Offer Unsolicited Windows Remote Assistance
When you don’t feel like walking to the 4th floor of a building , remote assistance can be your best friend. One of the best somewhat hidden features of Windows is the ability to offer a remote assistance request via IP or DNS name without having to have the user having to initiate the remote session. By offering, all the user has to do is click “Ok” and you can view access to their screen. A second “Ok” allows you to control the remote system. To set your Remote Assistance program up to prompt you for the IP or DNS name, all you have to do is append /offerRA to the target path in the shortcut properties as shown below.
Offer Windows Remote Assistance
Now when you go to your remote assistance shortcut, you are prompted with the below screen to enter the IP or name of the computer you want to assist.
Offer Remote Assistance
HP Pavillion DV6 Wont Boot
Upon tearing down an HP Pavillion DV6 to replace a broken hinge, i found that the system would not boot on reassembly. The symptoms were a dark screen, with all of the lights on the machine lit up. The caps lock, num lock, disk activity indicator, battery, etc. If it had an LED behind it, it was lit up on this thing. In addition the fan was running at a very high RPM. Some research found a few different “fixes” but none of them applied to my exact situation.
Ultimately the solution that I discovered was to simply reset both of the RAM sticks. When i reassembled i must not have got one of them fully seated, thus causing the system not to POST.
New Advanced Format Hard Disk Drive Technology
To accommodate larger capacity drives, hard drive manufacturers are in the process of transitioning all hard drives to a technology called 512e/4K or Advanced Format. The main reason for this is to provide even larger capacity hard drives in the future. Currently, hard drives implement a 512 byte sector limit. Advanced Format (AF) drives will adopt a 4KB sector limit. Hard drives will maintain backwards compatibility, current Advanced Format 4KB HDDs, will maintain in 512-byte SATA communications to hosts and will operate at 4KB. Both 2.5 and 3.5 AF drives began shipping in early April. According to Dell, there are a mix of drives hitting the market and they cannot guarantee if you will get a legacy 512 drive or a new 4K AF drive if your system needs a drive replaced under warranty.
So what in the world does all this mean?
Impact to home users should be minimal. Windows 7 is an AF aware OS, so if you are upgrading you should not have to take many additional steps. You will want to check with your manufactures website and update to the latest storage drivers. If your system is performing poorly after the upgrade, you will need to run an alignment tool.
Enterprise IT units are a slightly different story. If you are using sector based imaging such as Ghost, or Altiris, you will need to use an alignment tool after the image to realign the partitions. Basically, you would be applying your 512 byte sector based image to a drive whose sectors are 4KB. That inst going to line up. The alignment tool takes care of that for you.
In my case, we are using Windows Deployment Services, a file based imaging process. Since file based imaging does not care about the sector size, it should not be affected.
To see what you need to do in your scenario, visit http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&l=en&s=hied&docid=409842. This is a great article to read even if you are on a non Dell system.
The article mentions some specific alignment tools, none of which i have tested, but i will list them here and in the resources section. It also mentions a third party tool but if your hard drive was manufactured by one of the companies below, you should not need to purchase anything else.
Seagate: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=214391
Western Digital: http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7
Hitachi: http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/advanced-format-drives
Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_aft.html
Toshiba: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=ServicesSupport/AFDriveAlignmentTool
Cannot Uninstall Offfice 2007 or 2010 through Add/Remove Programs
This morning i was trying to upgrade a user from Office 2007 to Office 2010. For whatever reason, the install failed and did a roll back on the installation. Unfortunately, when i tried to install Office 2010 again, i found out that the roll back did not completely remove the failed Office 2010 install. I was presented with this error message:
“Description: Setup did not complete successfully. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: Office12Setup
Problem Signature 01: {10140000-0F00-0000-0000–0000000FF1CE}
Problem Signature 02: 14.0.4755.1000
Problem Signature 03: X
Problem Signature 04: 1603
Problem Signature 05: Word.en-us\setup.xml
Problem Signature 06: X
Problem Signature 07: X
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033″
I went to Add/Remove programs and noticed both Office 2007 and Office 2010 were listed. I simply tried to remove Office 2010 and received the following error message:
Office 2010 Install Error
After this setback, i couldnt install, or uninstall the failed Office 2010 software. Figuring a manual removal of office 2010 was the only way, i set out to find the reg keys and files that i needed to remove. In the process, i found Microsoft KB article 290301 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301. Microsoft has provided .msi uninstall and cleanup tools for Office 2003, 2007, and 2010. I downloaded the 2010 removal tool, and after a few minutes it took care of any remaining files, and i was able to successfully upgrade my Office 2007 install to Office 2010.
For the Office 2003 uninstall, download http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730793
For the Office 2007 uninstall, download http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9669698
For the Office 2010 uninstall, download http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9737366
Two quick additional notes, alot of forums suggest running the Windows Installer Cleanup utility. Microsoft has stated not to use that tool citing that it could cause additional problems. “This article previously contained a link to the Windows Installer Cleanup utility (MSICUU2.exe). If you were directed to this article to solve a problem installing a product other than Microsoft Office, please contact your software manufacturer for installation support on the product. Or, see the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article for steps to troubleshoot uninstallation issues with products that use Windows Installer:”
Secondly, If your seeing the above screen shot error when you are trying to install a copy of office that you legally downloaded, make sure you use the build in windows extraction utility. If you use something like Win-Zip or WinRAR, it may not extract properly.
Bootcamp – OS X Snow Leopard Black Screen Blinking Line
Well, apparently we are going to do a Mac post today. I figured that would happen inevitably. 
After running boot camp assistant on a 13 inch Macbook running Snow Leopard with the system up to date, i rebooted with the Windows 7 CD-ROM inserted. The system would boot up to a black screen with a blinking line, and would hang there. The issue would persist after trying different resolutions, resetting the PRAM, and rebooting the system.
The only solution that worked was to take the following steps:
1. Run the boot camp assistant from the OSX Side, and after creating your Windows partition, inert the disk and click on restart as instructed.
2. Shut the machine off, unplug the power, and take the battery out for about 30 seconds (if a laptop).
3. Put everything back together, unplug any external cables that are not necessary.
4. Boot the system holding the option key for a few seconds, select the Windows disk icon. The system should boot right into the windows install.
Taking the battery out bleeds any remaining power in the system, thus clearing whatever was causing the issue.
Find Those Missing Drivers with PCI Database
It is a typical scenario. You are prepping a system for imaging, or reformatted a system, you don’t have the drivers disk and you have that one pesky piece of hardware that you just cant seem to find a driver for.
A missing Device in Windows
There are plenty of sites to find drivers, the best being your systems manufactures website, secondly the website for the manufacturer of the component missing; but how do you know what driver you need? You need to identify what exactly that “Unknown Device” is before you can start poking around to find the driver for it. There are many applications on the internet that you can download that will supposedly tell you what driver you need, and go download it, but they typically come packaged with unwanted software or in some cases malware.
Using what your system already knows about the hardware, and a few online resources, you can easily find what the “Unknown Device” is referring to without cluttering up your system with unwanted software. All PCI devices are assigned a Vendor ID, and a Hardware ID. The vendor ID identifies what company manufactured that device. The Hardware ID uniquely identifies the model of that vendors device. Using these two key pieces of data, we can quickly identify what driver is needed. -
- First, access the device manager, and view the properties of the unknown device.
- Next, click on the details tab of the missing device
- Select Hardware IDs from the drop down. We will use the screen shot below to analyze what exactly we are looking at.
Hardware and Vendor ID's
In this string of data, we are only concerned with to key pieces of information. The data contained in Red is the Vendor ID. This always starts with VEN_. The data contained in green is the Device ID which always starts with DEV_. Now that we know how to find these peices of information, lets put them to use.
- Open a web browser and visit http://www.pcidatabase.com/. This is an online resource containing every PCI device that is manufactured.
- Enter your device ID, without the DEV_ into the Device Search field and press search. Note that we could search the Vendor ID, but that would only tell us who manufactured the device. We need the model so that we can find the appropriate driver for it.
- The device model will be displayed.
Vendor Search Result
From here we can see that the “Unknown Device” in my case was the SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio driver. You can see it also gives us the vendor ID which matches the data found in red in the above screen shot. Armed with the knowledge of your missing device, you can visit your system manufactures driver download area and find the appropriate driver for your OS.
Free Data Recovey Software
On multiple data recovery projects I have used both TestDisk, and PhotoRec to recover lost data.
TestDisk is useful when you need to recover lost partitions on your hard drive, write a new master boot record, change disk geometry, fix tables, etc. It is compatible with multiple file structures including NTFS, Fat32, ext2, ext3, etc.
PhotoRec is the tool to use when you need to do actual file recovery. The best part about this particular tool is that it does not care if the drive structure is corrupt or not. In many cases i cant even get into the drive in Windows, but this tool will still recover the data. Despite its name, it recovers all types of data, not just photos. I have had great results using the application time and time again.
Both piece of software are command line driven with no GUI, but are still fairly simple to use. The only thing i do not like that that PhotoRec wont retain directory structure, and the folders require a lot of sorting when the recovery is completed to find your data. Still, it is the most reliable software i have used for this type of work.
PhotoRec running a recovery
Links to both applications can be found in the Resources section.
LaserJet 2600n Print Spooler Issue
We have an HP LaerJet 2600n at the company i do consulting work for. It is an aging model, but still provides us with quality print outs. Recently after creating a new print quese, larger jobs would hang, and would not print until i restarted the Print Spooler service on the server. This seems to be a common issue with the printer due to a faulty driver. The easy solution is to Uncheck “Enable Bi Directional Support” in the printer properties.
Disable Bi Directional Support
Per Microsoft KB Article 132465, Bi Directional Support is described as:
“Most print devices now support bi-directional communications in a local area network (LAN) to provide feedback to print servers. This information is used in various dialog boxes (for example, for printer status and current job information). In Windows NT, bi-directional communication between a print device and a print server over the network can be accomplished if the following conditions are met:
- The print device can signal back to the print server (it is a PJL-compatible print device).
- You are using a communication channel or network protocol that can carry the signal.
- The print server is using the Windows NT Hewlett-Packard (HP) Network Print Monitor (HPMON) that expects the signal.”
By disabling it, you wont get feedback from your printer, but you wont have to constantly restart your spooler.
Launching Outlook in Safe Mode
Loading Outlook in Safe Mode is a good way to see if a problem is caused by a third party add-on. Safe mode loads Outlook without any add-ons. If you having issues with your Outlook install launch it is dafe mode from the command prompt by running:
outlook.exe /safe
If the problem does not happen in Safe mode, start disabling add-on’s one at a time, and go back to regular mode. Repeat until the you isolate the add-on causing the problem.
I recently used this method to fix an issues in Outlook 2010 where every time a user would open a message, outlook would crash. The problem turned out to be an add-on that was incompatible with Outlook 2010. Disabling allowed Outlook to run fine.
Duplicate Items in Outlook 2010 ToDo List after Upgrade
After doing an in place upgrade from Office-2007 to Office-2010 the user mentioned that the ToDo bar was duplicating all of the items. The user is on Exchange -2010. The issue also persisted when launching Outlook in safe mode. After doing some research a common solution was the run the following command from the command line:
outlook /resettodobar
This is meant to reset the view in the ToDo bar. In my case this did not work and i had to create a new profile for the user.
To create a new user profile:
- Go to the Control Panel and double-click on the mail icon
- Click on “Show Profile”
- Click on “Add”
- Give your new profile a name
- Go through the account set-up to associate the profile with your account.
You will also want to set this as your default profile so that Outlook automatically opens with it instead of prompting you which profile to use every time you launch it.
Adding a new Profile
Creating a new profile tends to clear up a significant amount of Outlook issues.