The webpage of Stoyan Varlyakov

Right,

this seems to be a not-so-common situation, but imagine you have initiated a large download (a multitude of GBs ISOs from MSDN) and your download interrupted.

Or windows updates restarted the PC while you were having a cup’o’tea …

You are now asking yourself the question “How can I resume my downloads” ?

If you have noticed that you are indeed using the Microsoft File Transfer Manager (sometimes masked as Akamai technologies download tool or similar), then you will end up here on my blog looking for a solution.

If this window looks familiar, then read below:

1. Open Run

The Icon looks like this:

Vista+Win7+Win8: click “start” and just type “run”

XP: Press start and look for the right hand side option “run”

2. Type this:

c:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe

3. Find the program, go to Options and select “place a shortcut on the desktop”

Done!

The problem is, this tool is around since 2006 and in 2006 user experience was not a high priority (for some programs it is not today as well…).

So I hope this helped 🙂

(if google or bing brought you here, scroll to the very bottom for a solution, I know what keywords you used 🙂 )

I recently purchased this laptop for my beloved life as a gift. I am not cheap when buying equipment, but as this will direcly be on the family budget, I needed do keep the WAF high (wife acceptance factor) by keeping the cost low.So if you are on the market for a 13.3 inch laptop which:

a) doesn’t weight a ton,

b) has VGA and HDMI output

c) mobile processor (not Atom)

d) non-gloss display

You end up buying the HP Probook 430. Specs wise it ticks all the right boxes, the little guy even has an extension port shared between the 3G UMTS card and mSATA. The 13.3 spots the usual 1368×768 resolution, but on a 13.3 that is the max you need for productivity and web surfing.

So I bought the Samsung 840 Evo SSD, installed win7 vanilla on it (licensed of course), tested the laptop with burn-in and was happy with how it behaves. Until we tried it on battery.

The laptop would randomly freeze and its display produced very strange image. If you have seen a VGA with broken sync buffer you will know what I mean. It just freezes.

And of course HP support was super helpful to tell me how this was a drivers problem, OS problem, my problem, everything else but the hardware. I didn’t buy that and went on the internet for “help”:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-HP-ProBook-ZBook/hp-probook-430-g1-display-goes-blank-and-flashing/td-p/6428244#.VH7fncnET2A

It doesn’t take more than a few searches to see that more than one person is having such issues. But apparently different countries, different warranty budgets – mine wasn’t honored.

I tried the usual steps – firmware, drivers, clean boot, etc… but as one would expect, this did not help.

I checked the event log to find a multitude of EventID 37 source: kernel-power events right before the computer froze. But the Laptop did not overheat, CoreTemp was showing the right degrees, stress testing using HyperPi again did not show a direct dependency between the CPU load and the freezes. The suggestions to change the power plan to High Performance did the trick with the original i7 (Nehalem based), but nowadays the power regulators are on the CPU as well – I haven’t seen an improvement using the high power profile on a desktop machine…

Right before turning this rather good looking laptop to a pile of plastics, I tried the oldschool PC troubleshootingI applied the overclocker-style approach – go to BIOS and whatever looks suspicions – disable 🙂

(SOLUTION) In BIOS I ended up changing only 2 settings:

1) the memory for the display controller was set to 128 Mb fixed , changed to 512

2) disable the option to allow the CPU to dynamically change frequency (also known as Turbo)

In my case this was not big of a change since I only have a core i3 inside (non turbo CPU). On the graphics part – the machine has 8G RAM installed so assigning 0.5 for graphics isn’t much of a change. Subjectively the laptop runs much smoother now and most importantly – does not freeze anymore!

That is all HP should have said about this issue, but they did not. Hopefully this helps another one to save a few hours of head banging troubleshooting.

Recently I came across an interesting problem.

I have on my work “hate-this-slow-POS” laptop every other Microsoft product out there. This includes proof-typing on 3 Languages and there is an interesting side effect.

After windows update jumps in and installs whatever it does, I end up with a very large option of languages to choose from. These include Korean, Japanese, and TWO types Chinese. I wish I was fluent in any of those, but I am not. So I ended up looking for a solution.
I came across a number of posts from angry people that they have not configured any of those in their settings, so pretty much the language settings tab looks like this:

But when you switch your language with your favorite key combo (Cntrl+Shift or Alt+Shift), then you end up clicking a lot more to cycle through this large list:

Q: Why the H… is this happening to me?

A: Some smart MS guy decided to embed the integration of Asian languages into the startup process. That’s right – in the registry. No check is done if my computer actually uses the exotic languages, nor am I asked “do you want to install whatever-this-is?”.

Q: So how can I remove them?

A: I found the answer on a official Microsoft partner forum. I am unaware who is the original source to give credit for this finding, but here is how you can do that the easy way.

1. Download this file and execute the .reg from this .zip remoteExtraLang

2. Reboot.

3. Done.

This is a zip file which contains 2 files.

removeExtraLang.reg – just execute that (ignore all warning that this will harm your PC bla bla)

removeExtraLang.txt – this is the same file, in plain text.

Here is what the file does:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
“IME14 KOR Setup”=-
“IME14 JPN Setup”=-
“IME14 CHS Setup”=-
“IME14 CHT Setup”=-

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
“IME14 KOR Setup”=-
“IME14 JPN Setup”=-
“IME14 CHS Setup”=-
“IME14 CHT Setup”=-

It just finds the extra entries done by Windows Update (thanks again!) and removes them.

You could manually look in the registry and remove the entries yourself, but I am a lazy person and since this issue might reoccur, I just keep a copy of the reg file.