Removing hard to remove programs from vista and xp

So there are programs installed in your XP or Vista system that will not remove themselves from your computer when you use the uninstall provided by the application or they will not uninstall anyway by and easy means.

There are a number of ways to manually remove the application by removing the applications registry keys from you computer, there can be any number of entries from 4 – 10 and manually doing this can be a pain.

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Reinstalling “Help and Support” Service after upgrade of Small Business Server 2003 to Service Pack 2

Came across this recently where after an upgrade of SBS 2003 to Service Pack 2, the Help and Support service magically disappears. I have upgraded SBS servers before but this has never happened to me. It’s a bit strange really, still trying to figure out why this happened. Anyone have any idea’s?

Anyway to reinstall the service requires 3 simple tasks.

1. Navigate to “%windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries” in the command-line.
2. Run the command: “start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install”
3. When the command completes (it should take a minute or two), the “Help and Support” service should appear in the Services list, so start it,

There you go, problem solved. If anyone knows why this happened do let me know..

Finding unused Windows Drivers the easy way…

One of the main cause of Windows crashing is device drivers, be they not working correctly due to a bad install, having a new driver replace an old driver etc. In most cases this leads to a blue screen of death and a reboot but in some cases it can just cause windows services to stop working unexpectedly and your left trying to figure out what caused the crash. In my experience it’s mostly due to drivers.

This fix should work on Vista and XP.

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