the hard drive to 60/80GB and beyond, as the iRiver H340 can accommodate a double-platter hard drive. There are so many customisations, or inSkins for it. There are so many great open source tools, most notably RockBox the open source firmware and iRiverter an open source video transcoder utility.³ As well as the fact that iRiver have continued to at times release new official firmware.⁴

It is a shame however that iRiver as well as most other mp3 player companies are detracting away from HDD based mp3 players towards arguably inferior flash based models. Cowon iAudio are perhaps the new iRiver, but even they are waning.

1. Thanks go to Denny. [↩]
2. Perhaps seek one out on eBay, or I hear that the PSP chargers work sometimes, check this information on misticriver.net . [↩]
3. Here’s a guide on how to use it, from iRiver America’s official website! [↩]
4. Most recently the 1.31K firmware. [↩]

There’s no point reproducing this information, I might as well link to the guy I found it off myself - here.

From my other posts, you may know I use go-oo which inherently is faster than upstream OpenOffice.org due to the faster inclusion of certain patches, or so the website leads me to believe.

Well I remembered that I saw that someone wrote into theInquirer.net about how to speed OpenOffice up and this was ages ago. I’ve been trying to find the article, you may have better success than me. Essentially it involved a few tweaks to the graphics cache.

Using this article, use the settings for undo and graphics cache but ignore using quick starter, things like quick starter I think at least, should never be used… it’s cheating and the less you have starting up with your computer the better!

This is related to my previous post about “Unsuccesful Update” in AVG.

Another issue my laptop suffered, unlike my desktop, was that when you update using the update manager instead of downloading it, installing it clicking ok and away you go, it panicked itself into thinking it was out of date (An ominous yellow box pops up from the toolbar, declaring that you’re in danger and that your virus definitions are out of date, when you literally just downloaded an update) .

To fix this, follow these steps.

1. Go to the AVG Free Control Center by double clicking the AVG icon by the clock.
2. Go to View-> ‘Extended Mode’.
3. Right-Click the [Update Manager] button and select ‘Properties’.
4. Select “Update Immediately” as opposed to “Update upon next computer restart”.
5. Done.

Hope that helps someone, it’s a rather simple thing and wasn’t particularly hard to find but it does seem strange that it comes under ‘Properties’ and not ‘Settings’.

Cheers.

If you have been having similar problems when attempting to update and you have not changed any of your settings e.g. proxy settings. Then here’s how I solved the problem of the dialog saying “Update Unsuccesful” and subsequently Windows XP bugging me every day about my apparently insecure system.

1. Go into the AVG Control Center (The icon is usually in the taskbar, by the clock on Windows XP).
2. Select ‘View’ -> ‘Extended Mode’ (At the top of the window).
3. Left-click ‘Update Manager’ and then left-click the ‘Settings’ button.
4. Select the ‘Advanced’ tab, and left-click the ‘Delete Update Temporay Files’ button.
5. Attempt to update again.
6. Restart your computer.

Hope that helps somebody.

When I got my Thinkpad a few years ago now, the problem arose that I’d want to be running multiple email clients (POP clients) because I now find myself with multiple devices and a need to have access to my email on each of these. This isn’t an easy feat with Gmail, things have improved recently however. I will present a few different solutions

1. Gmail’s ‘recent:’ feature which ironically is pretty recent, since it wasn’t available nor apparent when I first came across this problem. This has it’s own drawbacks from what I’ve been reading. Sent emails are received in the inbox, you also probably download the whole last 30 days messages every single time.
2. Setting up another Gmail address and setting up email forwarding to this address, so that all messages that enter Gmail1 also enter Gmail2. You can then use Gmail1 on your desktop and Gmail2 on your laptop. This isn’t a scalable solution. For instance when I buy an email capable phone/smart device I’d need to setup a third Gmail account in order to view my email unhindered, we’ll call this Gmail3. It also presents a few problems: spam handling, no sent messages/drafts, people replying directly to Gmailx to the nth term will not get their emails read most likely as you won’t receive the email on necessarily all clients. As it skips out the email forwarding process 1-2-3-n.

To use Gmail’s ‘recent’ feature. You can read about it here, which will be a much more concise explanation than I can muster. Although beware there are pitfalls as described above. Personally I am yet to try it out. I don’t want to have to have more workaround filters in each of my clients, some of which might not support filters!
I use #2, I use Thunderbird on both my desktop (Gmail1) and my laptop (Gmail2). There was something funny that used to happen when I tried it with just one Gmail account for two clients, I’d get a lot of duplicate messages and as soon as I used the webmail, it would stop working and revert to downloading the entire inbox up to that point, so I couldn’t use webmail at all - this is of course one of Gmail’s biggest boons, so to be without it is stupid.

Currently the process works fine, I can view each account’s webmail, I get my incoming messages into both inboxes perfectly. I manually have the same filters in Thunderbird setup, and each account’s structure mirrors the other (i.e. the folder, subfolder strucutre is the same for familiarity). In Thunderbird on my laptop I also have it set to ‘Reply-To:’ Gmail1’s address so that if a message gets sent all potential clients can view it.

In this manner you can set Gmail to use POP to retrieve your messages and archive them once retrieved so that when you do log into webmail all you will find are unread messages. You can then read any emails of interest in your inbox and then “Mark Message as Unread” and that will ensure the message is downloaded to the client, the next time the client checks your Gmail account.

Apologies for a long winded approach at explaining this. Seriously, any questions just ask via email or comments. I’m sure to get them ;-)

#2 does have a few other flaws, that I have touched on but will expand on here briefly. You will most likely be composing and sending/drafting emails on multiple clients. These do not get made available to all clients, they remain on each device. As well, if you are using an external client with Gmail I do not think that Gmail archives your sent messages, so there is only a local copy of the sent message (for those that use Gmail for pseudo-backup purposes, like me also).

Finally, an unrelated pet peeve. Gmail has a number of flaws. I like sending myself encrypted messages thanks to Enigmail and GnuPG. However if you send yourself a message from the same Gmail account. It won’t get downloaded back to your client:

Thunderbird(Gmail1) -> Gmail Servers.

Instead of:

Thunderbird1(Gmail1) -> Gmail Servers -> Thunderbird(Gmail1)

It never reaches you! Apparently this is a feature according to someone on the MozillaZine forums.

Update: Apparently Google are introducing IMAP slowly onto Gmail. So this should solve a lot of people’s problems and make Gmail a lot more useful in general. Click here to find out how to enable it.

Many people say Windows XP is insecure. They’re probably right on a theoretical level but for the everyday-user it’s perfectly secure.

Points of Entry protection is a strategy that involves saving a lot of time by scanning incoming files for viruses instead of doing a scheduled scan every week or month. This protects your system a lot better.

The internet is dangerous. Rogue ads can infect your system, it’s silly, but true. To prevent such things you should run the latest version of Firefox with AdBlock Plus and FlashBlock. Not only does this clear up your web experience it will also protect you from annoying and unwanted ads and flash, but allow you to view them if you would like. It will also speed up your internet access, as unwanted ads will not be downloaded I suggest you use Adblock’s subscribe feature to subscribe to EasyList or one of the other Adblock filter lists, this saves you the hassle of having to tune it yourself.

So now you’ve got a good, stable, safe platform to view the internet from. But when you download files you still want them scanned. I recommend installing Download Statusbar extension and configuring Anti Virus scan. Install AVG Free from Grisoft, which is not only a capable anti virus solution, it is unintrusive. You can find it here.

I find that the Windows XP SP2 Firewall is ok for the purposes of basic protection and is pretty well configured by default. If there is an application that wants to access the internet it will ask you if you want to let it, and answering in the affirmative will add this to the whitelist. You can always go back later and blacklist programs if you do so wish.

I have tried other firewalls in the past but they not only tend to slow down your system but I doubt they actually protect you any better than the default SP2 firewall, reporting bogus statistics etc.

Remember, if you scan files as they come in to your computer, you don’t have to do a lengthy check every week or month. Likewise, I configure MSN or now Windows Live Messenger to scan all received files by default. You can do this by selecting avgscan.exe in /Grisoft/AVG Free.

Also, if you want to use a download manager or a BitTorrent program, you can sometimes configure these to automatically scan. This way you can save your system from any predatory attacks. The world of downloading has got a lot safer though, and if you use this strategy you will most likely be clear of any viruses.

Alternatively, you could always move to Linux where Win32 viruses are benign :) . We’ll save the conversion speech for another day.