After entering my Windows 7 user account password, I am stuck with a blue swirl and the Welcome screen on my laptop. I waited for a while, and when it seems that nothing is happening to my computer, I forcibly removed the battery from my laptop and rebooted. Then, it was back to normal.

Just this morning, I encountered the same problem again! The MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) in me prompted a visit to the Microsoft Support website and I stumble upon Article 2578159 (The logon process stops responding in Windows Server 2008 R2 or in Windows 7). It matches the symptoms my laptop encounters:

When you log on to a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7, the logon process stops responding and a blue swirl is shown on the Welcome screen indefinitely. After some time, the computer stops responding to any network-related commands. You must forcibly restart the computer to recover from this issue.

With its cause described as:

This issue occurs because of a race condition between the Windows Event Log service and the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) tracing functions. When the race condition occurs, it causes a deadlock situation. This deadlock situation then causes the Winlogon.exe process to become unresponsive.

Good thing, a Hotfix file was able for download and my problem is now resolved!

With the Android Keyboard activated, PRESS & HOLD the letter N/n and several accented versions of that letter will appear. It’s rather tricky, as you will need to slide your way up from the letter N/n to that accented letter(s).

Processor: VIA C7-M 1200MHz 32-bit
RAM: 2.00GB
Display: 8.9-inch diagonal WXGA (1280 x 768) LCD with CCFL backlight
Keyboard: 92% of a full-sized keyboard
Connectivity: WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n, Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbits/s,

How about your setup? Which works better on your side? Please do indicate your ISP when you leave a comment. Thanks!

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So, I decided to teach my students then a work-around that will somewhat enable them to FTP using a Windows XP-based machine: Network Places.

When Windows Vista, and later Windows 7, were introduced, Network Places was scrapped out. Then, I came across this nifty utility called Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop allows you to map a cloud storage (that includes Google Docs & Windows Live SkyDrive) or any FTP location as a virtual network drive. Using Gladinet Cloud Desktop doesn’t require for a separate FTP client software to be installed in your machine, since you can tap the features of Windows Explorer to cut, copy, and paste files and folders from your PC to a remote location/server storage.

Being a techie person, I had subjected my BlackBerry Bold 9700 to several tests and trials. One of which was testing different video formats and encoding to see if they will play in the device — take note that the files were saved in the microSD card (media card). As a matter of practice, after the tests were done, I usually delete the file(s) from the device. However, I had noticed that the files I had deleted previously are still listed inside the Media section of the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Kinda weird, but my research paved the way for a solution.

BlackBerry Storm 9000 owners were faced with the same problem — deleted media items in the microSD card still appears in the Media list of the device. The normal work-around is to pull the BlackBerry’s battery out then restart the unit. In my case, it didn’t worked. Another work-around is to pull the microSD out of its hatch then re-insert it prior to restarting the device. It worked, but such a hassle to do it whenever I delete a media item.

Then, I came across a BlackBerry user’s forum, the solution posted was simple:

In the BlackBerry Bold 9700, go to Options -> Memory. Press the menu button and choose Remove Media Card. Then, press the menu button one more time and choose Install Media Card.

This method will show you the updated list of media items in your BlackBerry Bold 9700′s microSD card.

Now, here’s a trick to dictate WHMCS to use your local timezone:

1. Open the file configuration.php for editing.
2. Add the line date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Manila'); if you are from Manila.

The list of timezones can be found at http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Bug in Mailman version 2.1.11.cp3

We’re sorry, we hit a bug!

Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs.

Upon checking, it seems that a recent cPanel upgrade changed the permissions of the Mailman folder, resulting to the error. A quick fix can be done using the command line (or via SSH to your Linux server):

chmod 02775 -R /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/

If you were helped of this post, your “Thank you!” is accepted, but your PayPal donation is better.

Tonio (a friend since high school and works for Smart Communications) advised me to key-in the following keywords on my mobile unit: ROAM OFF then send it to 333. Wait for a couple of hours (around 2 hours for me) and I was back to mobile web surfing via GPRS/3G and was able to send MMS already!

This was confirmed to me by an email from Smart (in response to my email to them) stating that there are times wherein the International Roaming service is accidentally turned on(?). Hmmm.

Hope this helps those who had experienced the same thing and same error voice prompt.