Solutions

More dead routers

Posted by Brad

I had two Dlink DFL-700s die on me recently – one a few months ago and one a couple of weeks ago. I had one spare DFL-700 so 1 office was ok, but the other was not. Unfortunately, Dlink does not make the DFL-700 anymore. I setup 2 Dlink DFL-210s for a customer about a year ago, but they were a big pain in the butt to configure – way too complicated. I did not want to spend about $300 and then have to configure one again (I have detailed instructions on what I did here).

Luckily, I found the Dlink DIR-330. It is a VPN router with an 8-port switch. One thing that was always a pain with the DFL-700 was that you could not plug a PC straight into it for configuring it – you had to plug it into a switch. So that’s one problem gone. The DIR-330 was very easy to setup. I downloaded the manual from Dlink before I received it and the manual hadextensive instructions on configuring a PPTP VPN. It was a lot easier even than the DFL-700, which I had some problems with the first time I tried to configure it. I just setup the admin password and Internet conenction like a normal router. For the VPN, I had to create a VPN server and a DHCP range of addresses to use for incoming connections. Then I created the necssary users for connecting and put them in a group which I set the VPN server to use for authentication. That was it. I did not even have to configure any firewall rules. One little thing I think Dlink screwed up on that I changed is they left the WAN side open to respond to pings – big no no. So always check all the settings for little things like this that are major security problems.

Anyway, the DIR-330 router has been working great, and at $90 from buy.com instead of $300+ for a DFL-210, I am a happy camper.

Cannot reload Windows because customer has no CD

Posted by Brad

I had this happen to me today I and I think I’ve had it happen at least once before.  This is not a case of a customer losing something they had, something that came with the computer (I’ve had plenty of those).  This is a situation where some local computer shop sold a PC to some unwitting customer and used a Volume Licensed Copy of Windows.  In this case, it was a license that has even been blocked by Microsoft because I received a failure on the Windows Genuine Advantage program.

This kind of stuff really ticks me off because the customer is the one who gets screwed on this deal.  If the only way you can sell PCs for a profit is by putting pirated software on them, then you have no business selling PCs.

So in this case, a customer had a PC full of spyware.  After struggling and finally getting Malware Bytes installed and cleaning things up a bit, I was able to also install AVG.  Then I did several more scans with both and continued to find problems.  It seemed like every time I connected the PC to the Internet, some more junk hopped on there.  So I talked with the customer about reloading Windows and of course he had no CD for Windows.  I also noticed before I spoke with him that there was no Windows Product Key sticker on the side or back of the PC.  So after I explained the situation to him, the customer decided to go buy a new PC (this one was going on 3 years old).

So if you decide to buy a PC from a local shop, make sure you always receive a Windows or recovery CD and have a Windows product key sticker on the PC or on a certificate or on a book (an actual printed sticker, not something somebody writes down with a pen).

Trouble connecting to network printer after reboot

Posted by Brad

I received a call yesterday from a user who was having problems with a network printer.  She could get the printer to work sometimes, but when she rebooted the computer, the printer would not work at all.  The printer was connected to a Windows 2000 Pro computer and all the computers in the office were in the same workgroup.

I checked the network places and saw a share on the Windows 2000 PC.  When I tried to access it, the PC asked for a username and password.  I checked the Windows 2000 PC and saw three users listed.  I used one of the usernames (user1) with no password and was able to connect to the share.  i tried the printer again and now it worked.  But once I restarted the PC, the printer and share no longer worked without the username.

The first thing I tried was renaming the current username (owner) on the PC to user1.  This did not make a difference (I think internally the username was still being referred to as owner).  So step 2 was to create a new user (user2) and move owner’s files and settings to user2’s profile.  With that done, I restarted and successfully connected to both the share and the printer without the prompt for a username and password.

The biggest thing I felt I learned from this brief adventure is that renaming a username does not change its guts.  If you need a particular username on a PC, create a user with that name.

HP 2840 AIO Color Laserjet not for Vista

Posted by Brad

I recently bought an HP 2840 AIO Color Laserjet from Office Depot on clearance.  It came with 2 CDs, one for Windows and one for the Mac.  I tried the one for Windows on my Vista PC, but the software was only for XP or lower.  So I downloaded the Vista drivers only and Vista software.  I’ve never liked HP’s full software installs because they usually don’t let you do a “custom” install, allowing the user to choose what software to install.  But I guess enough people complained because HP seems to be allowing custom installs on at least some of their printers.

Anyway, I figured I’d give the Vista software a shot because I had read something about scanning over the network (I connected the HP directly to my network).  So I preceded with the install, receiving the ability to either install drivers only or all software (not quite custom, but an improvement).  I went with drivers only and got through without any problems.  Afterward I was able to print and scan to the HP from Vista.

However I wondered about faxing over the network, so I decided to first do a full install to XP in case I didn’t like it.  Everything installed fine and I was able to print, scan, and fax over the network from XP.  So, not letting a good thing stay good, I decided to install all the software to Vista.  This ended breaking everything.  Now I couldn’t print, scan, or fax.  I went online and read people complaining about the shoddy Vista support, and now I saw why.

Next step – to remove all software from Vista and try the drivers only install.  The uninstall worked (although I was annoyed that every time I ran the software it insisted on a reboot afterward – completely ridiculous).  The drivers only download install unfortunately was only for a USB connection and had no network support option, so it met the Recycle Bin.  Round and round we go back to square one.

So I reran the software install, making my original choice again of drivers only and ended up with print and scan support working.  Only thing that needed tweaking was Acrobat.  When scanning, I chose the WIA – HP Laserjet 2840 driver but also had to go to Scanner Options and under User Interface choose “Show Scanner’s Native Interface.”  I also downloaded a firmware update which works through the print driver, so make sure you can print before doing this, otherwise it won’t work (like it did for me when I tried it after I futzed up everything in Vista).

Funny aside to all of this was the Mac install.  The Mac disk actually only supported through 10.4 (Tiger) but installed on my 10.5 Mac Book Pro.  Too bad scanning and faxing were grayed out.  Back to the Internet for more updated drivers.  At least the Leopard software worked as well as the XP load did (not like Vista).  I had full print, scan, and faxing capabilities (makes me want to tell people complaining about Vista support to switch to a Mac).

I haven’t used the printer too much, but a printed some scans of a 90 year old document for my son and they looked amazing.  I think I’m going to enjoy this AIO device.

Sony Media Reader Drive Icon Trouble

Posted by Brad

I have a Sony USB media reader connected to my XP PC.  When I had to reload my XP PC after a hard drive crash, I couldn’t find the CD that came with the media reader which installed icons and names for the 4 drives which made it easier to identify them (instead of each being named “removable drive”).  This has bugged me for a while and last night I finally decided to do something about it.

After searching for a while, I finally located the software for download on Sony’s Storage Support website.  I downloaded and installed it, but nothing changed.  I found the program and icons in C:\Program Files\Sony Icon.  The I noticed the icon files weren’t displaying their icons, but some Nero viewer icon.

So next I went crazy trying to fix my icons.  After futzing with the file types in explorer and the registry, I did some searching and stumbled across a great post by KDivad Leahcim on Annoyances.org (it’s the 6th post from the top).  I followed the instructions and they worked like a charm.

Unfortunately, my drive icons still were not showing up.  So I did more searching and found this site  which talked about removable media drive icons in XP.  He mentioned a registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons) where you could set icons, but didn’t say how.  Luckily I had already renamed one of the drives and it showed up here as its drive letter (D) with a subkey DefaultLabel with a value of what I named it (CF Card).  Using a little ingenuity, I created a second key under “D” called DefaultIcon and gave it a value of “C:\Program Files\Sony Icon\sony_r_cf.ico” which is where my Sony icon is located.  That did the trick.

One more point of caution – when naming a removable drive, do it when a disk/card is NOT inserted; otherwise, Windows gives the disk/card the name, not the drive.

Even though this was a painfully long process (which kept me up way too late), I am happy to share this information from another lesson learned with my readers.

Problem Installing VMware Tools in Windows 98 VM

Posted by Brad

Since upgrading to VMware Fusion 2 a few months ago, I’ve been slowly opening all of my VMs which causes VMware to prompt me to upgrade them to the new version.  But like anytime you upgrade to a new version of desktop VMware products, VMware Tools needs to be upgraded (I remember similar behavior when I used to use VMware Workstation).  For some reason, I always have a difficult time installing or upgrading VMware Tools in Windows 98.  I know I’ve done it before because in this particular case, the software was already installed.  But when you tell VMware to install the VMware Tools in Windows 98, a CD is inserted but it shows up as an Audio CD.  I usually mess around with it for a little bit then decide it’s not worth messing with and move on.

This morning I already had a Windows XP VM open, but I wanted to look at something in Windows 98.  When I started Windows 98, it said it could not connect to the CD drive (because Windows XP was using it) so I said ok and it booted up.  Since the CD drive was not available, I thought I’d try the VMware Tools again and sure enough the software installed.  So for whatever reason, it is hard to install VMware Tools in 98 if the actual CD drive is connected.  Next time I’ll know to disconnect the drive  before trying to install the VMware Tools (which installs from a CD image).

King’s Bounty Setup Issues

Posted by Brad

My son received King’s Bounty: The Legend for Christmas, which is sort of a remake of King’s Bounty, the predecessor of the Heroes of Might and Magic series.  Although my son says the game is pretty good, I believe it was the hardest game I’ve ever tried to install.  After clicking setup from the DVD you hear 3 dings, but then nothing appears to happen.  After ending the process and retrying several times, I checked Task Manager and noticed a process called setup.tmp using 100% of the CPU.  Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I decided to search and see if other people were having the same problem.

After a quick Google, I went to the 1C forums (the game’s developer) where people were indeed complaining of having the same exact problem and trying different solutions.  The first suggestion was to right-click setup.exe and do Run As the local Administrator account.  This did not work for me.  The next set of tries involved running setup.exe in compatability mode.  One person said Windows 98/ME mode worked for him.  I tried all of them and none worked for me.  The last resort was try the install in Safe Mode.  Someone said they tried this but had no luck, but it actually worked for me (I went into Safe Mode with Networking to be exact).  After successfully completing setup and rebooting, the game ran fine, which was the same experience other people had who were able to get the game installed.

I still have no idea what the problem was, which was the consensus of others working on the problem, but at least the game works now.

Outlook – Autocomplete a Recipient’s Name

Posted by Brad

I’ve been offline for too long so I’m hoping to correct that starting now.  Here’s a topic I wanted to mention a while back when I bought a new PC for my wife.  She uses Outlook a lot for email, and when I setup Outlook on her new PC, she was not happy that her autocomplete entries were gone whenever she typed a new email.  She liked to be able to start typing a person’s name and have Outlook “fill in the blank” so to speak.

After a little research, I found out that Outlook stores its autocomplete info in an .nk2 file (Outlook Contacts Nicknames).  A quick search of her old PC (running Windows XP) located the file in C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  On Windows Vista, the file is located at C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook.  Rename the.nk2 file on the new PC, copy the old .nk2 file to the proper location, restart Outlook and you should have your autocomplete entries back.

FYI, my work was done with Outlook 2003.  Microsoft references this procedure in an article for Outlook 2003 titled “Copy Autocomplete name list to another computer.”

Stupid Vista Tricks

Posted by Brad

Or, how to turn on or find things in Vista that Microsoft decided did not need to be available by default.

Ever since I started using Windows Vista, it has bothered me that the representation in the system tray of two computers, one for upload and one for download, did not light up to show activity like they had since Windows 95.  Low and behold, last night I right-clicked the stupid icon and saw the option in the menu “turn on activity animation.”  I proceeded to turn on activity animation and there were my missing lights.  Now why would this not be the default selection?

Since the clock appeared in the lower right corner of the system tray in Windows 95, you’ve always double-clicked the clock to bring up the window that allows you to change the time & date.  Double-clicking the clock in Vista does nothing; single-clicking brings up a window where you can make an additional click on “Change date and time settings…” which brings up another windows where you can click a button that says “Change date and time…” which brings up another window where you can actually change the date and time!  Does it somehow make it easier in Vista to make people go through three steps to change the date and time instead of one step like previous versions of Windows allowed?

I was just reading a Windows Tips & Tricks email that talked about page file size.  John Savill points out that, though the old rule of thumb was the page file should be one and a half times your system memory, a better way now is to go by your  page file size – commit charge (peak) reading in Task Manager.  Unfortunately, Microsoft removed this reading in Windows Vista.  I had to download Sysinternals Process Explorer to learn this information.  But why was this information removed to begin with?

And finally, one of the best (read: worst) decisions by Microsoft in Vista – making the Run item unavailable by default on the Start Menu.  The Run item is one of the most useful features in Windows for novices and pros alike.  It makes it simple to run a program by just typing its name in a box.  But now you have to customize the Start Menu in Vista just to add it back in.  Do they think only a few super-nerds use this or something?

In an attempt to make Windows  as easy to use as the Mac (yeah, right), all Microsoft has done is waste everyone’s time by making them search for things and relearn the way they’ve done things for the past 12 years in Windows.  I mean, what was wrong with Add/Remove Programs?  Why when I right-click on the desktop does it say Personalize instead of Properties?  It’s no wonder why some people refuse to use Vista and stick with Windows XP.