Archive for January, 2009

How to restart the explorer shell in Windows XP

If you have landed yourself here chances are you already know why you want to do this, but for those who don’t here’s why:

When installing a new application, they sometimes require you to restart for them to work, often just restarting the Windows explorer shell will be sufficient for it to work as expected.

Normally most people just kill it via Task Manager, but this can have adverse effects on your system (such as data loss), so here’s how to do it properly:

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PHP getmxrr() support for windows

As many of you may be aware there’s a lack of getmxrr() support in Windows, which dates back as far as 1999.

It’s not a major problem for me as an individual because I never use WIN32 PHP in production, but for development and for the purpose of wide distribution it can raise an issue.

Apparently the lack of support in win32 is due to the lack of “res_search” in “bindlib_w32”, I’m surprised this hasn’t been fixed already.

The official PHP.net documentation for the getmxrr() function states:

Note: This function is not implemented on Windows platforms. Try the » PEAR class » Net_DNS.

However, there are problems with this suggestion…

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Free icon sets for your website

If you don’t have the time to make your own icons for your latest product or website, then you need to find some for free.

More often than not, the actual task of finding icons can be even more time consuming than if you made them yourself! Okay, maybe not, but pretty close, needless to say, they are often difficult to find as there aren’t that many going for free.

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Missing Mediaid.bin file

Recently I got asked to backup a Vista machine. I’m not a big Vista fan, so this was the first time.

I went ahead and backed up the entire machine onto my external USB hard drive, no problems.

However when it came to restore to a new vista machine I found myself with the following error:

The restore did not finish successfully. Error code:
The backup file could not be found. Check your hardware configuration or restore from a different backup (0x8100001A).

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