Fred Mastropasqua

India is about to put out a computer that’s only $35!! Crazy!  Then drop the price to $10 a unit as it sells. Don’t know what the stats are other then it’s a Linux based machine but I’d buy 10 of them.

From the picture it kind of looks like a wallet and flexible.  Who’s been smudging up my screen!

“India has unveiled a $35 computer prototype as part of its program to provide connectivity to its students and teachers at affordable prices.”

“The ministry said the price would gradually fall to $10 a piece.”

“The Linux-based computer is equipped with an Internet browser, a PDF reader and several other facilities…”

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/23/india.thirty.five.dollar.laptop/

Operating Systems, Gadgets & Cool Stuff

Original Post Here

Dreamscene was a feature introduced in Windows Vista that allowed users to have video wallpapers in the background. Microsoft seems to have replaced the Dreamscene feature from Vista with automatic changing wallpapers in Windows 7.  However by adding the Dreamscene files and making a few registry changes, Dreamscene can once again be enabled. Don’t worry if that sounded intimidating, we do have a file that does all for you [if you're on 32-bit.]

Note: I was unsuccessful in getting this to work on 64-bit Windows 7 Build 7048.

Installing Dreamscene:

1) First, you need to have Aero enabled. You’ll know Aero is enabled if you’re able to preview windows in your taskbar, use Aero Peek, or see the animation effects of windows minimizing. If you think Aero isn’t enabled, open the Start menu, and type in Aero.

Click on Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects and go through the wizard. The wizard will determine whether your computer is capable of having Aero on.

2) If you’re on 32-bit Windows 7, download the Windows 7 Dreamscene patch here

If you’re on 64-bit Windows 7, download this patch and follow the instructions in Important Readme.txt
Then skip Step 3.

3) Run the patch and let it do it’s thing. When it’s finished, explorer.exe will restart.
If it doesn’t restart, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and click on Task Manager. Right click on explorer.exe and click on End Task. Then click on File, New Task, type in explorer.exe and press OK.

Setting video clips as your desktop background

4) Before you start adding videos, you need to make sure that your videos are in .wmv or .mpg format. If they are not one of those formats, you can download a free video converter here.

Converting a video is simple. Choose Add Video at the top left corner and choose your video of choice. The drop down-menu in the right side-bar will allow you to choose your codec. On my computer, .wmv videos worked properly while .mpg videos would not work with Dreamscene.

The bottom portion of the sidebar will allow you to change the video size or bitrate. If you are not sure what those options do, the only one you should worry about is video sizesince some videos may end up being too large and get cut off the screen.

When the video is finished converting, a new window will pop up. Right click your video and choose Open Destination File Location to locate the video. You can also access your converted videos at this directory:
C:\users\%username%\Documents\Any Video Converter\

Once you have converted the file, just right-click and select Set as Desktop Background and Dreamscene will begin to work.

Should you want to revert back to a stationery wallpaper, sometimes the stopped video will stay frozen as your wallpaper. To fix this, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and click on Task Manager. Right click on explorer.exe and click on End Task. Then click on File, New Task, type in explorer.exe and press OK.

Note: Desktop icon text will become transparent sometimes. This is a bug that has yet to be fixed.

Operating Systems Windows7, Dreamscene

I was having problems trying to download XPMode because the website tries to validate your Windows 7 operation system.  Even though I activated successfully and I ran the MGA Diagnostic Tool locally and it said Genuine. It still failed the online check.

I even called Microsoft to see if they could figure it out. No luck. They tried the obvious stuff, re-entering my product key, re-activating.  They couldn’t figure it out. Even gave me a new product key and still no luck.  Then I told them I had to go.

Found the answer on my own..

I was getting Event Errors in my Application Log.

Source: CAPI2
Event ID: 257
The Cryptographic Services service failed to initialize the Catalog Database. The ESENT error was: -1011.

Then I caught online something on bypassing XP Genuine has to do with the Cryptographic services. Putting two and two together, I figured this error was the source of my problem.

After a little digging I found this article which gave me steps to wipe out my System Catalog Database. 

This fixed my error and allowed me to validate my windows online.

1. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
2. Right-click Cryptographic Services, and then click Stop.
3. Click Start, and then click Computer.
4. Navigate to %systemroot%\System32.

   By default, %systemroot% is located at C:\Windows.

5. Rename the catroot2 folder to catroot2.old.
6. In the Services snap-in console, right-click Cryptographic Services, and then click Start.

Operating Systems, Troubleshooting MGA, Genuine Advantage, Windows7

Yeah this one got me.. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/624/application-pool-identities/

The change microsoft made to have AppPool now run as “ApplicationPoolIdentity” instead of Network service.

So if you normally give Network Service rights needed to your webapp, you now have to stop doing that and change it to

IIS AppPool\DefaultAppPool

Or

IIS AppPool\<NAME OF YOUR APPPOOL>

End of that.

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Select a file or directory.
3. Right click the file and select "Properties"
4. Select the "Security" tab
5. Click the "Edit" and then "Add" button
6. Click the "Locations" button and make sure you select your machine.
7. Enter "IIS AppPool\DefaultAppPool" in the "Enter the object names to select:" text box.
8. Click the "Check Names" button and click "OK".

By doing this the file or directory you selected will now also allow the "DefaultAppPool" identity access.

IIS And Hosting, Troubleshooting, ASP.NET, .Net Framework, Operating Systems IIS7, application pool, asp.net

I was having wierd authentication issues on a Windows 2008 server with IIS7. I was trying to use Windows Authentication.  Worked fine from a remote location but failed when local on the server.

I found the solution on the MS Support site, Q89681.  Which suggested to turn off the LoopbackCheck.

To set the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key yourself, follow these steps:

1. Set the DisableStrictNameChecking registry entry to 1. For more information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   281308 Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name

2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

4. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
8. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

IIS And Hosting, Troubleshooting, Operating Systems

1. Right click on any bank space on your desktop.
2. Click new from the menu and create a New Folder.
3. Rename the folder as follow: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
   DO NOT use this trick on Vista 64X  and Windows 7 64X. It will cause your Windows to crash! (read comments below)

This will create a special shortcut to the godmode option; letting you access all Windows 7 or Vista functions via a handy GUI!

Operating Systems, Gadgets & Cool Stuff godmode, windows7, vista, operating system

TCP Ports:

netstat –anop TCP

UDP Ports:

netstat -anop UDP

Troubleshooting, Microsoft, Operating Systems tcp, udp, ports, command

Ok so I was disappointed with my Mac's HD capacity.  Granted you can get a 300GB HD installed in your MacBook but it's slow. 4200 rpm's come on.  I've used laptops where all the hardware was fast and the bottleneck was the slow drive.  So I went with the fastest drive they had, 7200rpm, but it was the smallest 200gb.

Then I made my 32GB windows partition and quickly I was running low on space on that drive as I installed all my work related software on the vista partition.  

So I wanted to upgrade the hard drive in the laptop.  Even though I've built my window machines for the last 15 years i've never really upgraded laptops before.  I've done repairs on them, but that was swapping out faulty parts for exact replacement, and I know nothing about Macs.

So I did some research out of curiosity and found this great post by Jeff Coughlin at http://www.jeffcoughlin.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/9/26/Upgrade-Hard-Drive-in-a-MacBook-Pro  

He's already done the research on which hard drive to purchase, the WD3200BEKT.

So I followed his steps.. 

Well almost.  See I have VMFusion running my Vista partition, so I installed WinClone and made an image of my VMFusion parttion and saved it to my Documents folder.

I'm running a MacBook Pro 17" screen with a 200GB 7200rpm drive. OS-X Leporad, and 32GB Partition to Vmware Fusion running Vista 32 bit Ultimate.  

Now, note here I was so excited to swap out my drive I just did it. Then delt with the VM partition afterwards, and ran into problems trying to boot my VMFusion vista partition, but the Mac portion worked out great.

So I then ran BootCamp again on Mac and partitioned 50GB for my Windows OS.  Once that was done I ran WinClone and restored the img I had taken before of my bootcamp partition back to the new partition.

The first time I went to load my Virtual Vista Machine with VMFusion it I got an error..

Cannot open the disk '/Users/Mastro/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

So I tried what it told me to do, I deleted the hard drive in the vmfusion settings for that virual machine and readded it.  Then I tried to boot the virtual machine. It didn't give me an error but it booted and couldn't find a bootable drive.

Ok so then I deleted the whole virtual machine in VMFusion, since my data was on that partition, this seemed safe to me.  I closed VMFusion and went to /Users/Mastro/Library/Application Support/VMware Fustion/Virtual Machines/ and deleted the "Boot Camp" folder.

VMFusion still saw my Boot Camp partition but as new now so I tried to run it and got the following error.

The Boot Camp partition is not prepared to run as a virtual machine. It appears that Windows did not shut down cleanly the last time it was used.

Notice the rest of the msg below the error, Restart to Windows, etc.. basically that's what I did and it worked great. Took awhile because windows had to run CHKDSK and re-allocate the free space and fix the indexes.

I'm sure there's a better way to go about it, but maybe not. This is how I did it, and it's working great.

Jeff's steps worked great for the Mac, so I took his steps and added the extra steps to handle the VMFusion aspect.

 Parts I ordered:

• Thermaltake BlacX N0028USU External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure
• Western Digital WD3200BEKT 320GB Scorpio Drive
• Phillips #00 Screwdriver
• T6 Torx Screwdriver
• Spudger

Software I Used:

• Carbon Copy Cloner v3.1.1
• Winclone v2.0.9

Jeff's Steps in Blue
Fred's added Steps in Maroon

1. Researched some hard drives and chose the Western Digital WD3200BEKT drive for it's overall balance of speed and power consumption (speed being the more important factor for me). Suggest: Newegg.com or Amazon.com.
2. Ordered the enclousure (think Jeff already had his) and the tools. Yeah I'm sure I already had what I needed, but I didn't want to take any chances.
3. Installed WinClone and made an Image of my 32GB VMFusion partition, I saved the image to my ~/Documents folder
   
4. Shutdown all programs on my Mac and disconnected from the web (don't want some auto-update running by mistake)
5. Mounted the new drive to the Mac (now in the enclosure unit) and formated it (use "Applications >> Utilities >> Disk Utility". Select the new drive (which shouldn't be formatted yet if new) and choose "Erase" with the default setting of "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)).
6. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the data and make the new drive bootable (took 3 hours)
7. Shut down Mac and installed new HDD
8. Booted up Mac with new HDD (it was a slow bootup the first time - see next step)
9. This next part I couldn't find documented anyhere on the web. I just happened to catch some guy talking about it in a forum after having slow bootups from my recent restore.
   • Go into "System Preferences >> Startup Disk", select the new drive, and restart (your bootup will be much faster now).
10. So I booted up to the Mac the second time after step 9 and then I loaded Boot Camp and created a new 50GB partition for my Windows OS, and I did not reboot, I choose Install later.
11. I loaded WinClone and restored the img I had made in step 3 and restored it to the new parttion made by boot camp.
12. I tried to load my VM and got Error #1 so I went to my User's folder and then to ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fustion/Virtual Machines and I deleted the "Boot Camp" folder.
13. I tried to load VM again and got Error #2 and then went to System Prefs > Startup Disk and set Windows as the startup OS and Restart
14. When Windows starts to boot let it run CHKDSK.. Stage 1 of 3 went quickly. Stage 2 of 3 took about 45 minutes.  State 3 of 3 took another 45min and even looked like it was hung up at times, but it finally finished (1.5 hours total)
15. Once I was booted into windows and logged in, everything looked great.  I went to Control Panel and to Boot Camp for windows and changed my startup back to Mac and rebooted
16. Once the Mac booted (took like 4 seconds :p ) I was able to load up VMFusion and run my Vista virtual machine. It wanted to reinstall the Virtual Machine Tools but that's fine, I did that and rebooted the Virtual Machine.

And that was it.  I would say it was really easy, esp Jeff's steps with the Mac, if I didn't have the VM partition, the whole thing (minus the cloning time) only took like 10minutes.

Total time with cloning time and CHKDSK waiting time.. took maybe about.. 5 hours. But that's 3 hours of cloning time and 1.5 hours of waiting for CHKDSK time. So really only 30 minutes of my time was used.

One thing that seemed to throw me off was that the Mac only seemed to register 297gb of space vs anything close to 320gb, must be how it allocates space or something, anyone know?  

Well now I have 18gb more space for my windows partition  (50gb) and like 100gb more for my mac, since the 32gb used before was freed up.

Hope that helps someone else down the road.

-Mastro

Apple/Mac, Computers, Operating Systems apple, macbook pro, hardware

Well I've had this problem awhile.. where if you move over to Vista and IIS 7 you'll notice that your Debug sessions timeout very quickly, 90 seconds to be exact.

It's very annoying.  I had once went through my app pool changing every time value I found to something higher just to fix it for the moment, which is a bad idea. I usually like to know why something happens and figure how to fix it properly.

So I came across a forum article on asp.net written by jshallard.

Here is the solution for fixing your Debugging Timeout Issue:
I went with the first option, I like to debug forever

In IIS 7 go to the Application Pools and select the Advanced Settings for the pool which you process runs in. In the Process Model section you can do one of two things;
    * Set the Ping Enabled property to False. This will stop IIS checking to see if the worker process is still running and keep your process alive permanently (or until you stop your debugged process)
    * If you prefer to allow IIS to continue the monitoring process then change the Ping Maximum Response Timeout value to something larger than 90 seconds (default value).

Operating Systems, Troubleshooting, Visual Studio vista, iis7, visual studio, timeout, debug, debugging timeout

 So when I'm at one location, say home, my Live Messenger connects fine. No problems what so ever. However, connecting from another location say the office, it doesn't connect. Or once in a blue moon it might make a connection that last a few minutes then gets booted.

Of course if you look up this error, you will get lots of posts on "make sure your connected to the Internet" or "it's your proxy settings", or a lot of other basic solutions to a more advanced problem.  Very frustrating, especially if you are more then an end user that knows and understands networking.

So after some research I found a post out there that had a suggestion that actually worked.

You basically need to disable AutoTuningLevel on your TCP connection.

This is the command to view the autotuninglevel
netsh int tcp show global

This is the command to disable it. disabled: Fix the receive window at its default value. This one worked for me, I've thought of using the restricted version but haven't had any problems yet.
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

This is the command to return it to the default normal setting. normal:
Allow the receive window to grow to accomodate almost all scenarios.
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

This is the command to set it to restricted which is you get some benefit from autotuning. restricted: Allow the
receive window to grow beyond its default value, but limit such growth in some scenarios.
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=restricted

After making this change I didn't need to reboot, but you may. I closed and re-opened MSN and it connected instantly. Hopes this helps someone else down the road.

Operating Systems, Troubleshooting vista, operating system, troubleshooting, microsoft, windows live messenger, messenger, msn, error 81000306, windows