Goodbye my friend

I bought my first Nokia in 1995 when GSM was still grizzling and battery life was about 30 minutes. I bought my first Communicator in 1999 and was e-mailing with astonishing facility from the Brick. I got my N95 swiss knife in 2007. It took me about two days to learn how to use it but that time was well spent. Now I got almost free 5230 which is doing its job. My next phone will not be a Windows 7 or whatsoever. I feel strangely ashamed and deeply disgusted. It is difficult to explain. I mean, the loser selects a sucker, Nokia marries with Microsoft. What next for me, an Apple? Beurk. an Android? Google is evil. I’ll need to stick up with Chinese Symbian clones then. What the heck, why should I worry, I got no shares, anyway. But still – I feel sad to see how the modern industry does not have any values and shamelessly kick out a couple of thousand engineers. And how many of past M$ telecom partners have been successful? Motorola? LG? I say, a Kiss of Death!

 

Cannot delete a directory because Thumbs.db is locked by a process in Windows XP – Remedy

If you have used thumbnails to view the folder and/or the sub folders the process is actually explorer.exe. There are some good, simple and reliable unlock utilities out there, but since I am on corporate Windows XP with no admin rights, I have to use another trick:

Warning : by killing the process that uses the Thumbs.db file the problem is resolved. The process is usually the Explorer. But to operate the Windows XP you need the explorer.exe process. If you fail to start the Explorer, you have to reboot using Ctrl+Alt+Del which does the same thing anyway, releasing the Thumbs.db file .

1. Right-click on the task bar – start Task Manager from the menu
2. In the Task Manager, select Processes tab by clicking on it
3. In the Processes tab, select Image Name to find quickly explorer.exe
4. Click on the explorer.exe to select the process  and press End Process
5. To the are you sure question, answer Yes
6. All your desktop icons will disappear
7. Don’t panic
8. Click Applications tab in the Task Manager
9. Press New Task… button
10. In the Create New Task dialog, type explorer and press OK
11. Close the Task Manager
12. Delete the stubborn directory (don’t open it first)

 

Microphone jack does not work on Dell Inspiron 1525

I just bought identical Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops with Windows Vista 32-bit, EN-US. After the initial, Dell FAI (Fully Automated Installation) the front panel microphone jack of one of the computers did not work. After verifying that the headset microphone worked on another computer, I checked the recording level settings from the Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Sound -> Manage audio devices -> Recording Tab -> (You can stop here, talk into the microphone and actually see the volume meter moving) -> Microphone/Line In -> Properties -> Levels Tab (how user friendly).

 

Iomega StorCenter 1TB (2x500GB) Setup

Iomega StorCenter 1TB
Netgear DG834PN

Surfing on the web before buying Iomega StorCenter 1TB was not very encouraging. There are quite a few people who consider the device noisy, overheating and difficult to connect. Because I have had good hardware experience in my work with Iomega’s 160 GB USB disk, I dediced to give them try.

It was clear before buying the product that the quality of Iomega software is not so great and their minimalist documentation suggest to customers a Mac-like, easy User Experience. This makes an impossible combination and I spent quite a while to prepare Windows Shares on the box. You can actually get it working somehow quite quickly but as soon as you try to make it work as you have planned, the

 

Windows XP SP3: AVC Compliant DV stopped working

I had to reinstall my home Dell Dimension 8300 again from scratch with Dell’s Windows XP SP1 disk plus the upgrade from Microsoft, which was SP3. Not surprisingly, I got problems with my Pinnacle Moviebox DV (it acts as a AVC compliant DV video camera on Firewire/1394) as I did have them with SP2 upgrade.

 

Windows XP SP3 and rotated displays (ATI)

My Dell Latitude D610 (ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300 – BK-ATI VER0008.017M.192.062) was upgraded by admins to Windows XP SP3. Small side effect was that the secondary dispay started flickering and its 90 degrees rotation disappeared. I took the rotation away and the dual screen worked again. Unfortunately it was not possible to set the rotation back on. Dell does not provide any driver upgrade and the AMD/ATI driver does not install. I am not the only one.

 

Sharepoint 2.0 and Vista authentication

If you have – like me – a Windows SharePoint 2.0 Inranet server with a non-crypted URL, such as http://mysharepoint.myintranet.com and you are using Windows Vista, you may have experienced authentication problems when trying to map your Shared Documents as a network drive.

 

Disable DDNS on XP after Sysprep

When a Windows XP system is installed with Sysprep it enables by default Dynamic DNS registration. This post explains how to disable the DDNS automatically both at global level and individually for each network interface. Useful for IBM Tivoli TPMfOSd based installations or similar.

 

Force network speed with Sysprep

By default, any network device driver on Windows installs with Auto-negotiation settings. The traditional approach to change the network speed setting is to have a checklist and use driver’s advanced feature tab to set the network speed and duplex setting to 100 Mbit/s Full-Duplex, for example. This article discuss how the settings can be done through a complete re-installation of the device driver, using a customized .inf file. The approach is particular interesting for automated installation methods, such as IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment (TPMfOSd).

 

Benchmarking W2003 native NFS client

We recently mounted a large file system from a NetApp server to be used with IBM Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment. Instead of using the usual Samba share, I activated the native Windows 2003 R2 NFS support, the client part of it. Of course, I was interested too see how well it behaves performance wise.