Fix missing or grayed out system icons in Windows Vista

Posted February 9, 2010 – 12:03 pm in: Uncategorized

The system icons in the notification area of my taskbar keep disappearing. It happens quite randomly – and fixes itself equally randomly.

In my case, the missing icons are usually one or all of the volume icon, the network icon, or the power icon. The clock icon always shows up for some reason.

When I try to re-enable them, they are often grayed out and I cannot check the boxes. Sometimes, they aren’t gray.

After some googling, I found a solution to this missing tray icons problem – though apparently not a permanent one.

This page provides a recap of Microsoft’s official method for fixing the problem. It involves going into your registry keys, deleting the ‘iconstreams’ keys, and then restarting explorer.exe (which runs the taskbar / start menu). The fix works for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

I tried this method a couple of weeks ago – and it worked! — for a while. Unfortunately, here we are a couple weeks later and my icons are graying out one by one. Now back to where I started.

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Windows UAC: Bye! Bye!

Posted February 2, 2010 – 3:24 pm in: Uncategorized

Ugh! I give up.

Yesterday, I disabled User Account Control (UAC) in Vista for good. Could there be a more invasive, yet ultimately useless program?

After 13 frustrating months using UAC, I still have no idea what it is supposed to be protecting me from — whatever it is, it has never, ever happened.

As part of my recent efforts to increase productivity and streamline workflows, I realized it was time for a change yesterday when, for the nth time, I tried to figure out what UAC is supposed to do — and I couldn’t.

In my search for answers, I found only techie jibberish or vague explanations, such as this from Microsoft’s website:

User Account Control (UAC) is a feature in Windows that can help prevent unauthorized changes to your computer. UAC does this by asking you for permission or an administrator‌ password before performing actions that could potentially affect your computer’s operation or that change settings that affect other users. When you see a UAC message, read it carefully, and then make sure the name of the action or program that’s about to start is one that you intended to start.

Uh, huh. I suppose it sounds vaguely useful – until I realized that not once in the 13 months has it ever activated when I haven’t been explicitly trying to do something. Unlike my Norton Anti-virus program which is constantly (and more or less silently) picking off various threats that are invisible to me. UAC…

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Giving up on Internet Explorer

Posted January 7, 2010 – 9:06 pm in: computers

I am dumping Internet Explorer today! I just can’t take it anymore. Too frustrating.

I do this reluctantly, however, because IE is still the dominant web browser on the planet – and since I build websites, I want my sites to work properly in it.

Until now, I have always tried to do some major tasks each day in IE as well as in Firefox and Chrome.  I thought that it was important to use all the major browsers regularly to stay up to the minute with how they worked.

But over time, I’ve used IE less and less because, for whatever reasons, it just seems to break an awful lot – plus it is slow and lacks the add-ons / plug-ins that have become so valuable in the other browsers.

Instead, I’ve used Chrome and Firefox more and more because they hardly ever have problems, they are both a lot, lot faster than IE, and their plug-in libraries add lots of great functionality. When, from time to time, those programs do have problems, they normally fix themselves with a quick shutdown and restart of the program.

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iYogi complaint: too hard to get my refund!

Posted January 6, 2010 – 5:12 pm in: computers

I’m having a helluva hard time getting a refund out of iYogi. Today, they secured $15M in follow-on funding, so maybe they’ll be able to pay up.

iYogi provides remote technical support to solve computer problems and whatnot. After comparing their services and prices to several other firms, I decided to give them a try. They seemed to have something that could be pretty useful.

I signed up in mid-January 2009 — but then closed the account within 2 hrs because they didn’t service 64-bit Vista machines (which they could have made clearer on their website).

I asked for a refund and received immediate confirmation email that they’d processed it. The email appeared official and definitive.

“Based on your request we have processed the refund for your subscription. This will reflect in your bank records/credit card statement within 7 business days, depending on your billing cycle.”

Silly me, I never checked my bank account. Only last week while doing year end financial tallies did I realize that no refund ever hit my account.

Spoke to them at great length on Dec 29 – routed thru about 3 people with each needing to hear the story in detail asking the same questions again and again and again. Was finally assured by a woman that they would call back within 24 hrs to confirm refund. Never heard from them.

On Jan 5, I spent about 2 hours on phone or on live chat in a series…

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Which version of Java for a 64-bit Vista machine?

Posted December 16, 2009 – 10:01 pm in: computers

I was recently trying to clean up things on my computer and noticed for the several’th time that I had 2 versions of Java installed and running on my laptop (a 64-bit Windows Vista machine).

Java for 64-bit OSJava is a programming language used in browsers – like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Java plugs into these browsers and helps them to do things like display graphics, play games, run widgets, etc.

I wasn’t sure if I needed both versions of the program or not, so decided to investigate.

It turns out that one version of Java on my machine is an x64 version (64 bit) and the other is an x86 version (32 bit).

Did I need both? Answer is ‘yes’ – at least in my case.

Reason is that I need the 32-bit version to run in tandem with 32-bit browsers that I use – and I need the 64-bit version to run with the lone 64-bit browser that I use (Internet Explorer x64).

Further information can be found here: Java on 64-bit Windows.

Need Java? Java downloads

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