Amardeep Sidhu's Tech blog

There are times when you just can’t do anything, I repeat, you just can’t do anything. In the evening I was working on my laptop and everything was fine. Next day in the morning when I got up, switched on the laptop and clicked on IE icon, it happily gave a beautiful error message “This application failed to start because msvcrl.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.” So it was the time for Googling about the error. Thank God I had Opera installed. After 2-3 hits I came to know that it was a trojan. Finally, there was one dll which needed to be deleted to get rid of this error message :) But after that there was some problem with IE in opening some of the sites. One option was to upgrade to IE 7 but don’t know why, I havn’t started liking IE 7 yet. So no other option left than restoring windows (I have Windows XP Media Center Edition installed). ...

When I got my Laptop, along with it also got Norton Internet Security and 2 months subscription for updates & all. Whenever I would boot up the laptop Internet Security would open the window for configuration. I kept on cancelling it for 2 weeks or so. But one fine (read not fine :( day I configured it. It was very happy. Said Thank You at the end. But the best was yet to come. After 10-15 days Windows (XP media center is installed on my Laptop) started showing signs of strain ;) It won’t start properly, after saying loading your settings it will stuck. Then I had to kill explorer.exe and start it again. With this also one strange problem that no startup items will be loaded :( I was discussing the same with one of my friend. He said that Norton must be the culprit. So I thought about uninstalling it. When I tried to uninstall it gave some strange error. Anyways it also told about one URL from where one could check details of the error. Finally when the uninstall started it gave one beautiful message “You still have 39 days of subscription left, if you uninstall the product you will not be able to reuse the subscription” :D ...

I was checking Tom Kyte’s blog. It was about an article titled A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily. Well first of all meaning of all three words from “define: * in Google” 1. Intelligent: having the capacity for thought and reason especially to a high degree 2. Geek: In computers and the Internet, a geekis a person who is inordinately dedicated to and involved with the technologyto the point of sometimes not appearing to be like the rest of us (non-geeks).Being a geek also implies a capability with the technology. ...

Running Linux from right inside Windows, just like a normal application !!! Idea looks cool. I was also searching for the same thing. After little bit of Googling got one link http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/beginners-guide-run-linux-like-any-other-program-in-windows.html This article explains everything about making it possible. (Thanks Kyle Pott :) I had downloaded Fedore Core 7 Live CD. Tried same with this method. It is working perfectly fine. Rocking Infact !!!I have 1 Gigs of RAM in my laptop. It is giving good performance but will definitly rock with 2 Gigs.This is how it looks like on my laptop . ...

For the last 4-5 months I was almost without a PC and internet. This problem was solved when I got my HP laptop last month and then internet connection this month. One thing I had heard much about was RSS feeds and also wanted to try the same because there were many blogs which I used to check regularly. I had an idea about the concept used by RSS feeds that you will need to install a piece of software on your PC, give link of the page you want it to monitor and it will inform you when there is something new since your last visit.(period) Nothing more I knew. ...

sometimes even very small things mess up everything in your head…something similar happened with me also…had two lists of numbers…some numbers were missing in one…wanted to find out thoes..instead of inserting values in tables then using SQL or using diff on Unix…thought about using Excel for the same…much heard about function VLOOKUP is there…which we can use for such scenarios…so I also tried the same….had heard a lot abt vlookup but was generally heard of it…as when people used to write “=vlookup(bla bla bla bla…)”…i just used to count my heartbeat…and look around…so this was the time when i really needed to learn vlookup so as a normal computer geek wud do…i opened google.com and started searching the same…what i got was really disappointing….everywhere i almost found the same language….(oops….i also checked microsoft help even dat techie lingo didnt help as when you have messed up the things…nothing really gets into your head….)…some of that text…m pasting here with a hope that it wont create copyright issues….i really got nothing out of this…. “Searches for a value in the leftmost column of a table, and then returns a value in the same row from a column you specify in the table. Use VLOOKUP instead of HLOOKUP when your comparison values are located in a column to the left of the data you want to find. ...