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Things I Didn't Know
Aug. 10th, 2007 05:56 pmI think that after four years of putting up with my habits of not clicking on every "You're a winner" advert I see, not downloading Gator or BonziBuddy and generally avoiding daftness like Internet Explorer unless I really have to use it, AVG must have just got bored at the beginning of the week, because it's throwing up meaningless virus warnings now. Has anyone else had problems with it recently?
The problem started when it detected a DLL for "LogMeIn", a web-based remote access program that I use (which is brilliant, by the way) as Obfustat.something - I was prepared to believe that this was just a false positive, because I can understand how bits of a program that lets you into a computer from anywhere on the Internet can be regarded as suspicious. But this morning it also detected something in WinRAR, which I would have thought was fairly innocent, though looking around on the Internet does reveal that it's happened before.
Anyway. I was looking up directions for a restaurant today, and I don't know if I'm the last person on Earth to realize this, but Boston's Back Bay has to be the most organized part of a city ever. I must have looked at Boston in Google Maps hundreds of times, and I never realized that the streets in that area are named alphabetically East to West - Arlington St, Berkeley St, Clarendon St, Dartmouth St... The streets running southwest to northeast are a little more unimaginative, being numbered "Public Alley"s that make people not so much have addresses as co-ordinates, but it's a fascinating street layout all the same.
The other thing that I didn't know is that drive letters can easily be changed in Windows XP. I discovered this because someone in the Click community mentioned that some of his portable programs weren't working correctly because every computer he plugged his USB drive into recognized it as a different drive letter. (In my experience, my computer recognizes my pendrives as anything from F: to J: at random.) But the computer keeps a record of the signature of each USB drive and the letter that it should be associated with, which can be changed with a bit of hunting...
Right-click on My Computer, and go to "Manage" (an option of which I wasn't aware until today, but it just brings up "Computer Management" that can also be started through 94 easy steps in Control Panel). Go to the Disk Management section near the bottom, right-click on a hard disk and select "Change drive letters and folders". Then hit "Change" (it also gives the option of adding multiple letters or mounting as a folder) and select your new letter. X, for instance.
Then close all that and you'll find that your C: drive has changed to X:. You will probably also find that Windows explodes because of not being able to find any of its vitally important files, so I wouldn't recommend that you do this to your hard drive - but it's very handy for things like USB pen drives, the original reason I went off and found this out. Even just now I'm ridiculously excited by the fact that I now have an A: drive for the first time since about 2002.
The problem started when it detected a DLL for "LogMeIn", a web-based remote access program that I use (which is brilliant, by the way) as Obfustat.something - I was prepared to believe that this was just a false positive, because I can understand how bits of a program that lets you into a computer from anywhere on the Internet can be regarded as suspicious. But this morning it also detected something in WinRAR, which I would have thought was fairly innocent, though looking around on the Internet does reveal that it's happened before.
Anyway. I was looking up directions for a restaurant today, and I don't know if I'm the last person on Earth to realize this, but Boston's Back Bay has to be the most organized part of a city ever. I must have looked at Boston in Google Maps hundreds of times, and I never realized that the streets in that area are named alphabetically East to West - Arlington St, Berkeley St, Clarendon St, Dartmouth St... The streets running southwest to northeast are a little more unimaginative, being numbered "Public Alley"s that make people not so much have addresses as co-ordinates, but it's a fascinating street layout all the same.
The other thing that I didn't know is that drive letters can easily be changed in Windows XP. I discovered this because someone in the Click community mentioned that some of his portable programs weren't working correctly because every computer he plugged his USB drive into recognized it as a different drive letter. (In my experience, my computer recognizes my pendrives as anything from F: to J: at random.) But the computer keeps a record of the signature of each USB drive and the letter that it should be associated with, which can be changed with a bit of hunting...
Right-click on My Computer, and go to "Manage" (an option of which I wasn't aware until today, but it just brings up "Computer Management" that can also be started through 94 easy steps in Control Panel). Go to the Disk Management section near the bottom, right-click on a hard disk and select "Change drive letters and folders". Then hit "Change" (it also gives the option of adding multiple letters or mounting as a folder) and select your new letter. X, for instance.
Then close all that and you'll find that your C: drive has changed to X:. You will probably also find that Windows explodes because of not being able to find any of its vitally important files, so I wouldn't recommend that you do this to your hard drive - but it's very handy for things like USB pen drives, the original reason I went off and found this out. Even just now I'm ridiculously excited by the fact that I now have an A: drive for the first time since about 2002.
