MikeKelly's WebLog

Don't Forget Those Passports!

As an experienced international traveler, I am embarrassed to admit that on a trip this weekend, I forgot my passport on an international trip. 

This past weekend was my wife’s 50^th birthday and we decided to celebrate it on Vancouver Island, at the Wickinannish Inn.   We thought enough about the border crossing that we planned to drive up Friday evening and stay just south of the US – Canadian border at the Peace Arch Crossing at Blaine, WA.  We stayed at the Semiahmoo Friday night, and had a wonderful evening.  On Saturday morning, my wife, Lisa, suddenly looked at me and asked, “Do you have our passports?”  We both quickly realized that despite numerous international trips, and despite having thought enough about the border crossing to want to be close to the border on Saturday AM to avoid any delays, neither of us had remembered the all-important documents.

A quick check on the web showed that Canada doesn’t require a passport for entry, although they do like to have proof of citizenship.  We were able to talk our way past the very friendly Canadian border control agent by admitting we had forgotten our passports and showing our Washington State drivers licenses.  However, we realized we probably would not have such an easy time returning to the U.S.  Thus began a flurry of calls to try to get our passports sent to us in Canada.  Since we weren’t returning to the U.S. until Monday (and it was Saturday morning) we thought this would be no problem.

We were able to call our next-door neighbors and get them to retrieve the passports from our house.  Now all we needed was for them to FedEx them up to our hotel in Canada to arrive by Monday AM and we were good to return.  Thus began the fun.

On Bainbridge Island, where we live, there is a UPS store – I called that store and found that because we were talking about an international shipment to Canada, they couldn’t guarantee delivery until Tuesday morning – and the cost would be $86, which seemed high just for an envelope containing two passports, but we needed the passports and would gladly pay it.  But Tuesday delivery was a non-starter for us – we have children, and while we had arranged childcare for them through Monday, we were reluctant to extend that another day.  Maybe FedEx could do better – I called the 800 number and found that, yes, they could get them to Canada by noon Monday if we dropped them off at a staffed FedEx facility by 5 PM Saturday.  However, while UPS has such a facility on Bainbridge, FedEx does not – it meant finding someone to get them to Seattle.  Meanwhile, other ideas flew around – could we get someone to just drive them up to the border on Monday and meet us at the duty-free?  Who could do that?  What about a FAX of the passports – would that do?  The first morning of my wife’s birthday weekend was spent with our friends, Steve and Jody, brainstorming all this.

We found a neighbor’s daughter who was willing to take them across on the ferry to Seattle to have them  sent via FedEx to us – but to where?  Tofino, on Vancouver Island, is pretty isolated (one reason we picked it for this weekend) – could we be sure of the FedEx delivery getting there?  Maybe better to have them delivered to the airport counter for Orca Airways at Vancouver Airport – we were flying Orca from Vancouver to Tofino on Saturday, and flying back on Monday afternoon.  It seemed safer to send them there than the hotel.  However, the counter is usually not staffed until just before their daily flight to Tofino, so what would FedEx do if there was no one there to accept the delivery?  Another call to FedEx – and another wrinkle.  While FedEx could guarantee delivery by noon to Canadian customs, it could not guarantee deli very beyond that.  “They could stay a day or two at customs; it just depends,” the FedEx rep told me.  This didn’t seem like a good idea – we could be stuck in Canada waiting for passports to clear customs.  (An aside – I once waited a long time for a shipment to clear customs in France and learned that there actually is a French verb, dédouaner, which means “to get something out of customs” – when a language has an entire verb dedicated to this, you know you’re in trouble…)

We finally decided to just try to rely on a color copy of the passport, which our neighbors emailed to us.  Perhaps the customs agents would be able to use the numerous identifying numbers on the color copy – as well as photos of us – to allow us to cross.

That settled, we drove out to Vancouver airport for our 40 minute flight to Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  Thus began the next challenge for this weekend.

Tofino is often socked in, something that neither the Wick nor the airline told us when we booked this several months ago.  “So what happens if we can’t land,” we asked.  “We’ll get you to Nainamo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island, and drive you across – about 2.5 to 3 hours.”  My wife, who is easily motion sick, turned pale at this – first a bumpy flight in a small turboprop plane, then a nearly three-hour drive across the island?  Let’s hope we can land.  We took off from Vancouver Airport about 12:30 PM, and though the flight was a bit bumpy, we were close to Tofino about 1 PM.  One of the charming things about these small aircraft is there are no secrets – you can see all the instruments and out the pilot’s windowpane.  I watched as the altimeter descended from nearly 8,000 feet through 4,000 to about 2,500 – and then started rising again.  I also watched the “Distance to Destination” readout change from less than a mile to 70.5 miles – clearly we weren’t landing in Tofino.  “The weather’s really deteriorated in Tofino,” the co-pilot turned around to tell us.  “We’re going to try Nainamo, but it doesn’t look good there either – if we can’t do that, we’ll go to Victoria – it’s beautiful in Victoria.”  Victoria – by my reckoning, a good five hour drive from our hotel in Tofino.  Things got bumpier as we flew towards Nainamo, and my wife took full advantage of the airsickness bags provided.  Happy Birthday!  We finally landed in Victoria about 2:45 – over two hours after leaving Vancouver.  There was no way we were going to get in a car for another five hour ride up to Tofino – in addition to wondering what might happen in two days, when we would return.

So with the help of our friends, Steve and Jody, we called around to hotels in Victoria and found a beautiful inn – Brentwood Bay Lodge.  They offered us a “day of” discount on two rooms with water view.  So we settled in for a relaxing evening and Sunday there; highly recommended place, we'll definitely be back.

But how to get back from Victoria?  We could ferry from Victoria to Vancouver, but our car was parked at the Vancouver Airport – not at the ferry terminal, 20 miles away.  We’d need another taxi back to the airport.  We got on the phone to Orca Airways, the carrier, and convinced them to change our return flight to come from Victoria – where they dropped us – rather than Tofino, where we were supposed to be.  It was quite nice this morning when we arrived at the small private aviation terminal at Victoria Airport – parked our rental car right out front, walked in and there was the plane sitting right outside.  No check-in; no security; no hassles.  Looking longingly at the Citation II parked next to our turboprop, I thought, “this is the way to fly.”  Fifteen bumpy minutes later, we were in Vancouver, loading our car – one hour after having departed our Victoria hotel.  Wow!

Oh – and the passports?  When we arrived at the border, we handed over the color copies our neighbors had emailed, along with a driver’s license.  The very friendly US border agent gave us no problem – we got the traditional “Welcome Home!”

HP LaserJet printer hung "processing job"

Vista makes it very easy to add a network printer.  A friend bought an HP laptop and wanted it set up on her LAN to print to a HP LaserJet 5N printer attached to her desktop.  So I went into Visa's 'Add Printer' wizard on the laptop and it discovered the shared printer on the LAN, installed it and said it was installing the driver by querying the printer.  So far, so good.  But printing always caused the LaserJet to hang with a "Processing Job" message displayed on its LED screen.  Only a power cycle on the printer would clear this. 

 I tried visiting the HP site, and found this page http://www.hp.com/cpso-support-new/SDD/main.htm?cc=us&lang=en which claims to install an ActiveX control that will detect whether the correct driver is installed.  I suspected a driver problem, so that seemed just the ticket.  It installed and claimed the wrong driver was installed and that it fixed it.  I rebooted, reprinted - and no cigar - still "Processing Job". 

I thought maybe the HP site hadn't installed the right driver after all.  Going back to the HP site, and searching manually for the Vista driver for the (discontinued) LaserJet 5N, I found a page that claimed the correct driver ships with Vista and there is no download available.  Hmm...

I went to the Printers control panel, right clicked on the printer and selected "Properties" from the "Adminisrator" submenu in the context menu.  This showed me that in fact the HP LaserJet 6N driver was installed - not the 5N.  Ah ha!  So I clicked the "New Driver" button, navigated the control that came up with printer manufacturers listed on the left and model on the right - found the "LaserJet 5N" driver and installed that.  Rebooted.  And it worked! 

So the advice - don't believe either HP or Vista if they claim to have found and installed the correct driver.  It's like the old journalistic saw: "If your mother says she loves you - check it out."  The devil is (usually) in the details - in this case, the difference between a 5N and a 6N.  :)

 

Lost Vista Password

My son has an HP laptop and playing around, changed his password and then couldn't get into his account.  There were a number of problems here, any of which we could have fixed had we been paying more attention earlier on (like soon after he got his laptop):

1. We could have created a password recovery disk (which can also be on a USB keyfob) - but we didn't.
2. We could have created a secondary administrative account on the machine with a password known only to me, his dad - but we didn't.

We've now done both of these things since we were able to restore access to the machine under his previous password.  But it was a bit of a trick to get access under the previous password.  I figured we were going to have to reinstall Vista, using the File and Settings transfer program to first grab his old settings and files, and then reinstall all the programs - probably a 3-4 hour undertaking.  But then I had another thought.

The key here was using Vista's System Restore feature. The exact steps will probably vary on your machine (and this is from my memory on his HP laptop, having just done this) but roughly what we did was:

1. Harangue him for a few hours to try to remember his password, try different variations (with and without caps lock on, for instance) and try omitting characters he might have thought he typed when he changed the password but didn't.  That didn't work. :)
2. Reboot the machine and press F11 while it's booting - on HP machines, this gets into the "recovery console" which is thoughfully put on the system disk in a separate partition by HP.
3. Select to restore the system (note: not restore to it's original factory condition - that will reformat your main partition and wipe out your files, which we really wanted to avoid).
4. Chose to reset to an early restore point - in his case, there was a restore point just four days old.  Vista creates these restore points regularly.  The only thing he had done in the last four days was reset his password, so I thought there was a chance that Vista might reset the old password along with the restore point.  I wasn't sure it would, but I thought it was worth a try.
5. It took about ten minutes for Vista to do this and it then rebooted - and he was thrilled that he was able to log in with his old password!

I've used System Restore in other cases to get rid of really wierd behavior, and it always works like a charm. This is yet another use.

Oh, yeah, and we then created a secondary administrative account on the machine.  Do that right now if you have a laptop with just one admin account - then squirrel away the password somewhere safe at home and you'll thank yourself one day.

 

Windows C++ Exception Handling

Good post on how to see the stack when an exception is thrown on Windows at http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/archive/2005/01/30/363428.aspx

Update on Windows XP Install over Windows Server 2003

I wrote about most of the issues I encountered with installing Windows XP on a machine that previously had Windows Server 2003 on it (as part of Windows Small Business Server) in the previous post.  But there was one more wrinkle I thought I would call out since others may run into this.

The XP install ran fine and at some point near the end, it rebooted - I think at this point most of the setup was done and it was "starting Windows for the first time..." as it says.  But on reboot, I got a blank screen.  I waited for 5, 10, 15 minutes - and it became clear that that screen was going to be black forever.  So I did what the clinically insane do - tried again.  Redid Windows XP setup (I was watching a football game during this, so it's not like I was sitting there the whole time and it only takes about thirty minutes...)  And of course, the same thing happened - black screen after reboot. 

At this point -  you'd think I'd learn to do this earlier, wouldn't you? - I stopped to think about what might be happening and I remembered that this machine had both a built-in video controller (on board - Intel Graphics blah blah blah) and a separate video card that I'd installed.  Unplugged video cable from the onboard video to the separate card - et voila, as they say.  Windows had on its own decided to use the other video card, even though it used the onboard video during setup. Go figure.  Thought I'd write this up in case this happens to you - if you have multiple video out ports, make sure Windows isn't talking to one you didn't think it was before giving up and pulling out your hair.

REGISTRY_ERROR blue screen error while installing Windows XP

I have an old Dell Dimension 2350 sitting around and when I learned that the head of our kids' school, West Sound Academy, didn't have a computer at home, I offered to give her this one.  She was thrilled.  I had used the computer as an experimental box - the latest thing I had on it was Windows Small Business Server 2003, which I thought she wouldn't appreciate, so I figured I'd just reinstall the original XP that came with it from Dell, put an old version of Office on it (I had bought non-upgrade versions of Office 2007 for all my home machines, so the old 2003 is now available for use on this machine - that wouldn't be the case, by the way, if I had bought an upgrade version of Office 2007, and, working for Microsoft, I try to be diligent about obeying licensing terms) and give it to her.

 So I booted up the machine and used the old F12 trick to boot to CD.   I didn't notice at first that this Dimension had two drives on it - a DVD drive and CD - this was made before they typically combined those in a single drive - and so it took me a couple of tries to realize that, duh, I had the CD in the DVD drive and so the BIOS wasn't able to boot because it was looking at the (empty) CD drive.  FIxed that and booted up.  Got through XP setup, accepted the license agreement, and then setup said "Looking for previous versions of Windows..." and promptly blue screened with a REGISTRY_ERROR STOP code.

I tried it again and - a result perhaps of one definition of insanity, repeating the same actions and expecting a different result - and didn't get a different result - I got the same bluescreen.

At that point, I stopped to think a bit and realized what was probably happening.  In general, new software installs over older software just fine - during testing, developers test that case and things like the version numbers of newer components work correctly to overwrite older components of the same name.  But installing older software on a system with a newer version generally doesn't work too well.  For one thing, it probably hasn't been tested - how would it?  When the older version was released, the newer version was just a glint in someone's eye - if that.  So Windows Small Business Server 2003 is newer than Windows XP - and Windows Small Business Server 2003 was what I had installed.  Probably whatever detection logic Windows XP setup was running to look for "previous versions of Windows" was freaking out at the newer version of Windows it found.  In fact, looked at this way, the STOP code made total sense - Windows Server 2003 probably changed the registry format in a way that Windows XP setup couldn't understand and so it was crashing when it found what it thought was a Windows registry file - but it couldn't read it.

It's at this point that my bootable PQDI CD became helpful.  What I needed to do was remove any trace of Windows Small Business Server 2003 from this machine, and to do that I needed to reformat the partition with it installed.  PQDI lets me do that.  I don't think you can get PQDI anymore - but there are probably similar tools out there.  Basically, you want to boot to something that lets you delete the partition on the disk that contains the OS.  Doing that will totally hose your computer - it's no longer bootable - except to the CD with the OS installer, which will then come up, see an apparently blank area on the disk and offer to install to it.  It will no longer look for "previous versions" of Windows because there's no where for them to be.  In fact, this is exactly what worked.  XP setup finished like a charm.

There's one more trick.  The XP distributed with this version is of course "RTM", i.e. the original version Microsoft released back in 2001 or so.   XP SP 2 was a major, major improvement in the security of that system.  IN fact, an pre-XP SP 2 system booted with an Internet connection will probably fairly quickly get infected with some virus.  So I was careful to remove the internet connection (I unplugged the cable) prior to installing XP and on another computer (one running Vista - even more secure than XP SP 2) I downloaded the XP SP 2 service pack and burned it to CD, then installed it on the XP machine prior to connecting it to the Internet.  Most of Windows Update (where you get this stuff from) is designed to install on the machine you're running from, but in this case, I worried that even leaving the XP machine connected to the Internet long enough to connect to Windows Update and download the XP SP 2 service pack could result in problems).  So I went to a special download site for "IT professionals" which lets you get the SP 2 as a single file that you can install from CD.

Showing a Checkmark in Excel

I had a problem that was surprisingly not easy to do in Excel, and since it seems like a pretty common thing, I thought I'd provide a note here on how to do this.

Problem: With Excel 2007, you want to display a "checkmark" or a "red x" in a column that has a logical value - i.e. if the value is TRUE then display a checkmark, if it is FALSE then display a red X. 

Excel 2007 has some really nice new conditional formatting options, one of which is "Icon Sets".  This would seem to totally do the trick, but it takes thinking about this problem a bit differently to get it right. 

Icon sets are all based around numeric values, not logical values.  So my mistake was thinking that for what is really boolean data - true or false - I should, well, put TRUE or FALSE in the column.   Nooooooo...  Instead, put a non-zero numerical value (e.g.1, or 10 or 100) in the column if you want to show a checkmark.  Put zero if you want to show a RED X.  Then select the column or cells, go to Conditional Formatting and select Icon Set, then select the set that has the red x, the checkmark, etc.

With the columns or cells still selected, go back to conditional formatting and select "Manage Rules".  You'll see a rule called "Icon Set" in the list.  Select that and click Edit Rule.  Now check the check box "Show Icon Only" - that way you don't see your values, just the checkmark or the red X.

 

 

Visual Studio 2008 "Orcas" Beta 2 and Silverlight

OK, have passed one hurdle in getting Scott Guthrie's Silverlight samples to work with VS 2008 Beta 2.  The trick suggested by Samsp on the Asp.Net forums is to change the version numbers for the assemblies in the web.config to 3.5 from 2.0.  That did the trick and resolved the missing assembly reference error I was getting when running the sample web app:

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

I still have a problem with the samples not seeing Silverlight installed - whenever I run I get the install logo - but I think that has to do with some GUID or version mismatch in the code.

Playing with VSTS 2008 Beta 2 and SilverLight 1.1

I've started playing around a bit with Visual Studio Team System Beta 2 release with SilverLight 1.1 Alpha release.  I used Scott Guthrie's SilverLight v1.1 samples.  Haven't gotten this to run yet - I keep running into some sort of configuration error related to System.Web.Extensions.  I'll post back if I get this figured out.

 

Troubleshooting a Local Network

I just spent a few hours on the phone with my friend Mike Loftin diagnosing problems with his local-area network (LAN).  Mike had recently bought a new machine with Vista installed and wanted to get it working wirelessly on his local network at home.  His problem was that it connected to the local network but not the Internet.  After playing around with IPCONFIG and the "Network and Sharing Center" on Vista, we figured out that he wasn't getting the correct DNS information.  He had an old DNS setting for when he used to use Comcast as his ISP - now he's using QWest.  We eventually figured out that Mike had a somewhat screwy configuration of his LAN, for historical reasons.  This probably applies to a lot of people.

What happens is you start with a single computer and a DSL or cable modem, which you connect directly to that machine.  All is good.  Then you get a second machine.  So what do you do?  Typically, you buy a router which enables you to create a local-area network.  Now the "right" thing (or perhaps best thing) to do is isolate the DSL modem from the original computer and plug it directly into the router, then have all the computers (both of them in this case) plug into the router.  However, DSL modems these days are smarter than they probably should be - they sometimes have wireless capability built-in and they have built-in DHCP servers.  When you buy a router with these capabilities as well, you potentially create a problem - you now have two DHCP servers on your network, one from the router and one from the DSL modem.  If you leave the DSLmodem plugged into the original computer and just use internet connection sharing to add the router (which is what Mike did) you have even bigger problems - because the original computer is also acting as a DHCP server (through internet connection sharing). 

So ideally you take a bit of time and do the following:

1. Turn off the DHCP capabilities on the DSL or cable modem - have it just be a simple modem.

2. Plug it into the router.

3. Redo the connections from all LAN computers to the router (whether wired or wireless).  Make sure the router has the DHCP enabled and has the right DNS settings or is set to automatically get the DNS info from the ISP.  Typically, you configure this by opening a browser on a machine connected to the router and type in an address like http://192.168.0.1 (the manual will give you the exact address) which lets you talk to the software on the router to control its configuration.

4. Have all the computers join a common workgroup - you set this in Computer Properties (Start / Computer / right-click and select Properties on Vista) - look down for Computer Name, Workgroup and Domain settings and click "Change Settings".  Two things are important: (a) each computer has a unique name and (b) they all have the same workgroup name (doesn't matter what it is, as long as it is the same). 

5. Reboot everything.

More info at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/mobility/articles/homenetworking.mspx and http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/b27b71d8-4098-47c8-ad95-05f51e49cd121033.mspx.

 

Problem installing "Form Fill" add-in for Windows Live Toolbar

I like the Windows Live Toolbar, but one thing I miss from its predecessor, the Desktop Search Toolbar is auto form fill.  This allows you to capture stuff like your email address, mailing address, etc. in a password-protected file on your local machine and when the toolbar detects a web form, you can with a single button fill in those forms.

I found that with Windows Live Toolbar, you have to install the Form Fill button separately.  But trying to do that from the options dialog consistently failed with an obscure Windows Installer error.

I used to work closely with the Windows Installer team when I was the development manager for Office setup, so I know a bit about debugging failed Windows Installer installs.  The trick is to get a verbose log of the install.

I did this and found this error message in the log:

DEBUG: Error 2738:  Could not access VBScript runtime for custom action
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2738. The arguments are: , ,
MSI (s) (6C:CC) [12:06:01:411]: Product: Form Fill (Windows Live Toolbar) -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2738. The arguments are: , ,

Next step: Search the web for the text "Could not access VBScript runtime for custom action".  I found this post which points out that for some reason the VBScript runtime is not registered on Vista (I'm assuming this is probably a security thing to prevent scripts from being easily run). 

Sure enough, registering the VBScript.DLL did the trick and I now have Form Fill!

Adobe Reader 8 and Vista Install Issue

Good post on resolving a problem I also had with installing Adobe Reader 8 on Vista.  There seem to be many symptoms to this problem and the root cause is that Adobe has tried to apparently make the setup too smart and it ends up getting tricked up by something on Vista.  The workaround is to catch the installation files after the self-extracting executable has extracted them, but before it fails to start the install, and copy the files to another directory.  This is because the oh-so-smart Adobe installer deletes the files after it fails to install them.  Copy them to a safe place, then manually run the installation, which will work.  Hopefully Adobe will investigate this problem, which seems it may be related to User Account Control on Vista, and fix it in their installer.

 

Setting up a new computer

Yes, even those of us at Microsoft sometimes struggle to set up our new computers at home.  Read on for my story...

I bought a new Dell Dimension E520 for my son for Christmas.  So Christmas Eve, after he was in bed, I dragged the Dell box out of its hiding place in the garage and started to set this up; I began about 9:30 PM. Dell has made this so amazingly easy since the first machines I remember buying from IBM in the 80s.  It really is very close to plug and play.  After about ten minutes, I had the machine up, finished the final stages of the XP installation customization for time zone and language, accepted the EULA and there it was. I've heard that Dell actually measures the customer setup time for a new machine and works to reduce that to something like ten minutes, and it was pretty right on for me.  Nice job, Dell!

However, what I'm sure they don't count in that setup time is the additional time to remove the so-called "craplets" Dell pre-installs on my machine in exchange for a royalty from the software provider.  I understand the reason here - as PC prices have been under such pressure, Dell has to make money someway and every $5 or $10 they get from an ISV for pre-installing their software on the millions of machines they ship is one way to do that.  They rationalize it that they are giving their customers something for nothing - although I've generally found that these "free" software packages are pretty much worth what you've paid for them.  So my first action on getting a new machine is to Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and browse through what's there.  In this case, there actually was some startup configuration for the Google Toolbar - and when I refused to accept the Google EULA, it uninstalled itself and thoughtfully asked for feedback on why I was uninstalling it, which I happily provided.  :)  For others, I just ran through Add/Remove and removed about six programs, including Yahoo Jukebox (already have Windows XP Media Center edition, thank you very much); some toy photo editing program (I prefer Digital Image Pro); and Norton Internet Security since I wanted to try out Windows Live OneCare as my firewall/anti-virus/anti-spam solution.  So after approximately another twenty minutes, I had the machine reasonably clean of craplets and ready to install OneCare.

The OneCare install went without problem, and I rebooted and it came up. 

Finally, I know it is best practice to go to Microsoft Update and get the latest updates.  The images pre-installed by Dell and other computer manufacturers are updated only every so often and won't necessarily have the absolutely latest security patches in them.  Microsoft Update downloaded 65 MB (!) of stuff, including many security updates and IE 7.  So that took about another forty-five minutes.  If you're keeping track, I'm now about two hours into this process, and I'm getting tired - it's now 11:30 and I'm ready to go to bed.  But I wanted my son's computer to work on Christmas morning and there is one game he is slavishly dedicated to - in fact, the reason for the new computer is to get better performance on this game - and that is World of Warcraft.  I knew the first thing he would try in the morning is WoW.  So I pulled out the CDs for that, and after I picked my jaw up off the floor from realizing that there are six - yes six - CDs for the WoW program, I started the installation of this.  It plodded along for another forty minutes or so, prompting me every so often to feed it the next 650 MB of stuff.  Geez, no wonder the graphics are so good in this game - six CDs is over 3,000 megabytes of data.  I'm sure very little of that is actual executable code - it's mostly images and data.  Amazing. 

So finally got WoW set up and - yawn - it's now about 12:30 AM. I'm well past time to go to bed.  One final thing to try - can I see the shared computers on the local network.  Nope.  So I spent about thirty minutes trying to troubleshoot that - oh, I know, the workgroup is wrong, go to My Computer / Properties and set the right workgroup.  No good - still can't see anything.  Hmmm, but I have Internet access, which means I'm going through the router on the LAN to get to the Internet.  Starting a command prompt and doing an "ipconfig" shows that I have an IP address.  I walked over to my wife's computer, which has the shared printer, and did an IPCONFIG there - going back to my son's computer and doing a Start > Run and typing in \\192.168.2.141 I was able to see the shares on my wife's computer.  Hmm... so it can access other computers on the LAN via IP address, just not by name.  I poked around a bit on the web (especially in the Microsoft support community for Windows XP Networking - a good source of community help) and found there references to a site that noted this usually was a firewall problem.  They specifically mentioned opening some ports to allow SMB (Server Message Block - the prototcol that allows you to access shared resources over a LAN) and NetBIOS through the firewall.  I realized I was too tired to start down this path, so I went to bed.

My son loved his new computer and raves about how fast World of Warcraft is running on it.  But in the back of my head was this nagging feeling that he couldn't access network resources which he will eventually want to - he's going to want to print a paper from the computer when school starts up again.  So last night, I went back to tackling the local networking not working problem.  I started about 9:30 PM again.  Here's what I ended up doing (this is from the post I eventually wrote for the Windows XP Networking community):

After spending quite a bit of time poking around on the network, I found that after doing three things, the problem went away.  I'm not sure if all three are necessary, but thought I'd document them here since I'm sure others will run into this.

1. You need to be sure that the connection on the new computer has NetBIOS enabled.

• To do this, go to Start > Connect To > Show All Connections.
• Right click on the connection you are using from this computer to connect to the LAN and the Internet.  Chances are it is called "Local Area Connection".
• Select Propeties and then scroll down in the dialog which appears to find the entry for "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" in the list labeled "This connection uses the following items".
• When you select "Internet Protocol", the Properties button below will become enabled.  Click it.
• Then click Advanced in the dialog that appears, and go to the WINS tab in the next dialog that
  appears and make sure that "Enable NetBios over TCP/IP" is marked.  You may
  have a choice to inherit the setting from the DHCP server - I just marked it as always enabled to be sure.

2. You need to open some ports on the OneCare firewall.  Again, not entirely sure this step is necessary.  There is a KB article describing this -
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/298804.  For OneCare, I went to the OneCare screen by clicking on the "OneCare" "1" logo in the taskbar.  I
then went to View or Change Settings and clicked on the "Firewall" tab then clicked on Advanced settings.  (If you're starting to think it's fairly ridiculous that you have to do all this "Advanced" mumbo jumbo to just get local networking to work, you're right.)  Now go to the Ports and Protocols tab and click "Add".  Add one and give it the name "SMB" which has "Both TCP / UDP" for the TCP or UDP setting; 135 - 139 as the ports; "Both" for direction and "Local network only" for Scope.  Click OK.  Now add another one for NetBios - give it the name "NetBIOS" and mark it as Both TCP/UDP, port 445, Direction Both and Local Network Only for Scope.

3. Reboot.  Always a good idea to reboot after changing anything fairly fundamental like this.

4. At this point, you're sure it's going to work - at least I was - and it still doesn't.  So there's one final trick that might in fact be the only thing necessary - so maybe try this first before doing all the mumbo jumbo above.  I'm just giving it to you in the order I did it.  The trick is to UNSHARE your Shared Document and then RESHARE them.  Yup; I found this one on a Windows Live OneCare support bulletin board.  So here's what you do:

• Start > My Computer
• Right click on Shared Documents and select Properties
• Click on the Sharing tab and UNCHECK "Share this Folder on the network".  Click OK.
• Right click AGAIN on Shared Documents (which is now a misnomer :)) and select Properties
• Click on the Sharing tab and CHECK "Share this Folder on the network".  Click OK.

Now, I'll bet if you go to Start > My Computer and click on "My Network Places" in the left side, you'll see all the shared folders on your local network.

Whew!

There is a general principle here, though.  It's amazing how often simply turning something off and then back on again fixes things.  My other son's computer had a problem the other day where his sound suddenly stopped working.  Couldn't remember what, if anything he had done, but it just wasn't working.  It turned out that after poking around in the Sounds control panel for a while I noticed there was a setting for "Use this device as a mixer" which I unchecked, then rebooted, then went back into the Sounds control panel and checked it back to use the SoundBlaster card as a mixer device.  Voila - sound back.

I'm posting this here to (a) document what I did in the hope that someday it will help others, since it seems that setting up a brand new machine and getting it to work on a LAN is not exactly an obscure user action and (b) to say that those of us who work at Microsoft are not immune from running into the same problems everyone else does - we just hopefully can do more to try to fix them (I've shared this with the OneCare support team at MS).

Happy holidays.

IE Detectives

Great post on using his tool, Microsoft Fiddler, to track down a web site issue by my friend and colleague, Eric Lawrence.

Desktop Search Saved me $20

I recently bought PartitionMagic, a tool for divvying up my hard drive so that I could have multiple OS's installed.  I want to have a partition where I can install a test vesion of Vista and Office while still having a "guaranteed safe" partition with XP.  Partition Magic came with a $20 rebate form if I had purchased any previous Symantec or Norton product.  I was sure I had, but the proof required either a receipt (good luck there) or an emal confirmation if I bought it online.  Hmmm.... So I just typed "Symantec" into my Desktop Search bar and -voila - up pops the email confirmation for having bought Norton anti-virus back in 2005.  Of course, I could probably have found this by searching around in email - but this took about five seconds and searched everything on my drive.  Definitely worth running (and it's built into Office Outlook 2007 and Vista).