Techie Haven

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

You just have to know where in your style.ccs to put it for hiding things you do not want to see on your blog.

Had a user that could not access any of his printers or print because his print spooler would error and stop the minute it tried to start.

Solution from HERE

1. Make sure the print spooler is stopped.
2. Next, open the C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers folder. (Here, we are assuming that your Windows is installed in the default C:\Windows folder)
   Delete all the .SHD and SPL files from this folder.
3. Restart the spooler and you should be good to go now.

You could also write a script to do the same action…

• @echo off
  net stop spooler
  del %windir%\system32\spool\printers\*.* /q
  net start spooler

In this particular case a picture embeded in a Powerpoint slide seemed to be the culprit. I converted the slide to an Adobe Acrobat document and it solved the printing issue.

For such a simple fix I was surprised how hard it was to find the answer. I wish I could give credit to another site for the fix but I don’t remember where I got it from a couple of days ago. You can quite simply delete your blog name from the general controls in wordpress but you lose some functionality and your site name from search engines, feeds, and the sort.

I added the following line of code in 2 areas, one to hide the site name and another to hide the slogan.

font-size:0px;

First you will need to go into the admin for your site. Click on Appearance in the left menu then Editor. Now click on Stylesheet in the bottom right menu.

Find the following logo code location to put the new code in, note the /* begin logo */ and the /*end logo*/. This is the block of code in your ccs that controls your site name and slogan in the header.

/* begin Logo */
.logo
{
display : block;
position: absolute;
left: {LogoLeft}px;
top: {LogoTop}px;
width: {LogoWidth}px;
}

h1.logo-name
{
display: block;
text-align: {HorizontalAlign};
}

h1.logo-name, h1.logo-name a, h1.logo-name a:link, h1.logo-name a:visited, h1.logo-name a:hover
{
{LogoNameFont}
padding:0;
margin:0;
font-size:0px;
color: {NameFontColor} !important;
}

.logo-text
{
display: block;
text-align: {HorizontalAlign};
}

.logo-text, .logo-text a
{
{LogoSloganFont}
padding:0;
margin:0;
font-size:0px;
color: {TextFontColor} !important;
}

/* end Logo */

Notice we put the new line of code in 2 places, under logonamefont and logosloganfont.

So that’s it. Nice picture in header, no ugly site name or logo text to mess it up.

If you have not seen it already the Dell support website now shows you the drivers for your system “as shipped”. Now after entering your service tag you will land on a tab with just the drivers for your system as it was built. There is another tab to the right with all the possible drivers for your model.

Lets hope other manufactures follow suit but I am not holding my breath.

Ugh.

Installing Windows XP Pro with SP2 and trying to figure out which drivers are which is a major pain. I highly recommend installing all your drivers before updating to SP3.

If you have issues with the laptop freezing up take out the battery and run just on socket power for now. I am starting to run into many laptops with bad or old batteries that lock up simply because of a bad battery… weird.

Make note that before trying to install the sound driver or modem driver you will need to install the Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) High Definition Audio class driver for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 found HERE.

If any hardware is not showing up in Windows make sure to check in the bios and see if it is enabled. Wireless was being hidden for some reason.

Of the 2 unknown devices that were listed, one turned out to need the ACPI power management driver. The other turned out to be the Intel Matrix Storage Manager .inf.

Now I have a nice clean install of Windows XP Pro.

A note on the 2nd method. I delete the .xml file listed but the PC still booted into the update screen. However, with a little more patience the update finally took. Don’t know if deleting the .xml using DOS from Hiren Boot disk did the trick or not.

THE FIRST METHOD:

Microsoft has a fix for this problem up on their website (here) and we’ll take a look at that method first.

The Microsoft “fix” basically tells you to use restore points to send your computer back in time. How far back? Well just far enough so that your computer is in a state before the broken updates were downloaded. The closer this date is to the present the better. If you restore too far back you end up with programs that don’t work and have a confused computer.

So how do you restore without being able to boot into windows? Again, there are two methods:

1. Take your Vista disc and insert it into the computer. Ensure that your booting with the CD and when the disc loads press “R” as soon as you see the option. Invoking this command will launch the repair section of the Windows CD which contains a System Restore program. Just select the closest time to the present and restore to that.
2. Boot into safe mode.
3. Click Start, a menu will pop up.
4. Click Run from the menu. A window will pop up.
5. Type in: “rstrui.exe” This will launch the system restore utility.
6. Select the closest restore point to the present.

After the restore is done you will find that you can boot into windows once again! There is one more step that you need to do. Microsoft recommends installing an update to windows update, crazy eh? You can find that update here make sure that you download and install this right away.

THE SECOND METHOD:

Now in case for some reason the restore point solution doesn’t work for you there is a second method. I got this fix from a fellow tech and unlike the recovery points method this one just modifies the “pending.xml” file. What you basically need to do is delete “pending.xml”. It is not a file that can be deleted easily when you don’t have access to Windows. But of course our favorite tool comes in handy again-

Download and install a copy of The Ultimate Boot Disc for Windows it’s a useful tool to have for these and other kinds of windows problems. Boot from the disc and in the menu that pops up choose Ultimate Boot Disc for Windows (or something of the like.) The next step will take a few moments so get some coffee, or alcohol depending on your mood. There! You will see that we have loaded a modified version of Windows! One filled to the brim with cool tech tools!

Select the “Computer” or “My Computer” icon. This will launch a folder with a list of all of your drives. Select the drive that contains your windows installation.

1. Click on the Windows folder.
2. Click on the Winsxs folder.
3. Find the file pending.xml.
4. Right click>Properties.
5. Go to the Permissions tab and give yourself full control over the file.
6. Click Apply.
7. Delete pending.xml.

Once we delete the “pending.xml” file windows no longer looks to it for instructions to install updates and we are free to boot into windows normally.

The next time you download updates that need to be installed Windows will recreate the pending.xml file with new correct updates and you’ll be good to go. Once you get into Windows don’t forget to download and install the windows update fix, it can be found here.

Credit for the fix: HERE

We are having users with issues reading abobe PDF in their web browser. To fix this issue I found that by going into Adobe Pro, Edit, Preferences…

Then select Internet on the left side. Then Remove the first checkmark (Display PDF in Browser). The plug in will uninstall. Then put the checkmark back in, which will reinstall the add in. You most likely will have to reboot the machine but it should do the trick.

This is an alternate way of getting a working driver from the *official* installer:

* Get LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe from Creative’s web site
* Run the installer, it will display the checking CRC window
* It will then tell you it can’t find an SB card – oh yeah? Leave the dialog alone, we need it there for the moment
* Owing to the magic way the installer works it has already unpacked all the driver files onto your hard disk, as soon as the installer exits it will delete them – so don’t let that installer exit yet
* Open an Explorer window, navigate to %USER%\AppData\Local\Temp and look for the most recently created directory (mine was called CRF000. There will be an Audio\Drivers directory under it, navigate to this directory. (BTW substitute %USER% with your user name)
* Copy the path from the path bar at the top of your Explorer window.
* Now open the Device Manager (Windows key+Break), select the ‘unknown audio’ device, right click and then select ‘Update Driver Software’ and then ‘Browse my computer for software’.
* Now paste the path to the driver into the text box and press next. The driver should now install. That’s it!

Now you can close the installer window. You now should have a working Live! soundcard.

The solution for this Vista problem simple once you find it. Just go and
download this 5 year old driver from 3COM site here:
http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/r…-TX&order=desc

“3c90x1.exe” “07 Nov 2002″ “Size: 0.89 MB”

Run the EXE that appears to be a DOS-style self extracting file and
extract it to some temporary folder. Now make Vista to look 3C905 driver
from that folder, and Vista finds a driver and installs it. After that
you can go and check the driver version and it looks like this:
“File version: 4.31.0000 Copyright 1994-2002, 3Com Corporation.”

Vista is now completely happy with this driver and you can get to the
internet.

But now that you have internet access you can make Vista look for an even newer
driver, it should find something and install this driver
“File version: 4.41.0000 Copyright 1994-2002, 3Com Corporation.”

There is only very small, or none, difference between those driver
versions and both seem to run fine on Vista.

Recently we had a rollout of the latest Office. Outside of people getting used to how to use the new software Excel was misbehaving. We found this fix for spreadsheets taking forever to open.

Menu item Folder Options
Tab File Types
List item XLS
Button Advanced
List item Open
Button Edit…
In the dialog box that appears you need to make two adjustments:

Application to Perform Action:
At the end of the line, replace /e with “%1″ (including the quotes)
DDE-Application not active:
Insert new text: [rem see command line] (including the brackets)