Insert name here

This post is somewhat off the usual topic of computing but I thought it would be worth compiling a list of injuries I’ve acquired over the last year and a bit, with the view of trying to receive less for the coming year. I’ve also provided a pain rating out of 10 so you can judge for yourself how much each of these injuries actually hurts (10 being maximum pain). I don’t think this list is anywhere near complete but these are the most memorable:

December 2008 – Foot burn.

This time I discovered the hidden danger in making a cup of tea. Having completed the perfect pour I dropped the kettle onto the cups, causing a catapult effect whereby an entire cup of boiling water landed on my foot. It looks quite bad, the skin started falling off straight away and various blisters developed overnight. Initial pain was probably 7 out of 10 but overall only  3 out of 10 (with the right treatment). Recovery time is estimated at 2 weeks.

December 2008 – Coccyx damage.

Snowboarding can be huge amount of fun, the sense of speed is great but as a beginner I found there was a fine line between extreme fun and massive pain. Ski runs are rated by difficulty, green is easy, blue is intermediate, red is difficult and black is extreme. As a beginner I naturally opted to try out a difficult “red” slope. I soon found the gradient of the slope was massive, which made it all too easy to pick up speed. The surface was very hard ice rather than soft snow. I fell at speed onto my tailbone (Coccyx) and ever since sitting down has caused me quite considerable pain. I’d rate the initial pain as a 4 out of 10 but the after pain is a definite 6 as it hurts almost all the time. Recovery time is estimated at +6 weeks.
October – 2008 – Achilles heel.

Running is great exercise and I found I could sleep a lot better after running a mile every day. I kept up a regular run on the treadmill nearly every day. However, I made the mistake of not wearing shoes. This resulted in an unsupported foot and ultimately a very sore Achilles heel. Initial pain was very low, only a 2 out of 10 but I made the classic mistake of ignoring the pain until it got worse. Overall a 4 out of 10 and recovery took 8 to 10 weeks.
June 2008 – Bicycle Crash.

Cycling is of course great exercise too! I thought it would be great to try out the cycle tracks at Haldon Forest Park in Exeter.  I tried some of the normal cycle tracks which were great, but I wanted more. The best on offer was a track rated “severe”- “A highly technical trail for experienced riders with the right bikes and protective equipment.” I defiantly didn’t have the right protective equipment and probably had the wrong bike – the rear tyre blew within the first minute of setting off. Having replaced the tyre I managed a further 30 minutes or so before entering a steeply banked corner way too quick. The track dropped away and I went straight over the bars, forcing my face into a collection of mud and rocks. The result was not good, my face was badly scratched. Luckily nothing was broken (apart from my sunglasses which must have saved my eyes). The pain was bad, probably a 5 out of 10 and the recovery time was quite long – at least 6 to 8 weeks and the scars live on.

May 2007 – Ear damage.

Unlike the previous incidents, this one wasn’t an accident. Some Plymouth scum decided to attack me, landing an unprovoked punch to my right ear, splitting the cartilage and causing a large amount of swelling. The pain was an instant 9 out of 10. Recovery was very slow, about 8 weeks before the pain subsided, although I don’t think my ear has fully recovered, I estimate a 10% loss of hearing in that ear.

So that concludes my accident prone year. I can confirm that thankfully I remain in one piece, all be it a collection of broken pieces!

Things have been a bit too quiet on here recently, so I thought I would take a few minutes to tell you about some neat scripts I have discovered recently whilst working on a site for Scotts Castle Holidays – they specialise in self catering holidays in large Scottish castles.

The first one would be Highslide JS. SCH uses this on a few pages, for HTML popups as well as the main image galleries belonging to each property. Highslide is an awesome bit of code, customisable in almost every aspect, extensive documentation and a great support forum for issues/feature requests. It needs to be licenced for a commercial site, but it is a small price to pay (29USD) for the instant functionality gain.

Secondly, there is the simple accordion script from Deziner Folio. This required quite a bit of tailoring to add the additional functionality required for the site, but is a great starting point for any accordion as it is so small, coming in at barely over 1k.

Let us know if you decide to use either of the above in your own projects!

A customer of ours recently called to say their HP L7680 printer had disappeared from their computer. On further inspection both the fax and the printer were missing from control panel – despite the printer being fully powered up and connected. I tried opening the HP solution center but it just said “No HP Devices have been detected”. But, it IS connected! The steps below outline how I managed to get it running again. Sadly it’s a bit of a long process, but it fixed the problem for me.

1. Enter the control panel and uninstall all the HP related software.
2. Unplug the USB connection – this step is very important.
3. Now, it is important to reboot the computer at this stage, to ensure you’re starting from a clean slate. Once rebooted you now need to download the HP removal software. There are various version of this. If you have a 7×00 series printer you’ll want the specific HP Software Removal Utility (recommended) or alternatively there is the more general All-in-One Software Removal Utility. Assuming you download the HP software removal utility, run the file and it will extract to C:/Temp/HP_WebRelease. Browse to this folder and look for uninstall_l4.bat. Running this file will perform what HP call a Level 4 cleanup – the highest level of HP rubbish removal.

****** Executing Level4 CleanUP ******
This cleanup utility will remove the HP Image Zone software and the
HP product drivers. Use this utility to remove software if you have a
problem using the software and would like to reinstall the software.

Use this LEVEL 4 cleanup if LEVEL 3 cleanup utility did not fix the problem
and you continue to experience software problems with your HP Officejet Pro

LEVEL 4 is the most comprehensive cleanup level and
will remove the HP product drivers, HP Image Zone software
and all HP components installed with your HP Officejet Pro device
****************

If you chose to UNINSTALL, Please do the following…
1. Unplug the USB cable from the back of your HP Officejet Pro device
2. After the cleanup finishes, restart your computer and wait for Windows
to start
3. Eject and re-insert the software CD that came with your HP Officejet Pro
device to start the installation
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish the installation
5. Try printing a document to confirm functionality
Press ENTER to continue Uninstalling…
OR
Press Q followed by ENTER to QUIT uninstallation

As per the instructions, just hit enter and wait for the uninstaller to complete.

Now reboot your computer again. Do NOT reconnect the printer yet.

You now need to download the latest verison of the HP All-in-one software from the HP website – don’t use the CD which came with it as this is most likely outdated. I chose the HP Officejet Pro Full Feature Software And Driver – weighing in at an almighty 300MB.

Once downloaded, run the setup file. The setup will prompt you when it is time to connect the printer.

Follow the installation as normal and you should have a working printer again.

I hope this helps you on your quest for a working HP printer!

“Good morning, Tanist Computers…”

“Hi, is that Henry?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“Umm something has happened to my computer, and I can’t browse the internet. It seems to want a password and I don’t know what it is.”

“Ok, that would be the Internet Explorer Content Advisor… Let me have a look and I’ll see what I can do.”

<< 40 minute interval >>

“Thanks Henry, you’re a gem!”

Here’s the problem:

Internet Explorer Content Advisor

So, how exactly do you remove the content adviser password in Internet Explorer 7? And why did it take so long? Well some registry editing was required, but the hardest part was talking the customer through various steps without being able to see his screen, because of course, he could not get internet access.

To remove the content adviser password you’ll need the following:

• A second computer with internet access (to download the following file)
• A USB key/memory stick (to move the file to the problem computer)
• Download this file (right click-> save target as) and place it on the memory stick

Ok, once you’ve got the remove-content-adviser.reg file on the problem computer, just double click and click yes to confirm. Now, fire up Internet Explorer and you’re away.

Thanks to pchell.com for finding the correct registry keys.

An easy one, this. Infact, it seems far too easy. Just share Pivot’s setup.exe in some folder on your server, and add the following to a startup script attached to your GPO (with the correct server name and share paths applied, of course).

\\SVR\Share\Path\setup.exe /quiet

That’s it! It installs near instantaneously on newer machines as well – well done that man.

This is really Henry’s tip, but having just reapplied it, I decided to make a post about it anyway.

We recently installed a new HP 2600n laser printer for a customer, it’s quite a cheap unit but seems to perform reasonably and is easy to deal with (excluding the below, of course). After installing the drivers on the server, we deployed the printer and tested it – all appeared to be working fine. However, a few print jobs later, the print queue decides to lock up. No more items are sent to the printer, however they are sitting in the queue.

We restarted the print spooler service, and all the jobs from the queue were fed to the printer and printed correctly – could it be a one off?

No would be the short answer to that one, later that week, the same thing happened again. The print queue still accepts jobs, but nothing is sent to the printer. Having decided to have a look through the printer options to see what could be done, it was decided that ‘Enable bidirectional support’ was a prime candidate for the chop.

The above can be found on the ports tab in printer properties. Unchecking this box resolved all the problems we were encountering, and the printer has gone for many weeks without freezing the print queue again.

Let us know if this solves the same issue for you!

I’ve recently been playing with a bit of software called Printer Peer. It’s a free bit of software which allows you to monitor the printing on your network, in terms of both printers and users.

Once you’ve had it up and running for a while it gives a quick insight into how printers are used on your network, allowing you to redistribute so that the cheapest to run are in the highest use situations, for example.

Let us know how you get on if you decide to give it a try.

We’ve been having lots of fun (or not) installing our action pack version of Small Business Server 2008. All of our client machines need to be disconnected from the old domain and then re-connected to the new one. We decided NOT to use the new 2008 migration tool for reasons which I wont go into here, so are having to migrate manually.

When connecting a computer via the SBS connection wizard (found at the URL http://connect) by default, we found that when the _sbs_netsetup user logs on, that it does not log off again, and any attempt to log off manually just causes it to automatically log back on.

To solve this we needed to grant local administrator rights to the local user _sbs_netsetup. Obviously as the user is currently logged on and you cannot log off in order to log back on as an administrator, it is not possible to do this on the local machine. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Run MMC on your server
2. Add computer management snap-in and set it to manage the computer in question
3. Browse to Local Users and Groups / Users
4. Add _sbs_netsetup to the Administrators group
5. Log off the local machine

Now the SBS setup process should complete as normal and you should end up with a machine connected to your domain and ready to go!

Ah, the fun with SBS 2008 continues. Today we noticed that one of the printers (an HP Laserjet 2300) we had added to the server for deployment via group policy CSE (client side extensions), was not installing on any clients. This included both x86 Vista and XP machines. The error we were receiving in the event log is as follows:

The user ‘HP LaserJet 2300 Series PCL 6′ preference item in the ‘Common {<id>}’ Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code ’0x8000ffff Catastrophic failure’ This error was suppressed.

This error is not very helpful as you can see, and infact turned out to be that the driver for the printer was not available. This led us into another issue – that of installing x86 drivers on the server to be available for clients when they connect.

Initially, we thought this would be easy. “Oh, just go into sharing and tick the x86 box in additional drivers”, we thought. Having tried to do that it turned out to be a lot more complex than it should be. Ticking this box will ask you to browse to find the x86 version of the x64 driver you currently have installed – easy. Then it will ask you to ‘please provide path to windows media (x86 processor)’ – OK, that’s doable?

It seems to be looking for the file ntprint.inf, and wanted to look on a CD-ROM, in the I386 folder by default. So, recognising the folder name we stuck in the XP pro disc, thinking we would be off, but alas, it tries to load the file and then gives the same prompt again! I then decided to search my own workstation (Vista Ultimate x86) for the the file and found the following directory to contain it, as well as an I386 folder.

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ntprint.inf_xxxxxx

I copied the contents of this directory to the same directory on the server which holds the x86 version of the driver in question, and then went into sharing and ticked the x86 box once more. It again asked for the path to the driver, but this time did not prompt asking for the additional media!

So, in conclusion, it seems you need both your x64 server and an x86 client available in order to get the driver installed, for our printer at least.

I ran into this little devil during my first installation of Windows 2008 Small Business Server (SBS). The setup failed with the error message:

FATAL: DcPromo_JoinDomain: The server was not promoted to a domain controller.

The solution was surprisingly simple. An active network connection is required to start the setup, however I had disconnected the NIC during setup. Bad move, this causes the setup to bail out. The solution, of course, is to make sure the network card remians connected for the duration of the setup.