Windows Control Panel applications

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

List of Windows control panel application and the name of the respective .cpl file in the %systemroot%\system32 folder. Uuuhhhm, you ask how knowing this should help you? Well, in the control panel you can’t simply right-click an application an chose “Run as…” from the context menu – that option is not available. Hence, you need to find the respective .cpl file and repeat that operation there…

Control Panel Applet Icon	.cpl file
Console	console.cpl
Accessibility Options	access.cpl
Add Hardware Wizard	hdwwiz.cpl
Add or Remove Programs	appwiz.cpl
Administrative Tools	Shortcut to main.cpl
Date and Time (Clock)	timedate.cpl
Compaq Insight Agents	cpqmgmt.cpl
Date and Time	timedate.cpl
Display (Properties)	desk.cpl
Fonts	Shortcut to main.cpl
Game Controllers (Joystick)	joy.cpl
International and Regional	intl.cpl
Internet Options	inetcpl.cpl
Infrared Port	irprops.cpl
Keyboard	main.cpl
Licensing	liccpa.cpl
Mail	mlcfg32.cpl
Modem and Phone	modem.cpl
Mouse and Keyboard	main.cpl
Netware Client	nwc.cpl
Network Connections (Connectivity)	ncpa.cpl
ODBC Data Source Administrator	odbccp32.cpl
PC Card	devapps.cpl
Phone and Modem Options	telephon.cpl
Power Options (Management)	powercfg.cpl
Printers and Faxes	Shortcut to \Documents and Settings\ user \Desktop
QuickTime	QuickTime.cpl
RealPlayer Preferences	prefscpl.cpl
Regional and Language Options	intl.cpl
Scanners and Cameras	sticpl.cpl from wiashext.dll
Server Manager	srvmgr.cpl
Scheduled Tasks	Shortcut to main.cpl
Sounds and Audio Devices (Multimedia)	mmsys.cpl
Speech Properties	Shortcut to :\Program Files \Common Files \Microsoft Shared \Speech \sapi.cpl
System	sysdm.cpl
Taskbar and Start Menu	Shortcut to \Documents and Settings\ user \Desktop
Taskbar and Start Menu	access.cpl
TweakUI	tweakui.cpl
User Accounts (Manager)	nusrmgr.cpl
Wild Tangent (spyware)	wtcpl.cpl
Windows Firewall	firewall.cpl

For explanations check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Control_Panel_applets_(Windows)

ASUS Pundit P4S8L

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

I just spent way too much time looking for information for an ASUS P4S8L mainboard built into a Pundit PC. The mainboard is not listed in the proper section on asus.com. I finally figured that in the ‘Product’ category one must not choose ‘Mainboard’ (which would be obvious, right) but ‘Barebone’ instead. Then you need to pick ‘Pundit’ -> ‘Pundit-S’.

To easen this for you I attached the mainboard manual to this post.

Installing MSI packages if you’re not an administrator

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

If you’re not logged in as an administrator on a Windows machine you won’t be able to install a MSI package. What’s worse, there’s no “Run as…” command in the context menu (as with other executables) if you right-click the MSI file. There’s a work-around for that described in “Installing MSI packages with elevated privileges”.

In case this link ever becomes dead, here’s what to do:

1. Open registry editor
2. Add a new key “runas” under HKCR\Msi.Package\shell
3. Now set the default value of this key to “Install &as…”
4. Now create the subkey HKCR\Msi.Package\shell\runas\command
5. Set the default value of this subkey to msiexec /i “%1”

Are virus coders an endangered species?

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

From time to time I surf some hacker/virus coder sites to check on the “mood” of those people. From current articles and incidents one could draw the conclusion that the end was near.

A desperate call to the community not to give up and not to turn their backs on virus coding: http://vx.netlux.org/29a/29a-6/29a-6.111

Yet another “community” (see next link) ceased to exist: http://www.rrlf.de.vu/

A virus coder broods about the relative success – and the lack thereof – of various types of collaborations: http://spth.host.sk/sowesh.txt That sounds so infantile, troubled, and sad. Like the lonely hackers confined to their computers in dark rooms finally realized that there’s a real world out there. A world with real people, that form close-to-real communities based on trust and respect united through common values.

Backup over LAN with Acronis TrueImage

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

Acronis TrueImage is IMO by far the best backup solution. I stopped using Norton Ghost years ago and didn’t regret it a single day.

For quite some time, however, I wasn’t able to have the backup data (usually a hard drive or partition image)  stored on a different computer over the network. TrueImage simply wasn’t able to locate any other computers in the network. I ascribed this to a crappy network setup and didn’t analyze the problem. A few days ago I realized that TrueImage – at least version 9 – has a problem automatically configuring the LAN adapter over DHCP. The chosen subnet mask was 255.255.0.0 although my network was using 255.255.255.0. So I switched off manual configuration in TrueImage, adjusted the subnet mask setting and now it works like a charm. A simple flag makes all the difference…

Disable Acrobat plugin in browser

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At work I recently had to disable the Acrobat plugin in IE in order to have the same environment as the customer who reported a bug in our software that wasn’t reproducible on my system.
Since I didn’t want to *uninstall* but only temporarily *disable* the plugin I started digging in IE’s Internet Options. There I found a few promising Adobe entries in Programs -> Content that I disabled. Unfortunately, neither a browser restart nor logout/login showed any effect.
The solution is to open the Adobe Acrobat Reader separately as an individual application. Then go to Edit -> Options -> Internet (or Preferences -> Internet on a Mac) and uncheck the “Display PDF in browser” flag.

Outlook, IMAP, and winmail.dat

This blog now resides at http://www.frightanic.com/. It will be discontinued here…

I’m probably the 100 millionth Microsoft Outlook user who ran into the dreaded winmail.dat-issue while switching from POP3 to IMAP. I posted to the microsoft.public.outlook newsgroup for help, but got none.

In the meantime I found a rather straight forward solution to move all my Outlook email from a .pst/.ost file to the IMAP server. You just have to leave the Microsoft world:

1. Install Mozilla Thunderbird
2. Tell it to import the email from your current Outlook installation
3. Create a new IMAP account in Thunderbird
4. Move all the imported email to the IMAP server with Thunderbird
5. I case you still want to switch back to Outlook – chances are that you won’t, since Outlook is a real bitch when it comes to IMAP support:
   1. Uninstall Thunderbird
   2. Create a new IMAP account in Outlook
   3. Delete your old POP3 account