Alberto Escobedo's Random Thoughts

Troubleshooting error code 78F when installing Office 2007 Service Pack 1

2008-01-04T06:29:00Z

After 7 failed attempts to get Office 2007 SP1 installed on my machine via Windows update I decided to investigate this a little bit further and you are going to laugh about the solution.

Believe it or not the only thing that was required was to have a CD in the drive while the update was happening, the funny thing is that it can be any CD/DVD as long as it contains some data, so put a DVD movie and start watching it while the service pack gets installed.

Replacing notepad in Vista

2007-01-08T16:08:00Z

One of the frist things that I do whenever I install a new version of Windows is to replace Notepad with Notepad2 as I find this to be a much more powerful editor.

There are some articles on how to do it with Windows XP and Windows 2003 but I could not find any info on how to do it for Windows Vista and this is what you need to do.

Rename Notepad2.exe to notepad.exe.
Find c:\windows\notepad.exe and c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe and set the owner to ‘Administrators’, and grant Administrators full control.
Using Windows Explorer, drag and drop the renamed notepad2.exe to c:\windows and c:\windows\system32.
Optional replace the permissions on the new notepad.exe to Read & Execute and Read.

Adding notepad to the SendTo menu list in Vista

2007-01-08T15:45:00Z

If you are like me I often find that I want to look at a file using notepad which might be associated with some other application. For example a batch file, an .config , or an XML these are typically associated with something else, but I want to view them with notepad to troubleshoot or edit them. To make it easy to open these files quickly from windows explorer I add notepad to my “Send To” menu. All you need to do is to add a shortcut to the application that you want add to the following directory.

In Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\[LogonId]\SendTo

In Vista
C:\Users\[LogonId]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Using a Virtual PC over a VPN

2006-09-03T17:54:00Z

Since I am on the road quite often I need to VPN into the internal network while I am out and I have noticed that if I start the Virtual PC host software on my machine prior to establishing the VPN connection my guest PC can't connect to the internal network via VPN. But if I wait until the VPN connection is established and then I fire up the Virtual PC host then everything works like a charm.

A friend of mine told me how frustrated he was that sometimes he was not able to get the Virtual PC connected to the internal network he had open many support cases and had gone through many hoops like having his VPC removed and rejoin it from the domain installing some hotfixes etc. and once I told him what I had found he is now a happy camper and has been able to connect properly since then.

Origami devices as MCE Extenders

2006-04-12T11:33:00Z

This is really cool since it looks like you will be able to operate an Origami device as a Extender for Windows Media Center, so you could watch your recorded TV on it, live tv, music etc.

More details at CE Pro:

From CS Pro's website

The especially good news for Media Center Edition aficionados is that Microsoft will enable Origami to serve as a Media Center Extender (MCX). Microsoft is coming out with a software version of MCX expressly for Origami, meaning these little touchscreens can serve as a slave to any MCE in the house, so users can play recorded content, exploit Online Spotlight, use the electronic programming guide -- anything they can do with other MCXs (and most things they can do with an MCE).

If you have automation software for MCE, you can use the Origami touchscreen to control the house.

This is great news and I really hope that Vista also gets similar functionallity

Use msn messenger to query encarta

2005-11-24T01:55:00Z

This is a very cool feature, you can add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM contacts list, you can ask it questions, e.g.

What is the size of Mexico?
What is the population of Canada?
When was Leonardo da Vinci born?
I want to see the map of Italy.
Solve 2x^2+7x=5

I especial love the solve feature

Setting up a Ghost network disk for Virtual PC / Virtual Server

2005-10-27T22:30:00Z

I use Symantec Ghost (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/) to create images of physical machines usually over the network. You can create a boot floppy to run inside of Virtual PC / Virtual Server. Symantec provide a nice wizard to do this with - but unfortunately they do not include the driver for the Virtual PC emulated network card.

The driver that you need is the NDIS2 Unified DC21x4 driver from here:

http://developer.intel.com/design/network/drivers/nd2_300.htm

Once you have downloaded this package you will want to point the Symantec Ghost boot floppy wizard at the 'mslanman.dos\drivers\ethernet\dc21x4\dc21x4.dos' file. You should not need to specify any special parameters for this driver in order to get it to work.

Problems with intelppm.sys and processr.sys with Virtual PC

2005-10-27T22:25:00Z

When moving a Virtual PC from my tablet to my desktop pc sometimes I get a blue screen stating that an error in the intelppm.sys and/or the processr.sys driver has occurred (usually when attemting to shutdown the virtual machine for the first time).

If you are seeing this problem repeatedly you can manually disable the drivers that cause this problem (with no negative side effect) by going to the following location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Processor

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm

And changing the 'Start' value to '4'.

For more information on this problem refer to the following post from Ben Armstrong

Hotmail on your media Center is coming

2005-10-19T03:40:00Z

Hotmail Add-in for Media Center Screenshots | Sean Alexander has some screenshots posted of a new Hotmail plug-in for Media Center that’s due out very soon!

Restoring PocketPC with ActiveSync

2005-09-07T04:32:00Z

I have been using a PocketPC phone edition for the last couple of months and after testing many different add-ons and software for the PocketPC it got to a point where my device was not very useful as it was taking a lot of time to boot and became very irresponsive. So I decided to do a hard reset and clear all memory contents and then restore it using a backup that I had created earlier but when I tried to restore it Activesync came up with the following message

"Restore cannot be completed successfully. The selected backup file was created from a different type of mobile device."

At this point I was getting worried since I did not want to go through the hassle of reconfiguring my PocketPC. Then I found that you will get this message under a couple of circumstances: either you've recently done a software upgrade (a new release of the operating system / ROM upgrade) and are trying to restore a backup that applies to the older software operating system or more commonly, you'll see this after having reset your machine, and the device is set to a different region to the region in use when it was backed up (it defaults to US English). Go to 'Settings | System | Regional settings', and switch to the appropriate language.

This last reason was the one that prevented me from restoring my backup.

Do you want to build your own MCE?

2005-08-12T20:33:00Z

If you were thinking on building your own MCE. I would highly recommend that you take a look at this link

Run Media Center in Widescreen (16:9) Mode

2005-07-22T21:48:00Z

Charie Owen gives a great tip on how to test your MCE extensibility application for widescreen compatibility without a widescreen monitor?

Click Start --> Run.
Type 'C:\windows\eHome\ehshell.exe /widescreen'.
Click the OK button.
Using the mouse, click the 'Restore Down' button to run Media Center in a window rather than full screen.

Media Center on old PCs?

2005-06-10T07:24:00Z

I have a couple of outdated PC's that I do not use anymore and I was wondering, would it be possible to use them as a Media Center Extender, I believe that this might be a good idea for a product that would allow me to use my older hardware as an extender. This version could be a cut down version of Windows XP that would allow me to remote the Media Center UI from my Media Center to this PC and stream audio and video to it and nothing more.

What do you think about this?

MCE Addiction

2005-06-01T02:31:00Z

I have been traveling for the last couple of weeks and one if the thinks that I have noticed is that when I am watching TV in the hotel I am always looking to do things that I can do with my MCE such as rewinding live TV or trying to skip through commercials and find it very frustrating to not to be able to do this.

Differencing Drives and Windows Security

2005-04-28T02:12:00Z

I have been using Virtual PC for quite a while now and a very useful feature of this product is Differencing Drives.

Well I was trying to create a small network for a lab that required me to have a Domain Controller and all of the machines that I was using where created out of the same base Differencing Drive. After succesfully joining the machines to the domain I could not log on into any of these machines with a domain account and was given the following error.

The Name or Security ID (SID) of the Domain specified is inconsistent with the trust information for that domain.

Well after struggling for a couple of hours trying to solve this problem I found that the problem was that all of the machines had the same SID and hence I was getting this error message.

I then downloaded New SID from SysInternals and then the problems went away.

This problem also may occur when using imaging software such as Ghost or similar.

Hope this helps you save some time if you ever encounter this problem.