I have been receiving a lot of nuisance calls from 08454122750 recently. The number will ring, and when I pick it up it will just hang up. This will then be repeated a day or so later. After a quick search of 08454122750 and ringing up T-mobile directly, it transpires that it is (as many people say online) part of a T-mobile marketing campaign for mobile broadband. When I reported it the T-mobile representative even tried to sell me the product while I'm on the phone complaining about their marketing practices!

 

How to fix (specific to T-mobile & 08454122750)

• Ring T-Mobile UK on 150. If you are on contract, this is free. If not it's 25p a minute so beware.
• They have changed their IVR system so it's impossible to speak to a general operator using their choices. Just press random numbers until the IVR gives up to speak to someone.
• Tell them about the calls from 08454122750, make sure you call it "harrassment" and that you are "upset by the calls". Let them know you have looked it up on the web and that you know it is a T-mobile phone number. They should remove you from the list. Feel free to let them know that they are alienating their own customers with this disgraceful behaviour!

Other types of nuisance call

(Or if you are not on contract and don't want to pay 25p/per min to talk to T-mobile, or you find that it doesn't work. If you have a recent Nokia mobile (cell)phone, the following should work too. 

A solution for recent Nokia phones 

• Download Best Blacklist Lite from the Ovi store
• Create a blacklist (call it 'Blacklist Nuisance calls')
• Add the phone numbers you want to blacklist, you can have up to 5 for free
• Make the reject type 'Send busy tone'
• Switch the service on, and leave it on. Make sure you restart the service when you restart the phone.

This program selectively makes your phone engaged to the numbers specified. Hopefully after a while the callers will just give up because they are repeatedly getting an engaged tone (and if they don't you won't know it anyway unless you check the log in the Blacklist application)

 

Another solution for most recent mobile (cell)phones.

• On most phones you can create a group ringtone or a ringtone for a certain contact.
• Create a new ringtone that is silent (either with a builtin sound recorder or just download this silent mp3 )
• Just create a nuisance group or contacts with the numbers you want to block.
• Assign the silent ringtone to these numbers
• Now when these numbers ring you up, you won't hear them, and they won't disturb you (your phone may still vibrate)

UK centric solutions for some situations

There is also the Telephone Preference Service, signing up with them will make marketing calls an illegal act if you are not an existing customer of theirs. But this won't help if you are receiving products or services from the company calling you (such as the 08454122750 number above) , or if the company is disreputable enough to ignore it! Also more information and complaints can be made to OFCOM (recommended for the 08454122750 number)



Any other solutions are welcome, just comment at the bottom (no signup required)

 

Given changes to Windows backup formats in Vista/7/2008 the following tools may be rather useful as W7 and 2008 become ever more common:

http://www.jmedved.com/default.aspx?page=vhdattach
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4

this 2nd one can even allegedly be used [with care] with Vista native VHD backups. or
http://www.winmount.com/mount_vhd.html

which allegedly also allows one to write to the VHD as well.

Alternatively, if you need quick access to VHD backups, you can mount them directly from the 7/2008 Disk Manager, but the mount doesn't survive a reboot.

Also VHDTool - command-line tool which provides useful VHD manipulation functions including instant creation of large fixed-size VHDs.

Trying to install Windows SP3 (Network Installation) on a client machine. It would not install, giving the error message "The system cannot find the file specified." and "The installation could not complete"

Thank you to DataOne on the softwaretipsandtricks.com forum which pointed me in the right direction.

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
regsvr32 /s atl.dll
regsvr32 /s Softpub.dll
regsvr32 /s Wintrust.dll
regsvr32 /s Initpki.dll
regsvr32 /s Mssip32.dll 

 

Not sure what to say really. I got this error earlier this month and just stared blankly at the screen for a while.

  

 

And a Windows 7 error (March 2010)

 

Some customers are asking about downtime, so here is a quick summary of realistic expectations. The following excerpt is from a Slashdot comment 6 weeks back (thanks to mcrbids)

So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.

So in order to assess how much money you should spend on uptime depends on how much downtime really costs you.

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