Posts Tagged ‘Shortcuts’

Clean disk space, fix broken shortcuts and delete old restore points on Windows 98,XP, 2000 with Free Spacer

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

 

freespacer perfect clean disk space on Windows 98 XP 2000 russian software

If you end up with a low disk space, or a lot of broken shorcuts without knowing how this exaclty happened  on  Windows XP and you need to free some disk space on OS without manually bothering to delete Windows Temporary files. Check out a tiny Russian Program called Free Spacer. The program is a good substitute for the inefficient windows default app Disk Cleaner. Free Spacer is FreeWare and it can be just used "as it is" but unfortunately access to source code is unavailable as well as use for commercial purposes is prohibited.

I've used Free Spacer multiple times on messed up PCs and always it does good, it is an excellent piece of software. Any Windows-Admin knows  Cleaning some disk space from unnecessary junk files, makes PC work faster. Free Spacer is very useful to run on Virus infested PCs, together with SpyBot , Malware Bytes and some AV soft like Avira.

As software is Russian, unfortunately menu buttons are in Russian too. Even non-russians can easily orientate as the most important buttons are first two from up to bottom and the last which is exit. The first button on from top onwards starts searching for garbage and obsolete and temporary files you can afterwards delete with the second button Удалить – meaning Delete in Russian). A note to make here is on newer Windows than XP Pro or XP Home FreeSpacer does not work well; even though it installs and runs on x86 Windows Vista and Win 7 it hangs up during scan.

For latest version of FreeSpacer check Free Spacer's Official version here, only available in Russian. As of time of writting this post FreeSpacer's latest version is 1.67, I've created mirror of FreeSpcer 1.67 here.

Here is description of what FreeSpacer "features" translated to English:

  • Powerful cleaner drive of unnecessary files.
  • Cleans efficient found "garbage." files
  • A large number of masks for the detection of unnecessary files / folders.
  • Cleanup folders with temporary files, not only Windows / Internet, but about 30 popular programs.
  • Search for invalid shortcuts.
  • Search system restore points.
  • Search for missing files and folders.
  • Support Exclude files and folders.
     

Windows XP: Fixing External Hard / Pen USB stick Missing Shortcuts (Problem with Shortcut) solution

Monday, December 17th, 2012

windows error problem with shortcut the item 689342.exe refers has been changed or moved

I was asked today to fix a computer with 682 GB external Hard Drive attached. For some unexplainable reason, many of the Directories storing hundreds of gygas of precious data become showing up as "Broken Links" – Missing Shortcuts. My first logical guess is that maybe, just a simple hard drive re-attach will be enough in order to solve the problem. Detaching and Attaching the external Seagate hard drive made any change, whether opening the hard drive content with Windows File Explorer, most directories were just showing as Missing Shortcuts, like you can see from below screenshot:

windows XP problem with missing windows directory shortcuts screenshot external hard drisk error

I was a bit sleepy and in a hurry, so at first glimpse I didn't well read the Pop-upped Windows exact error, after carefully reading, I've realized the 689342.exe and the rest of ID.EXE that were trying to open, whether clicked on the "questionable", missing shortcuts is for sure some kind of most likely Polymorphous Spyware / Virus or a combination of both.

The person owning the computer, was quite in shock as most of his data was located on the external HD drive. My assumption of course was that the problem is not so severe as it looks, as I've fixed plenty of Windows-es with mixed up registry, which were mixing how Windows understands windows extensions.
My hope was that the problem will be solved by simply Checking the Windows Registry with – Little Registry Cleaner tool and fixing the irregularitieswith current registry, thus I did a quick scan with it fixed a bunch of registry problems, did the usual Windows restart, but this helped not. Thus I, therefore started a Malware Bytes Anti-Malware Spyware "Swiss Army Knife" prog 🙂. Paralelly with scanning I decided to check if physically files are present on Hard Disk, by dir listing the files in Windows command prompt – cmd.exe , there all seemed okay files and directories were present, I can CD into each of the directories incorrectly showing in Win File Explorer as missing shortcut and all inside dirs was just fine.

Dir listing if files are physically present Windows XP Screenshot

 

I checked for "autorun.inf", as it is so common nowadays that external Hard Drives and USB Sticks are infected with Autorun Virus variations and my guess happened to be right, there was F:\autorun.inf. As it is with the Autorun Virus-es the file was set the hidden and read-only atrribs. I checked it is there with:

> dir /a autorun.inf
...

Then I deleted autorun.inf, by reverting the "hidden and read-only attribs:

> attrib -s -h -r autorun.inf
> del autorun.inf

Though, I hoped this would solve the problem, checking f:\ Directories in File Explorer, continued to be showing Folders linked to the unexisting 689342.exe. Then I read some posts online, discussing the weird "Missing Shortcuts" issue and after a while thx God I finally got the fix, which is as simple as:

> attrib -r -s -h /s /d f:\*.*

This command, took about 20 minutes or so, as there are plenty of data on the hard drive. Also I suppose in some rare occasions the removal of read only, system and hidden windows attributes, might create issues of certain programs installed, however in this specific PC case all was okay and it doesn't really mattered as the really important files to rescue were mostly in .DOC's DJVu, PDF and plain text format along with some movies

 attrib cmd attributes command to fix missing shortcuts on windows XP picture shot

As you can see on below screenshot, I had the Malware Bytes running in parallel along with a Working copy of Avira Free Antivirus, while the above command was running Avira immediately detected a bunch of Virus files, which were offered to be Removed or Quarantined.

After removing, all of the badware and testing in Explorer, all folders in F:\ were showing as normal.
However, though all looked fine, after the completion of Malware Bytes scan and the removal of catched Malware, just to be sure something has not left as viruses I run oneanother Avira AV scan of all Computer Hard drives and did a Restart. This is it enjoy 😉

How to make Print SysRQ keyboard key working on Slackware Linux’s XFCE

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

By default Slackware's XFCE, does not allow screenshot taking by simply pressing PrintScreen SysRQ, like is in most of the "more advanced" graphical environments (GNOME, KDE), MS-Windows 🙂 etc.

To have a key binding assinged to PrintScreen SysRQ key in XFCE, you will first need to have xfce4-screenshooter

I've earlier blogged on how to take screenshots on Slackware's XFCE by installing and using xfce4-screenshooter program , so I suggest you take a look at it.

After xfce4-screenshooter is installed start:

bash-4.1$ xfce4-keyboard-settings

XFCE4 keyboard settings window Slackware Linux screenshot

Further on go to:

Application Shortcuts (tab) -> Add

Type in the command prompt to appear xfce4-screenshooter and press the PrintScreen SysRQ keyboard button.
From now onwards pressing it will allow you to take screenshot like with GNOME's gnome-screenshot -i command.
Happy Screenshoting 😉