Year: 2007

Back in the Windows 9x days, it was often easier (and faster) to simply reinstall Windows on a non-booting computer than to actually diagnose the problem. Corporate IT departments still do this to a large degree – after all, it’s usually cheaper to just re-image an employee’s desktop than to pay an IT guy four hours of labor to troubleshoot some arcane issue. But for many home users it’s just not an option. Reinstalling XP itself doesn’t take that much time; installing the dozens of programs and “system tweaks” does.

Thankfully, Windows XP is pretty bulletproof; aside from basic “newbie problems” and self-inflicted issues (like spyware), you really have to work hard to take down an XP machine. But it does happen – in fact, it happened to me twice in just the past week! I decided to play around with various flavors of Linux. I decided to try the most “user friendly” version, Ubuntu, first. After playing around with the “live CD” version of the operating system, I decided to actually install it on my hard drive. Which was easy… but the Ubuntu installer overwrote the Master Boot Record (MBR) on my hard drive and Windows wouldn’t start (Ironically, in an effort to make Linux “easier” to use, they apparently removed the option not to install a bootloader… which made it impossible to boot into Windows!).

Continue reading “The Recovery Console”

I usually use the “Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard” to import pictures from my digital camera to my desktop PC via a card reader. However, my computer recently developed an annoying problem: although Windows autorun detected that a Compact Flash card had been put into the reader, and although it asked me if I wanted to use the Scanner and Camera Wizard to import my pictures, once I clicked “OK” to so… nothing happened. The wizard worked perfectly if I attached the Canon PowerShot directly to the computer, but nothing happened at all if I put the same memory card into the card reader.

This really bothered me, even if I had an easy workaround available (attaching the camera to the computer instead of the reader). Thankfully, I was quickly able to find that others have had similar problems, and that the good people at the Neoseeker.com forums had a quick registry fix that solved the problem. So if this ever happens to you, simply download this registry file. All you then need to do is unzip it and double-click on the .reg file and select “OK” to import the settings into the Registry. A reboot is not needed; after importing this file, the wizard immediately started working properly on my system.

There are literally thousands of computer problems that could be fixed remotely, thus saving your beleaguered helpdesk guy (or son… or husband) a long car trip just to click on a few icons. One of the main reasons why remote assistance hasn’t taken off even more than it has is due to a problem of access. Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop” would be an ideal solution to this problem, if not two significant issues: Remote Desktop is only available in Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, so if your client or loved ones run Windows 2000 or Windows 98, you’re out of luck. Remote Desktop also locks the console session (the session displayed on the monitor) as soon as someone logs in remotely. This isn’t a total deal-breaker, but it is sometimes convenient to have both the local and remote users looking at the same thing, so the helpdesk guy can see exactly what the end user is doing to get an error message.

Symantec sells a program called pcAnywhere that works on every Win32 platform and allows both users to see what’s going on. However, the program is a bit expensive, has a lengthy and non user-friendly setup process, and requires the end-user to make changes to his or her router configuration before someone from the outside can connect to the computer.

Enter VNC. It has all of the advantages of pcAnywhere but is completely free of charge. It also has all of pcAnywhere’s disadvantages too, but some enterprising folks on the ‘Net have come up with an interesting work-around: a way to “package” VNC so that all the end user has to do is click their mouse a couple of times to allow you to connect remotely. Although you’ll find complete instructions at the link below, the set up basically works like this:

Continue reading “Packaging VNC”

One small annoyance for a lot of people is having to click on the same five or six icons every morning to start their workday. For example, someone might need to open Outlook, Excel, QuickBooks, Calculator and Internet Explorer every single morning. That’s five mouse clicks to accomplish one task, and that can get annoying. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a single shortcut that can open all of these programs? You can easily do this via a batch file and five minutes of typing.

Try this: open Notepad and paste all of the yellow text below into the Notepad window. Save the file on your desktop as “sample.cmd” (make sure that “Save As Type:” is set to “All files” and not “Text Documents”, or else the file will be saved as sample.cmd.txt):

start calc
start /min mspaint
start charmap
start /max wordpad
exit

When you double-click on the batch file, the programs listed will open exactly in the order listed in the batch file. You’ll probably also notice that Paint has started but is minimized, while WordPad has been started in a maximized window. You might guess that this is because of the /min and /max switches in the batch file, and your guess would be correct.

Continue reading “Multiple Programs – One Shortcut”

So – you’ve downloaded a Bittorrent client, and you’ve even managed to find some public BT search engines or have gotten yourself accepted into a private BT tracker. What to download? What’s the difference between a TELESYNC and TELECINE version of a movie? Which one’s better? What’s an SCR, and why are they so popular? Use this handy guide to find out which version of a movie is which!

Continue reading “The Quick Guide To Movie Types”

Just about everything in a Windows NT\2000\XP\Vista environment is assigned a unique “security identifier” (SID). Every user on a machine and every computer in a domain has a long string of numbers and letters that make a each account or machine unique. This is great for security – for example, it prevents someone from installing Windows Server 2003 on a laptop and creating a “ghost domain” with the same users as your work domain. Because the SIDs are different between your work’s real domain and the hacker’s ghost domain, the fake accounts cannot get into the CEO’s email account or sensitive network shares.

However, this has long been a problem for IT folks when it comes to changing network configurations. If a company’s workstations need to be moved from a workgroup to a domain, or from an old domain to a new one, or even if the old domain controller crashed and had to be replaced… all of these instances cause the computer’s SID to change. And any “new” accounts will get a new SID. So this means that when you convert John Doe’s computer from a workgroup to a domain, he will have a new domain account and SID… which means that he will get a new profile on his computer… which means that all of his documents, bookmarks, settings, Start Menu entries, email, wallpaper(s), browsing history, saved passwords, and even his desktop will be different.

Continue reading “Recycling User Profiles”

If you’re the “IT guy” at a small company, you’re sometimes asked to do things you’ve never done before. This usually involves setting up a new piece of hardware or software, configuring it, then leaving it alone. Every once in a while, however, you’ll come across a true noodle-scratcher… such as how to use one Windows server to host multiple web sites. At first glace, it might seem impossible. After all, most websites run on port 80, and you can only forward port 80 to one server on your network. So even if you wanted to host the sites on two different servers, you couldn’t with most SOHO routers. You could always run one of the sites on a different port, but then visitors that type http://www.companyname.com into their web browsers won’t know to add :8080 at the end of the address and so they won’t get your home page. Telling employees to always add :8080 to the intranet address isn’t much of a solution either, as non-technical folks won’t understand why they need to do this, and will call you up, angry as hell, since they can’t get to the company intranet.

So how do you host multiple sites with one address? By using host headers. All 3.0 and higher web browsers use the HTTP 1.1 protocol. In version 1.1 the requesting browser sends the hostname to the server during its initial request. In other words, the browser essentially says “hey 192.168.1.1… I’m 192.168.1.3 and I’m looking for companyname.com. Is that here? If so, send me the webpage.” Host headers take advantage of this protocol, and redirect each HTTP request to the appropriate site in your local IIS installation.

Continue reading “Hosting Multiple Sites using IIS”

ISSUE: Your boss has tasked you with creating some new service (such as an instant messaging server), or perhaps management wants to move your company’s external website from third-party hosting to internal hosting. In either case, the service will be accessed by both internal and external users. Traditionally, this would require the use of two names: an internal one (“chatserver.internaldomain.local”) and an external one (“chatserver.externaldomain.tld”).

PROBLEM: Using two names creates confusion in two ways. First, your users might not be technically savvy enough to understand the difference between internal and external names. They might try accessing the chat server or website using the external name from inside the company or the internal name externally, either of which will result in failed connections. Secondly, your firewall or proxy server software might not handle internal->external->internal connections gracefully. If your internal users try to connect to your company’s external website, chances are that DNS will resolve to an external IP address; most firewall, proxy or NAT software that I’m familiar with don’t care for this type of setup at all, and problems may result from configuring your domain this way.

SOLUTION: Use a Forward Lookup Zone in your local DNS to resolve “external” IP addresses to local ones. This allows you to give your users a single address for the new chat or web server. And since anyone inside the company will use local DNS to resolve your external domain to local addresses, you can avoid any unpleasantness with your proxy\firewall software, since the packets will never hit the proxy in the first place.

Continue reading “DNS: Forward Lookup Zones”

Have you ever needed to archive a bunch of files to CD or DVD and not cared about the order of the files, only archiving them as efficiently as possible?

Last weekend I finally decided to archive around 43GB worth of video files to DVD-R discs. In a perfect world, I would have been able to organize my files, keeping all of my episodes of The Office or My Name Is Earl together on the same disc. However, the real world just doesn’t work that way. I don’t have enough hard drive space to keep entire seasons of my favorite shows prior to burning, so the 43GB worth of files was a hodgepodge of five episodes of this and six episodes of that. And with video files being so large (175MB for a half-hour show to 700MB for a one-hour British show), it’s nearly impossible to keep them together on one disc. One season of a British show like Life On Mars is simply too big for one disc, and while five or six episodes of My Name Is Earl will easily fit on a CD-R, it’d be a waste of a DVD-R disc to burn 650MB to a 4700MB DVD. The best one can hope for if you try to figure out which files could be burned to which disc is a loose organization of your files; at worst, one gets a huge headache trying to figure it all out.

Continue reading “Archiving Files Efficiently”

There aren’t a lot of media players for Windows that can read album art embedded in an ID3 tag. Windows Media Player is one, but I’d rather pull my fingernails out with a pair of rusty pliers than use WMP for listening to music. WinAMP has several plug-ins that deal with album art, but many of them simply read the FOLDER.JPG file you keep in the same folder as the MP3s. I don’t organize my MP3s this way, but even if I did, it wouldn’t help me see the album art on my two portable players (an Archos AV-420 and TCPMP on Windows Smartphone)… both of those read the album art via tags in the files themselves, not a JPG in a folder. But then I found Toaster for WinAMP! It not only displays the album art, it uses a UI that looks just like Windows native messaging display to do so:

Is that cool lookin’ or what? Toaster not only displays the art based on ID3 tag *or* folder.jpg file, it can also display the information in MSN Messenger, so you can annoy your chatmates with what you’re listening to as well!

Download Toaster for WinAMP for free here.