Adobe Flash Player does not update

A lot of security flaws in the Adobe Flash Player have been posted and a whole new virus category came to live where your computer gets infected by simply visiting a somewhat normal website. So you need to update you OS and your webbrowser AND every common plugin you use.

But what do you do if you cannot update your plugin even if you want to? I tried to update the Flash Player but it did not work. The download manager "getplusplus" did not start to download and even the full download of the player (buried somewhere deep inside the Adobe website) did not work. I even found an (even deeper buried) uninstaller but it did not help. Every time I started the full install or tried to use the download manager the existing installation did not get updated.

Again I found help on a weblog describing how to get rid of the getplusplus plugin in Firefox. It turned out to be an old version of the download manager which could not get updated and did not work with the new version of the flash player either. Strangely enough the new getplusplus gets installed but does not replace the old version and the outcome is a messed up download manager and a Flash Player that won't get updated ever again. So I disabled the getplusplus plugins in Firefox and deleted the file "np_gp.dll" from the plugins folder to end this. After that I could update the getplusplus and afterwards my Flash Player.

Seagate harddrive keeps on clicking

Several months ago I installed a brandnew Seagate 2,5" HD 7200.4 with 500GB (internal name ST9500420ASG) in my Dell laptop. After a few hours working the hd started clicking and beeping. Every time the hd clicked the OS stopped working for a second or two. I searched the whole internet for a remedy but all I found was that this problem was known in the apple world. I tried all the Seagate tools and check for new firmware version. But in the end I found no cure and the hd kept beeping. So far nothing bad has happened to my data. Anyway, two weeks ago I bought an external cooler for the laptop. Maybe the hd is just getting too hot inside the laptop (the old hd was only a 5400er).

The Zalman cooler works great and will definitely help to prolong the life of the laptop. But the beeping still remained.
The other day I found an entry in the dell forum where somebody had the same problem and stated that it is a dell incompatibility with this seagate hd and a new firmware for the laptop is needed to fix this. Unfortunately my dell laptop is too old to get any support. So I think the only way to end this click and beeping is to install a different hd...

Paragon Backup & Recovery and the uninstall aftermath

The other day I tested the Paragon software "Backup and Recovery 11". I don't like the UI of the Paragon software even though it is pretty easy to use after you got used to it.
But after a while I decided to switched back to Acronis True Image and wanted to uninstall Paragons software. After the uninstall was completed I did a reboot and during the boot of the system still showed the message "Press F6 to start Paragon System Backup on-disk Recovery Environment". What the ****?
So I searched in the forums of the internet how to get rid of the residues of the software and found out that there is also a program called dbhagent.exe that is still running in the background even after the software is uninstalled.
After I cleared the registry of the reference to this program and deleted the Paragon folder I could get rid of the recreation of the Paragon folders but the message during reboot still remained. So I recreated my MBR just like one of the moderators in the forum said with the tool EasyBCD. After that the system was okay again and I could get back to True Image.
Nevertheless it's a real shame that the Paragon uninstaller could not do the job correctly.