Had a user call reporting their computer shutting off suddenly. On reboot, they received the message “On last operation CPU reported a thermal event” Well.. This told me that the CPU fan had probably choked and the CPU had overheated causing the PC shut down. Upon inspection I found my initial thought was only partially correct.

The CPU had overheated, that was obvious, because the heat sync below the fan was completely clogged with dust… or a small feline, I’m not sure which. BUT, The fan was still working. Everyone should now take a look at the blog entry I made on cleaning your PC.

Now, what does that have to do with the DLL title? Well, it appears that one of the times the PC shut down on them, Windows was making use of some system files and they were corrupted or deleted. This caused the error:

“Windows unable to start, Load DLL’s needed for Kernel” this effectively halts boot-up. No chance for safe mode… Nothing. According to Microsoft he only solution at this point was to do an “In place” reinstall of Windows XP. This is a pain in the … but things could be worse.  I’ve recently found another soultion that may or may not work for you but here it is.

Boot your system from the Windows XP CD and choose to repair your system via the Recovery Console.
Once in the Recovery console select your installation of windows and follow these following steps:

1. type: “CHKDSK /f/r”  – this will take a long time but should fix the file system errors on the disk.
2. type: “BOOTCFG /rebuild” – This rebuilds your boot configuration.
3. type: “FIXBOOT” – fixes the boot sector.
4. type: “FIXMBR” – Fixes master boot record.
5. and lastly type: “EXIT”  – This exits the recovery console and reboots your computer.

I’ve not had an opportunity to test this second option for myself but, it looks like it should work well. The chkdsk takes a while to so it’s not much of a time saver or the “In-Place” reinstall. But it might save you some grief  should your installed programs get removed from the refreshed registry.

So.. In short… Take the time and check out the state of your PC.. Or have someone do it for you. It could save you A LOT of grief.

© 2009, Robert Owen. All rights reserved.

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A while back I blogged about Remote Desktop in Windows XP. Since the start of my Vista Quest I have continued to use the Vista remote desktop with great success. That is until I installed Services pack 1.

Here lately I’ve been noticing some differences when I log into some servers I manage. Nothing drastic mind you but there were some things that were no longer the same. So I got to Googeling…

I use the /console when logging in to these servers. For those who don’t know the /console switch gives you the ability to log into a remote server with out using a Terminal Service client and it also logs you into the desktop that you would see if you were standing at the machine. So, If you started a process that was going to take a long time, you could log into that session remotely and check on or finish the process. And if you needed to install some software that could not be installed “remotely” the /console switch would allow you to continue.

With the introduction of Vista SP1 the /console switch no longer holds the same function. They have changed the /console to /admin The main reason for this is for compatibility with the new Server 2008 platform.

Server 2008 doesn’t have a concept of a console that you can login to as that session (session 0) is for services and doesn’t have an interactive session associated with it. The /admin switch is to login to the session that would have the physical keyboard/screen attached to it.

So… For those of you using Vista with Service Pack 1 you need to start using /admin instead of /console. It appears this is true even connecting to Server 2003.

© 2008 – 2009, Robert Owen. All rights reserved.

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