The bane of many an IT repair bod, as well as millions of Windows computer users all over the world, is malware. Software specifically written to trick people into parting with their cash and/or spying on what they browse on the internet. That's just the tip of the iceberg; there are programs in the wild that exist solely to get your credit card number or passwords in order to facilitate fraud. So, what can we do about it?

So, everything is fine and you either schedule a disc scan or a purely automated chkdsk is scheduled that really spoils your day and just keeps repeating. You never get to Windows becuase as soon as the scan is finished, the system reboots. All those people trying to help by telling you to to run regedit are getting a little frustrating because you can't get into Windows in the first place! If this sounds familiar, read on because we *might* have the fix you need.

Is Apache being stubborn and not paying any attention to your carefully crafted .htaccess files when organising virtual hosts? Is it messing up your otherwise impeccable website hosting skills? It could be that it is listening to .htaccess files, but not to any on a 'per site' level.

This is fixed as follows:

Go to the httpd.conf file, open it.

Find (alt-f AllowOverride) the following:

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#

A small snag was encountered on a setup of a Citrix Metaframe/Xenapp server recently. It was version 4.0 and should have been addressed in subsequent versions (indeed, I've not encountered it in any other version).

The problem was that there no 'Create site' option available in the Access Suite once everything was set up, as well as hitting an error message 'The configuration for the site(s) could not be read'. The error message could have been more elucidating to say the least and it took a lot of work tracking down the problem.

The solution involves the following:

We ran into issues recently while setting up a php/mySQL server on IIS7. Once the basic installs of php and mySQL had been completed, a phpinfo() request would return:

"It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead"

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We are pleased to announce that secure ordering is now live on the site! You can now order your computer repairs through the site using our secure online order system (integrated with Sagepay) for maximum convenience.

Resolve IT - making PC repairs as easy as we can!

Well, this story is awful.

Wider range of support

We have added two lower-priced tiers of remote support, lowering the barrier to quality IT support. Now you can only pay for the support you need instead of it being a catch-all service as before!

Have a look for more information.

USB passthrough to guest OS problem? It's the OSE version of Virtualbox!

Recently I set up an installation of Ubuntu for a good friend who had experienced Windows XP problems (ntfs.sys had corrupted) and wanted something that would be less prone to viruses and malware. So, I suggested Ubuntu and we went for it! After the install, I added Virtualbox and installed Windows XP as a virtual machine. No problems - everything was rock solid and very fast. The only issue was that there were no USB devices passed through to the guest OS.