While troubleshooting a video playback issue on my wife's A45-S120 I
happened upon a video codec checker called "sherlock"

http://www.updatexp.com/sherlock-codec-detective.html

which told me that three MPEG encoder codecs were "broken"; i.e. they had
registry entries but no corresponding files. All of them were "Attila"
codecs and were supposed to be in the Program Files\Arcsoft\SHOWBIZ folder.
That folder doesn't exist ... and never has since the machine was first
booted. Neither has anyone installed or uninstalled Arcsoft SHOWBIZ.

My only conclusion was this registry garbage came pre-installed, courtesy
of Toshiba - perhaps as an aborted install, or not-cleanly-uninstalled
demo when the hard drive masters for this series was first imaged. Phooey.

I hear a lot of people say that they wipe all machines clean and do a
fresh install of the OS and things they need, rather than contend with
this type of trash collection ... am beginning to see the merit.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Mike S. wrote:
That is what I do, my system came with XP Home (yuck) and a load of
software I didn't want.

I just formatted and installed. DId a few driver downloads from Dell
and, presto-changeo, new install, clean.
- --
David Wade Hagar AKA Cyclops

http://members.cox.net/dwhagar
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dwhagar
http://genius-of-lunacy.blogspot.com/

"It's sick, but it serves a purpose." - Bill Cosby
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (MingW32)
Comment: http://members.cox.net/dwhagar/personal-key.asc
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkHRxzQACgkQbPwf4VgkRDuNJQCg6i2VjjmTzn sG34StGCNkbPx/
vUgAn1evI29RCkbSUobC8dxWyIZgf4M5
=rrVI
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----