Popular posts in 2009 from Absoblogginlutely.net

In common with a lot of other bloggers I’m posting a top 10 list of the most popular pages from Absoblogginlutely.net in the year 2009. It is rather worrying that all of the pages are from posts I have done in previous years. Even more concerning is that a couple of the posts are about updating antivirus software from 2004 so it is a bit scary that people were coming across the same problem in 2009. Either people are 5 years behind upgrading their antivirus software or Symantec still haven’t fixed the issue 5 years later…..

1. Manually removing Google Desktop – my most popular post each year and of all time. Originally posted April 2005.
2. Instructions on how to setup Dell’s Open Manage Server Administrator alerts. Rather than manually typing in all of the settings to configure a server, I wrote a script to configure the server and setup alerts. The setup process went from about 30 minutes per server to less than 5 minutes. Originally posted November 2007.
3. A zero day exploit for a Microsoft vulnerability had us all rushing around trying to patch our client servers in the middle of the day and before the patches were available on WSUS servers. I posted direct links to the 958644 patch as Windows Update was having issues in providing the url to the downloads due to the vast number of servers being checked worldwide. Having the blog entry made it very quick for me and obviously lots of other users to grab the patch at each client location. Originally posted October 2008 for a zero day exploit it is concerning this was so popular in 2009.
4. My instructions on how to Fixing a Blackberry hanging during the activation process was also still popular. Originally posted November 2007.
5. Back in 2006 there was a wireless vulnerability and I posted about my experiences about trying to obtain a current version of Dell’s wifi drivers for the Inspiron 610m. At the time the Dell driver package was  corrupt so a link to the Intel package was posted. Originally posted October 2006. I can understand why this page is popular as navigating the Dell website for drivers can be rather confusing. Driver downloads are not too bad, but management software and applications can be missing from the driver list or poorly named so it’s not obvious which cd image should be downloaded.
6. A little know utility, clientdiag, for debugging wsus client issues was my next popular post. I still find myself having to use this utility so I’m not surprised it’s still popular.
7. Due to feedback and experience with my Dell OMSA setup script, the Dell Open Manage Server Administrator setup script was updated and the original page updated to link to this one. I would have thought that this page should therefore have got more hits. I guess some people must be running an old version of my script! Originally posted November 2008 I now have a category specifically for OMSA
8. Way back in 2003 I discovered an issue that when Symantec Antivirus was updated, the outlook addin would not be correctly updated and an error message about vpmsece.dll would be displayed when outlook was started. Originally posted October 2003, it is very scary that this issue is still being discovered by users. I have seen references to my solution on Symantec support forums and I got several comments requesting help with the simple solutions.
9. I used to use Audible in 2004 and found a way to convert Audible data to mp3 so I could listen to the audio books on devices other than my mp3 player. Originally posted June 2004. I’m not sure if this solution is still a viable option (or if it is needed) as I don’t need Audible anymore.
10. Users not having their home directory mapped at login and cryptic msgina 1010 errors turned out to be users saving their passwords in Internet Explorer to access other servers on the network. Originally posted July 2007 but this is a problem that could occur at any point in time.