Category Archives: Windows

Dead USB port

So, in building the broadband access machine I’ve found a gift computer (twice as powerful as anything else I owned) that was ‘not working’. After loading XP onto and futzing with it for a while, I figured out that doing anything with the USB port locked up the computer… after a while. I tested the theory by running up a memory/CPU intensive game and letting it run for a few hours. It was happy until I transfered some files off the USB stick. Fault identified. If I want to transfer stuff off the machine, I’ll need to get a USB card, or hook up a network. And I think I’ll do the later.

With fault identification complete, I hooked up the broadband modem (Netcomm NB5) via the ethernet connection (given the USB connection wasn’t going to be working on this machine). Entered the IP of the modem into the browser, and got the modem’s login screen. Everything was good, and I shut down all access other than web via port 80 using the modem’s built-in firewall. Connection to the ISP was established, proxies entered into Firefox (not IE – CERT says there are no secure versions), and Google was available. Connectivity proven.

The web browsing machine got Fedora Core 3 loaded on (a simple process), and the proxy setup was repeated with the same results. FC3 comes with a pre-release version of Firefox, so I loaded up the CD with the .gz for 1.0.4 and loaded that onto the desktop. Then I spent a couple of hours figuring out that I needed to be root to install the browser, and where to install it. Having done that, I still haven’t got it as the default browser – that’s still the prerelease Firefox. But I can run up 1.0.4 from the command line, so at least it’s available, and adBlocker is installed, so well and good.

I figure that I’m going to lock the modem down to a single IP address it’s going to talk to, the FC3 machine. Anything else that wants data from the net is going to have to transfer it from the FC3 machine and won’t be exposed to the big bad internet, because I’m not ready to migrate our entire PC collection over to Linux just yet.

Which means I need to buy a switch.

Letting non-Admin users see the calendar

Some time ago I ranted about the Windows date/time control (double-click on the clock) not being accessible to mere (non-Admin) users on Win2K. This is an issue because a lot of people use it as a calendar to check dates, even if they have no intention of changing the date/time setting.

Raymond Chen writes that to use it in that way causes all kinds of havoc on older versions of Windows, and points us to an article which explains how to let non-Power/Admin users see the calendar. (It’s on a blog which I may have to read in more detail, about running Windows with non-Admin rights.)

Paint.net

Sick of MS Paint? Courtesy of the good people at Washington State University, try its free (and open source) replacement: Paint.Net. Packed with features, though a little slow on some computers if you leave the handy dandy transparent windows turned on.

While the multiple layers are great for a freebie product, would you honestly want to save all your graphical IP in its rare PDN format? Though arguably it’s at least partially future-proof as it’s open-source.

Paint.net requires the .Net Framework. By the way, how silly is this: the .Net home page contains no link to the Framework download. Obviously it’s a marketing site targetted at people who might be convinced to take on .Net as part of their IT strategy, but surely some of the people who hit it would be looking for the download so they can run some .Net program. Thankfully it is offered via Windows Update.

The pros and cons of Windows Movie Maker

The pros and cons of Windows (XP) Movie Maker 2.1.

Good: It’s easy to use, it’s a freebie with WinXP, it produces nice looking results.

Bad: It will only output MiniDV (huge files) or Windows Media (which a lot of people can’t play). Would it have killed them to at least let you spit MPEG out of it? It’s a very 1994 attitude towards interopability. On the other hand, if they’d done so, they’d probably have Adobe and ULead screaming about monopolies.

Green sites, dead pixels and Remote Desktop

Keep your web site green by hosting it in an environmentally sustainable data centre.

Unstick your dead pixels by flashing rapid colour changes through them. 60% success rate, apparently. What have you got to lose?

These guys claim to have got round the limitation of Windows XP Remote Desktop of only one user at a time, by replacing one of the Terminal Server DLLs with that from an older build of SP2.

Just a user on Windows

This topic has come up in discussions at work and at home and elsewhere recently: You shouldn’t need to be Administrator to run software. This has one of the primary failings of Windows over the years, and something which Linux and Apple and others have led the way.

The guidelines for applications go into some detail on this*. Most of it comes down to your application working out where it should be writing files and settings (and it’s only a single API call to find out) and using those locations. Not rocket science.

Yet it lives on… even while Microsoft is encouraging people not to routinely run as Administrator, far too many Windows applications (even those provided by Microsoft) continue to assume the user has permissions to write anywhere on the disk.

This article, for instance, lists a couple of dozen recent Microsoft games that have to be run as Administrator to work (and misinforms about the Runas command, to boot. Hint: you need to specify the user as /user:X, not just /X).

Unfortunately, the one I’m trying to get working, Train Simulator, is resistant to this solution, and won’t work even if you give all users full access to its own directory and to its entries under HKey_LocalMachine in the registry. Grrrrrr.

From the sounds of it, the coming versions of Windows (Longhorn) and IE and other applications will be better at this, with default users having few system privileges. And not before time.

*WTF did they make it an EXE download, with a compressed Word document inside? Could they make it any LESS friendly for non-Wintel users to read? How’s about using HTML fellas, or at least PDF?

XP logon screen tells you about unread mail

Okay, this is from the Windows XP logon screen.

XP Logon prompt: 188 unread mail messages

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I have nearly 200 unread mails, I want to know three things:

After all that messy anti-trust business, surely Windows XP and Office 2003 shouldn’t be so closely coupled as to provide this information on the logon screen.

Who decided providing this on the logon screen would be a good idea? What other surprise supposedly private items might popup for all to see?

How the smeg do I turn this off, while still using the Welcome screen, and preferably leaving Fast User Switching on?

This KB article describes it in more detail. I’ll need to do a little more digging to figure out how to turn it off.

Update 12:45pm. This article describes a registry hack that effectively disables it, by removing the privilege that updates the message count.

7:30pm. Yes, that registry hack seems to work. (And thanks to Wilson, who spotted it before I spotted it).

Upgrading OEM Nero 6

My new PC came with PowerProducer, which can produce DVDs, as well as an OEM version of Nero 6.0. On Tony’s recommendation I looked at the full version of Nero, but interestingly if you download and install the latest 6.6 version using your OEM licence, it doesn’t provide the MPEG-2 encoder required to produce DVD movies. To get that, you have to buy a key for the non-OEM version.

And before you suggest paying just for the upgrade from OEM to 6.6 non-OEM, it turns out that this special price isn’t available to users in Australia. Okay, so perhaps I could have lied and claimed to be in Europe or North America, but I have a nasty feeling that might lead to credit card complications further down the line. Thankfully the saving over the full version is only a few dollars, and even buying the full version online is heaps cheaper than going and buying a retail box.

So, after buying the full version key and re-installing 6.6, there it was, with DVD movie burning capability, and it seems to be a lot easier to use than the OEM PowerProducer, with a masterfully simple menu system letting you pick what kind of disc you want to burn. Now I can burn DVD movies of the kids’ antics for the family. (What, like I’d be using it for anything else??!) Obviously it lacks the subtleties of a more complicated DVD editing tool, but it’s good enough for me for now.

Regsvr32 goes wild

Task manager displayI was getting very odd results from Regsvr32 (the program for registering COM objects in Windows): it wasn’t doing anything other than creating a lot of processes which burned CPU for about 30 seconds before dying.

At first I thought it was the DLL I was trying to register. But even running the command with no argument produced the same result.

It turns out some errant install had replaced my pristine Windows XP SP1 copy of regsvr (version 5.1.2600.0) with some old copy (version 4.00.1381, which sounds suspiciously like it is from Windows NT 4).

Having found a colleague’s pristine copy, all was well again.

Mind you, XP complained shortly afterwards that some vital system files had been replaced, and asked for me to insert the XP CD. Do you think it would tell me which files had been replaced? Nope. Even the More Information button on the warning merely elaborated on the fact that the wrong CD was in the drive. Yeah, very useful.

Acquired by Microsoft

Just pondering Microsoft products that they originally bought (or bought with) or licenced from other companies:

What others?

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.