Category Archives: Windows

Disabling MSN & Live Messenger

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There are quite a few guides on how to disable this viral little program. Sadly blocking it’s default port rarely works, because doing so causes the program to switch to port 80, which for most would mean blocking http traffic too.

Several ways to do this on the internet involve editing the registry, this is something that doesn’t appear to work any more.

The only way I’ve found that works is to edit the computers group policy (start > run > gpedit.msc). Under Administrative Templates and Windows components, you’ll find Windows Messenger. Simply set “Do not allow windows messenger to be run” to enabled.
Thats it.

Update: This doesn’t work for Live Messenger, one method I have found that uninstalls WLM completely is to run a command prompt (as administrator), and simply type: msiexec /x {B1403D7D-C725-4858-AACC-7E5FA2D72859}.

Invalid Dynamic Disk – Windows Vista

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How to solve this irritating problem!

I recently upgraded to Windows Vista Home Premium. “Why?!” I hear you all cry. Well, it was simply to take advantage of being able to use more then ~3GB of ram. Which I am now doing, having wacked in 8GB of some rather shiny OCZ pc8500 memory.

A few issues abounded once I’d installed, one rather annoying one being that my 500GB second hard drive (I run a 74GB Raptor as my main disk) had been marked as ‘Invalid’ in disk management. Not being willing to switch the disk to another machine, copy the data, format, copy the data back and then reinstall the disk in my windows computer, I needed another solution.

Which was found in the rather excellent disk utility TestDisk.

After extracting the TestDisk archive to a folder, run the program, select the relevant disk, analyse it, set it as a primary partition and then reboot.

Thats it.