The Vista tweak by Lindersoft

[NewsArchive]

I hate blaming anyone but something very worrying has happened.

I have a new Vista laptop (1 day old) which was working perfectly. I had an
issue with Clarion so I installed the Lindersoft Vista patch to change the
win.ini file. It worked but did not resolve my problem. The laptop continued
to work for the next 5 hours.

Then I traced the problem down to Makeover (Capesoft) so I installed
SafeReader ready to install MakeOver. When I ran Safe Reader for the first
time the Lindersoft screen came up asking if I wanted to install the patch.
I am assuming Capesoft have included this in their installs.

I let it continue anyway and as the screen disappeared a worrying system
wanting appeared telling me that it had failed to open some security file.
Then my laptop went crazy and froze. The HD light was flashing and nothing
happened for 5 minutes. When I tried to run taskmanager it took forever to
open and even then failed telling me this security issue was a problem. So I
powered down which took forever.

When I restarted, the OS told me that some of the HD was inacessible and
needed to check it out. After an hour (literally) it told me that there were
4 bad File Record Segments. OK so it's a huge HD so takes time to check but
....

Then it perfomed a scandisk which took 2 hours. Now it seems to be working
again and guess what, my Clarion problem has gone after reinstalling
Safereader and Makeover this time succesfully.

Now I am very worried that my new HD has been damaged.

So I have 3 questions ....

1. Does Capesoft add the Lindersoft patch to it's installs?
2. Could the original failure (causing some very serious security failure)
be caused by a bug in the Lindersoft patch when you install it a second
time?
3. Where could I find a log of the scandisk performed as I need to check
that and perhaps send the machine back.

I am not at all happy but am not trying to lay blame. I am simply trying to
find out what could have happened so that others do not get this happening
to them.

BTW In Vista, if you try to perform a Scandisk if says it cannot do it
whioel Windows is running and asks to reboot and it will do it then. The
trouble is that I cannot find any log file created.

Many thanks

John Fligg

[NewsArchive]

Your notebook came with a defective HD. None if these softwares can damage
your disk.

> I hate blaming anyone but something very worrying has happened.

--
Jorge Alejandro Lavera
www.ClarionTemplates.com
www.InBack.com

[NewsArchive]

john,

> When I ran Safe Reader for the first time the Lindersoft screen
> came up asking if I wanted to install the patch.
> I am assuming Capesoft have included this in their installs.

prolly a bad assumption on your part as safe reader is the installer for
capesoft

> Now I am very worried that my new HD has been damaged.

not sure how software can physically damage a harddrive cept format <G>. but
if you're that worried, go buy a copy of SpinRite
from GibsonResearch

> 3. Where could I find a log of the scandisk performed as I need to check
> that and perhaps send the machine back.

check your event viewer

> BTW In Vista, if you try to perform a Scandisk if says it cannot do it
> whioel Windows is running and asks to reboot and it will do it then. The
> trouble is that I cannot find any log file created.

this is the expected behavior for all ntfs partitions whether nt4, 2k, xp,
vista


regards,
-p

[NewsArchive]

You system came with a very damaging software, people all over the world are
crashing the hard disks
They are removing Veesta and installing xp Pro

--
Dan Scott
C55-C6.3 9053 Clarion Templates (NOT ABC)
<www.garagepartner.com>

Credit card Processing in your software
www.x-charge.com

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

>1. Does Capesoft add the Lindersoft patch to it's installs?

I believe so. So do some of my installs and some other third party
installs.

>2. Could the original failure (causing some very serious security failure)
>be caused by a bug in the Lindersoft patch when you install it a second
>time?

No. I have installed it about 100 times on my vista machine during
testing without any issues whatsoever.

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com


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[NewsArchive]

Thanks to all. Of course I was not implying that Friedrichs (or any other)
software was faulty.

But it was such a coincidence that everything was working fine (other than
my makeover problem) and when I tried to fix it this happened.

Now the problem has gone away Makeover has reinstalled and Clarion working
as epxected.

So apologies to Friedrich and Capesoft if I unintentinally implied their
products were faulty. Hopefully anyone will appreciate the coincidence.

BTW a scandisk I am running has so far come up with no errors at all. All
record clusters are fine!

John

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

To answer Question 2.)

Of course, this is *NOT* caused by the Lindersoft "Clarion for Vista" patch.

What you had (or still have) is a hardware problem (IMO). If the OS told
you that some of the HD was inaccessible then this might have been caused by
a HD "head-crash". Scandisk repaired (well, not really) this failure. But
very often a Scandisk repair just means that it marks the physically damaged
sectors as bad so the OS will not use it again.

Friedrich

[NewsArchive]

Absolutely Friedrich and my apologies for intimating it was your software
that caused this. Just bad wording by me!

I agree about Scandisk reserving those bad areas but how to prove it? When I
phpne the company tomorrow and say the machine is working OK they will just
turn round and refuse to swap it out I bet.

I have no paperwork or anything to prove what happened.

Computers huh!!!

John

[NewsArchive]

>When I restarted, the OS told me that some of the HD was inacessible and
>needed to check it out. After an hour (literally) it told me that there were
>4 bad File Record Segments. OK so it's a huge HD so takes time to check but
>....
>
>Then it perfomed a scandisk which took 2 hours. Now it seems to be working
>again and guess what, my Clarion problem has gone after reinstalling
>Safereader and Makeover this time succesfully.

This tells me that your HD was bad. You need to have this machine
replaced. This is not quite unlike what happened on my old Compaq
laptop about 4 years ago. It crashed after I had spent two weeks
putting everything on it and get everything running. I took it back
and got a new one that served me well for over 4 years without a
single hickup:)

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com

Subscribe to information from Icetips.com:
http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

[NewsArchive]

Arnot - I checked EventViewer which told me nothing. At the time of the
crash eveything looked normal as though the machine had never been
misbehaving.

Now it "seems" to be working OK although I am running another scandisk and
taking a photo of any messages that come up on the screen.

Do you think it might just have been a "blip"?

John

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

Of course, this is *NOT* caused by the Lindersoft "Clarion for Vista" patch.

What you had (or still have) is a hardware problem (IMO). If the OS told
you that some of the HD was inaccessible then this might have been caused by
a HD "head-crash". Scandisk repaired (well, not really) this failure. But
very often a Scandisk repair just means that it marks the physically damaged
sectors as bad so the OS will not use it again. So the next Scandisk will
report "no errors found" (because the bad sector are marked now).

Friedrich

--
Friedrich Linder
Lindersoft
www.lindersoft.com
+1.954.252.3910

"point. click. ship" - that's SetupBuilder 6.7
Create Windows Vista ready installations in minutes

-- Official Comodo Code Signing and SSL Certificate Partner

[NewsArchive]

Tell them you have Veesta, that should do the trick

--
Dan Scott
C55-C6.3 9053 Clarion Templates (NOT ABC)
<www.garagepartner.com>

Credit card Processing in your software
www.x-charge.com

[NewsArchive]

Actually Dan - this is the first time that I hve a machine that is truly
capabale of running Vista. It is blisteringly quick even with McAffee loaded
and the graphics are superb.

Now I really do like Vista as before it was pretty cluncky on my older
machines.

All this blame about Vista is a bit unwarranted - it just takes some getting
used to, and personally with a machine capable of running it, I am now
finding it pretty good.

John

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,
>
> All this blame about Vista is a bit unwarranted - it just takes some
> getting used to, and personally with a machine capable of running it, I am
> now finding it pretty good.
>
I agree. I'm running it on this machine - which only has 768 megs ram. It
runs fine, a little slow on some things - but that's a ram issue - not
Vista! Clarion runs lightening quick with
Vista. So do my production apps.

jg

[NewsArchive]

And you'll see that Vista SP1 (RTM) works faster ;-)

One of the major new Windows Vista SP1 "features" is the "kernel update"
(evolution of the kernel). This brings the operating system into line with
the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. SP1 works very stable and
fast.

--
Friedrich Linder
Lindersoft
www.lindersoft.com
+1.954.252.3910

"point. click. ship" - that's SetupBuilder 6.7
Create Windows Vista ready installations in minutes

-- Official Comodo Code Signing and SSL Certificate Partner

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

>All this blame about Vista is a bit unwarranted - it just takes some getting
>used to, and personally with a machine capable of running it, I am now
>finding it pretty good.

Agreed, I like Vista and have no issues with it at all. You have a
hardware problem and it makes no difference if you are running Vista
or Dos 5! - been there, done that<g> This sounds like a new machine
and you should be able to demand a new one. According to
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-489509.php you can find the
scandisk log at:

To access the Event Viewer
... Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools> Event Viewer >
Application.
... Look for the Event from the source "WinLogon".

This might help you demonstrate that you had the problem and your hd
is faulty.

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com


Subscribe to information from Icetips.com:
http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

[NewsArchive]

Thanks Arnor. As much as I do not want to reload everything, it is much
better to do it now than later <g>

The scandisk log will be invaulable. Thank you.

John

[NewsArchive]

Agreed! And such posts like that don't really help the originator of this
thread.

--
Russell B. Eggen
www.radfusion.com
Skype Clarion chat: http://tinyurl.com/2273lm

[NewsArchive]

Since most modern harddisks automagically remap bad spots and make those
spots invisible, the only way to show those hidden spots is with a tool
like SpinRite. I would be very nervous to trust a harddisk if bad spots
continue to show up or it "chatters".

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

HTH,
Paul

[NewsArchive]

Absolutely Friedrich and my apologies for intimating it was your software
that caused this. Just bad wording by me!

I agree about Scandisk reserving those bad areas but how to prove it? When I
phone the company tomorrow and say the machine is working OK they will just
turn round and refuse to swap it out I bet.

I have no paperwork or anything to prove what happened.

Computers huh!!!

John

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

>Thanks Arnor. As much as I do not want to reload everything, it is much
>better to do it now than later <g>

Tell me about it! I mentioned my Compaq laptop. In 2003 we went to
Iceland for 3 weeks. 3 weeks before I bought a new Compaq laptop to
take with us. Had got everything loaded for me and got started on
loading some of Sue's stuff on it. Used two user accounts. I had
just restarted the machine to move from one account to the other as I
was mostly doing one user at a time. One day I switched users, rather
than restart. The machine came back in 256 color mode. Switched back
and now it came up in safe mode, 16 colors. Something was very wrong.
So I turned it off and let it sit for a while and then started it up.
Black screen all the way. It seemed to start up, but nothing
happened. So I called Compaq tech suppor the next day and they talked
me through a few things and then they told me to take it back and get
a new one. Did that and got a new one (the one I still have) and
everything was great. Except we were leaving in 3 days! I loaded my
email and Sue's email and set up Outlook express to check newsgroups
for both of us and that was pretty much it. I have _never_ switched
users on that machine again<g> But that machine served me without a
glitch for 4 years until I retired it last August for a new Toshiba
Vista laptop.

So, I know about having to reload under pressure<bg>

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com


Subscribe to information from Icetips.com:
http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

[NewsArchive]

User switching is very dangerous. I have been burned by lots of windows
"features".

I always make an image backup using Ghost (or TrueImage) after the hours
of loading from scratch and applying all the windows updates and
_before_ office and other massive registry invasive apps. A huge side
benefit is that when I can't stand all the slow down due to registry
fragmentation and corruption due to installs and uninstalls that plain
don't work, a full image restore then takes 1/2 hour since I do the
right thing and _never_ put my development environment or data on the os
partition. My smart clients don't either.

Saved my ass many times.

Cheers,
Paul

[NewsArchive]

Hi Paul,

>User switching is very dangerous. I have been burned by lots of windows
>"features".

You missed the point. It had _nothing_ to do with switching users.
It was a FAULTY machine. It died. Completely. The problem simply
happened to manifested itself when I was switching users. At the end,
while the tech was on the phone, the machine was completely dead.
Wouldn't even load the bios.

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com


Subscribe to information from Icetips.com:
http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

[NewsArchive]

Yeah fun eh?

The machine has been collected and they will either swap it out or repair.
Either way is fine because it was a truly amazing machine - the best I have
ever had and I guess a 300gb HD is just pushing things too far!!!

Trouble is Scandisk takes about an hour.

John

[NewsArchive]

Hi John,

>Trouble is Scandisk takes about an hour.

Don't think I've seriously run Scandisk since... last century<g> I'd
hate to let it lose on my dev machine with 1 160G drive, 1 300G and 1
360G removable drive<g>

Best regards,

Arnór Baldvinsson
Icetips Creative, Inc.
San Antonio, Texas, USA
www.icetips.com


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