Ask Virgil

I've been unable to find any simple utility that will display all installed programs on a computer along with their GUIDs. I've come across a lot of references to APIs, etc., but it seems that, for some reason, nobody's compiled a simple .exe that will do this, and present a visually pleasing list. ...

I've recently had to figure out how to use iptables to port forward traffic from an external NIC to an internal NIC. You need to have two different rules: -A PREROUTING -i External_NIC -p tcp -m tcp --dport External_Port -j DNAT --to-destination Internal_IP : Internal_Port -A FORWARD -d Internal_IP ...

I noticed when I installed Windows 7 at work that it was using a new boot animation. This is not animation that I was seeing on my home computer - which still had the old Vista animation. To (re)enable the Windows 7 boot animation: Issue the command bcdboot %WinDir% /l en-US . Note: If you are not u...

For additional Windows 7 codecs, take a look at SHARK007's Win7codecs . To disable Readyboost (and potentially improve boot time): Run regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\rdyboost\Parameters . Delete the existing BootPlan binary. Create a new BootPlan binary wit...

If you pin My Computer to the taskbar it appears as Windows Explorer and when you execute it you get Libraries instead of what you would expect from My Computer. To fix this: Right-click on the taskbar icon, then right-click on Windows Explorer and edit its properties. Under the Shortcut tab, and Ta...

See this blog post.

I don't like seeing a lot of the hidden files in Vista - such as the incredibly annoying "ProgramData" directory. (It would be less annoying if there were actually a space between the two words.) But I do want to see everything at times, I just don't want to go through the hassle of "...

The problem is that applying a folder view to all folders no longer does this. Instead, it only applies it to all folders of the same type as the one being viewed. This can be corrected. First, delete all current folder views by removing the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes...

Now upgraded to the final version of phpBB 3.

I had thought this would work - but it doesn't. Start Menu items are still disappearing on me. This is one of the more annoying issues I've encountered with Vista.

I've only noticed this as default behaviour under Vista. To prevent it from removing Start Menu items after a given amount of time (I don't know what the time out value is or how to change it), edit or create the following registry key to the given value: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows...

To get rid of "Our newest member" from the login screen, find line 31 from cache/tpl_prosilver_index_body.html.php. Delete the following:

After upgrading to the latest PHP, SquirrelMail 1.5.1 started showing "Message: preg_split() expects parameter 4 to be long, string given" at the bottom of each message. This is fixed by modifying line 926 of functions/imap_messages.php. Old: $flags = preg_split('/ /', $regs[1],-1,'PREG_SP...

This board has been upgraded to phpBB 3. (It's currently at an RC1 level, but I'll keep upgrading it as new versions come out. I won't bother updating this to reflect that though.)

Since this board is now running phpBB 3, this feature is no longer available.