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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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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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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 (0×8100001A).

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In my job I have to manage lots of machines all over the place. Many of them are on windows.

I often find tracking IP addresses to be a difficult task if they do not have a static IP address.

So what can be done to keep track of an IP address?

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Today I get a call.

Outlook Express won’t print.

I log in and take a look. Everything seems normal, and normal documents appear to print.

However, when I click the print button or go to File > Print nothing happens. Strange.

They are running Windows XP Professional SP2, with IE6.

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When watching long streaming online videos I often watch them while I do other things, perhaps even browse other websites. I need something to keep firefox on top!

The problem is the moment that I use another application the focus is taken away from the Firefox window and it goes into the background. This is no good as I can no longer see the video.

I decided to investigate a solution that could keep the Mozilla Firefox window “Always on Top”…

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Windows XP often does some really annoying things, such as automatically customising a folder, changing it’s kind into “music”, when it detects that the folder contains music files.

Although for some people this might be useful, for me it’s not. Often I’ll want to sort the files in a folder by different fields, NOT the ones that music folders have.

Easy, I thought, it’s just a case of changing the folder customisation kind back to “Document”. Wrong.

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I decided I was finally fed up with my Epson Stylus C46 bubble jet printer, and decided that I don’t really need it anyway.

Everything I print only needs to be in black and white, and anything else I can print onto the HP Photosmart 3110 All-in-one that I have located in the room on another machine.

So now it’s time to get serious, I decided to use a Samsung ML-4500 laser jet I had lying around spare.

Only, how do you install this thing on Windows XP?

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So you just downloaded an entire album, and it's in .wma (windows media audio) format, and you, of course, like any normal person want it in the .mp3 format.

What do you do?

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As a web developer my main tool is my text editor, which I use for pretty much EVERYTHING from coding HTML, to PHP to perl. A text editor is an essential part of my day-to-day life.

Meaning I need a text editor that I does what I want, the way I want it.

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