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Microsoft’s Windows Live Safety Centre was launched earlier this week. We’ll be monitoring developments with this new resource and let people know our findings via this blog.

A customer dropped of a Toshiba laptop for us to have a look. There were various problems, most of which were easy to fix but one error caused us much head scratching and research to get a solution.

Windows 98 SE just wouldn’t boot in either NORMAL or SAFE MODE. We kept getting the incessant:

EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module EXPLORER.EXE at 0177:00401f31

Here was the solution that worked for us on this occasion.

• Booted into command prompt by pressing F8 and making the appropriate selection
• At the command prompt ran c:>path=c:\windows\command
• At the command prompt ran c:>edit
• Editted the system.ini in c:\windows and changed shell from explorer.exe to winfile.exe
• Rebooted the laptop and it looked just like an old version of Windows
• Reinstalled the downloaded version of Internet Explorer (in this case it was 6) from c:\windows\windows~1.
• Just ignored any error messages during the install
• Rebooted into SAFE MODE
• Editted the system.ini again and changed shell back to explorer.exe
• Another SAFE MODE reboot. The reboot took a very, very long time as Windows updated all kinds of things in the background
• Once in normal desktop a normal system rebooted was performed
• Windows completed the final parts of the driver install and other stuff behind the scenes

Hope this rates well in Google as it is a solution that worked for us. Try it at your own risk.

We also cleaned up all kinds of other superfluous junk that was slowing down the laptop including the Novell client that wasn’t even being used!

Maplins Temperature Controlled Soldering Station operates at the following temperatures:

Temperature Zone Settings
1st Zone (yellow): 160 ~ 250
2nd Zone (orange): 250 ~ 290
3rd Zone (orange): 290 ~ 340
4th Zone (red): 340 ~ 430
5th Zone (red): 430 ~ 480

Warm up times
2 mins: 200 degrees C
5 mins: 400 degrees C
10 mins: 480 degrees C

Solder Information
Most common solder in use is 60/40 (60% tin, 40% lead).
The desired temperature of 60/40 is shown below:
Melting point: 215
Normal operation: 215 ~ 300
Production line operation: 300 ~ 380
Desoldering operation for small joints: 315
Desoldering operation for large joints: 400

All temperatures are degrees C.

Please note this information is for reference use only!

We hope other people find this guide useful.

Craig Murphy has just completed his first blogcast and we thought it would be interesting to find out the technologies and applications required to do it. It turned out to be relatively easy and more importantly the tools to do it are FREE. All you need is the free Windows Media Encoder download from Microsoft.

Craig pointed us over to Blogcast how-to: Recorder Settings for Windows Media Encoder, a blog entry by Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist John Howard. While working on another project using Typo3 we found another interesting blogcast on making blogcasts.

Another interesting perspective on creation of a blogcast is presented by Hannes Preishuber in his blog entry “How to make your own Blogcast video”.

Keep watching as we’ll be doing our own blogcasts very soon.

Charlie Poole has announced a new version of NUnit that support the recently released .NET 2.0 framework.

You can download it from the NUnit site over on Sourceforge.