Category: Tech

Last Sunday I started working on some wedding video editing and transfer to DVD for a friend. Right after I finished rendering the first 1.5Gig MPEG I noticed Windows Explorer using 100% of the CPU resources for a minute or more when I opened the directory with the large file.

I started playing around and found that all my folders with large AVI or MPEG files caused this problem. The problem was especially bad in one folder that has an 18Gig AVI capture file.

Searching around the net for information on this problem I found a number of forums with people having the same problem. The information led me to a Microsoft Knowledge base article with details about the problem. The culprit is Shmedia.dll analyzing the file contents to let Explorer display media specific information about the file. The Microsoft article states that the problem was fixed in SP2 but, since my PC is fully patched I think the problem has come back. Also the article says the problem is only with AVI files but I was seeing it with MPEG files as well.

There are a few different solutions posted around the net for the AVI problem. Looking at the various solutions I chose to use the CLSID renaming method as detailed at pc-speed-up.com.

As I expected, renaming the CLSID to:

 {-87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}

fixed the problem with AVI files but did not help with the MPEG files.

I looked in the registry to find out what CLSID provided the hook to Shmedia.dll for MPEG files. I found that

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT CLSID{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}

is the key for MPEG’s. I renamed the key to:

{-c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}

and it fixed the problem for MPEG’s. I hope this helps someone else having this very frustrating Windows problem.

WARNING – manually editing the registry is extremely dangerous if you are not careful you may have to re-install windows to get the PC working again. You have been warned so, don’t complain to me if you screw up your PC by following my information.

The new version of Firefox has been released. It’s working very well for me. Get your copy today.

Microsoft is giving away Visual Studio Express absolutely free until November 2006! I’ve checked the license agreement and faq and it includes the redistribution license and allows commercial usage.

I haven’t gotten it installed yet but I’ve heard that some of the features of from the professional version are disabled but they are likely features that casual users like me won’t miss.

You can install it from the web or download CD images at the manual installation instructions page.

As reported by EE Times, the Gartner group is predicting a long term decline for the DRAM market. This should be good news for all us PC users who keep needing more and more RAM.

Check out the whole article here.

The inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, was interviewed by EE Times this week. As usual, Bob is informative, entertaining and controversial.

I particularly like his thoughts on blogging and the New York times on page three of the interview.

IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony have formed the Open Invention Network to promote Linux by sharing patents royalty free.

Read more about it in this EE times article.

Congratulations AMD!

This EE Times article says that, the research firm Current Analysis, is reporting PC’s with AMD processors outsold PC’s with Intel processors for the month of October.

I’ve been a big fan of AMD processors and have chosen them over Intel for my own PC’s since the days of the first K6’s.

Sony is using rootkit technology in the digital rights management it puts on to some of their audio CD’s. This is the most invasive DRM I’ve heard about and could be very bad for your PC.

I have always recommended that people take extreme care when installing software from audio CD’s and movie DVD’s. Most of the time the software provides no useful function that other software doesn’t have and with this latest development it makes it potentially dangerous.

I first heard about this from a post on the PICList Tuesday and, it was the topic of this weeks SecurityNow podcast. To learn more about this issue visit the web page of the programmer who found it Mark Russinovich or, listen to the SN podcast.