Alberto Escobedo's Random Thoughts : Misc.

Using a Virtual PC over a VPN

albertoe — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 17:54:00 GMT

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.

Use msn messenger to query encarta

albertoe — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 01:55:00 GMT

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

albertoe — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:30:00 GMT

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

albertoe — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:25:00 GMT

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

Restoring PocketPC with ActiveSync

ALBERTOES — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 04:32:00 GMT

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.

Differencing Drives and Windows Security

albertoe — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 02:12:00 GMT

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.

For those Notepad Junkies like me switch to Notepad2

albertoe — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 14:55:00 GMT

Let's face it Notepad is probably one of the handiest programs for Windows. Due to Notepad's compat size and because it is fast and easy to use I often use it as a text editor when I don't have time to open Visual Studio or any other tool to manipulate a given file. I had been using some Notepad replacements but non like Notepad2. This tool has all the features that I was looking for (the most important feature for me was syntax highlighting) and yet it preserves some the easy of use and compact size of Notepad and it includes source.

Take a look at Notepad2 at http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Visual Source Safe Roadmap

albertoe — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 18:24:00 GMT

Microsoft has published information about an update to SourceSafe called Visual Source Safe 2005. Here are a few highlights in the list of new functionality:x

Remote Web Access over HTTP
Support for Custom Viewers, Merge Tools, and Editors
Managed Code Extensibility
Automate Your Team Processes
Unicode and XML Support

For more info, read the road map.