sony vaio fn key problem

it happened when my director laptop need to be downgraded to xp. he got sony vaio vgn-sz433n.
so i install the xp pro after downloading all the necessary drives and tools for xp.
everything went smoothly, all driver installed so no more “other devices” showed in device manager.
but when my boss used it he said that the fn key was not working for the projector but it is fine for other functions.

how to kill hung services

have you been wondering to see when we stop the service manually using services.msc it takes forever?
according to m$ it said because the automatic service started before lanmanserver.
you can check this in the even viewer if it is showing these error:

Event ID: 7022
Source: Service Control Manager
Type: Error
Description: Server service hung on startup.

Norton Safety Minder

it is been a long time ~ three years actually~ since i’m looking for a tools to filter the browsing for my company, for free of course.
in the HQ we have gateway, so this thing is covered, but in our branches it is not, since they use modem router from the ISP which has no good filtering.
i’ve tried opendns but since the public ip is dynamic so it was not working, even when i try the companion dyndns it was not working because it said the ip already registered by other user (go figure 😦 ).
now with this new norton product and free, i can finally do the monitoring on the users browsing.

with the good point of:

+ whitelist and blacklist beside conventional , not many parental control have these.

+client base windows user control, so it is hard to bypass.

+ hard to “endtask” since it is not using conventional .exe service.

+internet base, so even when the “children” use several computers, they still monitored as one.

undbx a cure for bloated outlook express file

from google code i got this file undbx
http://code.google.com/p/undbx/
it really good, up until then i usually use mccallan program to repair the dbx file of outlook express, but since the link to the file is dead (he still got awesome free email server program though).
okay so i change heart to undbx, since it is the only other one free program beside the mccallan.
from the google code here is the promise:

UnDBX – Tool to extract, recover and undelete e-mail messages from Outlook Express .dbx files.

Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Avi Rozen

enable oracledb connection through firewall

well my company has oracle 8i, and up until now we never turn on firewall in our intra network. but things got complicated when the worm named kido start to crawl our network. so we take policy to turn on the firewall.
but of course the first time we turn it on the oracle db cannot be connected: TNS-12535 TNS:operation timed out from other computer even though we already put an exception on post 1521 and only accept own network ip range.