Solutions

Stop 7E error after upgrading PC to Windows XP Service Pack 3

Posted by Brad

I was cleaning up a PC for a customer last night which had Windows XP Home SP 2. I figured I would go shead and download all the Windows security patches to help prevent any future problems. I started with SP3, which downloaded and started installing. I left it to finish overnight; when I checked the PC this morning, it had rebooted but was sitting at the menu to choose whether to load Windows XP or the Recovery Console. I had no keyboard access so I shut off the PC then started it. It started booting Windows, then blue screened, then rebooted. I went into Safe Mode ok, set the recovery options to not reboot after a stop error, rebooted, then was able to see the stop error. A search on stop error 7e and service pack 3 turned up this blog which contained instructions for fixing a problem the same as mine. The blogger talked about PCs having an AMD CPU getting this error after loading SP3. Sure enough, the PC I was working on had an AMD CPU. The solution was to go into the recovery console (luckily, as I mentioend earlier, this was already available via the startup menu), selecting the Windows installation, and typing “disable intelppm” (without the quotes). I received a message that this service had been changed from start to stopped (or something along these lines). I exited the recovery console and was able to boot normally into Windows.

You have to wonder if it is a coincidence that the system file causing the problem on an AMD PC was made by Intel.

Secure Erasing a Hard Drive

Posted by Brad

Just ran into a situation where I need to secure erase hard drives in a few older computers. I have Active Boot Disk and ERD Commander (the new Microsoft version) utilities with this feature, but the computer in question had only 128 MB RAM which was too small for the RAM disk these utilities need to create so I could not boot from them. Then I remembered some of the drive manufacturers utilities to check drives usually have this feature. One of the computers had a Maxtor drive (which was bought by Seagate) so I was able to use Seagate’s utility CD for this one; another had a Western Digital drive so I used WD’s utility CD. Check drive manufacturer’s websites for these great free utility CDs that you can download, make, and boot with to test hard drives and wipe them clean. Also, I always use the basic DOS versions of these utilities because they are smaller and easier to use and get the job done.

Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Not Working

Posted by Brad

I had a weird problem to fix today with my son’s Vista PC. He installed COD 4 and was able to play single player, but when he tried multiplayer it would start to load but then kick him back to the desktop with a Windows crash error. I updated the game to the latest version (1.7) but multiplayer still would not work. So off to Plan B again: Google for help. I found a solution that worked here. Someone listed having the same problem and found the solution was to have a microphone plugged in. Very strange solution – I have been playing PC games for 20 years and have never seen a situation where a microphone was required to play. I am sure the manual or readme file spells this out somewhere, but it seems like a dumb requirement. Or, if you are going to have this requirement, could the game makers be nice enough to add some code to the program to check for a microphone before starting game and actually tell you that the game will not start until you plug in a microphone?

Playing Age of Mythology on VMware

Posted by Brad

Recently I virtualized a physical Windows XP computer with great success on to VMware Fusion 3.0. I had Age of Mythology installed and wanted to see if it would work. When I tried to start the game, I received the error – “Video Card 0: vmx_fb.dll VMware SVGA II Vendor(0x15AD) Device(0x405)” not a supported video card or something like that. After doing a little searching, I found a post about making AOM work on Parallels (bleh) by creating a text config file for the video card and copying it to ..\Age of Mythology\gfxconfig and ..\Age of Mythology\gfxconfig2. Further searching turned up a similar post on VMware’s community forums. Someone named ocozette was nice enough to post the contents of the text config file:

In this this file you must put the following lines:
[config]
Vendor=VMware
defaultdevice=CyberBladeXP.gfx

[knownGoodDriver]
Month=9
Day=21
Year=2009
Product=0
Version=0
SubVersion=0
Build=0

[device]
0x405=CyberBladeXP,CyberBladeXP.gfx

I created the text file and saved it as 0x15AD_vmware.gfx as instructed and copied it to both the gfxconfig and gfxconfig2 subfolders. AOM worked like a charm after this.

Windows XP Upgrade to Windows 7

Posted by Brad

Just went through my first XP to 7 upgrade for a customer and it was pretty painless. The Windows 7 upgrade package comes with a list of instructions for upgrading from XP since you cannot do an in place upgrade but basically do a complete reinstall. The recommended options include running the Windows 7 upgrade advisor to check hardware and software for compatibility and using the Windows Easy Transfer program to transfer files and settings to Windows 7. I skipped these steps since the laptop was new and rated for Vista and I had already checked the hardware specs; I decided to backup user files myself because I did not know what the transfer program might backup and what it might miss.

The next step was to insert the Windows 7 DVD while in Windows and run the install choosing custom install (not upgrade). I was told when I selected what partition to install Windows to that if there was an existing version of Windows, it would be backed up to Windows.old. The installer ran on its own until the end where you have to give some basic information about location, time, and enter the product key.

It appears all of the user files were left on there either in there own original folders under the C drive or moved under Windows.old if they were in the user folder.

So the nice thing I learned about this process was that you do not have to reformat and then put back all of the data files, even though it is still a good idea to backup beforehand just in case. Also, XP to 7 may be a lengthier process because of application reinstalls, but at least the process is laid out very well for the average user.

Dragon Age Origins Install Problems

Posted by Brad

I purchased this game recently from GamersGate (the Collector’s Edition – I could have gone with Impulse too but GG is easier to find the install files so you don’t need a separate client like Impulse or Steam to run the game – more on this later). First thing I had to do was find the setup files which GG always hides when you don’t run the installer through them. The setup files are usually decompressed to your download folder, but this time they were not there. Time to hunt for wabbits!

I found the install files in a folder called Dragon Age Temp or something similar under my user folders. The three files are GameuxInstallHelper.dll, Installer.exe, unrar.dll. I copied these to my DA install folder and ran the installer myself.

Everything appeared to run smoothly, but when I went to start the game I received an error “The game cannot launch because of a misconfiguration. Please reinstall your game and try again.” I found some information on this on Impulse’s forums here. Sombody recommended installing EA’s Download Manager, which I did, but I still had problems. I also was receiving an error referencing PhysX. Nvidia’s PhysX software is on the Dragon Age DVD, but someone on the Impulse forum gave a link to an updated version on Nvidia’s website. I had problems with both because of the MSI error I mentioned receiving when trying to install Corel Paint Sho Pro. Time for more hunting.

So I finally found the solution to my original problem with PSP and with installing PhysX from MSI installers. There’s a nice troubleshooting writeup by Install Shield here. The relevant part for me was concerning changes I made to the Registry under the keys:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Shell Folders & User Shell Folders and

HKL/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Shell Folders & User Shell Folders

Under these keys I change the locations of My Documents (the “Personal” key) and Favorites so I can share these folder on the network and use them from multiple computers.  After I changed the “X” drive back to “C”, the installer worked fine. Kind of stupid that my changing a totally unrelated value bonks an installer.

That finally fixed my Dragon Age run problem. I can now get into the game, but I have not tried playing yet. Hopefully the worst is over.

Windows Vista / 7 Error – “Server Execution Failure”

Posted by Brad

I’ve been running Windows 7 Ultimate for about 2 months now and I’ve only had one problem that was annoying and luckily not a major show stopper. I was working on the computer and decided to reboot for some reason. When I logged in, I received the error “Server Execution Failure” and could not open the Computer to view any drives and could not connect to any network drives. Otherwise, Windows worked fine.

I did some searching and found people who had experienced the problem under Vista. Solutions included reload (obviously a last resort) and re-registering certain dlls (which didn’t work for me). Someone described the problem as a “DCOM” error. There was also some complicated solution involving doing stuff with COM settings that also didn’t work for me. Finally, I found a solution which involved creating a new user profile. This was difficult because I don’t think I could get into Control Panel.  There was talk of enabling the Administrator account if it was disabled and using that account to create a new user or going into Computer Management | Local Users and Groups and creating a user there. I happened to have a user already that I had created when I first setup the computer. I logged in with the other user, and everything worked fine. It was almost like a reload since I had to reconfigure everything (very annoying), but at least I avoided an actual reload.

Lost Audio Problems in Vista / 7

Posted by Brad

Sometime after I built a computer a couple of years ago with Vista, I started having random loss of audio which would require a reboot. I was never sure if it was caused somehow by iTunes since iTunes always seemed to be running when it would happen. This problem recently cropped up again since I have upgraded to Windows 7. However, I did finally find a solution. What fixes the problem is restarting the Windows Audio service (which also restarts the Creative Audio service). I’m not sure if one or both of these services is the problem, but at least I am able to fix it without a reboot.

Manually adding Microsoft Mary and Mike voices to Windows XP

Posted by Brad

I had a customer who was trying to add more voices to the Speech control panel module. He was using a program related to ham radio that would make an automated announcement before a broadcast. Following the instructions on a site for the software he was using, he installed the Speech 5.1 SDK software. Then, farther down the instructions he was reading, the page said not to do this if you were running Windows XP (which I didn’t understand since Speech 5.1 SDK says it’s compatible with XP, but maybe not when this other software is installed). IN any event, my customer could see the additional voices in the Speech module, but when he tried to change to a different one and press OK, he would receive the error “An exception occurred while trying to run “shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL
‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Speech\sapi.cpl’ .”

My first idea was to uninstall Speech 5.1 SDK. Well that removed the error, but it also removed the extra voices. I searched on the Internet and found other people who wanted the voices, but no good explanation to get them. So I reinstalled Speech 5.1 SDK and found the voice files and their related registry entries. I copied the files and exported the appropriate registry entries, then I uninstalled Speech 5.1 SDK. I then manually installed the voices as follows:

I copied the files mary.sdf, mike.sdf, mary.spd, mike.spd to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\SpeechEngines\Microsoft\TTS\1033” (their original location).

I imported the 2 registry keys referring to these files which are located at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\MSMike

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\MSMary

After this, the two voices appeared in the Speech CP module. I could select them without error and preview the voices.

Sometimes you just have to do things the hard way.