How to uninstall Visual Studio 2008

Posted on Jan 10, 2011

Step 1. Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008

Some article suggests doing Step 2 first which is described below, but the order does not matter, to my experience. You can uninstall VS2008 by using one of the following channels.

Add or Remove Programs (Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP) or Programs and Features (Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008)
Setup.exe in the VS2008 installation media

When you do this, however, you may receive the following error message:

A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.

This problem occurs when you install an update that adds a new Windows Installer feature to VS2008, as described in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 959417 . To resolve this problem, patch VS2008 with the latest service pack. Install something to uninstall… Irony, huh?

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Wubi fails to boot after upgrade

Posted on Dec 18, 2010

If Wubi fails to reboot after upgrade, try the following things.

If the system hangs at a grub prompt, then first try to replace the c:\wubildr file with the one in c:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr (change ‘drive’ if necessary and backup c:\wubildr first as a precaution). It appears that in many cases the upgrade is corrupting the wubildr file.

If the system fails to boot, especially with an error message,
file not found ‘loadfont’
unknown command
, then boot with a live CD, loop mount the wubi root.disk, edit the grub.cfg and remove all lines above the first “menuentry”.

Preventing the grub packages from being updated can be a permanent solution for this problem. Lock the version of the packages, grub-pc and grub-common in Synaptic Package Manager.

Network Level Authentication for Remote Desktop Connection in Windows 7

Posted on Dec 17, 2010

When setting up Remote Desktop in Windows 7 (Win7), you can choose whether to use Network Level Authentication (NLA) or not. NLA will probably enhance the security of your Win7 machine. However, after enabling NLA, your Win7 will be accessible only from another Win7 or Windows Server 2008 which supports NLA in the operating system level. To connect Win7 from WinXP, you should choose “Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure)” in the “Remote Desktop” panel, or you can activate NLA in case you are using WinXP sp3. The details are posted here, but the essence of the how-to is like the following.

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LsaIn the details pane, right-click Security Packages, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type tspkg. Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK.
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProvidersIn the details pane, right-click SecurityProviders, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type credssp.dll. Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK.
Exit Registry Editor.
Restart the computer.

How to make your WordPress a RSS reader

Posted on Oct 30, 2010

WordPress is my blogging tool. What I admire WordPress for is its simplicity and extensibility. It contains a lot of useful functions, yet the code is simple and easy to read. It is also very customizable with a little modification of the existing code. The more I know about WordPress, the more I sympathize with their motto, “Code is Poetry”.

As an example of how easy to extend the functionality of WordPress, I here show a way to make a WordPress page which regularly fetches the contents of the blogs you like. It just takes the following 3 steps.

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