Tried to install a 32 bit driver for the Dell 2330dn printer but the software kept asking me “please provide path to windows media (x86 processor)’”. Pointing the dialog box to the x86 directory or the i386 directory that came with the print driver didn’t help. Neither did pointing the dialog to a copy of the i386 directory from an xp cd. A reply posting on Microsoft’s technet site gave me a hint to get this working. By first installing and sharing the 64bit driver, it is then possible to install the printer by using the following steps.
On a 32 bit (in my case XP) workstation, navigate to \\servername and then double click on the printer that was previously shared.
When it asks for the driver location provide the location to the i386 directory of the extracted driver.
Verify once installed that the driver is now successfully listed as an option on the printer by clicking on the sharing tab and then the additional drivers button.
If you want to get the BIOS version of a pc without rebooting or the Dell service tag then use the following useful command(s)
wmic bios >c:\temp\1.txt
notepad c:\temp\1.txt
The reason I pipe to 1.txt and then display in notepad is that the formatting looks all messed up in a dos prompt due to line wrapping but looks ok in notepad. The BIOS version and service tag will be displayed (among other things).
This beats my previous preferred method when doing remote support of going to Dell’s support site, going to warranty information and then loading their activex component to detect the hardware information.
Update: You do need to have admin rights to run this command.
Further to this post on how to set up Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) for alerts I have amended the configuration files required to correctly configure OMSA.
I discovered that Dell’s documentation is incorrect and that running a batch file in an alert directly does not work – you need to call it with cmd.exe BUT you do not (normally) need to provide the path to cmd.exe – I have therefore changed the alert commands (shown in the extended entry).
I have also amended the dellalert.bat file as I also found that blat would not always work as there is no working blat profile when called from OMSA and there is no obvious way of setting a profile up. You could add the setup into dellalert.bat, trigger an alert and then remove the setup. Alternatively blat can have the mail server and the sender name provided in the dellalert.bat. This makes installation easier as all you need to do is copy the blat files to the windows directory. Again the updated dellalert.bat is in the extended entry.
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Update – this post is slightly out of date – please see my updated Configuring Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) page.
As mentioned in a previous post, we have several Dell servers that have Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) setup and one of the features of this software is the ability to setup alerts whenever an issue is detected by the built in monitoring system. In the new version, 5.3, even more alerts have been enabled – mainly in the area of storage management. To edit this setup you typically go to the website hosting the Server Administrator, log in and then set up all the alerts. Each alert is setup individually and takes several mouse clicks. One to open up the alert, one to select the alert process’s, another to click apply and then another to click the Go Back to Alert Settings. This is really inefficient and obviously takes a very long time to set this up on multiple servers. The process described in the extended entry below describes how you can set this up, quickly and efficiently by importing the same settings to your servers each time they are set up. Little customization needs to be done on each server but full instructions are provided.
Note- this post is slightly out of date – please see my updated Configuring Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) page.
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I checked on Dell’s website yesterday for the latest wifi drivers for the Inspiron 600m to fix the widely reported vulnerabilitys. Dell has a driver available but when you download the file, you can extract the files from it. However double clicking on the setup program causes the dellinfo.exe program to crash followed by a message stating “Error – This installer does not support installation on this computer.”
So far I’ve chatted with about 3 people on the dell chat program. The scary thing was when a tech asked me “Why is it your downloading the driver if the wireless card is ok?” – I had to (patiently) explain that I’m trying to download a driver to patch the critical vulnerability that is (from the readme) “Urgent = Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system.”
His solution was to send me the driver cd but we got cut off before we managed to exchange shipping address’s.
I checked the driver on another inspiron 600m this morning and the dellinfo.exe crashed on this machine but it tried to install the drivers but failed to do so with 2 more crashes that were reported to microsoft.
I tried chat this morning and the tech stated that the driver may be corrupt and I would need to contact customer care to report this. I called the customer care line 1 800 456 3355×7241969 who then after not understanding a word I was talking about put me through to support who then told me that they had put me through to the wrong department and I’m now on hold again – awaiting to put me through to the wireless support card. They can’t support me as apparently someone else installed the driver “2 hours ago” and therefore the download must be ok. A conference call to hardware support was the next step. Unfortunately hardware support were too busy to answer the phone so the tech guided me to the intel website and I downloaded the driver from the driver page on intel.com. Whilst I was downloading this driver my boss tripped over the phone cable, pulled the phone off the desk and hung up – I let out an involuntary wail as it was the end of 90 minutes with “technical hold support”. However the wireless drivers from Intel loaded ok but interestingly the windows driver version is the same as the version that I was currently running (9.0.4.17), but the Intel Wireless software (an alternative to Windows Wireless configuration utility) was upgraded a couple of versions to 10.5.0.3.
Note that if you scroll down on the driver page you can actually just download the windows driver by itself (something I should have done as I don’t use the IBM configuration software as the Windows Management software is easier to use as it is standard across all the laptops.
