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Due to a foul-up by securty firm Symantec, users of Norton anti-virus prducts found that Spotify had mysteriously stopped working today. The reason was that the security product had falsely identified the program – Spotify.exe – as a Trojan Horse and quarantined it.

It is possible to restore the program to its rightful place but it is a bit of a pain. Note that there is some risk in doing so as the law of averages means that some people with compromised PCs may have copies of the program that are infected by a Trojan, and this could include you. Anti-virus programs would normally attempt to clean the original program by removing the Trojan from it, warning if this is impossible. In our case Spotify.exe had itself been mis-identified as a Trojan, so it was safe to restore.

Norton’s official advice is to reinstall Spotify but ‘free’ users who don’t have the install files or their registration details may find it is no longer possible to register for the free version of Spotify. (Premium users can invite up to 10 friends to register for the free service.)

To restore the spotify.exe, simply follow these steps. Note that you need to wait until Norton have fixed the problem and your antivirus has been updated or it will simply quarantine the file again:

1. Double-click on the Norton icon in your System Tray (the bar on the bottom right hand corner of your screen, next to the clock)
2. Click on Quarantine. You should now see a list of Security History events that resulted in a file being quarantined
3. Near or at the top will be a message that a Trojan Horse has been removed, click on this so it is highlighted
4. Now click on the More Details button at bottom right
5. You should now be looking at a Security History Alert Summary saying “Trojan horse detected by Auto-Protect”
6. Clicking on the underlined words Risk Details will open a new window. Clicking on the Details tab should show that the supposed Trojan is spotify.exe. (If it doesn’t, go back to the Security history and lok for another Trojan removal event.) You can now close this window
7. Back in the Security history window, the final step is to click on the Restore button on the right

You should now see a screen a bit like this:

And you should now find that normal Spotify service is fully restored.

admin Hints & tips, News error, fault, norton, problem, spotify, symantec

Got the message “SAPISVR 5 has encountered a problem and needs to close” and found that neither Windows speech recognition nor your Office programs will work? The problem is caused by your speech recognition user profile having become corrupt. You need to switch to the default profile or another users’ profile to restore system stability. Your profile contains all of your speech training data, so having the file corrupt itself is a bit of a pain.

Here is how to switch away from the corrupt profile:

1. Go to the Windows Control Panel (Start/Control Panel) and double-click on the Speech icon
2. In the middle of the window is a box listing the speech user profiles, each of which has a tick box next to it
3. Select another profile (often the default profile is the only option) and click the ‘Apply’ button at the bottom of the window

You should now find that windows speech recognition is working again, although the computer may need a reboot before it is happy again. You should now go back to Control Panel/Speech, delete the old profile, create a new one and re-train the system to your voice.

admin Hints & tips corrupt, crash, error, problem, profile, sapisvr, speech, Xp

The Thomson DTi6300 PVR can become slow and unresponsive if the available free disk space falls below 15%. This easy to fix by deleting a few programmes.

Sometimes however these boxes can get their disks in a twist, which can result in flaky operation even when there is sufficient free space. In this case, the answer is often to reformat the disk, which can be accomplished by following the steps below.

Thomson DTi6300 disk reformat instructions

Warning – this operation will delete all recordings!

1. Select Menu then Set-Up and finally Help
2. Press the  green remote button to access the Advanced Information menu
3. Press the blue button
4. Finally press the green button to proceed

The process takes about a minute, after which the box will restart, then go into standby. Hopefully you will then find your box operation has been returned to normal.

admin Hints & tips DTi6300, fault, fix, flaky, format, thomson, Top Up, unreliable

Real Player is a high quality media player, which is freely available for Linux operating systems. It isn’t included in Linux packages because it is not a fully open source program. There are .rpm and .deb packages available for RedHat and Debian variants but nothing that will obviously work for Ubuntu. Fortunately it is fairly easy to get RealPlayer to install on a computer running Ubuntu. Here’s how:

Download the file to your root directory

1. Find the ‘vanilla’ Linux version of RealPlayer here on the Real website. The current file is ‘RealPlayer11GOLD.bin’.
2. Choose which language version to download – English (GB) seems the right one to us. Right-click on the link and click ‘Save link as’. Save the file to your root directory (the one with your username on it).

and give it permission to run as a program

1. Once downloaded right click on the file in the download window and choose ‘Open containing folder’ to find the file.
2. Right click on the file and click on ‘Properties’. Click the ‘Permissons’ tab and tick the box saying ‘Allow executing file as a program’ then click on the close button

Tell Ubuntu to run the installation program

1. Start the Terminal program (click on Applications in the top Ubuntu toolbar then Accessories and finally Terminal)
2. Type (or copy & paste) the following: sudo ./RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
3. You will be asked to enter your password and the RealPlayer installation program will run.
4. Hit ‘Enter’ at the prompt to allow the installation to start.
5. The default installation directory shjould be fine so hit ‘Enter’ again at the next prompt.
6. Finally press ‘F’ to start the real job of installing the RealPlayer files.

When finished RealPlayer should be listed under Applications/Sound & Video. Click on it and you will be asked to agree the licence. RealPlayer will also at this point integrate itself with Firefox and possibly other browsers on your system.

admin Hints & tips install, player, real, ubuntu

Sometimes the error arises because one or more of the applications has a ‘memory leak’ bug. When this happens the program keeps reserving RAM but not releasing it when it is finished with it. Some version of Internet Explorer appear to have this problem and it is worth upgrading to the latest version.

You appear to need to keep at least 1.5 times your RAM size free on the disk to avoid problems. If you have 2Gb of RAM for example you would need at least 3Gb of free disk space. To further complicate matters, Windows seems on occasion to spuriously tell itself not to allocate any hard disk space to a page file.

Here is how to reset you page file setting and fix the problem:

• Make sure you have enough free disk space, as above
• Right click on My Computer and select ‘Properties’ (My computer may be found on your desktop or in Windows Explorer. To open windows Explorer press the Windows key and ‘E’ at the same time)
• Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab
• Click on the Performance ‘Settings’ button
• Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab
• Click on the Virtual memory ‘Change’ button
• If you have more than one hard drive make sure the C: drive is highlighted.
• The best option is to let Windows manage the amount of virtual memory, so click the System managed size’ option and click on the ‘Set’ button
• Finally click on the ‘OK’ button

admin Hints & tips error, file, low, memory, page, pagefile.sys, virtual, windows