Zsoldier's Tech Blog

I was having issues where my PS3 was not seeing my Desktop Media stores. I had turned sharing on but was still not able to see it. It saw my laptop just fine so I knew the problem was w/ my desktop. I started scouring the web looking for ways to fix it, needless to say, I came up empty handed. I started looking through my system log and found that my "Windows Media Network Sharing Service" was not creating the share because my DRM was corrupt. Since I did not have any DRM media I was not concerned on losing it so I started searching on how to fix it. Here is what I came across. Hope this helps some of you out there. (I tried posting this to the playstation forums, but either the site was having issues or my computer was) Just follow the procedures listed on this site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;810422 If you were like me and don't have any DRM protected stuff (Windows XP SP2), just do this: Go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users Go to Tools...

This post is a little more technical than most, but I felt it important to post this because I could not find anything online to help me fix it. I would get this error when trying to pull up instances of the Win32_NetworkAdapter. To trace the problem I used this notification query string in WBEMTEST and asynchronously: 'Select * From MSFT_WmiSelfEvent' Once run, I then repeated the error, and found an error occurred from a provider called BRCMGroup. In short, all I had to do was uninstall a Broadcom provided CIM from add/remove programs (Broadcom Drivers and Management Pack, I removed CIM only). I hope this will help anyone out there dreading the idea of rebuilding their WMI repository. UPDATE: My colleague has a more in-depth explanation of how to address this type of problem. Click here to read the entry related to my post.

In a previous post I talked about free tools you can use to protect, prevent, and remove spyware, trojans, viruses, etc. What I forgot to mention was a critical and important piece, the firewall. Both Windows XP and Vista come built-in w/ a software firewall. You want to make sure it's turned on. Most computers installed with Windows XP or Vista have this turned on by default. If you have Norton, McAfee, or TrendMicro they may have provided you w/their version of a firewall. Most often Windows will warn you if you do not have your firewall turned on. But if you want to be sure, you can follow these steps(Windows XP): Click Start Click Control Panel (or Settings, then Control Panel) If in classic view(many icons) double click the Windows Firewall icon. If in Simple View like pictured below click "Security Center" By following these steps you should be able to see whether your firewall is turn on or off. Windows Vista: Click the Windows Icon (usually located on the bo...

There are 3 free tools that I personally use to keep my PC systems free of the garbage that the internet can produce: AVG Free - A free Anti-Virus tool that is quite popular and does a fine job of keeping viruses off my computer and updates itself automatically. Spybot - A free Anti-Spyware tool. This works well to immunize your computer from known bad websites and helps to rid your computer of trojans and spyware if you do get infected. If your computer does get infected with something, the best way to run spybot to get rid of those nasty infections is under Windows *Safe Mode. Spybot does not have a automatic update method, so you will need to run it periodically and run its update task. I would recommend to run it at least once a month to update it. Spyware Blaster - A free Spyware Prevention Tool. This tool is simply meant to augment Spybot in further in its immunization task. Spyware Blaster does have an autoupdate function, but requires you to pay for it. Otherwise you have to...