Infomania.co.uk » error

Spotify stopped working? – how to fix the problem

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:04:47 +0000

Due to a foul-up by securty firm Symantec, users of Norton anti-virus products 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:

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)
Click on Quarantine. You should now see a list of Security History events that resulted in a file being quarantined
Near or at the top will be a message that a Trojan Horse has been removed, click on this so it is highlighted
Now click on the More Details button at bottom right
You should now be looking at a Security History Alert Summary saying “Trojan horse detected by Auto-Protect”
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
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.

How to fix the Windows XP speech recognition SAPISVR crash problem

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:22:52 +0000

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:

Go to the Windows Control Panel (Start/Control Panel) and double-click on the Speech icon
In the middle of the window is a box listing the speech user profiles, each of which has a tick box next to it
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.

Fixing the Windows ‘low or out of virtual memory’ errors

admin — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:25:47 +0000

Windows uses hard disk storage when the memory needed by the runnning programs is bigger than the amount of RAM memory your PC has. This ‘virtual’ memory is called a page file and is located in C:/pagefile.sys.

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

Solving the ‘cannot find flash.ocx’ problem

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:22:14 +0000

Some people are being plagued by PC error messages saying “cannot find flash.ocx”. Often there is no indication of the program that has been looking for the missing file, so diagnosis is difficult.

Flash is an application that is great for providing interactive features on web pages. It is also used by screensavers and to provide menus on CD-ROMS. It was created by Macromedia (now Adobe) and for the first six generations the main programme file was called flash.ocx but since then the file name has included the vesion number. Some out of date applications that use Flash expect the file to be called flash.ocx, so throw up this error.

There are two possible solutions to the problem:

Find the application that is causing the problem and update or uninstall it
Create a new version of flash.ocx by finding the latest version of flash on your PC, copying and pasting it into the same directory and renaming the copy to flash.ocx. The file is located in this folder: C:/WINDOWS/system32/Macromed/Flash

The second solution may be less work but flash.ocx is deleted by the updater every time a new version of Flash comes out. Consequently you will need to keep repeat the copying and renaming process.