It has always baffled me as to which converter to use, the “free standalone” or the “paid integrated with vcenter” converter. In the past, I have assumed that the paid converter was more capable and I believe it was for some period of time. However, at VMWorld, it was a strong consensus that at this time the standalone converter was much better than the vcenter-integrated converter.
I am doing an SBS 2008 install at a customer and have run into the whole x86 / x64 print driver problem. The SBS box is x64 and that is where I wanted to install the network printers. The terminal server is x86. I did some research on the driver compatibility and universal printer drivers and decided for simplicity sake to use the HP universal print driver. I got everything installed, but during testing a couple of the printers (specifically the HP 4050 series LaserJet), I had a very weird problem come up. Every time I printed something, the printer would display “waiting on manual feed tray” as if the job was specifically targeting that tray. Even when I statically set the default tray in the driver config, it would try to pull from the manual feed tray….ahh the joy of printers. Well, after about an hour of troubleshooting, I tried changing what seemed like a very unrelated setting. [more]
Notice the Paper type is unspecified. By default that is set to "HP Tough Paper" on this model of printer. If that setting is not changed, it defaults back to the manual feed tray NO MATTER WHAT. Does the gremlin in the printer know what type of paper is loaded…well, apparently so. Do yourself an favor and set it to “Unspecified”.
Array Configuration Utility: If you install the ACU (v8.28), it will not work with IE8. You must install v8.30. The error report states that there is already an instance of the ACU running, and will not let you run a second copy.
The new version of ACU is completely different from the earlier version. Here is a list of changes: [more]
There is a conflict between some network providers and the PGP password filter that handles keeping the domain password synchronized with the boot password. Specifically, if you have a Symantec SNAC Network Provider, it can cause a password change to break the single sign-on feature. What you do to fix it is: [more]
Pull up the Provider Order screen via:
Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center -> Manage network connections -> Advanced (I had to press and release the Alt key to get the Advanced option in the menu – you may or may not have to) -> Advanced Settings -> Provider Order tab.
Once in the Provider Order tab, I saw PGPpwflt was at the bottom of the list and Symantec SNAC Network Provider was at the top of the list. I moved the Symantec provider to the bottom of the list which left things like:
This fixed the problem.
Note: This is best done before you change your password!
For Vista users you may have found that when you run ipconfig from the command prompt you are given an extremely long list of network interfaces. These are actually all IPv6 tunnels. In order to disable these tunnels there is a registry setting that has to be changed. The registry setting is located at:
HKLM>System>CurrentControlSet>Services>Tcpip6>Parameters
Within the parameters key you have to edit a dword called ‘DisabledComponents’. By setting this value to 1 this will disable your IPv6 tunnels and thus clean up your ipconfig results. Its possible that you may not have ‘DisabledComponents’ under the Parameters key in which case you will have to create one
To use BitLocker in Vista, you had to create a separate active drive partition. When Vista first shipped this had to be created manually, but Microsoft released a BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool later to help with the partitioning.
With Windows 7 this partition is still required but is created automatically when BitLocker is enabled. However the Drive Preparation Tool is still supported as a command line tool, intended mostly for scripting the BitLocker setup for multiple systems.
More information is available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd875534%28WS.10%29.aspx
I was installing Vista from a DVD under VMware and needed to the change the boot order in the BIOS to boot from the optical drive first. The problem was the BIOS splash screen went by so fast I couldn’t hit the F2 key in time. I found the solution by adding a line to the VMX file of the VM:
bios.bootDelay = “boot delay in milliseconds”Prior to deploying Office 2007 enterprise wide at one of our customer sites, we selected a cross-section of users to test various Office applications that were used within the organization. One particular user was complaining of a typing delay when using a particular database application in Access 2007. Since this user was using Access 2007 on a Terminal Server across a WAN link, my initial suspect was a slow WAN connection. Upon reviewing the user’s setup I discovered that the user was using a thin client to first connect to a production Terminal Server then launching another RDP session to connect to the Office 2007 test Terminal Server, this could cause delays as well. After reconfiguring the user’s thin client to connect directly to the test Terminal Server the user still complained of typing delay. Since the user was located in at a WAN location in the same city as the data center, I had the user come to the data center to test the database application thereby taking any WAN slowness out of the equation. The typing delay still remained though. [more]
After conducting further research on the issue, I discovered an article instructing those who experience Access 2007 performance problems to turn off the Access 2007 Status Bar. (Office Orb -> Access Options -> Advanced -> scroll down under DISPLAY and uncheck “Status Bar”) Thinking that I had nothing to lose I gave it a try and it immediately remedied the problem! Who knew that keeping track of the Caps Lock and Num Lock was so resource intensive!
If you’ve ever wanted to restore the original Outlook shortcut to the desktop, you’ve probably found that a normal shortcut that points to outlook.exe (the kind with an arrow on the icon) lacks some of the functionality that the original Outlook icon had (for instance the ability to edit your machines “Mail” settings by right clicking and choosing properties). To restore the Outlook original icon to the desktop, edit the registry as outlined in the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238567
Offline files are still sensitive to long path names. I had a Word document open (deep in a folder tree and a long file name) and tried to create a PDF for uploading to a customer. I kept getting errors - sometimes it indicated the file was read-only (which didn't make sense) and sometimes it said I didn't have access. Ends up if I shortened the file name a little, it would work.