Jim's Pond - Exploring the Universe of Ideas
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Monday, December 20, 2004

My Love Affair with Windows Continues

I'm kidding. About a week ago last night (exactly) I started to get the family windows box back in working shape. It has been running slow. Really slow. So I conducted a virus scan. No viruses. That was good. Then I ran Ad-aware. 392 suspicious files identified and quarantined. Time elaspsed: >30 minutes. I was hoping that would be the end of it. But no.

I decided to download Spy Bot and give it a try. 31 more suspicious files found and fixed. I was pretty stoked. Then I decided to look into a cosmetic problem that had crept up a couple of months ago. The buttons in the upper right corner, you know the ones that minimize/maximize/resize, had become garbled. But why? A few times over the past weeks I'd attempted to fix this problem with no luck. Oh, I'd made some good attempts but this time I was feeling so good about my progress that I decided to go for broke.

Did you know that those little buttons are called Caption Buttons? I didn't. Going to the properties window and right clicking on these buttons gave me that bit of information. A quick google of "Caption Buttons" gave me a lot of information to sort through.

Did you know that there is a special font that controls these buttons? Yes, it's true. It is the marlett.ttf font. It's a hidden file in the C:/windows/font folder. If it gets corrupted the nice dash, x and square in the captions buttons goes away and is replaced with odd looking figures. It isn't pretty.

The only way I found to restore the marlett.ttf file is to extract it from a CAB file on the windows disk and place it in the C:/windows/font folder. That extraction process isn't easy for the average person. It took me a while to locate a windows disk, find the marlett.ttf location, identify the path and complete the extraction process. Like three days, off and on, for instance. It wasn't pretty, but I did get those caption buttons looking and working right.

While I was at it I decided to clean up the temporary internet file folder. About 25,000 files later I was finished. It took me a couple of passes. It was Saturday morning before I'd found enough time to get through this entire process. My last step was visit the windowsupdate.microsoft.com site and download all critical files and sort through the 44 other possible upgrades. I feel like I've really accomplished something. Of course, I haven't.

I ran ad-aware and spybot last night. Another 30 or so spyware apps were introduced over the last week. I took a look at the temp files. Several hundred more had to be deleted. Can you see me staring into the jaws of an eternal hell. Um, I believe that most of you are sitting next to me in the same boat. How does the average user deal with the windows nightmare?..........
10:09:51 PM    comment []






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