Techie Haven

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”

Thanks to a reader I have been made aware that the driver at the linked location no longer exists. Fortunately I downloaded and kept it just in case. Click the 3com logo below to download it.

Run the EXE that appears to be a DOS-style self extracting file andextract 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)

This has been a problem sometime with the tight security we have here.

When a blank CD is used in a burner and then following the steps using windows XP to burn a data cd an error is given stating the cd is not blank. We found these changes to the registry will fix the problem.

Without rebooting the PC changes to the registry can be applied by going into task manager and stoping and starting explorer.exe or after making these changes you can just reboot.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD
Burning\Drives

- All CD drives show up in same key

- “Drive Type” value determines whether drive is capable of writing and
rewriting

01=CD-R Drive
02=CD-RW Drive
03=Write Disabled

Change the value to 02.

Also check hkey_local_machine\system\currentcontrolset\services\CDrom. The value for autorun was 0. I changed it to 1.

If in either place in the registry you see something along the lines of AutoRunDisable delete that entry.

Well, it’s done. I will be using this site to keep track of my IT tips and tricks of the trade. I wish I would have started this a lot sooner… like 10 years ago sooner… but I hope to get some of the same problems from the past and get the solutions posted here with some helpful links.

Lets start with the links that I used to get this up and running. The only snafu I ran into… well, I had a couple…

1. Needing to get to the file browser as root to make changes required to certain files… found this gem… In the instructions below I did not have experience with vi so I just went into the file browser as root and CAREFULLY made the needed changes.

Basically log into root by typing su root in a terminal, put in your password, then type nautilus –browser & and ignore any error messages in the terminal window.

2. I had to add my local IP address for my server along with my site name in the etc/Hosts file like so 192.168.1.55 www.techiehaven.com and for good measure 192.168.1.55 techiehaven.com. Before making this change if I tried to go to localhost after installing WordPress I would just get my router admin page when trying to get to the site from within the LAN.

Here are the web pages I used to get up and running…

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