PC Tools sells out to Symantec

// August 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // News

Money talks as PC Tools falls to Symantec

The ever-acquisitive Symantec is to buy anti-malware vendor PC Tools, taking another prominent independent out of circulation.

The deal to buy the privately-held Australian vendor has yet to be finalised, and the price announced, but is reported to be set to complete by the end of the year.

PC Tools sells a number of products for consumers and small businesses, including several – Spyware Doctor, PC Tools Anti-Virus and PC Tools Internet Security – that overlap heavily with products sold by Symantec. The fate of these products has yet to be made clear, though Symantec has said that the brand and company will continue as a separate division, with current PC Tools CEO, Simon Clausen, at its head.

“The combination of our two companies will provide additional value and choice for consumers worldwide to better enable and protect their digital life,” Symantec’s Janice Chaffin said, giving away nothing.

“By adding PC Tools, we build on the market-leading success of Symantec’s consumer offerings and firmly position ourselves for continued incremental growth in a rapidly expanding market,” she said.

Courtesy of Techworld

Alright I’m not a huge fan of Symantec and this sale doesn’t make me any more likely to like them in the future.  I just can’t believe some of their purchases.  They bought Sygate and effectively dissolved the company and integrated their technology into the new Endpoint Protection.  The bought @Stake who made LC5 (L0phtcrack), and dissolved that company citing that US export regulations.  They basically throw their money around and ruin great companies.  I used to actually do some Professional Services through an IT company for Symantec.  If you didn’t like them before try working with the Professional Services division of Symantec.  Seriously it was one of the most screwed up experiences of my life.  It didn’t help that the company I worked for didn’t want to train us on anything and would just throw us out to the wolves by sending us to Enterprise clients to implement products that we were certainly not qualified to even talk about, let alone install.  I’m sure I will include some great stories on this at a later time.

How to fix VSS errors in Windows XP and 2003.

// August 13th, 2008 // 8 Comments » // Troubleshooting, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP

I use Mozy Home to backup my laptop online so I don’t lose confidentials files or important documents in the event of a hard drive crash.  Well for some reason my laptop started hard locking when Mozy would start so I had to disable it so I could keep working.  Well today I decided to fix it after another hard lock.  I opened up Event Viewer and had the following error:

After seeing this I immediately go and check the VSS writers on my Windows XP solution by opening a command prompt and typing “vssadmin list writers.”   Of course this shows all the proper writers.  So next I check the shadows by typing “vssadmin list shadows” and instantly I get an error: Error: 0×8000ffff.

At this point I realize that VSS is essentially broke on my machine.  I remembered seeing a KB article awhile ago with Microsoft for repairing VSS after a corrupt registry subkey called subscriptions.  If you want to check out the KB article go here or simply use the following instructions, which I slightly edited for Windows XP.

Resolution

1. Click Start, click Run, type Regedit, and then click OK.

2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions

3. On the Edit menu, click Delete, and then click Yes to confirm that you want to delete the subkey.

4. Exit Registry Editor.

5. Click Start, click Run, type services.msc, and then click OK.

6. Right-click the following services one at a time. For each service, click Restart:

• COM+ Event System
• COM+ System Application
• Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider
• Volume Shadow Copy

7. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

8. At the command prompt, type vssadmin list writers, and then press ENTER.

9. If the VSS writers are now listed, close the Command Prompt window. You do not have to complete the remaining steps. If the VSS writers are not listed, type the following commands at the command prompt. Press ENTER after each command.

• cd /d %windir%\system32
• net stop vss
• net stop swprv
• regsvr32 ole32.dll
• regsvr32 oleaut32.dll
• regsvr32 vss_ps.dll
• vssvc /register
• regsvr32 /i swprv.dll
• regsvr32 /i eventcls.dll
• regsvr32 es.dll
• regsvr32 stdprov.dll
• regsvr32 vssui.dll  (does not work in Windows XP)
• regsvr32 msxml.dll
• regsvr32 msxml3.dll
• regsvr32 msxml4.dll

Note The last command may not run successfully.

10. At the command prompt, type vssadmin list writers, and then press ENTER.

11. Confirm that the VSS writers are now listed.

12. At the command prompt, type vssadmin list shadows and then press ENTER.

13. Confirm that there are no errors listed.  On Windows XP you should see: No shadow copies present in the system.

14. Congratulations your machine should work again with any VSS compatible programs.

Dell Broadcom Wireless + Windows XP SP3 = Page Fault Hell

// August 6th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Windows XP

I’m pretty calm for the most part but I will have to say that this problem is ridiculous.  Basically I had this laptop that was using a huge amount of page file with nothing running.  After using Process Explorer and Task Manager I came across this beautiful gem of an image (pay attention to bcmwltry.exe):

This is easily fixed by updating the drivers but seriously there should be a huge warning about this issue.  A normal user would throw their PC into oncoming traffic if they experienced this.  I really do feel bad for the neophytes out there.