Several people have blogged about the new addon to msconfig that enables you to run extra tools from within msconfig. This thing should really be part of windows update to make life easier for everyone (or rather the techies amongst us who support other people’s machines). Incidentally I was asked to validate my copy of Windows XP AGAIN – I don’t know how many times I’ve had to do this – thought it was meant to be a one off thing.
Month: October 2005
Apparently there is a spat going on between level3 and some other isp which explains why I’ve not been able to download a couple of podcasts for the past couple of days. Thankfully though it is not as bad for me as it is for GeekNewsCentral
There is a great tool from Microsoft to troubleshoot SUS installations from the client. From my experience it tells you fairly quickly where the problem lies.
Download from this location with the Readme. These are linked (at the moment) from the wsus support page which also contains a link to the server version of this tool (which I’ve not tried yet)
A good set of results can be found in the extended entry.
For my reference – troubleshooting and DR readiness Thanks to You Had Me At EHLO
I’m currently reading the Firefox Hacks book which is so much better than the firefox garage book. One of the extensions listed in the book is infolister which lists all extensions and themes installed in firefox and can publish it to a website. (Which would possibly reduce these firefox extension posts 🙂 Combined with the Mass Installer extension it looks like you can replicate an install of software from one machine to another easily – this would make it a lot easier for me to keep my machines in synch. Note that I’ve not tried this yet as the infolister on this machine is very bare – only two extensions but that is because all the extensions that were loaded got wiped when I moved my Firefox profile directory. It would be good if infolister also listed greasemonkey scripts installed – perhaps that will come in the future. The forum discussion is 20+ pages long so I’ve not had chance to read it yet to see if anyone else has had the same idea.
Update The infolister is merged into Mr Tech’s Local Install (but doesn’t have the ftp uploader facility) but you do have the ability to copy/paste the output as html, text or bbcode – I’ve added the html output from my machine in the extended entry…..
The library are unveiling their new website next week according to their announcement. I’m surprised they are doing this now before the new computer system goes in later this year. Will be interesting to see if they start doing native rss feeds for library books that are on loan.
We heard back from the Estate Agents today to say that the survey didn’t show up anything that the buyer wasn’t happy with so the sale is proceeding. In disappointing news we got a letter from the solicitors asking for the deeds for the house and the inventory – something we gave them about 5 months ago. After calling them they admitted they had lost the papers but found them after sending the letter to us. This is good news as I didn’t want to delay the proceedings by having to get another inventory done and get the paperwork back to the UK. Oh, and if you are looking for a solicitor, find one who uses email so you don’t have to rely on snail mail for correspondance (or the time difference on phone calls)
I’m getting the message “library not registered” when attempting to open a navigator in quickbooks with errors on the various qpg files that it tries to open. On speaking to their tech support who had me remove the software, install it, install in safe mode, remove, reinstall in normal mode, then download the updates again (thankfully I had saved the 80mb patch file to disk so I didn’t have to download it again) he then recommended that I repair Internet Explorer as this was the problem. Unfortunately you can’t repair IE in xpsp2 (see KB318378 so I reinstalled xpsp2 again.
At this point, he admitted, several times, that NOONE in support can tell me what ocx’s or dll’s are required by the various pages used in the Navigator pages. I asked who could tell me which files are needed, but he kept telling me to repair internet explorer instead.
I’ve heard Intuit’s support is notoriously bad and I now believe it. I would have expected him to check my internet explorer security settings, popupblocker settings and it was only after about 40 minutes on the phone that he checked what version of quickbooks I was using (pressing F2 gives that information)
He was not interested in the fact that there was an incompatibility issue with Quickbooks Premier 2002 and Windows NT and that I am getting the same type of message. Unfortunately in this case, the pc that has a working copy of quickbooks and the faulty pc have the same version of comcat.dll
From the sounds of it, there is a permission problem in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\ but whereabouts I am not sure. It’s time to use regmon from sysinternals again to monitor for access denied messages when launching quickbook navigators.
Solution in the extended entry
A useful tip to provide a bit more screen space in the browser (useful for low resolution monitors) is to move the bookmarks toolbar in between the throbber and the help menu.
Kristen and I went to some garage sales this morning and we got some good bargains. We got a couple of sandwich cooler bags (which I need to keep my sarnies cool in the car whilst I’m driving to customers) for a couple of bucks each, Operation and battleship games for 30cents each – a bargain although I’m much better at Operation than Kristen – even when I use my left hand – she had a flukey series of lucky guesses with battleships and it took me another 16 shots to sink her battleships after she had sunk all of mine.
We also got a HP Deskjet 930c for $5 – our printer in the uk was a 940c model. We were told it had a paper jam in it which the previous owner couldn’t be bothered to fix and when I opened it up there was a sticky label in the innards – part on the back roller and the other half deep inside but as it was a thick plastic label it held together well so I was able to reach in and grab a corner and slowly peel it off. 5 minutes later I had an almost new printer for $5!
The same garage sale had a brand new full size tripod which we got for $5. Previously I’ve made do with a wall and a mini tripod but now I can take this one around for family shots etc.
Whilst driving around we drove through one estate in Dublin, Tartan fields, and the houses there are (gi)(e)normous. Most of them had 4 car garages and some looked like they were almost their own gated community. The sad thing is that most of the houses probably only had 2 people living in them. If you feel like donating some money to the building fund then take a look at this listing site – only another 3.5billion adsense clicks needed to put a deposit down 🙂